Introduction

Hi everyone! 
My  name is Samantha Gramlich, but I just go by Sam. I just officially and permanently moved here to Fredonia with my boyfriend of two years. I have two years left here at Fredonia, and its going by too fast! I am a Junior Childhood education major with a concentration in English. I hope to someday teach first grade. My favorite thing right now is American Sign Language. I've taken two semesters, and I can't get enough of it. I even started a club on campus of which I am now the president of.

I took this class because its in my concentration requirements, and I've had Dr. McGee before, and I really enjoyed her class! I think I'll enjoy getting a completely different perspective on writing in this class as well. I know it will definitely have an impact on how I teach my future students. 

One part of the reading that struck me was the quote, "Nineteenth-century women writers sometimes adopted pseudonyms to disguise their voices..." (Pg 9). I knew of this before, but after just two classes, I already started thinking about this differently than I have before. 

It's sort of comical that women would trick their readers (including men) into reading their work by saying they were male. I bet most of the time, if not all of the time, no one knew the difference. It's sad to think that people are so obsessed with labels, that they think they wouldn't enjoy a book written by a woman, yet they had proven otherwise. 

It's also sad that this had to be the case. The works of men and women alike deserve to be recognized. Authors, no matter their gender, should be recognized as authors and not as wanna-be writers. 

The final thing I want to touch on is what would happen if we did this on purpose today? Would people still be fooled? An interesting experiment would be to have all submissions for one year to a particular newspaper or magazine be completely anonymous entries. Both men and women can write in, and the editors are not allowed to know who's writing belongs to whom. At the end of the year, the entries would be counted (similar to what VIDA did) and see how the results would change without the gender bias.