Kat McAdaragh

“To essay is to try – and what greater act of courage is there than a woman trying to name her truth in a world that has silenced her?” – Anonymous

The essay form is having a feminist renaissance. But this resurgence isn’t about the stiff academic compositions we learned to write in school. It’s about the return of the raw, personal, meandering essay – the kind that dares to think aloud, to question, to feel.

This reclamation is political. Women are turning to the essay not to prove a point but to embody their own authority – even when uncertain, even when messy. In a world that often demands resolution from women, the essay says: You don’t have to be finished to be heard.

A Form Built for Complexity

For centuries, women have been encouraged to simplify themselves – to be likable, agreeable, and coherent. The essay resists all that. It welcomes contradiction. It celebrates doubt. It holds multitudes.

The personal essay, especially, allows women to explore the intimate alongside the intellectual. As cultural critic and essayist Leslie Jamison writes in The Empathy Exams, the form “asks us to be brave enough to admit the limits of our knowledge” (Jamison, 2014). And in that bravery, a deeper truth often emerges.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” – Joan Didion, Why I Write (1976)

Essays as Resistance to Closure

Patriarchal storytelling often demands closure: healing, forgiveness, redemption. But women’s lives – especially those marked by trauma, violence, or erasure – don’t always wrap up so neatly.

The essay allows for incompleteness. It resists the narrative arc that demands the woman be either victim or survivor, tragic or triumphant. In her book The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate describes the essay as a form that “thinks against itself,” a natural fit for the interior complexity women have often been told to suppress (Lopate, 1995).

Feminist writer and theorist bell hooks wrote that “the function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible” (hooks, Outlaw Culture, 2006). The personal essay is one such form of imaginative possibility – especially when it defies convention.

The Rise of the Hybrid Essay

Today’s most influential women essayists often blur genre boundaries. Writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, and Roxane Gay use form as a tool – bending and braiding personal narrative with cultural critique.

In In the Dream House, Machado constructs an archive of queer domestic abuse by weaving fragmented essays, second-person narrative, and horror tropes. Her refusal to tell the story in a linear or “logical” way reflects the dissociation of trauma itself.

Academic and essayist Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts similarly defies categorization. The book is part memoir, part philosophy, and entirely its own form. Nelson defends the hybrid essay as a radical feminist act: “I had never read a book that let someone think and feel and be ambivalent and all over the place – like a person actually is” (Nelson, 2015).

Why Now?

We live in a time of increasing polarization, oversimplification, and soundbite culture. Women’s perspectives are often flattened in these formats – reduced to hashtags, headlines, or hot takes.

The essay, by contrast, slows things down. It offers nuance. It makes space for contradiction, for slowness, for questions that may never be answered. In doing so, it becomes an act of resistance – not just in content, but in form.

“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name.” – June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights” (1980)

The return to the essay also reflects a broader feminist turn toward authenticity over performance. As essayist and novelist Zadie Smith said in an interview with The Paris Review: “There’s no requirement for the essay to come to a conclusion. That’s what makes it a space of freedom” (Smith, 2009).

How Women Are Reclaiming the Essay

• By centering the personal, and recognizing that what is personal is also political- a feminist principle articulated by Carol Hanisch in her 1970 essay “The Personal is Political.”
• By breaking traditional form, using fragmentation, nonlinear timelines, and hybrid structures to reflect lived experience.
• By resisting resolution, acknowledging that healing, rage, and ambivalence often coexist.
• By building community – through digital platforms, zines, and indie journals – where women can publish essays outside of gatekept literary spaces.

As Roxane Gay notes in Bad Feminist: “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy” (Gay, 2014). And the essay, above all, is a genre that honors the mess.

The Final Takeaway

The reclamation of the essay form isn’t a trend. It’s a feminist act.

It’s a return to the voice as the central tool of resistance. It’s a reminder that women don’t need permission to write, to contradict themselves, to revise.

We are no longer interested in being tidy, digestible, or silent.

We are claiming the page. We are claiming the form. And we are not afraid to write in fragments.