Challenging Voices: Listening to Australian Women Writers across Time to Understand the Dynamics Shaping Creative Expression for Women Writing Today

Abstract

This article argues for the critical need to value the voices and creative work of contemporary women writers in Australia. Historically, women writing in Australia have endured erasure, dismissal, and suppression. I argue that there is still, in the modern period, a continued lack of awareness, recognition and education on Australian women’s writing despite targeted awards and the achievements of the feminist movement. This piece reflects back across time, drawing on interviews I conducted and PhD thesis research with women writers in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century, and maps how the legacies of gendered notions of writers impacted women at this pivotal era to consider what this may mean for women writing today. It also explores how feminist theories such as écriture féminine are helpful for framing and understanding the responses of Australian women writers to the shifting notions of sexual difference and agency in writing. This article aims to provide insights into the complexities of liberation for women from the past to modern times, and the impact of gender on creative expression in Australia across changing social periods.

1. Introduction

In Australia, women writers continue to experience forms of erasure and absence from the contemporary literary canon. While lecturing on a subject titled ‘Writing Australia’, every year over the last five years, many students admit that they do not know many Australian women writers or read much Australian literature at all. Their education in school consisted predominantly of literary works from the British and European canon with the elevation of famous literary male figures. There is a dearth of local writing on their curriculum with the exception of a few standard texts deemed foundational to the Australian sense of nationalism like Henry Lawson or Banjo Patterson.

In order to counter the ongoing legacies of invisibility for Australian women writers, there are projects such as the ‘Australian Women Writers Challenge’, founded by Elizabeth Lhuede in 2012, drawing on statistical evidence in key reports, such as the VIDA and the Stella Count, that Australian women continue to receive less attention, critical reception and exposure than male authors by mainstream media and literary journals. The Australian Women Writers Challenge1 encourages readers themselves who have a passion for literature to read and review books by women to help address this disparity. The VIDA count is conducted by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (VIDA), who describe themselves as a ‘non-profit intersectional feminist literary organisation dedicated to creating transparency surrounding gender imbalances and the lack of diversity in the literary landscape’2^. Volunteers for VIDA provide an annual breakdown of forty literary journals and periodicals to source statistical data book reviews and media across genres, enabling insights into equity issues in the publishing industry. The Stella Count is specific to Australian book reviewing. Starting in 2012, it collects and analyses data on gender in relation to authorship, length of reviews and genres3.

This article draws on the work and voices of Australian women writers in the early 2000s to reflect on what terms like ‘women writers’ and ‘women’s writing’ meant in this period in Australia. The aim of exploring this particular period is, as this journal describes, to reflect retrospectively and gain insight into whether possibilities for literary articulation felt greater than before for Australian women writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and generate an understanding of this time for present and future generations. At this time, I spoke with a range of women writers for my doctoral research after realising that upon completing a degree in English Literature at an Australian university, I had received practically no substantial education about women writers in Australia throughout the course of my studies. This glaring omission was not an isolated incident but rather a reflection on the erasure and dismissal of women’s voices and one that needed to be addressed by speaking directly with them.

This article also explores how écriture féminine and feminist theories are helpful for understanding the responses of Australian women writers to the shifting notions of sexual difference in writing. It aims to provide insights through women’s experiences of the emergence of their creative writing and the impact of gender on their creative practice. It draws on conversations with Australian women writers in the early 2000s, who were selected for their diverse modes, status as a published ‘writer’ and varied trans-generational xperiences of the feminist movement and growing up in Australia. Fiction writers Carmel Bird and Drusilla Modjeska grew up in the 1940s, Kate Grenville and poet Dorothy Porter in the 1950s, poet Gig Ryan and playwright Hannie Rayson in the 1950s and 1960s, and playwright and novelist Leah Purcell in the 1970s.

While this article is not a close reading of individual works, it is important to note the influence of feminism and feminist themes in the works of the creative women in these conversations. Carmel Bird’s novels such as Red Shoes (1998), The White Garden (1995) and Cherry Ripe (1985) delve into the experience of abuse and victimisation of women through a darkly gothic lens that excavates the exploitation and passive socialisation of girls into oppressive ideas of femininity and virtue. Drusilla Modjeska’s novel The Orchard (1994) draws on the Central European folk tale of the handless maiden where a young girl has her own father cut off her hands so he can make a deal with the devil. Modjeska explores in this work the histories of women whose lives have been overshadowed by men. Her work Poppy (1990) is a fiction based on her own mother, who was forced into a mental institution against her will. This experience of women imprisoned as they are labelled ‘mad’ draws on powerful feminist stories of the way the medical system has been manipulated to erase and destroy women’s freedom. Kate Grenville powerfully explores the treatment of women from a range of perspectives. Her novel Lillian’s Story (1985) tells of a young girl with a monstrous father, who ends up in later years as an eccentric character who is without a home and walks the streets of Sydney. Her later work Dark Places (1994) takes on the challenging voice of the monstrous father himself, who traumatizes his daughter, to interrogate male violence.

Poet Dorothy Porter plays with form and genre in creating a lesbian detective character in The Monkey’s Mask (1994) who is charged with investigating the murder of a young female student. The writing is expressive, erotic and boundary-crossing, which is characteristic of her other works including What a Piece of Work (1999) and Wild Surmise (2002) in depicting queer voices and desire. Gig Ryan’s poetry is visceral and fiery in expressing rage and sharp wit about both the human condition and the experiences of sex and power as a woman with works including The Division of Anger (1981), Excavation (1990) and Heroic Money (2001). Her poem ‘If I Had a Gun’ (1980) tells of how the narrator would shoot the men who cross her path and treat her with degrading sexism.

