Forgotten Women

I’ll admit, I found it incredibly difficult to decide which, out of Zing Tsjeng’s Forgotten Women series, book to choose, I eventually settled on The Writers. (That being said, you cannot sleep on any of them. In The Scientists, you’ll not only get to learn about amazing women like Fe del Mundo, the first woman to be accepted into Harvard – simply because the board didn’t realise that Fe was a female, not a male, name – but man’s response to it. For example, in 1986, when Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge finally began accepting women, men held… show more.

Editor-in-chief of VICE magazine, Tsjeng is also editor of the “Forgotten Women” series (other titles include “The Scientists”, “The Leaders”, and “The Artists”).

I like this one because I’ve actually struggled to find books that explicitly focus on unknown female writers. I suspect this is partly because these writers are often unknown because they didn’t physically publish much if any work (though not through lack of trying).

It’s hard to document women writers who left little paper trail behind them. I find Tsjeng’s decision to profile “forgotten women” across a range of fields inspiring and provocative.

Although I wish she… show more.