The Nasty Women’s Writers Project is into its 6th year and we, founders Maria and Theresa Dintino, feel it’s time for some updates. Part of these updates is that we have changed our writer submission guidelines. These revised guidelines, along with the project’s mission, are included below.

Originally, we imagined engaging in this project for a couple of years, but realize the continuing value and need as women’s rights are being challenged and revoked, creating crises for many. This backlash has motivated us to continue this work.

We appreciate your readership and support and if you’re a writer, please consider contributing to this project.

About the Nasty Women Writers Project

Hillary Clinton was called a nasty woman by Donald Trump in the final presidential debate of the 2016 election, raising the ire of every woman who has ever been maligned for using her voice to speak the truth, for using her voice to assert herself.

We live in a patriarchy where women who have voices and use them are called all kinds of disparaging names, among them, more often than not, nasty. On Nasty Women Writers, powerful truth-espousing women are 100% welcome.

We say no to this shut down of powerful women’s voices and claim nasty as a stance of power! We support nasty women’s voices and the nasty voices of women writers who have been on the frontlines of this fight for years. Through this project, we give voice to the wide range and diversity of Nasty Women Writers, both past and present.

For years, these women’s voices have been silenced and erased from the fabric of our collective experience. The devastation has been tremendous. Girls and women not seeing themselves represented in roles of power and heroism further perpetuates disempowerment and exploitation.

Nasty Women Writers Founders, Maria and Theresa Dintino

The vital threads of these women’s visions and voices destroyed and silenced, discrediting and discounting their contributions to the pattern, the pattern of a balanced, healthy paradigm. Here we seek to restore and reveal their integral threads, a step toward weaving a pattern that will set us on the path to wholeness.

We are two literal sisters who rebelled all our lives, our big first effort at resistance when as young girls we packed up our Kool-Aid lunchboxes and spent an entire day in the woods and on the railroad trestle behind our house, imagining freedom.

We are both writers and we are both nasty.

CONTRIBUTING TO THE NASTY WOMEN WRITERS PROJECT

We welcome and encourage contributions to this project and website. If you have been inspired by a nasty woman from Literature, Art, STEM or Activism that you would like to write about as a contribution to this project, let us know through the form on the contact page.

Below are the writer’s guidelines for Nasty Women Writers.

Criteria:

  1. You must be a feminist. A feminist is a person of any gender who believes in and speaks out for equality and equity for all. A feminist also focuses their activism on what are commonly called women’s issues, including women’s health, equal pay and representation, and the global epidemic of violence against women.
  2. Any gender may write for Nasty Women Writers but the site focuses on and features the work of people who identify as female.
  3. The mission of Nasty Women Writers is to promote the voices of women or people who identify as female as we believe those voices have been silenced through time and still encounter barriers. We acknowledge the intersectional realities of the identity of being female and seek to actively include all. We also acknowledge that other gender identities are marginalized, including nonbinary, intersex, and trans. If you feel strongly that you want a person of one of these genders represented on this site, reach out to us. We will review your piece with the same criteria we do other submissions.
  4. Please research to make sure that the nasty woman writer/artist/scientist/activist you write about is a feminist, and not racist, antisemitic, homo or transphobic. If certain behaviors they engaged in are deemed inappropriate today but were normalized in the time the person lived, we request that you allow for transparency and address that.
  5. We welcome pieces about nasty women from Herstory as well as contemporary nasty women.
  6. We are looking for original content, written in your own words, supported and enhanced with quotations. Please document all sources used, both in-text, as well as in a Works Cited at the end of the piece. You can use AI for research but be responsible and fact check and, please, no pieces written by ChatGPT.
  7. Your piece will be reviewed by our editorial board to make sure it is the right fit for the Nasty Women Writers project.

Thank you for your interest.