Playwright Hannie Rayson creates the women characters on stage that she wanted to see in the theatre. Hotel Sorrento (1990) centres around sisters, domestic spaces and the fragility and strength of women’s family bonds. Her works, including Competitive Tenderness (1996) and Falling From Grace (1994), consistently represent women as three-dimensional protagonists rather than side roles. Leah Purcell’s play Black Chicks Talking (2003) was groundbreaking as a platform for Aboriginal women’s voices with a group of Aboriginal women sitting down for a dinner party together, with each expressing their diverse experiences and stories. Her one-woman play, Box The Pony (1999), spoke unflinchingly to her own experiences as an Indigenous woman in Australia and exposed the brutality and devastation of domestic violence.

These are women writers whose creative works resonate with honesty and courage as they speak on the experiences of power, feminism, colonisation, identity and the importance of having a voice that is heard.

2. Australian Literature on Women Writers

Firstly, this article will give an overview of key Australian studies of literature on the subject of women’s writing. This literature was, to a great extent, produced in response to the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This feminist movement led to a rising interest in Australia on the importance of women’s stories, perspectives, self-expression and textual representations. Influential works such as Kay Ferres’ The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers 1890–1930 (Ferres 1993); Delys Bird’s Gender and Landscape: Australian Colonial Women Writers (Bird 2000); and Patricia Clarke’s Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth-century Australia (Clarke 1988) explored early Australian women writers, providing insight into the historical context for women’s writing.

The Time to Write, for example, is a collection of essays edited by Ferres that include contributions by Helen Thompson, Gillian Whitlock and Jennifer Strauss, among others, on a range of early nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian women authors, including Mary Gilmore, Henry Handel Richardson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin and Barbara Baynton. The essays focus on gender and sexuality within women writers’ fiction as well as how gender affected the lives of women writers. ‘The key premise of the collection’ Ferres states, ‘is that reading and writing are gendered practices’ (p. 2). Ferres provides an excellent introduction to the topic by outlining the situation for women writers at the turn of the twentieth century, arguing that the ‘legend of the 1890s has cast a long shadow’ (p. 1), as Australia’s national identity is celebrated as masculine, anti-authoritarian and independent. As ‘feminine’ came to represent British colonialism and ‘masculine’ came to represent an ‘Australian’ identity, early women writers had to traverse the contradictions between the demands of first-wave feminism and bush nationalism. Furthermore, due to the energy invested in elevating the national ideal of bush mateship and viewing literature as art, the novels written by early Australian women writers were often dismissed as romantic frivolity written for an English audience. As a result, novels by early Australian women writers frequently failed to be taken seriously.

Dale Spender’s Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers (Spender 1988a) and Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945 (Modjeska 1981) also prove to be highly enlightening on the history of Australian women writers and the reasons for the failure of Australian literary culture to provide an accurate representation of their contributions. Spender’s Writing a New World offers insight into the social and cultural context for women writers at the start of the twentieth century and emphasises the ways in which history has failed to acknowledge the popularity and high quality of early Australian women’s writing. Spender argued that women had been erased from Australia’s literary history because their views and values did not conform and often destabilised the dominant masculine discourse. Spender states that women have created a literature of their own: ‘women’s literature takes women as their starting point and the world is mediated through women’s eyes, as individuals, as members of their sex’ (p. xv).

Likewise, Modjeska’s Exiles at Home explores the decades of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s in Australia for women writers such as Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead as well as lesser-known ones such as Dulcie Deamer, Anne Brennan and Zora Cross. Modjeska’s work demonstrates a ‘tradition of women’s fiction that does have its own coherence, in the struggle to express a view of the world and the self that is comprehensive as well as specific to women’ (p. 257).

Texts such as Susan Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s–1930s (Sheridan 1995); Guila Guiffré’s To Be Australian, A Woman and a Writer (Guiffré 1987); and Carole Ferrier’s Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-century Australian Women’s Novels (Ferrier 1985) explored further the experiences and fiction of Australian women writers. Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines, for example, contributes to the research and information available on early Australian female voices and gives a new perspective on some of the better-known women writers to argue, as Modjeska does, that these women writers were representatives of a ‘flourishing cultural scene’ rather than rare exceptions (p. 8).

Sue Roe’s Women Reading Women’s Writing (Roe 1987) and Shirley Walker’s Who Is She?: Images of Women in Australian Fiction (Walker 1983) provide an overview of the positions that women have occupied as writers, as well as analysing the representation of women within fiction. Walker’s Who is She? presents a wide range of essays that show how investigating images of women in fiction is a highly complex project, as representations are open to diverse interpretations. The difference in the styles and agendas of contributors such as Lucy Frost, Carole Ferrier and Dorothy Green exemplifies the inquisitive approaches involved in embarking on any form of ‘feminist’ enquiry.

Collections of women’s writing are available such as Dale Spender’s The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing (Spender 1988b) and Heroines: A Contemporary Anthology of Australian Women Writers (Spender 1991) plus Connie Burns and Marygai McNamara’s Eclipsed: Two Centuries of Australian Women’s Fiction (Burns and McNamara 1988), which demonstrate the range and breadth of Australian women’s literary production. Eclipsed offers fifty short stories covering two hundred years of Australian women’s writing, including stories by Catherine Helen Spence, Eleanor Dark, Olga Masters and the Indigenous writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker). The anthology exhibits the creative ability and skill of women writers who have been ‘eclipsed in the traditional study of Australian fiction’ (ix). It is notable that most of the seminal texts on Australian women’s writing appear predominantly in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. After this period impacted by second-wave feminism, which marks a surge in the aim to rediscover hidden histories and counter the suppression of women’s voices in Australia, there are significantly fewer publications on this topic. The ones that emerge tend to focus on specific writers such as Ann-Marie Priest’s Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century (Priest 2018) exploring the writing lives of Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park. There is also evidence of increasingly diverse and intersectional approaches as evident in Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing (2017), with an explicit aim in its summary to capture a ‘wide range of multiracial women authors…and varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders’.

