we come from women who wrote themselves alive

when the world tried to write them dead

A great hall of women who gave us the language of liberation.

This isn’t a revolution with a soundtrack.
There’s no montage, no swelling violins.
It’s quieter than that—
just the scratch of a pen
on a grocery list turned manifesto,
just a woman in the back row
writing herself back into the story.

We begin with a simple thank-you
to the women who wrote us into existence—
who didn’t wait for the nod or the grant
or the kind nod from the professor.
They wrote anyway.

Virginia Woolf asked for a room
and gave us the blueprints to build one—
even while her own mind tugged at the corners.
Audre Lorde turned illness into testimony,
refused to be silent,
and named her rage a life force.
Mary Wollstonecraft dared to write
that women were not ornaments—
and then died giving birth to another revolution:
Mary Shelley.

They didn’t write because they were fearless.
They wrote because fear was no match for ink.

Doris Lessing shattered the form,
wrote a novel that folded in on itself
like an origami map of one woman’s mind.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote philosophy in a lover’s breath
and asked why women were “the second sex”—
even while tucking away letters to Jean-Paul Sartre.
bell hooks (yes, lowercase on purpose)
braided Black feminism, pedagogy, and love
into something sharper than any theory
the ivory tower could hold.

Jane Austen, unmarried in a house full of brothers,
sliced society open with a teacup and a quill.
Adrienne Rich kicked open the academic gates
in lace-up boots,
her poetry soaked in feminism,
her essays battle-tested.

And then:
Sylvia Plath,
who wrote with mercury on her tongue,
each line a fire escape from despair.
Her words still shimmer,
even as we wince.
Toni Morrison,
writing before sunrise
with children asleep in the next room—
gave us Blackness
not as suffering, but as sacred epic.
She said: Write the books you want to read,
and then did.

Maya Angelou told us: Still I Rise,
and she said it for all of us
with our backs bent beneath history.
She made language into a staircase.

Anne Sexton gave grief its own wardrobe.
She dressed it in metaphor,
gave it a room to scream in.
Her confession was a candle,
a way for the rest of us
to find our own hands.

Anne Carson cracked open myth
and found herself inside.
She told the story of Geryon
and made the monsters beautiful.
Zadie Smith took multicultural London
and wrote it onto the page
with humor, elegance, and sharp teeth.

Eve Ensler,
in a trembling voice,
gave our bodies names
that no one had dared to speak aloud.
Sappho, from the island of Lesbos,
wrote of women in love
before history tried to erase
her very vowels.
Her poems came to us in scraps,
but they were enough to light the flame.

Warsan Shire reminded us
that no one leaves home
unless home is the mouth of a shark.
She carried exile
like a child on her back.

Ursula K. Le Guin dissolved gender
in science fiction
and asked us to imagine better worlds—
and better selves.
Susan Sontag sharpened thought into art,
even as illness took her breath.
She said: Be serious about being serious.
And she was.

Margaret Fuller,
journalist, suffragist, abolitionist—
declared equality
while clinging to a ship off Fire Island.
Joan Didion turned heartbreak into syntax,
wrote grief like it was
a scientific report,
so we could survive it too.
Octavia E. Butler,
quiet and exacting,
built time machines
that took us into the brutal truth
and back out again.

And then—
Nora Ephron,
who said what we weren’t supposed to say
but couldn’t stop laughing as she said it.
Her wit wore stilettos,
and her rage smelled like Chanel No. 5.
Even while dying,
she took notes.

Amanda Gorman,
barely old enough to rent a car,
spoke truth to a divided nation
with a gold ring and yellow coat.
She reminded us
that hope is a muscle.
Gloria Steinem,
who walked America into knowing better,
still radiant in aviator glasses and certainty.
Rebecca Solnit mapped resistance
in sentences long enough to lose yourself in—
and then find yourself again.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stood tall
on two continents
and dared us to call her feminist
and say it like it’s a compliment.
Michelle Obama,
with arms strong from gardens
and speeches that didn’t shout—
just rumbled like a gentle earthquake.
She told us:
When they go low, we go high.
Even when it hurt.

There are more.
Of course there are.

The seamstress writing poems
between hemming sleeves.
The grandmother teaching her granddaughter
to spell rebellion.
The teacher sliding a banned book
into a backpack with a wink.
The immigrant mother writing
in the language her children
forgot how to read.

