By Lena Raine
In the quiet corners of history, secret alliances of women writers have thrived, a whisper network of pen pals, typists, bloggers and zinesters swapping ideas and encouragement under the radar. Across continents and centuries, female authors have found solace and strength in friendship, turning correspondence into rebellion. From covert Soviet samizdat rings to WhatsApp writing circles, these “pen sisters” show how camaraderie fuels creativity and resistance.
Soviet Ink: Typists and Secret Libraries
Imagine 1970s Leningrad censored poetry and dissident stories pass hand-to-hand on carbon paper through a maze of workplaces and kitchens. Historians note that Soviet literary undergrounds depended heavily on women, librarians, secretaries and typists who risked their safety to copy and share forbidden texts. In fact, one study emphasizes the “crucial role of women, who represented the majority of typists, to samizdat production”. Often blurring the lines between official jobs and secret gigs, these women secretly became publishers. One by one, friends swapped samizdat volumes in book clubs, birthing a parallel culture.
These typists were the midwives of an unapproved poetry network, quietly keeping the republic’s human voice alive.
As one survivor recalled, “Practically everybody had some samizdat at home” by the 1980s.
Friendship literally wrote the revolution in ink: daughters would whisper verses to grandmothers who would share them with neighbors. While official history barely notes them, researchers credit these women’s networks with sustaining Soviet writers when all other outlets were silenced. . In this era of brotherly statehood, it was a sisterhood that slipped protest poetry across apartment walls.
Zines and Digital Giggles: Global DIY Publishing
From the riot grrrl basements of 1990s Seattle to today’s global blogs, women have embraced DIY media. The Grrrl Zine Network (a real one-woman web project) documents an astonishing range of feminist zines worldwide. Its founder lists zines like Bendita (Brazil) and Clit Rocket (Italy) and Pink Punkies (Argentina) among hundreds of “feminist fighters, underground rebels” shouting about patriarchy through glue and glitter.
By one count, this network links around one thousand independent women’s zines from over thirty countries. In zines from Bitch (USA) to Magazine (Brazil), editors “talk about our experiences and thoughts, as well as anger and resistance of growing up in a patriarchal society,” forming a borderless sisterhood on the printed page.
And the DIY spirit has not stopped at print. Female writers now swap blog links, share writing prompts on Instagram, and
encourage each other via email chains. Teen girls in community centers are taught that “every girl out there should write some poems or rants and start her own zine”. transforming personal catharsis into public empowerment. In these circles, the personal is political, and even scribbled notebooks can become tools of liberation.
Pen pals & Letters: Old-school snail mail and postcards let distant friends exchange stories or serialized novels. (Picture wartime letters wrapped in secret code!)
Clandestine Press: Bootleg pamphlets, samizdat books and restricted magazines. Secret mimeograph clubs once churned
out literature banned by regimes.
Feminist Zines: Handmade little magazines, often sold at punk shows or swapped by mail. They gave voices to topics
mainstream media ignored.
Blogs & Online Journals: The internet era let hidden writers form instant communities across borders think Iranian poets sharing verses under a pen name, or Latin American feminists blogging about resistance.
Chat Apps & Social Media: Today, encrypted groups on WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook keep women writers connected. For example, an Indian writers’ WhatsApp group might let a young poet vent about censorship, while her friend in
Bangladesh shares tips on publishing underground. These channels, both old and new form the braided threads of a global friendship network. Each tweet, post or photocopied poem is a small act of rebellion against isolation.
Cyberfeminist Rebellion
The digital frontier became another battleground. In the early 1990s, “cyberfeminism” emerged as female artists and coders
around the world linked up online. They faced a techno-cowboy world (computers seen as a man’s domain) by “hijacking the toys”, writing code and manifestos with a feminist twist. One Aussie collective, VNS Matrix, wrote a notorious Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century on a billboard, proclaiming “We are the virus of the new world disorder.” Member Virginia Barratt later said their mission was “to remap cyberculture with a feminist bent” against male-dominated spaces. Across continents, women coders, poets and artists embraced the “cyborg” idea of Donna Haraway to push boundaries. Their online salons and email lists are direct descendants of pen-and-paper networks just with hashtags. They remind us that even in pixels and gigabytes, friendship and shared purpose can challenge the old guards of race, gender and power.
Magazines and Literary Salons
Not all networks stayed underground some boldly went public. In the Middle East and South Asia a century ago, pioneering female editors launched feminist magazines that circulated quietly among like minded readers. In 1923 Baghdad, Jordan born Paulina Hassoun printed Layla, Iraq’s first women’s journal, literally petitioning parliament in its pages for women’s rights. And thirty years earlier, Lebanese, Egyptian Hind Nawfal’s Al-Fatat (founded 1892) wove “a fiery fusion of the political and literary,” encouraging Egyptian women to write poetry, essays and biographies. These titles often folded under pressure or lack of funds, but they planted seeds: by the 21st century, millions of Arab women readers were online, continuing the conversation.
Similarly, South Asia saw women’s literary gatherings, for example, India’s Kadak Collective is a modern comics cooperative of eight artists who describe their art as “strong, severe, sharp, like our tea.. The group’s very name (Kadak
means “strong” in Hindi) signals boldness. By pooling skills (illustration, storytelling, design), they channel friendship into
graphic storytelling that tackles everything from gender to urban life. Like literary salons of old, each Kadak cartoon or
comic strip is a shared effort, a conversation in ink.
Diasporas and Indigenous Voices
Friendship networks also thread through diasporas and Indigenous communities. Consider the intertwined tales in Yaa
Gyasi’s Homegoing: twin Ghanaian sisters separated by colonial fate, one remains in a castle in Ghana, one is enslaved
in America, their stories spanning centuries and oceans. Though fiction, this narrative echoes real networks of women
keeping memory alive. In Canada, activist poet Chrystos penned poems bridging racial lines, and even Audre Lorde and
Joy Harjo (Black and Native American poets) exchanged tributes in life and death, underscoring creative kinship
beyond borders
Sisterhood Today: Humor, Hope and Hacks
The world may have changed, but the spirit endures. Today a college student in Nigeria might start a feminist blog following
advice from an aunt overseas; a poet in Afghanistan might launch an Instagram zine from hiding. In global lockdowns,
women’s literary chats on Zoom or WhatsApp have multiplied, modern pen pal networks replacing the whisper thin
notebooks of the past. And of course, “Feminism is NOT dead! It’s very well alive,” as one zinester rightly declares on the Grrrl Zine Network.
By befriending each other and swapping stories, these “pen sisters” prove that friendship itself becomes a form of rebellion.
The real secret? You don’t need a secret decoder ring, just another woman who gets it, scribbling back at you.
