This research aims to firstly illustrate the exceptional literary merit that can be found in women’s writings. Specifically pertaining to the women poets of the Beat generation, this study examines why it is that they may have been overlooked in this sense, and largely excluded from the literary canon. This question is important to our ability to sustain a deep and critical insight on the effects of gender marginalisation on women writers themselves and indeed our understanding of literary history. My research additionally proposes an influence on contemporary Irish poets to further exemplify the importance of these writers and discredit such reasons that they may have been neglected. 

This research was best served by a qualitative, literary-critical methodology which utilised close textual and contextual analysis of selected works by Diane di Prima, Lenore Kandel, ruth weiss, Elaine Feeney, and Kimberly Campanello, using digital and physical archival materials from both the libraries of Trinity College Dublin and The British Library London. This process was informed by feminist literary theory from critics such as Hélène Cixous and Kate Millett. 

Naïvely, I began this project wanting to speak as little about the male figures of this literary movement as possible, but it was found that in order to reasonably answer my research question that this was impossible. Not only was it found that U.S. American society failed these women greatly, but consequently so did their own, ‘progressive’ male peers. This is of considerable significance to understanding how art communities support each other internally even now, as the structures under which these inequities operated did not simply disappear, and instead such inequities may now materialise in these communities in different ways.

The next step for this project is further, more intersectional exploration of marginalised women writers and deconstructing the barriers which opposed them as a means of understanding and deconstructing present disparities in this regard.