ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists (PEN's) list typically contained up to nine hundred cases of people around the world who have been victimized for what they have written. Women are being silenced every minute of the day, and their names do not appear on the PEN list. If women from the North have such difficulty making space in their lives to write, women of the South, who frequently live in circumstances of far greater exigency, have little hope, even if they are literate, of succeeding. While men who are arrested frequently face beatings, sleep deprivation, starvation, and other methods of torture, women face all these threats as well as one of the worst forms of torture: sexual humiliation and rape. Women may be silenced behind prison bars or by censors' blue pencils, but more often they are silenced by being deprived of the skills they need in order to be heard in the first place.
