Chapter 2
Women’s Writing
Introduction
This chapter attempts to examine the difficult issue of women’s writing. It looks at what women are allowed to write, how they are allowed to write it, and what the consequences of these restrictions are for the way in which women construct their work identity; for self-expression and the communication of ideas, and, taken together, for the impact of these issues for the work role, progression, and career. It is generally assumed that the act of writing is unproblematic, that there are specific styles – the journalistic, academic, legalistic, novelistic, diaristic, personal and so forth – which can be acquired through training or disposition, and that these styles can be exercised with varying degrees of competence in the act of writing. However, beyond the most obvious and clichéd simplicities, little attention is paid to gendered writing and while there has been some attention to this theme in language and literature studies, there has been a widespread assumption in conventional organization theorizing that patriarchal language and writing is not only entirely appropriate as the bench-mark standard but, more than this, it is the desired medium of communication for academic discourse. Indeed, the privileged [masculine] style of writing has been regarded as the primary acquisition of an academic education. Reference to almost any management or organizational studies journal would readily confirm this view. ...
