Version Lost: The Women Whose Words Never Made the Final Draft

If you’ve ever tucked a sentence into your notes app and thought, no one needs to see this, congratulations, you’re not being secretive, you’re simply being historical in the quietest way possible.

(Because we all trauma-dump into our Notes app, as we should. It’s totally fine and even encouraged to be therapeutically lonely sometimes and we’ll talk about why.)

For centuries, women have written in the one place they felt most heard, most seen, and most unjudged: in journals and today in Notes app confessions. Men kept diaries too (of course they did), but for women, the private page became something deeper: a refuge, a rebellion, a record.

Because here’s the truth we often get wrong on the Internet or in mainstream media: writing thoughts and feelings in a diary isn’t some teenage quirk or a productivity hack. Journaling was survival for women, through unrecorded history: it was a way to protect truth, memory, and the most honest recollection of events from voices muted or unheard.

And the moment those private words grew into something serious like poems, literature, or autobiographies, dare I say, that’s when the real danger began: someone usually tried to ‘fix’ them.

Often women’s words were rewritten, corrected, or quietly confiscated — not metaphorically, but literally. Scholars like Paula Backscheider have shown that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male editors often reshaped women’s poems to fit the world they were trying to preserve.

Publishers engaged in “revising and cutting” women’s work, and poets like Katherine Philips were “at the mercy of the editors who ordered and arranged their texts.” Another editor, Charles Cotterell, even “rearranged her poetry,” ignoring both her manuscript and earlier editions.

All because it was too bold, too emotional, or too honest for the world. So, the next time someone tells you your idea is “too much,” “too creative,” or “not quite on-brand,” just remember, women have been edited out by smaller minds for centuries.

If there’s one mercy of the digital age, it’s this: our messy, brilliant Version 1s and our first drafts survive. But in the eighteenth century, only the edited Final Version survived, leaving no trace of who she really was on the page.

And yes, we’ll come back to these examples: the poems cleaned up, the letters intercepted before they reached their readers, or the manuscripts quietly altered because her truth made people uneasy.

(And I don’t say this lightly. I asked our wonderful, man-coded ChatGPT 5.1 to check a few passages for grammar and spelling, and it regurgitated its own version, in its own tone… then AI-splained why its version was superior. Classic.)

After All of This, Women Wrote Anyway.

They wrote anyway, like Julian of Norwich quietly composing visions of the divine in a world that didn’t expect women to write about God. They wrote anyway, like Phillis Wheatley crafting poetry that outlived the very systems built to silence her. They wrote anyway, like Murasaki Shikibu writing The Tale of Genji in secret while men mocked women for writing in their own language.

It wasn’t legislation that silenced them. It was a world unwilling to hear them. Literacy was withheld. Education was rationed. Real writing was reserved for the powerful. And don’t even get me started on the archive, curated by the same narrow slice of power (a few white men) who decided which stories were worth saving.

Across history, women wrote in the same patterns they lived by: quiet when the world demanded silence, bold when a window opened, rebellious when they had no choice, shaped always by a maternal and spiritual depth the archive never knew how to name. And so, their words slipped through the cracks of the record.

“Pulitzer Prize–winning author, historian, and former Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said it best in her iconic Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History: ‘History isn't simply what happened in the past; it is what later generations choose to remember.’”

But Why Did This Happen?

It wasn’t because women lacked skill or interest. I mean, they were writing everywhere — in Byzantium’s scriptoria, in medieval Europe’s cloisters and courts, across dynasties, empires, and eras — and often with more nuance, complexity, and emotional intelligence than the men whose work survived.

The danger, at least to the patriarchal systems that shaped our institutions, was what female literacy made possible: independent thought, private conviction, competing versions of events, and perspectives that disrupted the neat stories told about the world.

I mean, can you imagine a world where female-empowered perspectives and narratives weren’t just footnotes? Authentic and powerful, in the most beautiful way.

All in all, women’s writing wasn’t forgotten; it was sidelined because it threatened the hierarchy, and dare I say, the patriarchy.

God forbid a girl wanted to read, or worse, write.

