March has flown by in a hurry, meaning Women’s History Month is nearly over. We’ve spent this month thinking about female authorship: The unique, exultant perspective that emerges when female creativity has an avenue for expression, and the literary inheritance we remain indebted to today.
So, if you haven’t had time to build a reading list (or if your bookshelf is noticeably empty of female authors), we’ve compiled a few of our favorite quotes on women’s writing, plus some recommendations to boot.
We’re blessed with a wealth of authors who have given us the language to discuss and diversify discussions of feminism and intersectionality. Here, you’ll find just five, but we hope they’ll spark some rabbit-hole research and late-night reading about the authors responsible for bringing women’s writing to the fore.
ISABEL ALLENDE
“Write what should not be forgotten.”
— Isabel Allende
Chilean-American author Isabel Allende does not shy away from those scenes and subjects that might turn most writers, and most readers, away. Instead, she leans into them, is inspired by them. As she explains: “The desire to write flares up inside me when I feel very strongly about something. To write, I need a very deep emotion.” More often than not, that deep emotion stemmed from scenes of abject suffering and bleak inhumanity. Perhaps it was her training as a journalist that shaped her artistic sentiment. Perhaps, too, it was the brush with a bloody military coup that forced her to leave her home country behind.
But attempting to understand Allende’s perspective is pointless. What matters is not why she wrote as she did but what she said by doing so. Indeed, Allende peppers her work with vivid detail, the kind of detail that lingers, the kind with staying power. Lauded for her long-form work, Allende quickly achieved critical success. House of the Spirits, her first novel, is perhaps her most well-known. Eva Luna, a fictionalized account of the death of her daughter, is arguably a close second. Yet, it is in her short stories that Allende’s creative spirit truly shines. Where her novels stem from the daily routine of her craft, her short stories bear the spark of that insistent inspiration.
“And Of Clay Are We Created” offers insight into Allende’s process in approaching short-form work, revealing the blend of technical prowess and personal experience that makes them shine. Following a journalistic grappling with tragedy, the short story echoes the tragedy and witness that define Allende’s work, the relentless rendering of trauma and suffering that is so characteristic of her craft.
NTOZAKE SHANGE
“I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so there is something there for them when they arrive.”
— Ntozake Shange
Growing up the daughter of a surgeon and a social worker—both life-long admirers of the arts—did not shield Ntozake Shange from the harsh reality of life in America as a Black woman. For Shange, memories of early childhood bear the pain of desegregation efforts. One of few Black children bused into all-white schools, her earliest memories are of the mistreatment that followed.
This period sparked in Shange an overwhelming sense of isolation and distance, one she sought to mend in her work. With school-yard community denied to her, she constructed it for herself. Indeed, the act of self-construction would become characteristic. At 23, she changed her name to Ntozake (meaning “she who comes with her own things”) Shange (“who walks like a lion”). Fiercely independent and driven by a desire to reconnect with the African roots she felt equally distanced from, Shange spent her life writing for those who, like her, felt restricted to the margins.
A playwright above all else, Shange is best known for the intimate performance for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which sought to provide an inheritance to the young Black girls that Shange saw so much of herself in. Poetry, playwrighting, and performance—Shange embraced any avenue to embody her language. However, she also produced long-form works, such as her 1982 novel, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo.
Regardless of her chosen form, Shange’s work found its footing in those early memories. Time and again, she heard that her dreams were inappropriate for a woman and unachievable for a Black woman. And, time and again, she achieved them even still.
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
“In a time of destruction, create something.”
— Maxine Hong Kingston
“Better to raise geese than girls” was a phrase Maxine Hong Kingston heard often. The child of first-generation Chinese immigrants, Hong Kingston’s early life was steeped in patriarchal trappings and traditional prejudice.
