Women in the Writing World
Did you know the first know author in the history of world literature was a woman?
Seriously.
Enheduana was a royal princess and high priestess who lived in the 23rd century BCE in the city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. Her poems, which have survived all these millennia, are often hymns to sing the praises of Inana, the Sumerian goddess of sex, war, change, chaos and conflict. (See? Another powerful woman…:))
How did I not know this before? She’s been around for a while, though, obviously less popular and older than, say, Homer. But with a welcome expansion of the literary canon searching for more female, non-Western voices to contrast the male (and white) view of literary history, comes more cultural recognition for Enheduana. This includes museum exhibits, a musical adaptation of her poems and new translations.
I love this fact because it reinforces everything we inherently know about women in the writing world (there is a place and always has been). It’s refreshing evidence that women’s voices may have been silenced before but not silenced forever.
Oh, and she promotes a nonbinary, gender-fluid perspective of the world, too.
What else is there to say, but women writers rock? 🙂