A (socially isolated) room of one's own: women writing lockdown.

Armitt, Lucie; Cowman, Krista; Pedersen, Sarah

Abstract

Our eighteen-month project, "A [Socially Isolated] Room of One's Own: Women Writing Lockdown", is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It involves collecting, capturing, archiving and evaluating a variety of written responses by women about the first lockdown phase (March - June 2020), irrespective of whether or not those women self-define as writers. The final main output will be a virtual exhibition, "The Lockdown House", to be launched in June 2023, which will showcase many of these original responses. All forms of writing are eligible for inclusion: published fiction and poetry, song lyrics, newspaper articles, social media posts, scrapbook and diary entries. In effect, we are mitigating against the ephemerality of women's early responses to lockdown, such ephemerality being one of the problems that both Virginia Woolf and historians have associated especially with women's writing. As Deborah Withers observes in her article on how the digital age can mitigate against the historic ephemerality of women's work, "history does not and has not always happened in the same way for everyone" (Withers 2017, 681), including, of course, all women.

Citation

ARMITT, L., COWMAN, K. and PEDERSEN, S. 2022. A (socially isolated) room of one's own: women writing lockdown. Women's history today [online], Summer 2022. Available from: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-history-today-summer-2022/

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 20, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Aug 16, 2022
• Publication Date: Aug 31, 2022
• Deposit Date: Aug 25, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 25, 2022
• Journal: Women's history today
• Print ISSN: 2059-0156
• Electronic ISSN: 2059-0164
• Publisher: Women's History Network
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: Summer 2022
• Keywords: COVID-19; Lockdown; Women's writing; Women authors
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1740827
• Publisher URL: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-history-today-summer-2022/