The Roig sisters, Rosa and Manola, author and artist respectively, have been working for years to document the many Valencian women writers who have been relegated to the background or, directly, to oblivion throughout history. This effort has materialised in a book that was published in October 2021 by the Valencian Government: “Les nostres escriptores: les veus oblidades de les lletres valencianes“ (Our women writers: the forgotten voices of Valencian literature).
Written by Rosa Roig and illustrated by Manola Roig, this work is “a great educational resource to draw the attention to the literary legacy of female authorship. It stands out for the quality of its content. In addition, it complies with the guidelines that we follow at Women’s Legacy and, therefore, it also serves as a reference to learn how we can rescue those women whose knowledge has contributed to the development of humanity in all areas”, explains Ana López-Navajas, Women’s Legacy’s project manager.
The prologue to this book perfectly sums up the motivation behind the work carried out by Rosa and Manola Roig: “And since what is lawful must not be taken away, we must not let ourselves be deprived of the talent of Valencian women – a talent that enriches us collectively – which has always existed, despite the clumsy attempts to hide or minimise it. The more than five hundred and fifty names of Valencian women who have written and published in Arabic, Latin, Spanish, Valencian and Galician demand attention and proclaim their genealogy and their creation capacity. To ignore them is to perpetuate a deception and to impoverish our cultural heritage“.
On the other hand, the Roig sisters have channelled their work through an itinerant exhibition entitled “Nosaltres, les escriptores. Valencianes en el temps” (Us, the women writers. Valencian women through time), which presents a catalogue of 450 Valencian women writers with the aim of “introducing the gender vision in the reading promotion plans that are designed at libraries, schools and universities, while trying to fill the gap that currently exists on the work of Valencian women writers in the literary stories and the school curricula”, as they explain themselves.All in all, from Women’s Legacy we can only recommend you to approach the work of Rosa and Manola Roig, as well as that of so many other colleagues who are working in the same direction towards equality through education.
