Formal literary writing began far later for women than men. In England for instance, Fitzmaurice et al. (1997) assert that it is virtually impossible to name a woman writer prior to Jane Austen even though women were writing as early as the time of Chaucer (1). They argue that until the seventeenth century, women writers were viewed as ‘odd’ adding that ‘the enormous commercial and artistic success of Aphra Behn's plays on the London stage of the 1670s and 1680s marked the end of the time where only men were literary luminaries’ (1).

The suppression of female expression has been a global phenomenon. In Africa, the formal education of women and their ability to express themselves in writing began even later. Many female writers on the continent in the 1980s and 1990s had very little or no education. Writing on the continent was the preserve of the masculine gender at the time for the simple reason that females were then deterred from attaining a formal education (Bertons 2001: 94). Hence though they told stories under the moonlight and by the kitchen fire; that was as far as it went.