These works inform the influences and knowledges on writing and gender that shape Australia’s historical and current literary culture. It is this culture that is the focus of interrogation in the following analysis of the notion of being a ‘writer’ for women and ideas on ‘women’s writing’ in the early 2000s.

3. Australian Women Writers and the Right to Speak

Articulating one’s voice, making space for a new perspective and owning the right to speak and be heard are at the forefront of power relations. Discursive autonomy is the first step in reinscribing one’s own definition of self and the capabilities of that self to navigate and reinvent society. Writing, as traditionally a male pursuit, still had resonance as an act of gender transgression for some women who grew up in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, given that it provides an outlet for articulation that is widely disseminated, copied, quoted, preserved through time and relegated into history.

As Judith Butler states in Sexual Inversion:

Oppression works not merely through the mechanism of regulation and production but by foreclosing the very possibility of articulation … the feminine is precisely what is erased and excluded in order for intelligible identities to be produced.

(Butler 1996, p. 68)

Such oppression is apparent in the ways women have in the past been socially inscribed through a patriarchal upbringing and education to view literature as a male domain. In contrast to discursive autonomy, women were encouraged to be silent and passive receptors. They earned approval by performatively enacting such ‘feminine’ behaviour. Through repeated exclusion from the active articulation of their experiences and rewards for pliant submission, the habitus of women consists of an internalised knowledge that their perceptions and subjectivities are likely to be invalidated and dismissed. A feminine identity is thereby vulnerable to such foreclosure of articulation as described in Butler’s description of oppression, where it is not only the prevention of production but the possibilities of producing that were foreclosed.

It is evident that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Butler’s theory of performativity are helpful frames for understanding the experiences of writing for women and the ways in which the idea of writing as predominantly masculine was reinforced through the repetition of exclusive practices, gestures, texts and behaviours. Many of the women writers I spoke with in the early 2000s for a PhD on Australian women writers expressed reservation and fear in inhabiting an identity of ‘Writer’. The construct of this term conjured canons of Western literature dominated by men and therefore positioning oneself in this literary framework felt alien to their corporeal sensibility. As McNay notes, Butler claims that the

idea of the performative expresses both the cultural arbitrariness or ‘performed’ nature of gendered identity and also its deep inculcation in that every performance serves to reinscribe it upon the body.

(McNay 2000, p. 33)

This performativity is not a voluntary process but one that arises from social and cultural constraints that comprise the conditioning of individuals. In this sense, Butler’s description of the ways in which identities are performatively constituted echoes Bourdieu’s definition of habitus as ‘the active presence of the whole past of which it is a product’ (Bourdieu 1980, p. 57).

Thus, the traditional exclusion of the feminine from the literary canon allowed the identity of ‘writer’ to be produced as a Western, masculine elite subject position and reinforced writing as a male pursuit. The trope of this literary exclusion can be traced back to philosophies such as Plato’s (427–347 BC), which suggested that women originated from the souls of men who lacked reason, and Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, who claimed nature (female) as the object of knowledge (male), with men as the ‘knowers’ and women as the ‘knowable’ (Westmarland 2001). Through the transmission of philosophies such as these throughout Western history, ‘social capital’, Bourdieu’s term for the power to access specific resources, status, influence and cultural power, generally remained a masculine privilege.

Various works such as The Sociology of Education (Musgrave 1966); Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory (Grenfell and James 1988); Bourdieu and Culture (Robbins 2000); and ‘Bourdieu, subcultural capital and risky girlhood’ (Bullen and Kenway 2005, pp. 47–61) draw on Bourdieu’s analyses of culture and education systems to critique the limits and constraints on certain bodies of attaining social and cultural capital. In The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Moi 1994), Toril Moi demonstrates aptly how Bourdieu may be useful in analysing the status of women writers and intellectuals. Moi uses the example of Simone de Beauvoir to demonstrate that Beauvoir’s close proximity to highly regarded male intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Beauvoir’s approach of minimalising any threat she might pose as a female intellectual to French academia, enabled Beauvoir to attain a degree of intellectual and social capital unusual for women in France at this time. Works such as Moi’s indicate how Bourdieu’s theories enable an understanding of habitus as performatively constituted to enhance awareness of the ways individuals may respond to the struggle for capital—social, cultural, intellectual or educational in various contexts. Historically women’s self-articulation has been inhibited and to various extents constrained by oppressive socio-political forces. Social paradigms underpinned by literary and cultural dynamics and the diverse forces at play in the access and constraints on forms of ‘capital’, impacted past Australian women’s opportunity to write and sense of themselves as writers.

The women writers I spoke with for my dissertation began their creative ‘articulation’ in childhood. Leah Purcell grew up hearing stories constantly from family, as ‘yarning’ is connected to an Indigenous oral tradition; Hannie Rayson recorded radio plays onto a tape; Dorothy Porter read out her stories to school friends at lunchtime. Gig Ryan, Carmel Bird and Drusilla Modjeska devised plays that she performed with their siblings. Modjeska invented an entire imaginary family with a set of complicated interweaving relationships that would be interrupted when a ‘real’ person arrived and literally sat on these make-believe characters.

Despite their early creativity, many of these women said they were aware of exclusion from mainstream discourses and from the possibilities of transforming these first imaginative workings into ‘writing’. In much of Modjeska’s work, she deals with this theme of the foreclosure of women’s potential for articulation. In Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999), a biography of the Australian artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith, Modjeska discusses the figure of Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). As Lily tries to paint, the shadow of a man falls across her canvas:

His name is Mr Tansley, he’s another guest, and he sidles up to Lily Briscoe and whispers: Women can’t write, women can’t paint. That shadow is a powerful image and a great deal will have to happen before Lily Briscoe’s painting can match its power.

