Women's writing (literary category)

There are examples in the 18th century of catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752); John Duncombe's Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers; and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.

Mary Scott's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women writers being published.

Some scholars, such as Roger Lonsdale, mentions that something of a commonality exists and that "it is not unreasonable to consider "women writers" in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly 'feminine' in social and literary behavior they faced.

The normative events within a woman’s life do not always coincide with that of a man’s; part of this difference includes the fact that women can bear children.

Studies such as Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing.

Most genres and sub-genres have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the "female gothic"[13] or women's science fiction, for example.

While the women’s writing literary category covers a multitude of subjects and situations, there are clear common themes within works that reflect the ideals of more than one woman.

Due to the perpetual war being waged in the fight between pro-choice and pro-life lawmaking, the tone in which women writers speak of pregnancy has sparked debate amongst the feminist movement.

Writers like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Acevedo, Diane di Prima, Mina Loy, Elana K. Arnold, Robin Benway, Virginia Woolf, Janet Finch, Mary H. K. Choi, Jessamine Chan, and more have examined the subject of motherhood from a variety of perspectives, in a multitude of mediums.

The categorization of women authors as a separate literary category addresses how inconsistent and inaccurate some men's interpretations of living as a woman can be.