En guise de réponse à la question qui fédère les essais rassemblés par Janet Todd sous le titre Gender and Literary Voice, « Is there a distinctive female style/tone/content ? », Joyce Carol Oates réplique : Content cannot make serious art. Good intentions cannot make serious art. "Characters with whom women identify" don't make serious art. [...] "Women" refers to a sociological, political, and biological phenomenon (or class, or function, or stereotype); "literature" refers to something that

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... lways transcends these categories even while being fuelled by them. A feminist "theme" doesn't make a sentimental, weak, cliché-ridden work valuable; a non-or even anti-feminist "theme" doesn't make a serious work valueless, even for women. Unfair, perhaps, unjust-but inevitable. Content is simply raw material. Women's problems-women's insights-women's very special adventures: these are material: and what matters in serious art is ultimately the skill of execution and the uniqueness of vision. (Todd, 1-9; c'est moi qui souligne)