Reasons Why You Should Read Books By Women

Years ago, a young girl came across a book, with a daunting name she didn't fully understand and an author she hadn't heard of. She gambled, flipped the coin in the air, and purchased the book. She won't admit that she was short on money that day, or that she had to borrow some from her driver, or the fact that ever since that bookshop disappeared from the plaza. Of course she won't, it makes everything less believable. 

She read the first half of the book while sitting in the car on her journey back home. There wasn't enough ink in the pen that she held in her hand or the space in the margins of the book to hold her confession. A teary confession of a lost daughter finding the words that guided her home. She found the vocabulary for her expression. The language that can describe the turmoil her soul was in. A companion stretching out a hand and reassuring her that she isn't alone in her thoughts. Validating her opinions, confirming her fears, and upholding her ideals. 

The book was, Handmaid's Tale and the author was Margaret Atwood and the girl was me. 

For years now, we have had this very masculine description of what a woman ought to be. She was a muse, a heartbreak, and a curse. Bewitching innocent men, luring them away from their dreams, and being the cause of their downfall. Or she was the helping hand, the audience, the one that stayed in between the lines rather than the centre. Women written by men took the backseat. They stayed behind. Playing the role assigned.

That's how they have been perceived. As beings without desire, destinies or dreams. As vessels of infinite virtue. They weren't real or close to reality. They were always mirrors reflecting men, their lives, and their stances. A woman in a male novelist world is there just to glorify the hero. She is there to quench that thirst for superiority. She has no role apart from reacting to situations the main lead is tangled. Literature is filled with such wreckage of female characters at the hands of male authors.

For so long, we were at the mercy of male interpretations. But then we had no other choice. Our ancestral mothers were forbidden from learning, they were never taught the alphabet that could make a sentence, the collection of which could tell their truth. Learning was not on the agenda for women in the 18th and 19th centuries. So while Dickens and Fielding were busy creating worlds to be remembered long after their time, a woman was losing her sanity cause she couldn't put into words what she felt.

Our history never had the insider's touch. Because those who lived through it never had the ability to narrate it. Yes, there were exceptions. Those who ventured into the realms that were declared unfit for them. Those who cleared the path for so many of us. With time, we started having our own set of heroes. Women took the pen with a vengeance to make up for the years that went unrecorded.

Today when I look at my own books, I'm forced to think about all those women who must have searched for familiarity while looking up a book. How empty the libraries must have felt, how unwelcoming. They must have thought it impossible for a female-authored book to be displayed in the very column of the bookshop. We are blessed to have Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Emma, Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Bluest Eyes. They coined a language in which we found solace. Their presence in our rooms, in our lives, is proof that what lacked was a voice. We are the continuation of their stories, the collective voice.