Heilbrun and Anxiety of Authorship

To be honest, I completely misinterpreted Carolyn Heilbrun’s essay when I first read it. For some reason, I mistook her to be positing that the cultural limitations that restricted a woman’s agency gave her a different kind of agency all together. I came at this with a sort of hindsight bias. Now that women have come much closer to equality, I saw the filtered writing of oppressed women as making a statement in itself. By not expressing how they truly felt, the women were making a point. This is a nice analysis from my retrospective, but it is really not relevant to the agency of women writers during the time that they lived. They undoubtedly wanted to exercise their agency, but were restricted. Their lack of agency is not a type of agency in itself, it is simply an injustice.