They all wrote us here.

And now—
we write.

We, who passed dog-eared books
under desks like contraband.
We, who scribbled poems on receipts
while someone waited in the car.
We, who found ourselves
in one woman’s voice,
and didn’t know until then
we had one too.

Let this be our vow:
we quote them in boardrooms and bedrooms,
we speak them in protest and in prayer,
we write beside them
in history’s blank spaces.

Let our daughters know
that the pen was never mightier
than the trembling hand
that dared to hold it anyway.

Because we come
from women
who wrote themselves alive
when the world tried
to write them dead.

And so shall we.

Look, I’ve told you about the women who wrote me free—the ones who lit the match and handed me the pen. But now I want to hear yours. Tell me about the women who left ink on your life. Maybe it was a writer whose book cracked you open on page seventeen. Or a teacher who slipped you Adrienne Rich under the desk like it was contraband and said, “You’re going to need this.”

Maybe it was your aunt who wrote birthday cards like they were Pulitzer speeches. Your sister. Your Sunday school teacher. That friend who mailed you poems during your divorce. (Yes, that one. She still deserves a thank-you.)

Name them. The authors. The rebels. The women you knew, the women who knew, who still know and recognize you. Drop them in the comments like blessings, like breadcrumbs, like battle cries.

Let’s build a mighty shrine to them in the replies. Always forward, Gloria

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The Women Who Wrote Us Free

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own
She asked for space and gave us blueprints for freedom—quiet, radical, essential.

Audre Lorde – Sister Outsider
Cancer in her body, fire in her voice—she made silence unbearable.

Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
While the world labeled women property, she handed us a passport to autonomy.

Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
She didn’t just write a novel; she fractured form itself, refusing neatness.

Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex
She saw the whole architecture of patriarchy—and gave us the language to dismantle it.

bell hooks – Ain’t I a Woman?
She braided love and liberation, tender and unflinching in the same breath.

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
With no formal education and a shared writing desk, she launched a thousand sharp observations.

Adrienne Rich – Diving into the Wreck
She mapped the damage done to women—and the way back to ourselves.

Sylvia Plath – Ariel
She spun despair into dangerous beauty, then left the door open behind her.

Toni Morrison – Beloved
She made us sacred, mythic, unforgettable—her words carved into our very marrow.

Maya Angelou – And Still I Rise
Her poems stood taller than history’s attempts to knock her down.

Anne Sexton – Live or Die
Grief became cathedral in her hands—candles lit with every confession.

Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red
She reimagined monsters and made them tender, queer, divine.

Zadie Smith – White Teeth
With elegance and wit, she captured London in all its chaotic, multicultural glory.

Eve Ensler – The Vagina Monologues
She made the unspeakable theatrical, sacred, and hilariously unashamed.

Sappho – Fragment 31
Desire survived across millennia because she once dared to write it.

Warsan Shire – Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
Her poetry holds exile and womanhood like twin flames.

Ursula K. Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness
She dissolved gender with prose and made possibility her homeland.

Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation
She turned thought into art and wielded seriousness like a sword.

Margaret Fuller – Woman in the Nineteenth Century
She declared equality long before it was fashionable—or safe.

Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking
Grief, in her hands, became exact, clinical, and impossibly human.

Octavia E. Butler – Kindred
She made science fiction a mirror, history a warning, and survival a genre.

Nora Ephron – I Feel Bad About My Neck
She taught us to laugh at what hurts and to never stop taking notes.

Amanda Gorman – The Hill We Climb
She stitched unity from the ragged seams of a wounded nation—young, unshaken, radiant.

Gloria Steinem – My Life on the Road
Her life became a movement, her suitcase packed with rebellion and grace.

Rebecca Solnit – Men Explain Things to Me
She named the unsaid and handed women the vocabulary of resistance.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – We Should All Be Feminists
She carried feminism across oceans—eloquent, elegant, unstoppable.

Michelle Obama – Becoming
With roots in the South Side and poise forged in fire, she reminded us dignity is revolutionary.

—

Together, they gave us a vocabulary for freedom—a map with inked initials at every trailhead. Their stories were not just stories. They were doors. We walk through them now, carrying our own pens.