(Modjeska 1999, p. 18)

Carmel Bird’s essay ‘Fact of Fiction’, in her collection of short works Automatic Teller (Bird 1996), reinforces this awareness of suppressed articulation. Bird says the following:

I am inclined to think writing fiction is not a good thing for girls to do. Good girls should be careful to stay at the fact end of the scale. You shouldn’t go turning your granny into a butterfly.

(Bird 1996, p. 11)

When asked why writing fiction was a gendered activity, Bird replied that boys could do it because they could do anything. Girls who wrote fiction were bad because ‘Girls should stay at home and have babies and not worry their heads about any of this other stuff’. For Bird, this meant that she was a ‘bad girl’:

It’s very exciting and exhilarating to transgress, so writing is deep down somewhere, a form of transgression which is terrific and I don’t know how men feel when they’re writing but when I’m really writing it’s terrifically exciting, it’s like getting away with something or flying!

(Kelada 2005)

At the time, Bird was preparing a workshop for Melbourne Girls Grammar School on creative writing, which she called ‘Playing in the Traffic’, ‘because it’s tricky and it’s dangerous and it’s play’.

(Kelada 2005)

It is evident here that the exclusion of the feminine historically continued to influence women writers in Australia at this time. With the identity of writer continually constructed as the domain of a Western masculine imaginary, the very act of writing becomes boundary crossing. The idea of belonging in the literary world is counter to the expressions here of shadows critiquing their voices and being ‘bad’ for even wanting to write. This is in stark contrast to the delight of remembering childhood passions for expression and creativity. This obstruction and foreclosure has therefore impacted the habitus of these writers as the messages they receive about writing as gendered perpetuates exclusion and a sense that the right to speak is one that constantly requires active self-reinforcement.

4. Invalidation and the Literary Canon

In contrast to this sense of excitement in transgressing the laws of gender convention, Kate Grenville found the notion that ‘women can’t write’ blocked her capacity to pursue her ambitions of being a writer. This negative appraisal of a woman writing had been instilled in her at university she said, through her study of the canon of great male writers:

You had to become an honorary man in order to write. You mightn’t actually have to change your name but you had to occupy some strange voiceless storytelling position. My first attempt at writing was blocked because I was trying to occupy that kind of non-position—telling a story without having a voice to tell it in.

(Kelada 2005)

Grenville unblocked herself by travelling overseas and working in film, which gave her the freedom to try her ‘long suppressed dream of writing’ (2003). Once she abandoned the idea of wanting to be a ‘writer’ and began in the film industry, she found herself at liberty to write:

I’d given up on the idea of writing, so it freed me to actually start writing. It’s the difference between wanting to ‘be a Writer’ and wanting to just write. So instead of writing with one eye to the audience and thinking, ‘Oh, they won’t like that because it’s too female,’ it could just come out the way it came out.

(Kelada 2005)

Playwright Hannie Rayson began writing to counteract the lack of strong feminine representation that made women like Grenville feel excluded from the literary canon. She was in acting school, being told to do performance pieces with low-status and high-status characters. She could not find texts with parts for women let alone high-status women. She started to write them for herself and her classmates. Rayson’s own articulation began because of the foreclosure of previous women’s voices. She felt compelled to invent female characters, and in this sense, she filled the silence left by Mr Tansley’s dictum, ‘Women can’t write’.

In contrast to the racial privilege of the white women writers, which exists even as they suffer gender oppression, Leah Purcell’s experience of writing mirrors the complexities of the identity of ‘woman writer’ when English is, as Purcell says, the ‘language of a foreign country’ and the language of the coloniser. Invalidation occurs through being taught not only ‘writing’ and the great ‘male’ writers, but also the great ‘white male’ writers. Purcell’s education in English is punctuated by stories of cultural misunderstanding and ignorance. Purcell’s first memory of telling a story is at school:

We had to give a morning talk …. As a little girl, I used to always listen to my Nana and my Mum tell stories …. The story they would always tell us was about the Mundagutta. That’s from the Dreamtime, that’s the rainbow serpent in my grandmother’s belief system.…

So, here I am giving my morning talk and telling my majority white class (only three Murries including me and the other two were my cousins) about the Mundagutta, thinking I’m being real deadly. How the creek moves and that’s how we know the Mundagutta is on the move …. Then the teacher says, ‘Leah stop telling lies and sit down’. And I said, ‘No, I’m not, my Nan told me that’. I was really hurt that she said I was lying because I am not a liar and my Nan’s not a liar either. When I look back on that now she could have ruined my self-esteem and I may never have got into my acting or writing …. It’s amazing that I picked a pen up or tapped on my keyboard. Ever more ‘Shut up! Sit down! You’re lying’.

(Kelada 2005)

Purcell’s Dreamtime stories were labelled ‘crazy’ and she was silenced by the authority figure in the classroom. From the difficulties of navigating English as a foreign language to facing condemnation when she did speak, Purcell’s experience of the Western education system resulted in paralysis:

There were a lot of things that were negative said in regards to my creativity, at school anyway. I didn’t write again until about ’89.… I’m not scared of writing any more but it’s a harder, frustrating and longer process when I’m writing.