Why Women’s Writing Disappeared

(And Why It’s More Complicated Than TikTok Think-Pieces Suggest)

Women were not typically punished by law for reading or writing despite how tempting and unsurprising it could be to imagine a medieval librarian chasing a girl with a torch through a stone hallway.

The real issue wasn’t punishment; it was access. And honestly, access wasn’t exactly overflowing for most men either. The system was stingy with everyone. Literacy was a VIP section with basically no one on the list. Lol.

Here’s what happened (the facts), without the pity, bitterness, and “men are trash” energy.

• Medieval Manuscripts, Monasteries, and Exclusion

In medieval Europe, literacy lived in rooms built for men where girls were not permitted to learn — in monasteries, scriptoria, universities . Books were rare and expensive. A few aristocratic women learned to read, even fewer were taught to write, and many had to dictate their words to male scribes because holding the pen itself was considered a privilege of men. What survives from that era survives because men copied it and what they didn’t copy slipped out of history.

And yet, women wrote anyway. They slipped their voices into margins, into letters, into hymns, into whatever space they could find, proving that their absence in the record doesn’t signal a lack of brilliance, it reveals the limits of an archive curated by power.

• Lutheran Literacy, Victorian Limits

The Protestant Reformation created one of history’s few openings for women’s literacy. In parts of Scandinavia, Lutheran teaching required every believer — women included — to read Scripture. For a brief moment, female literacy rates soared, offering a glimpse of what education might look like when women weren’t excluded by design.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, restrictions shifted from explicit exclusion to cultural gatekeeping. Public libraries in Britain and North America became male-coded spaces, and a woman reading alone could be treated as improper, suspicious, or even morally at risk, a pattern well-documented in Victorian library history. Education followed the same script: girls were taught “accomplishments” like music, needlework, French, and moral refinement, not the philosophy, science, mathematics, or law reserved for men. Institutions openly claimed women lacked the “mental stamina” for serious study, creating an educational system that kept women brilliant only in ways that didn’t threaten anyone — a quiet confinement that shaped entire generations.

Today, in a progressive world, women are only labelled as improper, suspicious, or morally at risk due to gender stereotypes, double standards, and societal norms that police female behaviour and autonomy. Not because of reading and writing! Phew.

• Literacy as Resistance in the American South

  
  

In the American South, the story grows even darker. Anti-literacy laws targeted enslaved people of all genders, criminalizing the teaching of reading or writing. Statutes like the South Carolina Slave Code of 1740 made it illegal to instruct enslaved people in literacy, punishing the teacher rather than the learner, but producing the same result: enforced silence. Here’s the decree that was cast upon Black lives: “Teaching slaves to write, or employing them in writing, shall be deemed an offense punishable by a fine of one hundred pounds.”

Literacy was treated as a threat because it created possibility, agency, and resistance. Sometimes, it wasn’t just about gender; it was about control.

• Modern World, Medieval Rules: Afghan Girls Shut Out Again

  
  

In Afghanistan today, under Taliban rule, girls and women are once again barred from secondary school, university, and most forms of public education. UNESCO calls it “the most significant systematic denial of female education in the world.” More than one million girls have been pushed out of classrooms, and even libraries and cultural centres are now closed to them.

This isn’t history repeating — it’s history continuing.

And yet, Afghan women and girls resist. Malala Yousafzai survived a bullet for daring to learn. I don’t know how girls are studying in Afghanistan today, but I imagine them slipping into underground classrooms, trading books like secrets, teaching each other anyway. When a system works this hard to silence you, using your voice becomes an act of revolution.

I feel like our ancestors are watching this unfold, facepalming in unison because apparently this was on our 21st-century bingo card.

---- Intermission ---

Your life may be nothing like all of the above, but let’s be honest, you’ve heard your fair share of ‘that’s not for girls’ growing up. Because all this is not medieval, it’s even modern.

I was born in the 90s and I'm sure I'm not the only millennial who was discouraged to study what she wanted. As a teenager I wanted to be crown prosecutor. My father suggested to my 16-year-old self that, ‘This is not a great career for women. You should study Accounting.’ My brother was encouraged to study law. Today he is articling at a world-class law firm in London, England, not too far from Big Ben.

