El desconocimiento de la tradición literaria femenina y su repercusión en la falta de autoridad social de las mujeres

Abstract

The lack of social authority of women has an effect on their difficulty to gain access to public spaces of power and it is sustained by ignoring the feminine contributions to history, in general and, especially, to literature. The last one is particularly important because it offers, through texts and writers, the referents with which we form our cultural model. The ignorance of this tradition of female knowledge is due to the exclussion of women from History, Literature and from the texts that they release, such as school and university textbooks or anthologies.

This paper presents an analysis with the data of the women writers’ presence in the ESO literature textbooks. Women’s presence is very poor: 7 % and it shows almost the total exclusion of female writers in literature through history, despite having a rich literary tradition, as many studies have shown.

This exclussion leaves women without any models, without a tradition to take part in and it impoverishes the collective cultural heritage, turning their social situation into a precarious one. In this way, the ignorance of the feminine literary –and cultural– tradition becomes the instrument that undermines the social authority of women and makes it more difficult for them to reach or assume more powerful roles.

It is necessary that the tradition of female knowledge becomes part of the common cultural referents legitimating women socially: the recognition of this tradition brings them back to the collective memory, returns them to the literary –and cultural– tradition and provides them with social authority. The social authority necessary to assume and get engaged in any kind of power.