(Kelada 2005)

Purcell’s experience captured the power of educational institutions on an individual’s sense of worth and ability. The failure of Western society and the education system to understand and meet the needs of Indigenous people is a catalyst for widespread cultural and individual alienation. Purcell may not be scared of writing anymore but the term ‘writer’ was still one she did not identify with:

The big W word scares me. Every time I get up and speak I say, ‘I won’t call myself a writer, it’s too clinical’. I’m a yarner, storyteller, I’ve now got a pen and paper and technology where I can store my stories for future generations. Mate I’m an old soul from Dreamtime, I prefer to talk it or move it, I prefer to be called a storyteller.…But I’m straight up, I say ‘I don’t like that word writer so I’m just going to yarn to you’.

(Kelada 2005)

Judith Allen, in her essay ‘Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History’ (Allen 1986), states the following:

Professionalism has meant a denigration of older, popular practices of history, oral traditions and so forth as the babble of blurred reminiscences and fanciful interpretation.

(p. 177)

Even as Purcell worked with the medium of writing as an effective vehicle for communicating stories, she reclaimed her culture’s oral tradition in her idea of herself as a ‘yarner’.

The conception of writing as ‘story telling’ rather than the traditionally hierarchical art form of white males is a tool that other women appeared to draw on. As a white woman writer, Modjeska still found the mantle of ‘writer’ a daunting prospect, as it signifies a masculine elite subject position that excludes her gender if not her race:

I never thought of myself as a writer. Being a writer was not something I could conceive of …. It’s always struck me as an immodesty to talk of myself as a writer so I very often don’t. When people say, ‘What do you do?’ I’ll say ‘Oh, I work at home’ or something feeble like that. So it still feel like there’s a vanity around saying I’m a writer. I still feel there’s something fraudulent, as if I’m saying I’m Milton or something whereas I’ve ceased to feel as if my writing is on forged paper—that feeling’s gone from my writing entirely—but I still feel to say I’m a writer…maybe that goes back to being a woman writer. It feels alright to say I’m a ‘woman writer’ but to say I’m a writer…

(Kelada 2005)

‘Woman writer’, then, in Modjeska’s experience, denoted a lesser, subordinate category to the title ‘writer’. In the past, the categorising of women writers ensured that women in Australia remained excluded from the literary canon. Even while this categorisation provided a forum for their voices, they could be dismissed in sweeping generalisations regarding their biological ability and innate skill as writers.

The ambiguity of poet Gig Ryan’s relationship with the term ‘woman writer’ is reflected in the name she has chosen to claim authorship. Ryan prefers using her family nickname ‘Gig’ to the name ‘Elizabeth’ because it is gender neutral:

I liked the fact that it was gender neutral and people couldn’t figure out what sex I was. But I find it bizarre that people always assume you’re a man, particularly as I got better known and people would totally assume I was a man then because you couldn’t be well known if you’re a woman sort of thing.

(Kelada 2005)

With her name, Ryan can mask her gender in a fashion similar to that of pseudonyms used by women writers in the past, such as Henry Handel Richardson and George Sand (Gauthier 1980, p. 164). It is evident from Ryan’s comment that, while pseudonyms may be less common, this gender bias was still pervasive in her experiences.

In 1977, when Ryan moved from Melbourne to Sydney at twenty-one, she found the poetry scene strictly segregated according to gender. While the male group was the scene for intellectual debate, Ryan was expected to join the women’s group:

I found myself split. I got annoyed with the attitude that because I was a woman I’d automatically have to fit in with the women writers’ groups and I just didn’t, whereas now I can see how important they all were and get on fine with them all. [Then] I was never really part of their scene in a way… But I was kind of their representative as well… By just forcing the men to think differently, I was representing the other women poets.

(Kelada 2005)

While Ryan expressed irritation with still being compared only to other women poets and with the assumption that women are only influenced by other women, she felt the category of ‘women writers’ was still necessary three decades on from that time in the 1970s, to enable the redressing of ongoing gender inequality. Grenville shared this viewpoint, stressing that in an ideal world, such a category would not be necessary:

It would be very nice if you saw it withering away, like the state under Marxism. I’d rather not be ghettoised as a niche feminist or ‘Woman Writer’. But the reality is that at this moment in our culture I think we still need a bit of affirmative action. Hopefully, like all forms of affirmative action, it’s a way-station on the way to somewhere else.

(Kelada 2005)

Poet Dorothy Porter, who sadly passed away in 2008, preferred not to be categorised but could see the benefits and disadvantages of such a categorisation.

I’d just prefer to be called a writer but I don’t mind. I passionately call myself a feminist and I’m enough of a feminist to want to be seen as doing something in terms of women’s writing because it is different but if it’s all lumped together I think it can end up being too institutionalised and marginalised. When women writers are lumped together, they can be too easily dismissed or trivialised.

(Kelada 2005)

Modjeska was also highly ambivalent, observing that if the category ceased to exist, the discussion of different readings, discourses and experiences involved in the writing process could be absorbed into a more central discourse. This may mean women would no longer remain on the outskirts. She notes how the artist Grace Cossington Smith was often referred to as a great Australian ‘woman’ artist. This gender categorisation allowed some critics to remain dismissive of her work as she was not acknowledged as simply a great Australian artist.

Publisher and writer, Hilary McPhee who co-founded the groundbreaking McPhee Gribble press in 1975, found the ‘woman writer’ category irrelevant. McPhee drew on her experience as a publisher working with an extensive range of women writers to note that the majority of women she knew did not like being grouped in the category of ‘women writers’. In McPhee’s opinion, it was time for the term to be dismantled as there were a different set of issues women had to counter.

Women writers were always categorised as certain sorts of voices in this country and sought after only if they were writing certain kinds of things and not particularly sought after unless they were, so there were masses of women writers writing children’s books, and women were, of course, acceptable as poets, but not usually regarded as being poets with great gravitas.

Equally with fiction, Christina Stead was the outstanding example of the most cerebral and powerful of women writers but the majority of writers were regarded by publishers as saleable if they were young, attractive once the publicity machine started working, and writing probably for the library market rather than serious literature so we tended to have a bit of tension between the categories.