Oh, by the way, Big Ben, named after Sir Benjamin Hall, didn’t advance women’s rights, but his wife, Augusta Hall (Lady Llanover) did help preserve Welsh language and culture and supported women’s education. Imagine a parallel universe where Big Ben was called the Llanover Tower.

Today, I hear Gen Z girls share similar sentiments, which sometimes are shocking, sometimes not so surprising, and most times simply heartbreaking. When they say things like ‘my best friend’s dad doesn't want her to pursue music, so she's studying Statistics.’ or ‘My parents want me to go in engineering. They don't want me to go in nursing.’ Boys are encouraged and respected when they choose law, engineering, or even nursing.

I once asked my aunt once what she studied for her undergrad during the 60s, she said ‘Home Economics’ learning subjects like sewing and cooking.

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As historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, the archive is never neutral — it is a site of power where entire groups can be pushed to the margins or erased altogether. Fiction has only made that truth easier to see. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t invent the link between literacy and power; it amplified a dynamic as old as civilisation, that whoever controls the written record controls the narrative.

And yet, across continents and centuries, women wrote anyway. Here are fifteen of the voices history tried to mute — and failed.

The Hidden Fifteen

(Left on Read, Ghosted, and Now Returning to the Chat)

1. Enheduanna (Mesopotamia, 2285–2250 BCE)

   
   

   Before the world had authors, Enheduanna wrote herself into history boldly, publicly, and without permission. High priestess of Ur in Mesopotamia and the world’s first known writer, she composed hymns to ancient Sumerian goddess, Inanna (including The Exaltation of Inanna) documenting exile, conflict, spiritual restoration, and identity, long before such themes had names. Her work shaped Mesopotamian thought for centuries. If you want to understand where women’s narrative begins, start with her.

   
   

   Why lost: Many of her clay tablets were shattered in war, eroded over millennia, and scattered by time.

   
   

   Read more: New Yorker: The Struggle to Unearth the World’s First Author

   
   

2. Hypatia of Alexandria (Egypt, 350–415 CE)

   
   

   Hypatia taught mathematics and philosophy in a city that treated both as dangerous in the wrong hands — especially a woman’s. Ancient sources say she wrote influential commentaries on Diophantus’ Arithmetica, Apollonius’ Conics, and Ptolemy’s Almagest, clarifying everything from early algebraic puzzles to the geometry of curves and the astronomical models that shaped the ancient understanding of the cosmos.

   
   

   None of those texts survive with her name on them; what we have is the outline of a towering intellect, violently removed.

   
   

   Why lost: Her brutal murder at the hands of a gang of Christian zealots, along with selective copying practices, left her writings lost in time and tragedy.

   
   

   Read more: Britannica: Hypatia, Mathematician and Astronomer

   
   

3. Fatima al-Fihri and the al-Fihri’s Circle (Morocco, 800s)

   
   

   Fatima al-Fihri founded al-Qarawiyyin – the world’s oldest continuously operating university. And women around her helped build an intellectual powerhouse, teaching Qur’anic law, debating theology, studying astronomy and medicine, and translating knowledge across languages like Greek and Latin. They were part of the engine, not the periphery. Later historians remembered the institution but forgot many of the women who sustained it. Their ideas survived in the curriculum; their names simply didn’t survive in the archive.

   
   

   Why lost: As attribution norms shifted, women’s scholarly works were not preserved or simply attributed under male names, turning a network of women thinkers into a footnote.

   Read more: World History Encyclopedia: Fatima Al-Fihri and Al-Qarawiyyin University

   
   

4. Kassiani (Byzantine Empire, 9th century)

   
   

   Known for her beauty and intelligence, Kassiani was born in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) and wrote hymns so sharp that they slipped into Byzantine worship for centuries. A poet, abbess, and one of the earliest named female hymnographers, she left behind a cluster of anonymous works scholars now attribute to her based on style and transmission. No recordings exist of Kassiani’s works, however her most famous composition, “The Fallen Woman” has been arranged by many composers during Byzantine times as well as recently.

   
   

   Why lost: Liturgical texts were recopied by male scribes who rarely preserved women’s authorship, allowing her poems to endure while her name faded.

