feminist poetry by IBTICEM Tlili

Women across the world and in all different cultures are taught from an early age to speak quietly, not to swear, to begin questions with apologies and qualifiers, and to wait to speak until they’re spoken to. Writing is a realm in which women can speak up as loudly as they want.

The page is a space for women to start a dialogue and reveal parts of their lives and thoughts that might otherwise receive more pushback were they to be voiced; on a smaller scale, consider the powerful (if not quite literary) tweets behind the recent #YesAllWomen Twitter campaign, one of which read “#YesAllWomen because this hashtag may be the only place some women can speak safely.”

Luckily for us, there are plenty of women writers who are able to write honestly and assertively about their lives. They may write about feminism, but their writing is also itself a feminist act itself in that they disrupt and deconstruct a patriarchal literary tradition. The list could go on and on, but writers like Marge Piercy, Toni Morrison, Gayatri Spivak, and Caitlin Moran work within a feminist framework (in poetry, novels, theory, and memoir) and engage in intersectionality, knowing that feminism is a complex creature involving race, class, religion and age.

Here, some great quotations from feminist books to inspire you:

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