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Ursula Le Guin's 1986 essay, "Prospects for Women in Writing", opens with the sentence,

It's only been about two hundred years since women gained access to literacy and began to empower themselves with that great power, the written word. And they have written. The works of women acknowledged as "great" -- Austen, the Brontës, Dickinson, Eliot, Woolf -- make a high road for other women writers to follow, so wide and clear that... [etc.]

If this 'claim' is true then I think it may be relevant to topics such as https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17000/are-men-more-creative-than-women

So, to what extent is it true? If this topic needs to be narrower, perhaps restrict it to "English-speaking women" (Le Guin is American).

To provide context, the essay ends with,

... Wolf knew that and said it in the 1930. Most of us forgot it and had to rediscover it all over again in the sixties. But for a whole generation now, women have been writing, publishing, and reading one another, in artistic and scholarly and feminist fellowship. I we go on doing that, by the year 2000 we will -- for the first time ever -- have kept the perception, ideas, and judgments of women alive in consciousness as an active, creative force in society for more than one generation. And our daughters and granddaughters won't have to start from zero the way we did. To keep women's words, women's works, alive and power -- that's what I see our job as writers and readers for the next fifteen years, and the next fifty.

The context of the question makes it clear that "women gaining access to literacy" means women being able to write/publish works which will be read by other women -- so, please ignore examples of women who can read when all the authors are men, and/or women who can write when all the readers are men.

A now-deleted answer said that the answerer didn't know what was especially significant about the "200 year" number. I note that most the authors in the quote (i.e. Austen, the Brontës, Dickinson, and Eliot) all worked approximately 200 years ago: and so I guess that the existence of those authors was the reason for LeGuin's saying "200 years". The author of the same deleted answer then said something to the effect that that the existence of those specific authors was remarkable or unprecedented in some way: but I don't know in what way, or why it was such authors came to be, then and not before.

My guess is that the cause was two-fold: women being educated less than men were; and a social bias which kept women (especially aristocratic women) from any 'commercial' activity including publishing.

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ChrisW
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  • The title seems to me to mean "have women been literate for at least two hundred years", but your text seems to be more like "have women only been literate for two hundred years"? I assume that want the latter meaning, since that's what you quote and highlight, but could you please confirm that? –  Jul 23 '13 at 18:06
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    @Sancho I changed the title to match the quote. Evidence in either direction might answer the question, but I want the latter meaning, i.e. what she said. – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:12
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    As it stands right now this is likely too broad and even from a English-speaking world it is flatly wrong from the broad sense since upper-class women in Medieval times were taught to read and write. – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 18:13
  • I don't suppose you have a link to the original essay? – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 18:14
  • @rob If it is not absolutely true because you can find one counter-example, can it be mostly true? In case additional context helps, the remainder of the essay says that women are now (1986) writing for other women, and for the next generation of women, which was not previously possible. – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:17
  • @rob I believe a good answer will reveal the extent to which the claim is true. –  Jul 23 '13 at 18:18
  • @ChrisW Well, that's why I want to see the original essay to see what the full context was. – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 18:18
  • @rob I Googled for the quoted text and didn't find a link. She is a living author: I own a printed book. I quoted a paragraph here, which I hope is fair use. I can try to answer other questions about the essay's content/context if you have them. – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:20
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    @Sancho Right now the question is too broad since historically women have had access to literacy on the basis of their class, or where they were born in the world. From a Western standpoint, upper-class women were able to read and write and lower-class women were likely just as illiterate as the men were. If we expand to other parts of the world... things get complicated since there was extreme bias against women but typically it depends upon the culture. – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 18:20
  • @ChrisW Maybe see if you can find a link to the book the essay appears in on Amazon or an eBook? With regards to context, if you can give a sense of if she is approaching from a Western standpoint or if she is speaking in very broad strokes it would be appreciated since there might be some context that is missing. – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 18:23
  • @rob Can you answer, to what extent were pre-18th century upper-class English women literate: how many of them, and how much? Just enough to decypher the alphabet, enough to write personal letters, or enough to publish literature? Are there many women authors from that time? How did the "extreme bias against women" which you mention affect 'access to literacy'? – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:27
  • @rob Skimming the essay, some other allegations/quotes include, "About thirty to fifty persent of modern authors are women"; "what is called 'literature' remains 90% male, decade after decade"; "when a woman author dies, none times out of ten she gets dropped from the lists"; "the writer only does half the job ... many more women buy and read books then men"; "Wolf knew that and said it in the 1930. Most of us forgot it and had to rediscover it all over again in the sixties. But for a whole generation now, women have been writing, publishing, and reading one another, in artistic and ... – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:34
  • ... scholarly and feminist fellowship." So the essay mentions several time-spans, and several degrees of access to literacy. – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:35
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    @ChrisW The second part depends on the part of the world since in some places women were second-class citizens. I'd have to do some research to be able to properly formulate how literate pre-18th century women were, but [16th-century women authors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:16th-century_women_writers) weren't rare per se. I seem to recall that for upper-class women of the era would have been able to more or less universally write letters. Lower-class women were generally illiterate and I would have to check the literacy rates in men. – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 18:36
  • @rob 'in some places women were second-class citizens' I don't think they could vote, in England, in the 19th century. I know that Le Guin is interested in many cultures including indigenous ones, but given the authors she cited I'm comfortable with restricting the discussion to the English language, which I guess means mostly England (earlier) and America (later). – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 18:42
  • @ChrisW Well, maybe call other parts of the world third-class citizens then? Within the context of England and America the question should be quite answerable. – rjzii Jul 23 '13 at 19:09
  • @rob Why "third-world citizens"? I'd be interested in data from other countries or continents too, but less interested in any Ancient History; however ideally an answer would at least also include data from the English-language world. – ChrisW Jul 23 '13 at 19:39
  • @rob `upper-class women of the era would have been able to more or less universally write letters. Lower-class women were generally illiterate` -- As you said in a comment to KeithS's answer, it (the alleged phenomenon) may be something to do with a/the middle class. – ChrisW Jul 24 '13 at 00:36
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    While it is certainly (and trivially true) that some women have been writing for a long time, the possible *interesting* (to me, of course) claim here revolves around a possible gender differential in when literacy because widespread (and at that this may vary be region). – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jul 25 '13 at 15:01
  • For what it's worth, the reference "Woolf knew that and said it in the 1930" is likely a reference either to the speech/essay *A Room of One's Own* (first published 1929) or perhaps something similar. In it Woolf spoke of a hypothetical "Shakespeare's Sister" and her likely lack of opportunity compared with William's. Naturally it's not fully sourced with particular proof that each woman prior to 1786 had no literary audience as Le Guin generalises ;-) – Steve Jessop Dec 02 '14 at 18:28
  • @SteveJessop Yes, Le Guin mentioned _A Room of One's Own_. – ChrisW Dec 02 '14 at 18:30
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    Anyway it lays out what Woolf considers the prerequisities to be a productive author. What she describes are rare circumstances indeed for women, who had very little access to "academic" career tracks through most of Western history. Although again it's hard to conclusively demonstrate exactly how rare across the centuries. I guess there has been for centuries a smallish but non-negligible audience of literate nuns reading (among other things) Hildegarde of Bingen, but that's not quite the cultural momentum Le Guin seems to be talking about in your quotation. – Steve Jessop Dec 02 '14 at 18:33
  • @SteveJessop Ursula Le Guin has been one of my favourite authors since I was young, so I'm used to assuming that, "Of *course* women are literate and able to write." I find it remarkable that (or if) that's relatively recent, and/or relatively uncommon across all centuries and all societies. I knew that (political) voting is relatively recent. – ChrisW Dec 02 '14 at 18:51
  • Well, voting is well-documented and happens all at once. In any given country and year, either there's female suffrage or there isn't, not many cases of "well, sort of, a few could, but it really wasn't generally supported and often quite strongly disapproved", as tends to be the case with professional writing. The Holy Roman Empire had some female electors, I guess you could count them as marginal outliers ;-) – Steve Jessop Dec 02 '14 at 18:56
  • For the "200 years" figure, maybe she is referring to free tax-supported education available to girls. – GEdgar Mar 05 '16 at 03:53

