apoetreflects:

“A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture.  I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language.  She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”

—Adrienne Rich, from the essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1979)