Women Writers....

I have a question that keeps coming up whenever we speak of Wroth. Was she really the first woman to break down the barriers? Perhaps there were other women writers at the time, but her writings were the ones that survived time. It makes me question why do we not have more writings by women. We say that during the time, men were the poets, men were the prolific writers, but perhaps this is largely due to the fact that women kept writings to themselves, or their writings were lost. We have a similar problem with music. Here's an analogy that a teacher once used: Take a record store. All the popular, best selling albums are sold, with few remaining, and all the crappy albums that no one wants are put into storage. The good stuff is sold, listened to again and again, destroyed by wear-and-tear, and ultimately disappears after some time. Some hundred years later, researchers decide they want to look into what kind of music people listed to in the early 2000's, and they find this huge stockpile of what we didn't want. From that, they assume that this was the popular music of the time. What if something like this happened with literature? Perhaps there were a lot more women authors, but it was Wroth's work that survived? (Note: I'm not likening her works to "crappy" music.) I'm curious to know what others think...