Tillie Olsen identifies silent periods when women are diverted from their work by needs of their families; Spender talks of  silence upon silence  that has kept women's experience from being encoded; Adrienne Rich, in On Lies, Secrets and Silences , sees women's struggle for self-determination  muffled or silenced over and over ; most recently, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar chart women authors' apparent alienation from language, their frequent use of pseudonyms an attempt at renaming or, really, naming themselves.
A large proportion of women authors use pseudonyms.