This post is intended as a tongue-in-cheek response to the book "How to Suppress Women's Writing" by Joanna Russ. Her book deftly catalogs the ways in which women writers have been ignored, suppressed, dismissed, or downsized in literary history. It is a sober look at how women's creative works have been written out of history, and this manufactured silence is then held up tauntingly as proof that womenc cannot - and should not - write. Although she focuses on literature, you can easily find parallels in other fields - music, art, even science and philosophy.
What her book does not touch on is how to appreciate and uplift women's work. This is not inherently a problem - every book has its scope, and it is unfair to expect one author to do everything. I intend to fill this gap with this work in progress - how to appreciate women's writing, and women's work in general. It is based not just on countering the ways in which women have been suppressed, but on actively bringing women to the front.
There is overall a process of attention - breadth in the very first phase, then narrowing to depth in understanding a woman or a woman's movement, and then surfacing back up to breadth again and finding new connections. By this process of 'diving and rising', we can avoid the pitfalls of mindlessly collecting undifferentiated women in lists, only paying attention to women in feminine/masculine fields, recognizing women for just one major work, and treating women creators as only exceptional individuals with no past or future. When done over time, the result is a feminine intellectual 'canon'.
To do: explain each of the steps