François Poullain de la Barre was a little-known 17^th century writer and feminist philosopher who said, “Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party.”

Having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and finally having the liberty to design my own syllabus for life, I’ve spent the last year and a half reading books written by women: novels, autobiographies, poetry, nonfiction--everything under the sun. About twelve months into this journey, I told myself I need a rest- because after a year of reading justified anger, anguish, bravery, honesty, power, realism, and devastatingly incomparable hurt from such articulate writers, a part of me was starting to break.

At first it wasn’t a conscious decision, but after a few months of aggressive underlining, dog-earing, and margin notes, I didn’t want to stop, regardless of how exhausted my mind was. Why has reading women writers simultaneously left me feeling like I’m swimming upstream in a nasty, cold river for 6 hours and like I can’t stop smiling and want to go streaking through an open field on a sunny day with wildflowers in my hair?

So many women have written about similar themes, similar sadness, similar exhaustion, similar quests for independence, similar struggles, similar injustices, similar accomplishments. Yet it got me thinking: Why are so many of these books written by women only read by women? And further, why is it so difficult to break the binds of embedded, everyday sexism?

Sexism has been tightly, and often times discretely, bound within our politics, culture, sciences, philosophy, art, and religion for many centuries. I began to explore: how have respected, educated, and established men propelled sexism by using scientific data and philosophical writings?

I live in a western world that is overwhelmingly rooted in both scientific fact and ancient western philosophy. From a young age we study the classics: Socratic thought, Aristotle, Plato--our governments are inspired by their philosophical genius. But Aristotle also wrote, “The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. We should regard women’s nature as suffering from a natural defectiveness.” Our forefathers and our forefathers’ forefathers were all steeped in a tainted cup of tea: the superiority of men, and the shortcomings of women.

Scientific genius Charles Darwin said that ‘women were at a lower stage of evolution.’ In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man,’ an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolizes, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s supernumerary bone. Humanity is male and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself.”

Therefore for centuries it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. In Masculinities by R.W. Connell, he discusses the exclusion of women from universities and how it was lawfully justified by the claim that ‘the feminine mind was too delicately poised to handle the rigors of academic work.’ He says, “The resulting mental disturbance would be bad for their capacities to be good wives and mothers. The first generation of women who did get into North American research universities not only violated this doctrine, they also questioned its presuppositions by researching the differences in mental capacities between men and women. They found very few.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most famous and widely read authors of the 20^th century writes in his book Tender is the Night, “Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad.”

It wasn’t until the Victorian feminist movement in the mid 1800’s that a very select group of (mostly white) western women began urging other women to educate themselves. But educating themselves wasn’t easy and didn’t even begin to make a dent in our over-arching, both sexist and racist, culture. British scientific journalist Andrea Saini recently published Inferior, a data-driven book highlighting how science has propelled sexism. She says, “In the past, if women wanted to practice science, they sometimes became assistants to their scientist husbands or fathers, their contributions subsumed under their names. These lost women of science are slowly being rediscovered.”

And it wasn’t until around the time of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, that women were even recognized in the formal philosophical and literary world. Yet they weren’t taken seriously until over a century later. Respected literary contributors like the Brontë sisters originally published under a male pseudonym in order to be taken seriously, along with Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot), Louisa May Alcott (A.M. Barnard), and endless others.

So in a western culture steeped in studying male-based philosophical, religious, and scientific curriculum, there’s no surprise that I took a class called “Women Writers” in college, and that I would probably never even dream of seeing a class called “Men Writers,” being that male writers have overwhelmingly flooded our text books and syllabuses throughout history. Just meditate on the word “history” itself, his story.

We are now living in an age where women writers and scientists and politicians have emerged from the shadows. How is it then that women have successfully competed in the University scene, and have fought their way into political rooms, labs, museums, and doctors offices with their elbows out for the past 100 years? One of the ways is that we read their stories, we took them seriously, we listened, we triumphed together. In order to progress as a society, we read their stories. We cannot put these books and stories and women down. Because in so many ways, their stories are my stories, they are your stories, they are your grandma’s, mother’s, neighbor’s stories: black, white, brown, straight, gay, old, young, rich, poor, feminist or not.

Sometimes I find myself in sobs, in rage, or in mild depression while reading Adichie, Angelou, Atwood, Wollstonecraft, Hurston, Friedan, Morrison or de Beauvoir--but that’s ok. I am supposed to feel this fiery, uncomfortable fit, I’m supposed to examine how I’ve been treated differently, respected less, or judged more simply because I am a woman. I am supposed to be reminded of my resilience and ability to counteract society and pre-established gender norms. Because if I don’t, if we all won’t recognize this emerging collection of herstory, we will never cure the infectious disease of sexism within our classrooms, governments, libraries, doctors offices, streets, houses, and places of worship.

These books should be celebrated because they understand that injustice still runs rampant through streets, whether you’re in a suburb or city, western or eastern cultures, a slum or Manhattan. These voices should be celebrated for audibly and loudly and sometimes quietly pushing back on what we are taught by both societal norms and in the classroom.

All of these women’s voices are my mothers’. All of them say to me and all of us: be strong, do not give up, you have incredible power, you are smart, you are worthy.