Early Women's Writing

The founding of the Women Writers Project in 1986 was spurred both by enthusiasm and by frustration. Enthusiasm, because it was clear that women had been writing in far greater numbers, and far more prolifically, than had previously been thought; frustration, because most of this material was inaccessible except in archives. Reprints and anthologies were rare, and usually focused chiefly on later periods -- the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, for instance, included only five authors before 1600, and only about twenty between 1600 and 1830.

In its first five years, the WWP collected and transcribed nearly 200 texts by nearly 100 authors before 1830, and began making draft printouts available to teachers and scholars on request. This first phase of the project aimed above all at diversity, to demonstrate the tremendous range of women's writing across genres, issues, and social positioning. The resulting textbase challenges the misconceptions about early women's writing -- that women wrote only private texts, wrote only in the belles-lettristic genres of lyric poetry and fiction, did not engage in political debate. Even in this initial sample, we find (in addition to verse, fiction, and drama) philosophy, religion, medical texts, letters, history, autobiography and biography, domestic manuals, education, natural history, and politics.

Our subsequent transcription efforts have focused on increasing our coverage of specific areas, in response to scholars' needs and the priorities set by our advisory board. With a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we have added substantially to our collection of Renaissance texts. We also encoded a substantial collection of speeches by Elizabeth I with support from the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities. A further grant from the NEH increased the diversity of our Restoration and early eighteenth-century texts, adding popular dramas and short fiction, materials from debates on issues like midwifery and marriage, and several of the earliest texts by women of color. More recently, with funding from subscriptions, we have worked to build our coverage of race and nationality further.

The impact of the Women Writers Project textbase on the study of women's writing has been considerable, and the curricular impact has been the greatest of all. Teachers have sent us a huge variety of syllabi, adding women's writing to survey courses, pairing women's writing with men's in courses on particular themes or periods, or creating courses focusing entirely on women's writing. In addition, our texts have been used in research for dissertations, new editions, books, conference papers, and workshops.

These effects have been multiplied with the textbase available in electronic form. Internet access is transforming classroom and research use, by enabling students and scholars to explore the entire textbase, making their own discoveries of little-known texts, looking at the development of word usage and style, and comparing various treatments of a given theme or trope. The electronic medium adds the power of searching and textual analysis, and it also allows for flexible displays to support different audiences.

Other projects are also working to create electronic collections of women's writing.