How to Suppress Women's Writing

[Rich does,] stating:

in pretending to stand for “the human,” masculine subjectivity tries to force us to name our truths in an alien language, to dilute them; we are constantly told that the “real” problems ... are those men have defined, that the problems we need to examine are trivial, unscholarly, nonexistent... Any woman who has moved from the playing-fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world, knows the extraordinary sense of shedding ... someone else’s baggage, of ceasing to translate. It is not that thinking becomes easy, but that the difficulties are intrinsic to the work itself, rather than to the environment...

A more explicit, systematic rejection of the canon and the standards that support it can be found in the field of art — a rejection believe parallel to that going on in a more piecemeal fashion in literature. For example, Mary Garrard asks:

Why is our art history . . . full of virtuous reversals in which a virile, heroic, or austere style suddenly and dramatically replaces a feminine, lyrical, or luxurious one— David over Fragonard, Caravaggio over Salviati, clean international Modern Gropius over wickedly ornamental Sullivan or Tiffany?"

Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff answer:

The prejudice against the decorative has a long art history and is based on hierarchies: fine art above decorative art, Western art above non-Western art, men’s art above women’s art . . . “high art” [means] man, mankind, the individual man, individuality, humans, humanity, the human figure, humanism, civilization, culture, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, Christianity, spiritual transcendence, religion, nature, true form, science, logic, creativity, action, war, virility, violence, brutality, dynamism, power, and greatness. In the same texts other words are used repeatedly in connection with . . . “low art”: Africans, Orientals, Persians, Slovaks, peasants, the lower classes, women, children, savages, pagans, sensuality, pleasure, decadence, chaos, anarchy, impotence, exotica, eroticism, artifice, tattoos, cosmetics, ornaments, decoration, carpets, weaving, patterns, domesticity, wallpaper, fabrics, and furniture.