Women’s stories can counter gender discrimination

A reader’s ability to view female characters as complex, layered, intellectual beings would have a profound effect on how they view actual women.
[This is archived content and may not display in the originally intended format.]

Mary Cassat, A Kiss for Baby Anne. Domestic subject matter is often blamed for the fact that Cassat is less known than her fellow Impressionists.

It was interesting to see the novelist Kamila Shamsie’s provocation in The Guardian last week for publishers to only publish books by women in the year 2018 – a provocation which has already been taken up by at least one publisher. Shamsie wrote that:

Unlock Padlock Icon

Unlock this content?

Access this content and more

Natalie Kon-yu
About the Author
Natalie Kon-yu was awarded her PhD in English and the Creative Arts from Murdoch University, Western Australia, and is now living in Melbourne, where she works as Lecturer in Creative Writing, Literature and Gender Studies at Victoria University. Natalie’s creative and critical work has been published in national and international journals such as TEXT and Kill Your Darlings. Natalie was the Emerging-Writer-in-Residence at Katherine Susannah Prichard Writing Foundation for 2009, and her manuscript was long-listed for The Australian/Vogel award in 2010. Natalie was a recipient of the Australian Society of Author’s Mentorship for 2011 is working on her manuscript, The list of missing things with Susan Hawthorne of Spinifex Press. She is part of an editorial team compiling a book about female friendship which is going to be published by Pan Macmillan in 2013.