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I can think of a pretty good example that disproves the theory. Women in Classical Japan (c. 900-1000AD) were famous for their literary art. To choose two famous examples, Murasaki Shikibu wrote "The Tale of Genji" (once called "the world's first novel") and Sei Shonagon wrote a famous diary called "The Pillow Book." "The Tale of Genji" is probably one of the most (if not THE most) influential books in Japanese history.

As it happens, while the men of the Japanese court were slogging through epic poems in "official" Chinese, women were building the foundations of native Japanese literature. Pretty cool.

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Maia
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    +1 Thank you; that does seems to disprove the theory, at least for Japan/Japanese. I find it curious that the two authors you mention were contemporaries (in the same way that the several authors except Woolf, listed in the OP, were also contemporaneous). – ChrisW Aug 08 '13 at 09:58
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    I specialize in Classical Japanese literature, so that's what immediately springs to mind. You might also enjoy looking into Sappho, the Greek poet who died around 570 BC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho – Maia Aug 10 '13 at 01:47
  • And the other ancient authors? One assumes they were men. But, for example, the part in the Odyssey where the sailors get changed into animals and the witch's followers play with them, surely a woman wrote that. – RedSonja Mar 04 '16 at 09:08
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    RedSonja - why would one assume other ancient authors were men? Not sure your comment helps here. Maia named a couple of famous ones, but there were also others. – Rory Alsop Mar 04 '16 at 10:47
  • 21 of the "100 poets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogura_Hyakunin_Isshu) were women, including one empress. All well before the last 200 years in Japan. This illustrates, I hope, that a lot of upper class Japanese women were writing (although Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu are probably the most famous). – Francis Davey Feb 18 '18 at 23:10
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There is really good quantitative data on this in Estimated illiteracy of men and women in England, 1500-1900

In 1700:

In Moklinta, Sweden 89% of women could read.

In Iceland 50% of women were literate.

Amsterdam 44% of women (70% of men).

England 25% of women (40% of men)

France 14% of women (29% of men).

DavePhD
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  • Thanks. I think the context of the quote was whether women were able to write, and be published. – ChrisW Dec 19 '16 at 19:39