Women have been suppressed in many aspects of life. In work, in the home and in expressing themselves, women have not been allowed to fulfill their own desires. In the comedy scene, women are coming into their own only recently. Women were not allowed to express themselves freely in front of men until the middle of the twentieth century. The expression of humor and comedy was kept to the "women's realm" and women have only been able to truly express themselves by breaking through the barrier of expression with force. Women in the South, female comedians and humorous female writers have all begun to make their styles of comedy known, and introduced the world to what they were not allowed to express, except in private, before.
Barbara Bennett's Comic Visions, Female Voices, tells of the female side to southern humor. For generations humor has been a big part of the lives of southerners. Humor has bee incorporated into work, play and education. Unfortunately, until the 1970's, women in the South were not encouraged to be outspoken in public, let alone show that they might have a sense of humor. This led to women joking around in their own private spheres of the home, like the kitchen. .
As a result, men did not often understand female humor, as women did not understand the male form of humor. Bennett shows in each chapter how the male form of humor is different from the female form, because they evolved in different areas and with different groups of people. Men have a more crude and unrefined sense of humor whereas women are more delicate with some subjects. For instance Bennett points, in her chapter titled ""De Maiden Language": Voice and Identity," out that men are more likely to make fun of a handicapped person where women will make fun of the more powerful characters like the father of the household or the preacher. Many resented this change in scene and very few female authors were kept in print until the women's liberation in the 1970's, when female authors" works were uncovered and sent to print again for redistribution.