(Kelada 2005)

The impact of the literary canon and the ways in which the category of ‘woman writer’ has been used to contain rather than liberate women are key issues for understanding the obstacles for these women writers. Their experiences give insights into the importance of ensuring that the canon continues to be challenged, deconstructed and diversified. The ways in which marginalised authors have that marginalisation reinforced through education systems and literary publications that regurgitate the same Western masculine hierarchies are profoundly damaging. It is impossible to know how many more voices and experiences would have found freedom in the possibilities of writing and creative expression if not for the weight of the canon and the subsequent force of beliefs around what counts as ‘literature’. Creating subgroups to attempt to redress the imbalance can also be seen here in the views around the categorisations and labels such as ‘woman’ to be a complex endeavour. If these categories are employed in ways that ensure these distinctions reiterate notions of ‘less than’ or ‘other’, then they will only serve to uphold problematic conventions rather than create any real or lasting change.

5. Navigating Language and Notions of Difference

Streaming women’s voices into certain kinds of writing, such as children’s literature or romance, has traditionally been grounded in the notion that women write differently from men. In the past, this difference has been based on conventional concepts of the feminine and masculine, with women’s writing perceived generally as tending towards superficial domestic fiction in contrast to men’s rigorous literary endeavours.

In the 1970s, though, French feminist theorists influenced by psychoanalysis, such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, were at the vanguard of redefining women’s writing and determining the spaces and forms in which women and the feminine could emerge in language outside patriarchal discourses. For these theorists, drawing to various extents and in diverse ways on the work of Lacan, Derrida and Althusser, language was seen not as a means only of communication, naming and labelling, but as a structure whose role revised and informed the very nature of power itself.

Questioning the structure of language enabled an analysis of identity, subjectivity and consciousness that highlighted language as not simply an organisational form but as a condition for producing subjects and, hence, as the foundation for the “existence of all other practices” (Grosz 1989, p. 39). Such an approach enabled feminists of the second wave to challenge the phallocentrism of language, deconstruct sexuality and pleasure and theorise the positioning of the feminine and its locus in prevailing discourses.

Cixous’ approach imagines a feminine representation that celebrates female specificity. This does not necessarily mean only females can perform feminine writing, as ‘the feminine’ is a liberating, pluralistic and subversive force crucial to destabilising phallocentric discourses. In a metaphor that echoed Kristeva’s semiotic ‘unspoken’ and Irigaray’s premise that phallocentric language provides no space to speak, Cixous used the image of writing in milk, ‘white ink’, which meant words that are invisible and texts that cannot be read (Cixous 1975a, p. 251; Ferrier 1983, p. 195). Cixous used the term écriture feminine to describe the movement embracing new ideas on writing creatively, experimentally, philosophically and theoretically in ways that used language to undermine masculine homogeny (Blyth and Sellers 2004, p. 23). Conflating politics and poetry, Cixous wrote in her essay ‘Sorties’ (1975):

…this practice will never be able to be theorised, enclosed, coded, which does not mean it does not exist.

(p. 92)

Écriture feminine was seen as a space of liberation. For writers, practicing écriture feminine resulted in ‘a variety of disruptive meanings brought to bear on seemingly stable texts’ (Blyth and Sellers 2004, p. 34). Cixous used the word voler, playing with its double meaning of ‘to fly’ or ‘to steal’, to characterise the way writing could potentially break and appropriate language, ‘to steal into language to make it fly’ (Cixous 1975b, p. 95). This bears a marked similarity to Bird’s sense of flight and transgression when she described earlier the pleasure and liberation she found in writing.

The Laugh of the Medusa is Cixous’ famous manifesto for writing in a feminine way as it depicts a utopian imagining of the power of female creativity. Cixous states the following:

To write. An act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal … tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvellous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak.

(p. 250)

Despite their differences, Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray all read and write texts to decentre constructs of femininity in prevailing discourses governing Western society (Conley 1984, p. 2). While their approaches may diverge at times, the work of French feminism instigates an appreciation of writing as the ‘blank pages, gaps, borders, spaces and silences, holes’ in dominant masculine discourse, often an obscure, silent, disorienting space (Kristeva 1981, p. 165; Gauthier 1980, p. 164).

In the wave of scholarship impacted by second-wave feminism, new ideas exploring the philosophies of power, language, voice and embodiment gained traction in Australia. The writings of Australian theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz with works including Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Grosz 1989), Moira Gatens with Feminism and Philosophy (Gatens 1991) and Genevieve Lloyds’ The Man of Reason: “Male” and “female” in Western Philosophy (Lloys 1984) brought international conversations and theory into generative engagement with Australian creative writers and scholars. Evidence of the influence of these transnational routes can be seen in the translations of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, among others, appearing in Australian feminist publications including ‘Refractory Girl’ and ‘Hecate’ and igniting a range of responses and critiques. A useful insight into the popularity and reception of these theoretical debates can be seen in the special edition of Hypatia dedicated to this topic, with collected papers from an international conference called ‘Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy’ (2000). This volume explores how critical feminist intellectuals and writers as the introductory essay describes were ‘learning to think intercontinentally’ (p. 1). Women writers in Australia gained access to and engaged with the thinking of French feminism, and theorists like Butler and Bourdieu, among many others, for navigating and imagining possibilities and articulations of different futures. This article draws on some of these theories in the following discussion of women writing in Australia as they are helpful for understanding and framing their experiences and challenges.

