writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS
Women must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which
they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the
same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text—as into the world
and into history—by her own movement.
Hélène Cixious, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 1975.
In April 19‐20, 2014, the Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation organized the
international symposium “Writing Women's Lives: Auto/Biography, Life Narratives, Myths and
Historiography” in order to contribute to women’s memory and the writing of women’s history, both
in Turkey and internationally. Participants came to Istanbul –Yeditepe University from five continents
and different parts of Turkey to share their research and questions about women’s history and lifenarration.
The symposium hosted more than 200 contributors from Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Brazil,
Cameroon, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Holland, Hungary,
Iceland, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lithuania, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, Poland,
Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, the UK,
Ukraine, the USA, Uzbekistan and Yemen. No conference held in Turkey on this theme has ever
drawn contributions from so many countries. This collection is prepared to record contributions from
a variety of different disciplines and standpoints, and is composed of 125 papers presented during
the symposium and confirmed for publication by the academic review board.
The symposium allowed interdisciplinary encounters on a wide range of topics including
feminist/women’s auto/biographical literature, especially the narratives of feminist pioneers and
women’s rights activists; female figures in literary, artistic and scientific texts; regional, national and
global women‐centred myths; the intersection of historical characters with fictive elements; the
representation of feminist/women’s lives in media and textbooks; men in feminist/women’s
memoirs; and social memory, theory, methodology, ethical and moral issues in the historiography of
women.
Writing and recording the experience in historical documentation has dominantly been a male
occupation. This inevitably provided privilege to male experiences and strengthened the patriarchal
postulate regarding man as the essential component of humankind. For women, accessing the means
for literacy and engagement in public affairs has always been more challenging and even almost
impossible. Limited access to literacy and domestic roles, in which women have been entrapped,
were the major obstacles that hinder women’s engagement with public life and macro socio‐political
issues in outer world, and in turn discourage them to record their experiences or remarks.
Women lacked the basic requirements to write, because as Virginia Woolf claimed they did not
have a stable income and a room of their own, both literally and figuratively. Even if some women
could in time have the means for writing, it seems that they lacked courage to write under
patriarchal precepts which insistently claim that women’s experiences, engagements, ideas or
pursuits have not been essential. Canonical accounts of history and social sciences ignored women’s
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