Verity, I love you. I agree with everything you've said here, as someone else who writes but most emphatically does not want to be a woman writer. But there will be some romance in at least one of my books, because it's about teenagers and growing up and romance is often a part of that. Also because I've had those characters in my head for far too long and think they just make a perfect couple XP However, I'm not writing romance for the sake of romance, and I'm certainly not writing it because I'm a woman and it's what women write.
I'm taking a module this semester entitled "Aspects of Modern Poetry" (modern being the first half of the twentieth-century). Of the ten poets we study, only one is a woman. And that woman refused to be considered a woman poet and, while I admire and respect her for that, it further emphasises the masculine domination of the module. It's true that a lot of the characters in modern poetry happened to be male. T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and then the ones who fought in the First and Second World Wars. However, what about Amy Lowell? H. D.? Marianne Moore? We touched on them in a seminar on Imagism, but read only a couple of their poems.
I got a really interesting book out of the uni library a while ago, though I haven't had a chance to read much of it yet (Damn exams). It's called Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, and edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. While I'm a bit iffy about them being called "Women Poets" in the title, they do need identified as women because that is the basis of the book. It's about women who have been prejudiced against as poets because of being women (and the editors argue that women poets face more of this than women novelists, particularly historically when novel-writing was acceptable from women who needed to support themselves), and so it makes sense to call them women.
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I'm taking a module this semester entitled "Aspects of Modern Poetry" (modern being the first half of the twentieth-century). Of the ten poets we study, only one is a woman. And that woman refused to be considered a woman poet and, while I admire and respect her for that, it further emphasises the masculine domination of the module. It's true that a lot of the characters in modern poetry happened to be male. T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and then the ones who fought in the First and Second World Wars. However, what about Amy Lowell? H. D.? Marianne Moore? We touched on them in a seminar on Imagism, but read only a couple of their poems.
I got a really interesting book out of the uni library a while ago, though I haven't had a chance to read much of it yet (Damn exams). It's called Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, and edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. While I'm a bit iffy about them being called "Women Poets" in the title, they do need identified as women because that is the basis of the book. It's about women who have been prejudiced against as poets because of being women (and the editors argue that women poets face more of this than women novelists, particularly historically when novel-writing was acceptable from women who needed to support themselves), and so it makes sense to call them women.