Silent and stoic as a child, Hong Kingston found her voice in the early years of adulthood. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s. There, she found the independence that had been long denied her. An outspoken advocate for Civil Rights and vocal critic of the Vietnam War, she shed the veneer of quiet agreeability expected of her.
Hong Kingston’s body of work is distinctly Chinese American. An amalgam of her life, her writing draws upon the rich mythologies of her cultural heritage and the racism and inequality of the second-generation immigrant experience. Her work—including her two wildly successful autobiographies, The Woman Warrior and China Men—dissects identity across all its intersections. There, as in much of her work, Hong Kingston evaluates what it is to be Chinese and American, to be an author and a daughter. The two works operate in conversation. Together, they create a treatise on intersectional feminism deeply rooted in the staunch idealism Hong Kingston found in herself as a young adult.
Fiction, autobiography, mythology, historiography—Hong Kingston’s work often defies definition. One definition cannot be argued: It is transformative and deeply touching, addressing the feminist thought that bubbles up under the weight of traditional values and in the pressure chamber of life as a second-generation immigrant.
JOAN DIDION
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
— Joan Didion
Beginning her career as an associate feature editor at Vogue made investigation and expose essential pursuits for Joan Didion. Her work, often concerned with the sociocultural landscape of her environment, echoed that early preoccupation. Frank, blunt, and frequently unflattering, Didion’s portraits of the scenes surrounding her—and those who occupied them—capture a nation at odds with itself. Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem took this effort to an extreme, surveying the state of the 1960s, from political figures and women accused of murder to hippies and California dreamers. No one escaped Didion’s gaze unscathed.
Yet Didion could also be as literary as she was lurid. Novels like A Book of Common Prayer find depth of meaning in the glamorous devastation of her narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana. Yet they also find empathy and compassion in the object of Grace’s perverse fascination, Charlotte Douglas. The work meditates on uniquely feminine sorrows, transforming Charlotte into something of an everywoman. She is, for all purposes, an object of quiet unhappiness that may feel eerily familiar. While Didion’s flights of fancy were occasional, she most often found her footing in the physical, depicting life as it was and inviting readers to analyze it with the same gimlet eye she did.
If Didion’s work does not seem decidedly feminist, it is because it was not overtly so. In her work, readers will find empathy and understanding of contemporary inequities—sometimes on the subject of American gender politics and sometimes on the subject of expanding conflicts abroad. What they will not find is an explicit call to action. That was, of course, decidedly not Didion’s style.
BELL HOOKS
“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough.”
— bell hooks
To conclude our list, we chose perhaps one of the most iconic female writers and essayists of all time: bell hooks. Truthfully, the choice was simple. Hooks’ work speaks to the sentiment Women’s History Month seeks to celebrate: Intersectional feminism, the struggle to reconcile one’s conflicting prisms of oppression, and the importance of making space for one to do so.
Specifically, hooks orients her discussion of intersectionality on the experience of Black women, writing from a position of not only personal experience but also academic exploration. Her earliest works, Ain’t I a Woman and Feminist Theory, delve into hierarchies of discrimination and domination, seeking to unearth the web of oppression that imagines the Black woman as something she is not, something deeply opposed to her true, creative being.
Notably, hooks wrote under the name of her great-grandmother, to honor her legacy. Too, she published exclusively under “bell hooks,” lower-casing her name to divert attention from herself and reorient it onto her work. Her unique choice of self-identification speaks to an overarching theme of her life, constructing her image as she saw fit—and damn the consequences. An author when told not to be. Vernacular when meant to be academic. Opinionated when silence was demanded. Hooks’ life and craft bear the mark of her lived experience as a Black, female academic seeking to share her knowledge—both learned and earned—with a world that often wished she might do otherwise.
Need more recommendations to round out your Women’s History Month?
Discover Four Feminist Novels Exploring Identity and Displacement. If that’s still not enough, dive into Seven Women Writers You Should Read. Then, head over to enotes.com for study guides, author biographies, and everything else you need to get started!