   
   

   Read more: Project Muse – Historical Anthology of Music by Women: Kassia

   
   

5. Rabia Balkhi (Persia/Afghanistan, 10th century)

   
   

   Rabia Balkhi is remembered as one of the first recorded female poets of the Persian world: a woman who wrote of love, longing, and mysticism with clarity and conviction that turned her life into legend. Later chronicles describe her as a poet and martyr of love killed by her brother for loving beneath her class. Legend has it that she wrote her final verses in blood on the hammam walls where she was imprisoned.

   
   

   Why lost: Her story survived through later Persian and Afghan sources and oral retellings, but no autograph manuscripts remain; the “Rabia” we hear of today is part history, part echo.

   
   

   Read more: The Story of Rabia Balkhi, Afghanistan’s Most Famous Female Poet

   
   

6. Murasaki Shikibu (Japan, ~1000 CE)

   
   

   Murasaki Shikibu, daughter of the scholar Fujiwara no Tametoki, learned Chinese by listening outside the door while her father tutored her brother — a subject women of the Heian court were discouraged from studying. Her quiet mastery later led to her serving Empress Shōshi, where she taught the empress to read Chinese poetry. Within this world of court women writing in Japanese vernacular, she composed the legendary The Tale of Genji, a landmark work often considered the world’s first psychological novel.

   
   

   Why lost: Her given name was never recorded, and later literary traditions obscured the historical woman behind the masterpiece.

   
   

   Read more: Harvard Magazine: Murasaki Shikibu

   
   

7. Gwerful Mechain (Wales, 1460–1502)

   
   

   Gwerful Mechain wrote the kind of poems patriarchal culture fears most: joyous, specific, erotic praise of women’s bodies alongside devotional, satirical, and fiercely moral verse. Among her surviving works is “To her husband for beating her,” a four-line, strict-metre englyn that curses domestic abusers with lines as sharp as a blade:

   
   

   “May your knees break, your hands shrivel / And your sword plunge in your guts to make you snivel.”

   
   

   Why lost: Her most daring poems collided with later moral gatekeepers and in their discomfort, her manuscripts were softened, miscatalogued, or stripped of her name until only a scattered handful survived in Welsh archives.

   
   

   Read more: Literary Hub: On the Gleefully Indecent Poems of a Medieval Welsh Feminist Poet

   
   

8. Hwang Jini (Korea, 1500s)

   
   

   Hwang Jini — Joseon Korea’s most celebrated gisaeng poet — wrote sijo on love, the futility of existence, and the fleeting nature of the world that still anchor Korean literary history. Her work echoes Confucian and Daoist tones on the surface, but underneath is a woman claiming emotional freedom in a world that denied it. Many versions of her poems survive because her verses lived first in performance, then drifted into manuscript.

   
   

   Why lost: Confucian moral codes and the oral nature of gisaeng culture left her authorship vulnerable to alteration long before her poems were written down.

   
   

   Read more: Medievalists: The Story of Hwang Jini

   
   

9. Sor Leonor de Ovando (Dominican Republic, 1544–c.1610)

   
   

   Sor Leonor de Ovando is recognised as the first known poet born in the Americas: a Dominican nun whose religious sonnets were admired enough by colonial officials that a few were copied into their collections. She wrote with full command of Baroque Spanish poetics even as the broader literary record erased almost everything about her. What survives is minimal: five sonnets and a handful of loose verses (los versos blancos).

   
   

   Why lost: Only a handful of her poems were copied by male correspondents; later literary histories focused on male colonial writers, turning her into a historical footnote.

   
   

   Read more: Infinite Women: Leonor de Ovando

   
   

10. María de Zayas y Sotomayor (Spain, 1590–1661)

    
    

    María de Zayas wrote with fire at the heart of the Baroque age — stories that exposed gender violence, hypocrisy, and the dangers women faced inside supposedly moral households. She was widely read in her lifetime and unflinching in her defence of women’s autonomy. Her two major collections, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos, challenged a literary world that preferred women silent.

    
    

    Why lost: Later male critics dismissed her prose as “excessive” or “improper,” pushing her out of the canon despite her early fame and sharp social critique.

