Literary Ladies Guide

This article is reprinted with permission from Unknown Literary Canon. Women were oppressed in patriarchal civilizations the world over. And women the world refused those systems and structures. Women the world over rose up in rebellion against their oppression.

They chaffed against the private domestic sphere before leaving it. They found ways to acquire knowledge that was forbidden to their sex and gender. They defied the odds to take ruling power from men, or ruled alongside and equal to their husbands. (Shown above right, Pandita Ramabai.)

During the colonial/imperialist era, they joined and were welcomed into anti-colonialist movements. Later, they came to together and forged feminist movements to throw off the shackles of domination and oppression that tried to contain and silence them. Read More→

Chief Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa (1931 – 1993, familiarly known as Flora Nwapa, was a Nigerian-born author, poet, short story writer, and activist.

She was known as the “Mother of African Literature,” and was the first African woman author whose writing published in England.

Here’s more about her writing, including the influences behind her debut novel, Efuru. Read More→

Who would have ever imagined that librarians would become targets in contemporary culture wars? Most of today’s battles are over banning and censorship, as we know. (Shown at right, Belle da Costa Greene).

And though book banning is nothing new, it wasn’t the primary concern of the librarians highlight here today. They were blazing trails in other ways (you’ll frequently see “the first” here). All of these professionals were visionaries who elevated the role of libraries as cultural hearts of communities.

These librarians proudly built diversity and cultural awareness into the fabric of what has evolved into the contemporary library. And that’s something that can’t be unraveled. Read More→

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetry was first published in NAACP’s The Crisis in 1916, and was subsequently included in the premier Black journals and anthologies of the 1920s. Georgia was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. Presented here is the full text of An Autumn Love Cycle, her third collection, published in 1928.

Though Black women’s poetry was regularly featured in the era’s periodicals, an entire collection by one writer was a rarity. Georgia published three poetry collections in the span of six years; one more was to come decades later.

Her first collection, The Heart of a Woman (1918) featured poems both specific to Georgia’s life yet universal to the female experience, speaking of love, loneliness, and women’s constrained roles. Decades later, the title of this book (and its eponymous poem) would inspire Maya Angelou’s 1981 memoir of the same name. Read More→

If you love learning about fascinating women of the past, but aren’t inclined to read full-scale biographies that take you from the second they were born (or earlier) to the minute they died, another fantastic route into their lives is via novelizations, also known as biofiction.

This type of novel usually focuses on a particularly interesting portion of a fascinating real-life person’s journey. This seems to be a growing genre, and when done well, as in the small sampling following, is entertaining as well as illuminating.

To create these novelizations successfully requires a delicate balance involving deep research and creative license.  Here’s a small sampling. Read More→

The Technique of the Love Affair (1928) sums up the new attitude toward men, sex, and relationships of the modern woman in the late 1920s perfectly, not to say outrageously and shockingly.

It gives cynical and completely amoral guidance to young women on how to master and dominate men without ever falling under their spell; the woman who follows its advice will always be in control, never be in love and never be subservient to a man, says the author.

Although the book always has its tongue firmly in its cheek, and although it is no doubt intended as comic relief, it still probably presents and represents the thinking of the dedicated 1920s flapper better than any other book of the period, fictional or otherwise. Read More→

There’s a lot of hoopla around 2025 being the centenary of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. It’s the quintessential novel of what’s come to be known as the Jazz Age.

But it’s not the only centenary worth celebrating in 2025. There was some great 1925 fiction that came from the pens (and typewriters of women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather, Anita Loos, Anzia Yezierska, and more.

Poor Scott Fitzgerald didn’t live long enough to see the lasting legacy of his work (he was gone by 1940, at the age of 44). There’s a LOT (this is the listing on Google News alone) of news and editorializing about Gatsby. It’s kind of cool that a book is getting so much attention in the midst of all the horrors we’re living through — kind of a testament to the power of literature. Read More→

Edna St. Vincent Millay was just nineteen when she began to compose “Renascence” some time toward the end of 1911. Written at a time of uncertainty about her future, it was a poem about herself, yet it dealt with the common human struggle to find hope when everything seems hopeless.

She had been an outstanding student in her tiny Maine high school, and a star contributor to the popular children’s publication St. Nicholas Magazine. Once she had passed the age limit (eighteen) for submissions, she was left without an outlet for her poetry.

Fighting despair, she grasped that no one could save her but herself. “I must exert every atom of my will and lift myself body and soul — above my situation and my surroundings …” Read More→