nathaniel hawthorne whining and pissing himself in eighteen fifty five over the fact that women were writing better and more popular stories than his shit shit shit trash shit piece of shit awful didactic shit novels (via sashayed)

this again bc //selfie culture// in 1855

(via bananaleaves)

#REAL TALK #women have been very successful writers since the eighteenth century at least#like commercially #making bank #and COMPLETELY COINCIDENTALLY around the same time we see the rise of a new definition of ‘culture’ #that begins to separate out the idea of ‘real’ art from commercial success #HMMMM #always distrust that rhetoric #100% of the time (via zlot)

^^^^^YEP. i think a lot of people are under the impression that like, the reason there are so few women on class reading lists and in anthologies when it comes to pre-WWII american literature is just because it was difficult and rare for a woman to get writing published, and extra hard for a woman to become a critical and/or popular success as a writer. THIS IS LITERALLY A HUGE LIE. 

in america in particular, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it’s super common to see literary magazines publishing more poetry and fiction written by women than by men. the number of women publishing books of poetry, essays, fiction, social commentary, you name it, was like…ridiculous it’s so big. an actual fuckton of the best-selling american novelists, poets, and essayists of the nineteenth century were women. and this carries through into the beginning of the 20th century. and it’s not solely upper-class white women getting published: between like, 1860-1935/40, a number of black women were publishing works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, a few native american women were getting published, LITERALLY LIKE A MILLION “pioneer moms” published memoirs (so. many. pioneer. mom. memoirs.), and working class women were writing nonfiction, social commentary, memoirs, and poetry. SO MUCH THINGS. 

the reason this isn’t reflected in people’s class reading lists or in big “canon” anthologies is basically because pretentious “literary” white mens have spent the last half-century or more writing AND teaching that ENTIRE nineteenth century genres/styles of literature are the definition of trashy bad unoriginal cliched writing. 

and those ENTIRE genres/styles they summarily kicked out of the “real literature” club just happen to be disproportionately made up of works written by women. so much very coincidences, right? hahahaha NOT. just some 100% prime calculated misogyny, racism and classism. 

but it’s not like i have feelings about that or anything. nope. no feelings here. feel free to move along, nothing to see here, have a nice day. 

(via this-reading-by-lightning)