Exchanging Hats

As a woman writing during a time when white men dominated high-brow literature and publishing, Elizabeth Bishop endured condescension and tokenism. Adrienne Rich, another 20th-century lesbian poet, recalled that Marianne Moore and Bishop were the only mainstream and critically acclaimed female poets when Rich began her career.

However, Bishop detested this. She refused to be the sole female writer in otherwise all-male anthologies and defined feminism as equality between men and women. That also meant forgoing appearing in all-female poetry anthologies.

“Undoubtedly, gender does play an important role in the making of any art,” said Bishop. “But art is art, and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art” (Delany, Ella. “Elizabeth Bishop and the F Word.” Columbia Journal, 2011).

Many late-20th century feminist poets—such as Rich, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Marge Piercy, and Audre Lorde—sought to foreground their experiences as women in their works and created women-led opportunities away from the white male-dominated literary establishment. Bishop sought to keep her writing “genderless” as a way to maintain her observational objectivity. Literary critic James Fenton explained that Bishop wanted people “to take universal experience as her legitimate range” rather than only interpreting it as about women's experiences (Fenton, James.