"There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge"
About this Quote
Jong’s sentence is built like a courtroom brief disguised as a complaint: it piles up “still,” “lesser,” “not as important,” “less,” until the reader can feel the suffocation of the hierarchy she’s naming. The intent isn’t to argue that the nursery is literally a battlefield; it’s to expose how cultural prestige gets assigned, and how those assignments just happen to track gendered labor. By pairing “nursery” and “bedroom” with “battlefield,” she spotlights a value system that treats care, sex, domestic negotiation, and interior life as small because they happen in private, while granting automatic grandeur to public conflict and institutional power.
The subtext is sharper: this isn’t only about critics dismissing “women’s writing.” It’s about gatekeeping what counts as knowledge in the first place. “What women know about” isn’t a natural category; it’s the product of social sorting, where women are steered into certain forms of expertise and then mocked for lacking the “serious” ones. Jong is calling out a double bind: relegation followed by ridicule.
Context matters. Coming out of the post-1960s feminist surge and the backlash that followed, Jong is speaking as a novelist whose own work was routinely filed under “confessional,” “sexual,” or “women’s lit” in ways that implied triviality. The line anticipates today’s debates about autofiction, romance, and domestic narratives being treated as “guilty pleasures” while war stories and political epics get framed as Literature. Her rhetorical move is to make the prejudice sound as blunt and ridiculous as it is, so the reader can’t hide behind tasteful euphemisms.
The subtext is sharper: this isn’t only about critics dismissing “women’s writing.” It’s about gatekeeping what counts as knowledge in the first place. “What women know about” isn’t a natural category; it’s the product of social sorting, where women are steered into certain forms of expertise and then mocked for lacking the “serious” ones. Jong is calling out a double bind: relegation followed by ridicule.
Context matters. Coming out of the post-1960s feminist surge and the backlash that followed, Jong is speaking as a novelist whose own work was routinely filed under “confessional,” “sexual,” or “women’s lit” in ways that implied triviality. The line anticipates today’s debates about autofiction, romance, and domestic narratives being treated as “guilty pleasures” while war stories and political epics get framed as Literature. Her rhetorical move is to make the prejudice sound as blunt and ridiculous as it is, so the reader can’t hide behind tasteful euphemisms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Erica
Add to List
