For years, women had to use male names to publish their writing. Is it any different now?

From the Brönte sisters to JK Rowling, many women have had to adopt male-sounding names to get their books released

Historically, writing was considered a predominantly male profession. There's a reason why the English literature canon is stereotypically considered a list of dead white men. 

However, women have been part of literature from the very start. Some consider The Tale of Genji, the early 11th-century manuscript by Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, one of the first novels. But Lady Murasaki and her work are an exception. While women of the Heian period were usually excluded from learning Chinese, Murasaki had a particular talent for the language and became a fluent writer. In the centuries since, women trying to get their work published would regularly be discouraged by social or economic pressure or would have to go to great lengths to do so. 

More often than not, they would have to publish under pseudonyms as society considered writing "degrading to femininity". They would sometimes have to go financially uncompensated for their efforts.

Kamala Das, often considered 'the mother of Indian-English poetry' and usually compared to Sylia Plath, wrote of her struggles in becoming a published author: 

"A woman had to prove herself to be a good wife, a good mother, before she could become anything else. And that meant years and years of waiting". 

Her own father, an important figure in the journalism industry, tried multiple times to stop her work from being published. 

Nearly all of the work of Jane Austen, now considered an essential part of English literature, was self-published. The exception was Pride and Prejudice, which was published 'on commission', but at the cost of the author's own financial risk. Her writing was rejected multiple times by popular publishing houses, who did not find them worth the risk.

The Brönte sisters published their books as the fictional Bell brothers. Emily's Wuthering Heights was published under the name Ellis Bell, while the works of Anne and Charlotte went under the names Acton and Currer.

Middlemarch, considered one of the 'greatest English novels', was written by Mary Ann Evans under the masculine name of George Eliot.  

However, there were efforts over the years to encourage women's education more broadly and cultivate their interest in writing. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft, the British feminist philosopher and mother of Frankenstein writer Mary Shelley, criticized contemporary educational and political theorists who believed women should not receive an education. 

Begum Rokeya, a prominent advocate of women's rights in Bengal, pushed for girls and women to have broader access to education in Matichur and other essay collections. She also established a high school for girls and advocated to improve the status of women through the foundation of an Islamic women's association. 

Virginia Woolf's famous 1929 essay 'A Room of One's Own' also argues against the social and economic barriers to women's free expression, stating, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". 

But, despite the drastic changes in women's social and cultural status over the centuries, some of the old biases linger in the publishing industry.

Even in the late 20th century, JK Rowling was encouraged by her publisher to use an ambiguously gendered pseudonym instead of a more female-sounding name to appeal more to her target audience of mostly young boys.

In 2015, author Catherine Nichols wrote an article for Jezebel, a US website for women. She described an experiment where she used a male pseudonym to send her work to publishers and received more than eight-and-a-half times the number of responses she did under her name. 

"He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25," she wrote, "My novel wasn't the problem it was me - Catherine".

In response to this heavy bias, or because there is a market for it, there has been a recent rise in multiple publications that specifically cater to female authors. In the past few decades, several blogs and websites, like Jezebel, have cropped up that highlight women's issues or their experiences with writing and publishing. The Twitter account @read_women, for example, attempts to raise awareness on this issue.

Publishing as an industry is archaic. Not just in age but in its views and preconceived biases against women which have long calcified. So as readers, it is our job to incorporate more writing by women into our usual diet. And, as members of society, it is our job to advocate for improvement in access to publishing for women by advocating their work and rights and by being intolerant towards gender-based discrimination. 

This article is part of Stripe, bdnews24.com's special publication focusing on culture and society from a youth perspective.