In contrast to the peak of second-wave feminism where women intensively explored sexual difference through notions such as écriture feminine, at the turn of the twenty-first century the emphasis appeared to be more on eroding sexual difference in favour of individuality and autonomy. To insist on a difference in writing based on gender assumptions reinforced a potentially essentialist binary that constrained expressive fluid identities. Writers emphasised how difficult it is to answer questions of this nature without being restrictive or generalising, as much writing now crosses gender boundaries and negates stereotypical assumptions about ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ writing. The attitude was one of highlighting the uniqueness of each writer, regardless of gender, and rejecting this potentially limiting categorisation.

However, the specific differences that did come up when discussing the notion of women writing resonate with the ideas of difference and rupture central to écriture feminine. Porter had a sense that

Maybe women are more attentive to the subtleties of intimacy and touch and texture…and there’s less kind of bludgeoning and less sentimentality too. Women have a certain kind of knowledge of the world through their own blood stream that men sometimes don’t have. I sometimes think some men see the world in so many removes, as if they’re seeing it through glass. Women don’t have that luxury but this could all change. The twenty-first century—particularly with generations of women who have not been oppressed, denied things, suffered some kind of cultural apartheid—could be very different.

(Kelada 2005)

Rayson stated that her work was identifiably written by a woman as the majority of protagonists are female and they drive the action:

They are at the centre of it. It has a female sensibility in that women are not at the side-lines and for men who act in my plays … they actually felt for the first time ever, that they understood what actresses felt. They understood that their role was not central to the plot, they were sort of decorative—the more astute male actors said that to me and I don’t think they liked that too much.…The people who drove the plot forward were women and that was the first time they’d [male actors] ever been in a play in which that had been their experience.

(Kelada 2005)

Rayson felt that she could write multi-dimensional roles for women:

I wanted to give good meaty roles to actresses, that’s for sure and … I knew that I could create more vivid, more funny, more emotionally complex, more dimensionalised people and … a feminised vision, which is one in which I think women do have a capacity to be able to think about whether you should be using plastic nappies or cloth ones, next to whether we should be engaging with the war in Iraq, next to whether the cleanser you buy at Coles is really as good for your skin as stuff you pay $150 for. Women can talk about those things and their careers and in conversation in a very fluid way. …[A]nd it used to attract me very much to writing scenes that were just women.

(Kelada 2005)

Rayson noted that while there are very empathetic males, the qualities of empathy and listening are ones women are conditioned to have and, as a result, they make good playwrights. In this sense, habitus, the social upbringing of girls to listen and empathise, apparently works positively to endow women with ideal skills for playwriting in this construction.

One justification for the traditional streamlining of women’s voices into certain kinds of writing, such as children’s books rather than plays, has been the conventional notion that women wrote about specifically ‘women’s subjects’. These subjects were most often seen as relating to the domestic, private space, as opposed to the masculine public space; hence, they belonged in the ‘home’ rather than on stage.

On the topic of subjects and themes, responses indicated that the idea of ‘women’s subjects’ was still relevant due to gendered socialisation. These subjects did revolve around women’s experiences of reproduction, sexuality and child-rearing; however, it was no longer a restrictive situation where a woman had no option other than writing about the domestic sphere because it was the sum of their life experience. Writing reflects changing social status and roles and the tensions inherent in their positioning as women.

Ryan, for instance, said that women were more aware of gender politics and this comes through as the subject of her writing:

I just don’t think men are going to be as aware of them [gender roles] because they are in this position of superiority where they’re reinforced by everything so they’re not aware of how sexist language is and how sexist the world is because it doesn’t affect them badly so they can’t be aware of it. I think that’s why people overlook that stuff in my work a lot actually. They just can’t see it. Reviewers can’t see it. That’s one of my main themes and it’s not even conscious. I can’t help but write that.

(Kelada 2005)

Likewise, Bird felt that women have to struggle for power and this is evident in her writing:

Women writers are searching for the mechanism of empowerment. Their writing is their tool but within that tool they still have to find the spring that will empower them.

(Kelada 2005)

Grenville made a connection to historical constraints, saying women’s life experience tends to take certain forms depending on the time in which they live:

Women in the past hadn’t gone to war, or been kings or CEOs of big companies. There are a whole lot of life experiences that we haven’t had. We’d be writing about different material. Also our position as the ‘other’ in a male-dominated society might give our writing a difference—either a very internalised brooding quality or an ironic one. There are plenty of women who are breaking it down now.

(Kelada 2005)

Porter heralded the possibilities for breaking down conventionally coded ‘women’s subjects’:

I don’t write like the traditional woman writer at all but maybe I’m using my unusual femaleness to break new ground for women, to look at things in a different way for women. …My kind of femaleness is not too trapped in traditional femininity but at the same time not too trapped in traditional feminism, so it’s not too trapped in a kind of traditional femininity nor too trapped in traditional lesbian feminism. It moves around because I move around. I’ve loved both men and women. I’ve identified, I’ve been straight, I’ve been bisexual, I’ve been lesbian, I’ve been this, I’ve been that, to suit myself. I’m a very selfish woman. I suit me and my imaginative and romantic moods and I think this has juiced up my writing.

(Kelada 2005)

It is evident that the notions of specific subjects reflect the changing socio-political context. For writers such as Ryan, Grenville and Bird, the second-wave feminist movement towards equality and empowerment, and the varying positions on this struggle, has become one of the central ‘subjects’ of their writing. Resistance to the notion of writing styles reflected anxiety for women writers in leaving themselves open to being ‘ghettoised’ or existing on the margins. It is clear, however, from Porter’s ‘unusual femininity’, Bird’s transgressive excitement, Rayson’s invention of her own strong female characters and Purcell’s transition from being too scared to pick up a pen to having signed a three-book deal, that while the ‘shadow’ of oppressive forces has been powerful, these writers were more than capable of matching its power.

