Too often female voices are brushed aside. Too often we hear, “women are to be seen and not heard.”
For generations, as women, we have been conditioned to remain small. We have learned to shrink ourselves down in order to make others more comfortable. We have held our breath for fear that our voices will be too much for the world to handle. We have been told to stand there and look pretty, and historically, we have listened.
Some of the greatest female litterateurs of our time, the Brontë sisters, responsible for works like “Jane Eyre” and “Agnes Grey,” originally published under male pseudonyms in order to avoid the scrutiny allotted to opinionated female voices. The trailblazing authors you know as Emily, Charlotte and Anne were once Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Today, as female writers, we have the ability to take revenge on the society that silenced us. We don’t have to hide behind aliases. We can boldly write out in the open and we write to avenge those that came before us with timid hesitancy in their pens.
The pursuit of writing as a vocational aspiration was seen as frivolous for women in the 19th century and as a result, Jane Austen, an author whose work has become a cornerstone of our generation, began by publishing her work anonymously. Originally, Austen’s first novel, “Sense and Sensibility,” was not said to be penned by Jane Austen but simply “By a Lady,” in fear of the era’s societal implications associated with female authors. Her subsequent novels were casually attributed to “the author of Sense and Sensibility,” until her death in 1817 when her eulogy, given by her brother, shattered that glass bubble and revealed Austen as the exceptional mind behind them.
American fiction writer Dan Simmons once said that “nothing helps an artist’s career more than a little death and obscurity.” Austen proved this theory in that only in death was she honored for the art that she created in life. It is incredibly morose that a woman had to die in order for her words to live. The living half of her heart had to stop beating so that the world could meet the other half of that heart that exists on paper.
Today, women have the freedom to make themselves heard. Although it is still not a perfect world, and there are plenty of obstacles that stand in our way, we now have the ability to speak out. We have the ability to become the voice of something greater than ourselves.
We don’t have to anonymize our pens or hold our breaths out of fear. Our words are our oxygen, derived directly from our hearts. We write for the versions of ourselves that once believed that our words … our oxygen made it too difficult for others to breathe.
Writing is the most visceral form of metamorphosis. It is a continually changing and evolving skill that, when mastered, can change the world. It is ink and paper that make people feel vividly and live vicariously. It is an accumulation of letters that make up words that make up a writer’s entire soul or rather an extension of it told through the stories of those around them.
It is art, but rather than with pencils or paints, the canvas is colored by sentences perfectly constructed to appeal to whatever sets of eyes were intended to be moved by them. There is no right or wrong, yes or no, black or white; all writing sort of lives in a perpetual gray area that allows for messages to be heard, lives to be changed and voices to be amplified. Writing is a sort of gentle violence, and that is what I love about it.
So, all of the wonderful female writers out there, I urge you to write dangerously. I urge you to remember the importance of your presence and the gravity that your words hold in a world that once let them float into oblivion. I urge you to write for Emily and Charlotte, Anne and Jane. Write for your mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and all of the women whose recognition came too late.
Put pen to paper and fingers to keyboards and shout from rooftops.
I implore you: dare to breathe, dare to speak and dare to write.
