How to Suppress Women's Writing is a book by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny...

, published in 1983. Written in the style of an irreverent sarcastic guidebook, it explains how women and minorities are prevented from producing written works.

The methods used that the book outlines are:

1. Prohibitions
2. Bad Faith
3. Denial of Agency (deny that a woman wrote it)
4. Pollution of Agency (show that their art is immodest, not actually art, or shouldn't have been written about)
5. The Double Standard of Content (one set of experiences is considered more valuable than another)
6. False Categorizing (women artists are categorized as the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or lovers of male artists)
7. Isolation (the myth of isolated achievement: only one work, or a short series of poems are considered great)
8. Anomalousness
9. Lack of Models
10. Responses
11. Aesthetics

Reception

Feminist and civil rights scholars generally received the book positively. It is highly regarded for its cutting humor and wit, as well as its disarming and novel presentation of the problems of sexism

Sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...

 and racism

Racism

Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

in the arenas of art and writing.