Thanks to committed and painstaking work by feminist literary historians and academics, it is now widely accepted that women did not first pick up their pens in the twentieth century but that they have always written. Many reasons have been put forward to explain the scarcity of writing by women in previous centuries: sanctions were placed on such activities not deemed suitable for women, and even when women found the time and private space to write, their finished work struggled to be accepted by publishers and the reading public. In any case, women, it was suggested, had little to write about given their supposedly limited 'domestic sphere'.

The patriarchal nature of the publishing industry was one of the obstacles which women writing in the 1970s still had to overcome. At the same time previously ‘private’ or domestic matters were beginning to find heightened political and literary treatment, as exemplified in the feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political’ (‘das Private ist politisch’).