Women's Writing: Discuss

Must must must link to this provocative and well-argued piece, by Kerry Clare, on women's fiction, and how it continues to be viewed by critics as being of lesser value than men's fiction, long after Virginia Woolf wrote about the issue in A Room of One's Own: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop -- everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists."

In her essay, Clare posits that the gestational nature of a book like Lisa Moore's February is indeed very much unlike the plot- and conclusion-driven fiction that we consider to be traditionally male; but that the layered and continual sock-folding nature of "feminine" fiction should not and cannot be dismissed simply because it approaches time and human transitions differently.

I guess my question is: do women really understand time and action differently than men do? Is this a feminine quality, or does it relate more to the fact that more women than men, even now, spend time folding socks, and completing repetetive daily tasks? Do our bodies call us to repetition and a less linear understanding of time, are women by nature gestational beings? Just asking. I don't know.

Read the article. And then comment, because I want to know what you think (... as I sit here, writing what seems to me to be a prototypically feminine book).