6. Changing Times

These writers were selected due to the range and success of their creative work and to present a range of generations and experiences in Australia. It is evident in the tensions and recollections that there was still a heavy weight of conventional restrictive notions around writing and the idea that authorship was not necessarily a birthright.

Work that attempts to map shifts in perceptions of gender and writing for generations across time enables understanding of the impact of social, political and cultural movements. There needs to be an understanding of the changes for women, charting experiences from second-wave feminism to the ‘Me too’ movement and supporting activism that refuses the silencing of diverse and minority voices. The deepening of critical enquiry into the experience of writing comes through in recent reflections on writing through COVID-19, and the necessity for speaking out through an embodied feminist lens is evident in articles such as Sharon Eeh Ling Quah and Alexandra Ridgeway’s ‘The woman writer’s body: Multiplicity, neoliberalism, and feminist resistance’ (Quah and Ridgeway 2022). Here, they continue to ask the questions that drove the conversations in this piece: ‘What really goes on behind the scenes?’ for writers and they go on to ‘reveal our chronic medical condition, socio-economic contexts, and intersectional privileges and challenges…to disrupt the neoliberal, masculinized publishing machinery as a form of feminist resistance.’ (Quah and Ridgeway 2022, p. 45). Their personal and unflinching approach captures the renewed energy for demanding spaces for subversion and expression.

In Australia, the #MeToo movement brought to the fore the silencing and restrictions on women’s voices. As noted by Wes Mountain in ‘#MeToo has changed the media landscape in Australia but there is still much to be done’:

Australia’s notoriously strict defamation laws have also limited how survivors can talk about their experiences. For example, it has been difficult for Australian survivors to “name and shame” their perpetrators as part of #MeToo.

(Mountain 2019)

These laws differ from the U.S and other countries:

Unlike in the US, where public figures who say they’ve been defamed must prove that the statement is false and published with malice, in Australia, the reverse is true: a woman is presumed to have defamed through her accusation unless she can prove her statement is true on the balance of probabilities.

(Australia’s defamation laws are failing women who want to say #MeToo, Rigby 2018)

There is recognition, however, of the influence of the movement on the literary scene in terms of opening up critiques of the canon and calls for diverse voices and texts. In an article titled ‘The whole canon is being reappraised; How the #MeToo movement upended Australian poetry’, Jacinta Le Plastrier, publisher and CEO of the national poetry body Australian Poetry, argues the following:

There’s a surge of writing coming out of First Nations communities … There’s a huge rise in First Nations writers and women, queer and nonbinary poets who are writing about the body but also colonial assault, rapaciousness and trauma.

(Convery 2021)

This surge is linked in the article to a shift in Australian poetics galvanized by exposures of the abuses perpetrated by leading literary figures of Australia’s bohemian circles, termed ‘the generation of 68’. As Le Plastrier described:

…key to the shift is that writer’s feel they now have “permission to speak” about certain topics in their work, such as personal and collective traumas. “That doesn’t mean it’s not difficult, but permission has been granted—you will be published and if you are, you will be held in community. It’s impossible to work through traumatic experiences in art in isolation, but the community makes it possible”.

(Convery 2021)

It is clear, however, that not enough has changed in Australia since the early 2000s. While there is a surge as described in the literary scene, there is still a vital need to increase platforms for diverse voices. Projects such as ‘The Australian Women Writer’s Challenge’ mentioned in the introduction require further funding and publicity. This project continues to challenge readers to intentionally curate their reading list and address imbalances in the range of voices, experiences and perspectives they consume. There is recent research from Victoria University that confirms the ‘severe under representation of First Nations writers and Writers of Colour in Australian Literature’, as they conducted the ‘first ever First Nations and People of Colour Count’4 to interrogate the outputs of the Australian publishing industry (Atkinson 2022). Chief investigator of this research, Dr Natalie Kon-yu observed that the results of this count are ‘a reminder that not everyone gets to tell their stories in Australia. These numbers are really a confirmation of the imbalance we already felt, but couldn’t prove, and are intended to pave a way forward’ (Atkinson 2022).

These are challenges that should be introduced to students well before they reach university level. The reality is that many continue to struggle in their university course on ‘Writing Australia’ to name any Australian women writers, contemporary or historic, that they have read or have even thought about as an absence in their literary education.

7. Conclusions

In recalling Butler’s statement that oppression is the foreclosing of the possibility of articulation, and as apparent in the resistance to calling themselves ‘Writers’, the ramifications on these women speaking at the turn of the twenty-first century indicate the insidious impacts of negative legacies. Their various beginnings, from Bird’s idea that ‘good girl’s don’t write’ to Modjeska’s description of the shadow of Mr Tansley over Lily Briscoe’s canvas whispering ‘women can’t write, women can’t paint’ and Purcell’s fear of being seen as ‘crazy’, speak to ways dominant discourses could have foreclosed the possibilities for creativity and expression.

The discussion of the category ‘woman writer’ foregrounds the paradoxes in negotiating the networks of power that might erase voice and agency. While this category enables visibility and focussed affirmative action such as collections of women’s writing and women’s prizes, the grouping simultaneously reinforces the divide that is responsible for exclusion from the mainstream.

Writing, as a form of articulation, can be a locus for transgression and subversion in the struggles for discursive dominance, the right to define intelligible identities and determine what terms represent. In their work and lives, it is possible to witness how, while still a product of ideological systems, these writers attempted to transform their experiences into positive re-inscriptions that exposed and undermined notions of neutrality, normality, objective rationality and discriminatory knowledges. While writers in this period may not all have been keen on embracing or exploring ‘women’s writing’ in terms of any specific écriture feminine, their responses to their experiences of writing as women demonstrate the many ways to break into language, or in Cixous term voler, ‘steal into language’ to fly.