Women Writing the World – And Why That World Might Look Different

A note from Julia, on our March curated exhibition wall

I grew up in a society that had women's rights designed into its foundations.

Not as a movement, not as a conversation, not as something women had to fight for in the streets. It was written into the constitution. The Soviet Union was, in many ways, a pioneer of formal gender equality — in 1917 it granted women suffrage and the right to hold office, and by 1920 had introduced the world's first legal abortion. Women were expected to study seriously, to have professions, to contribute fully to public life. Nobody questioned whether a woman could be an engineer, a doctor, a scientist. In many ways the formal equality was real. Women entered the workforce in enormous numbers. They ran laboratories, taught universities, practiced medicine. The Soviet Union built real infrastructure around this promise. Daycare was accessible and affordable. Workplace canteens fed families. Pioneer camps took children in summers. Maternity provisions were written into law. The practical obstacles that working mothers elsewhere struggled with alone were, at least in part, collectively addressed.

And then they came home.

And cooked dinner. And helped with homework. And cleaned the apartment. And did it again the next day.

Nobody called this the double burden, at least not in any conversation I was part of growing up. It didn't have a name. It was simply what life looked like. The official story said women were equal. The actual story was written in exhaustion, in the quiet competence of women who learned to do two full lives at once and were not counted for either of them.

There is a film that captures this contradiction better than any statistics. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, the 1980 Soviet film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, follows Katerina — a woman who builds a successful career, raises a child alone, becomes a factory director. And then she meets a man who tells her, more or less directly: never tell me what to do. I will always make the decisions. On the simple assumption that I am a man. The film doesn't present this as a problem. It presents it as natural.

The women's movement that helped write those constitutional rights into Soviet law was real. Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya and others genuinely fought for them, genuinely believed in them, genuinely won something. The tragedy is not that they were cynical or naive. The tragedy is that they won the formal argument — and then the society they helped build gradually stopped asking them to participate in its deeper design. The rights were written in. But writing rights into a constitution is not the same as building a society together. Women were granted equality. They were not equally present in deciding what that society would become, what it would value, how it would organize itself. And that absence shaped everything that followed.

The Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin reflected on this in his short story Nastya (2000) — quiet, disturbing, almost fairy-tale in its tone — is about a young woman who follows every social requirement placed on her without question or resistance, right to the end. I have thought about that story many times since. It is not a story about oppression from outside. It is a story about a woman who has absorbed the world's expectations so completely that she can no longer see them as expectations at all.

I thought about all of this when we were building our Staunton Books & Tea curated wall for March.

Every year, International Women's Day arrives with its flowers and its celebrations. And every year I find myself wanting to ask a slightly different question than the one the occasion usually raises.

The question, as it is usually framed, is: How do women become equal participants in the existing world?

How do women get equal seats at the table? Equal pay for the same work? Equal access to the same institutions? These are real and necessary questions. I don't dismiss them. But having grown up in a society that answered all of them formally — yes, equal pay, yes, equal access, yes, equal rights — and watched what happened in practice, I find myself wanting to ask something slightly different.

What if the table itself was designed in a way that makes genuine equality very difficult to achieve?

What I mean is this. The world that women are asking to enter equally — the professional world, the political world, the economic world — was shaped in conditions where women were largely absent from the design process. And so it was built around a particular set of values: competition, individual achievement, productivity measured in output, advancement measured in rank, the assumption that the most valuable thing a person can do is to win against odds. In the Soviet version, they were dressed in the language of collective progress, but the underlying logic was the same: produce, perform, advance, contribute to the machine. These are not inherently male values in some biological sense. But they emerged from a world designed without half of humanity at the table. 

Women entered that world. The most successful ones learned to be very good at a game they didn't design. And still — in the world I came from, and in most of the world — they came home and cooked dinner.

I want to be careful here, because I am not making an argument about men and women as opposites. I don't believe that men are naturally competitive and women are naturally cooperative, or that women would simply build a better world by virtue of being women. That is a different kind of myth, and I have seen enough of what happens when myths get built into constitutions to be suspicious of all of them. Many men are just as alienated by the dominant values of modern life as any woman. Many women have internalized those values completely.

What I am suggesting is something more modest and, I think, more interesting: that the values which currently organize most of our shared life — how we measure success, what we consider productive, what we reward and what we ignore — were shaped in conditions of profound exclusion. And that when more voices are in the room from the beginning, different questions get asked. And some of those different questions might lead somewhere worth going.

This is what these books on this wall are doing, each in its own way.

The books we have chosen do not all make the same argument. They come from different countries, different centuries, different traditions. But many of them are asking, in their own ways, a version of the same question: not how women can succeed in the world as it exists, but what a world might look like if women had been part of designing it from the beginning.

Han Kang's woman in The Vegetarian doesn't ask for a seat at the table. She simply stops eating. It sounds like nothing. In the novel it is a complete and devastating refusal — of the system, of the expectations, of the logic that says you must consume and produce and perform. It begins with a woman deciding, quietly, that she will not participate on the existing terms. I find this one of the most radical acts in contemporary fiction precisely because it requires nothing dramatic. Just a refusal. Just a no.

Olga Tokarczuk's heroine in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is dismissed, patronized, and ignored by everyone around her. She responds by quoting William Blake and solving murders. Her refusal to accept the world's verdict on her is not loud or dramatic. It is simply absolute — and that, Tokarczuk suggests, may be the most radical posture available.

Virginia Woolf, writing in 1929, asked for a room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year. She was asking, underneath the practical request, for the conditions that would allow a woman to think freely — not to compete on the existing terms, but to create the space for a different kind of thinking altogether. Djamila Ribeiro, writing in Brazil in 2025, takes that argument further: not just who gets to speak, but whose framework defines what speaking is worth.

And then there is Mary Shelley. Twenty-eight years old, having already invented science fiction with Frankenstein, writing in 1826 a novel about the last survivor of a plague that has emptied the earth. The Last Man is not a cheerful book. But there is something in the audacity of it — a young woman imagining the end of everything, two hundred years ago, with nobody paying particular attention — that feels important to me. The world she imagined was one where all existing structures had collapsed. What came after was entirely open. She had the freedom to imagine from scratch. Not many writers get that, and fewer use it as honestly as she did.

That openness is what this wall is really about.

Not the argument that women are better. Not a utopia. Not a reversal of anything. Just the question: what gets imagined when more people are in the room? What values emerge when the conversation includes the voices that have historically sustained everything quietly, without being officially counted?

Women have been writing that world for centuries. In letters that were never published, in diaries that were burned, in novels that went out of print, in poetry that nobody taught in schools. This wall is twenty small pieces of that larger project — the ongoing, unfinished work of imagining otherwise.

Come and walk through it. The story starts on the left and ends on the right, but you can begin anywhere. Follow what calls to you.

And if you find a book here you've never heard of — good. That's the point.