In honor of Women’s History Month, Bakersfield College reference librarian Marci Lingo gave a lecture titled “Authors Lost/Authors Found: The Rediscovery of Women Writers” in the BC Fireside Room on March 22. The lecture featured three female authors from the late 1800s to early 1900s: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zora Neale Hurston. All three authors’ works went unappreciated at the time they were published and remained so until the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s.

Lingo first spoke about preparing for the lecture. When visiting her doctor, she mentioned that she taught women’s literature. Her doctor asked if there was a men’s literature class.

“That’s every other literature class,” Lingo said.

At the time the featured authors lived, there were very few creative outlets for women except for the home and maybe church, Lingo said. Women were rarely educated, but somehow they learned to read and write. Lingo spoke about books’ “universality” and how the author’s gender might affect a potential reader.

“Women’s experience . well, belonged to women, right?” she said. “Women readers were supposed to find universality in works by and about men, and we did. Why shouldn’t a man be able to relate to [Charlotte Bronte’s] ‘Jane Eyre’?”

Lingo said that to assume a man cannot gain anything from a book written by a woman is offensive to men.

As an English major, Lingo said she was only assigned one book by a female author: “A Severed Head” by Iris Murdoch. “Even in the 1990s, we read nothing by a woman,” Lingo said. “It made me angry, because I didn’t know better [before], but by 1990, I did.”

Although some of the works by the featured authors were successful, for one reason or another, the women lost the respect they’d earned. These works had to be “rescued from obscurity” when they became more relevant in the feminist movement of the 60s, Lingo said.

The first author Lingo spoke about was Chopin, who lived from 1851 to 1904. Chopin married at 20, and when her husband died 13 years later, she unsuccessfully tried to maintain their plantation and store. She became depressed and her doctor suggested she write to help. One of her earlier works, “Desiree’s Baby,” was successful and “concentrated on a woman’s role in marriage,” Lingo said. Her later book “The Awakening,” however, was described as pornographic. Its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, becomes unsatisfied with married life and sees death as “the only way out.”

“She’s clearly examining the limitations of marriage,” Lingo said after reading an excerpt from the book.

Because of the book’s poor reception, Chopin spent the last five years of her life frustrated at not being published. Since then, “The Awakening” has become a standard text in American colleges and has been assigned more than “Moby Dick,” according to Lingo.

The second author was Gilman (1860-1935), who was raised without much affection because her mother believed “a child would be better served not expecting love,” according to Lingo. She decided never to marry until she finally relented to Charles Walter Stetson’s numerous proposals. Lingo said she believed that “marriage would cure her” of her feminist ideals. When she developed post-partum depression, she endured a treatment which forbade her to touch a pen, brush or pencil. She followed this until her depression worsened and finally found happiness when she divorced her husband and later remarried, according to Lingo.

Lingo focused on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a book about a woman who is trapped in a home for three months and suffers mentally because of it. Lingo said that the book’s feminist themes were often ignored because it was seen as a ghost story. After reading an excerpt from the book Lingo spoke of Gilman as not only an author, but an activist as well. “She advocated women’s equalities on all fronts,” Lingo said. “Her beliefs were radical even by today’s standards.”

Finally, Lingo spoke about Hurston (1891-1960). She was raised in Eatonville, Fla., which Lingo described as the first self-governed, all black town in the United States. Lingo read from an essay called “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

“She really became a wanderer. She was an extraordinarily clever woman,” Lingo said of Hurston. “Instead of distancing herself from her African heritage, she celebrated it. She didn’t want to assimilate, she wanted to be Zora.”

Lingo also read an excerpt from “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” about protagonist Janie Crawford. Through her journeys, Janie “finds her strength is not dependant on a man,” said Lingo. Later in her life, Hurston had trouble getting published after being forced to write on a conservative publication.

Lingo finished her lecture by telling why these women are important and influential.

“All three women took uncompromising paths in both their lives and their works,” she said.