What are Jean Ferguson Carr's main points in her essay "Writing as a Woman: Dickens, Hard Times, and Feminine Discourses"?

In her essay "Writing as a Woman: Dickens, Hard
Times, and Feminine Discourses," Jean Ferguson Carr makes a number of
specific points, including the following:

• George
  Henry Lewes saw Dickens as a popular entertainer who was not a serious literary
  artist.


• Lewes compared Dickens’ writings to writings by
  women and implied their feminine traits.


• In one typical
  piece of writing, Dickens was in fact

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making use of a feminine guise, privileging the
intimate, private, and informal qualities usually associated with women over the social,
public, and authoritative powers usually associated with
men.

• Carr is
  interested in why Dickens shows an interest in (and sympathy for) women in his writings
  yet never explicitly challenges their subordinate positions in
  society.


• Dickens seems to identify with women in many of
  his writings and seems to explore his own inferior social status as a writer by
  exploring the ways in which women are oppressed.


• In
  Hard Times, Mrs. Gradgrind symbolizes the limits within which women
  are forced to function. Her husband, Mr.
  Gradgrind,

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has been a social "wife-killer," obliterating
his wife's role as mother to her daughter and keeping her from fuller participation in
the daughter's narrative. He has "formed his daughter on his own model," and she is
known to all as "Tom Gradgrind's daughter." He has isolated Louisa in his masculine
realm, depriving her of any of the usual female resources with which to oppose his power
. . .

• Dickens
  himself, as a writer, resembles the novel’s two key female figures in a number of
  ways:

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Like Louisa and Mrs. Gradgrind, Dickens must
articulate his valuing of "fancy" and his concern about crossing proscribed boundaries
in language devalued by the patriarchal discourses of reason and
fact.

• Dickens
  “wrote like a woman” in the sense that he wrote in ways not always approved of by the
  patriarchal male establishment, but of course Dickens, as a male, nevertheless had more
  privileges than real women in his
  society:

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Dickens' experimentation with excluded positions
of women and the poor provided him with a way of disrupting the status quo of the
literary establishment. But, ironically, his experimentation also helped him capitalize
on his status as an outsider in that literary
realm.