    
    

    Read more: Encyclopaedia Britannica — María de Zayas y Sotomayor.

    
    

11. Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta (Brazil/Portugal, 1711–1793)

    
    

    Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta (1711–1793) was a Brazilian-born author of the Enlightenment era who is considered the first female novelist in the Portuguese language. She wrote Aventuras de Diófanes (1752), a philosophical novel critiquing absolutism and arguing for more enlightened rule — from a woman living under it. Her writings also incorporated a feminist stance, criticizing the neglect of female education.

    
    

    Why lost: Censorship, imprisonment, and deliberate male reattribution combined detached her name from her own novel, turning her into a “disputed” author in the book she actually wrote.

    
    

    Read more: Project Muse: Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta and the Portuguese Enlightenment

    
    

12. Women Ballad Singers of North India (India, 1700s–1800s)

    
    

    Across the villages of North India, women kept oral history alive through ballads like laments, love songs, migration songs, and work songs that held entire worlds of feeling. These were unnamed voices singing of separation (virah), harvest, childbirth, stolen freedoms, and the everyday tragedies of women’s lives. Their verses travelled by memory, not manuscript, shaping Punjabi, Hindi, and Rajasthani folk traditions long before they were ever written down.

    
    

    Later, artists like Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur carried this lineage into the 20th century, transforming women’s folk expression into a recorded, recognisable musical tradition.

    
    

    Why lost: Oral transmission, anonymity, and patriarchal discomfort with women performing in public meant their songs were rarely recorded, so their names disappeared but melodies survived.

    
    

    Read more: The Sisters Who Pioneered & Popularised Punjabi Folk Music

    
    

13. Obour Tanner (USA, 18th century)

    
    

    Obour Tanner was a reader, letter-keeper, and beloved friend known today through her correspondence with Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry and one of the most internationally recognised Black writers of the 18th century. Their surviving letters carry tenderness and intellectual kinship, and are now recognised as one of the earliest documented literary friendships between Black women in America.

    
    

    Why lost: Archival practices preserved correspondence selectively. Tanner’s own reflections and records were never gathered as “literature”; her labour appears only in the margins of Wheatley’s story.

    
    

    Read more: History Bytes: Reading between the Lines for Obour Tanner

    
    

14. “Widow Harris” (Cherokee Nation, 1800s)

    
    

    “Widow Harris” appears in James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee as one of several named sources through whom Cherokee stories entered the written record. Identified by an English descriptor rather than a personal name, she represents the many Indigenous women whose narrative knowledge sustained myth, memory, and cultural continuity even as their identities were reduced or erased in print.

    
    

    Why lost: Colonial anthropology preserved the stories, not the storytellers, recording Indigenous women as anonymous “informants” while their words became canonical.

    
    

    Read more: James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee

    
    

15. Madeline Brandeis (USA, 1897–1937)

    
    

    Madeline Brandeis was a filmmaker and children’s author who understood visual storytelling long before “multimedia” had a name. Through her Little Players Film Company and illustrated photo-story books about children around the world, she brought global narratives into early 20th-century classrooms. Much of her work faded from view not through controversy, but through neglect as silent films decayed and books slipped quietly out of print.

    
    

    Why lost: Early film was fragile. Children’s media was rarely archived and without reissues her work scattered into fragments rather than a legacy.

    
    

    Read more: Jewish Women’s Archive: Madeline Brandeis

So What Do We Do With These Lost Pages?

We don’t need to turn these losses into tragedy. We’re simply here to remember.

We’re here because the sisterhood wrote anyway. Their insistence became our inheritance.

That’s the part we hold close. Not as outrage — though there is plenty to be outraged about — but as stewardship. So that we learn to read differently: to read like detectives, to read like daughters, to read like the future is watching.

And then we do what they did: we write anyway – our own, true story.

So pick a woman from this list and keep her in your pocket. Drop her name in a meeting. Reference her in a deck. Teach her in a classroom. Post her on your Instagram story. Let her be the plot twist no one expected.

This is how we rebuild the record: not with pity or nostalgia, but with intention — by refusing to let the women who wrote before us be buried a second time.

This is how we make sure these women don’t disappear twice.