FEMINISM

KATIE GARNER & REBECCA MUNFORD

What is feminism and the feminist theory?

 Feminism describes the campaigns, activities, and texts concerned with challenging and
transforming how women are treated and represented in society.

 It is a political movement and discourse that encompasses a diverse range of perspectives,

theories, and methods.

 As well as analyzing patriarchal structures, feminist theory seeks to propose new ways for
women to bring about social change.

 This drive underlies much feminist activity, from public campaigns for new political
rights, to the search for a new “feminine” writing.

 Current Anglo-American models often conceptualize the history of Western feminism in

terms of three movements, or “waves.”

The first wave of activity dates from the end of the eighteenth century through to the
beginning of collective female political action in the form of the Suffragette and New
Women’s movements in Britain and the US, and the granting of partial (1918) and full
(1928) franchise for women in Britain.

The 1960s signal the beginnings of the “second wave,” when women collectively campaigned
on a broad range of issues including sexual health and contraception, pornography,
domestic abuse, and gender discrimination in the workplace.

Following the decline of organized second-wave activities in the 1980s, different accounts of
feminism from black and Third World women began to readdress the First World bias of
the first and second waves.

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These differing positions, alongside developments in the fields of gender studies, postcolonial
theory, queer theory, and postmodernism, inform third-wave feminism, which accordingly
takes a more global and plural view of the relationship between power and subjectivity.

 The history of feminism does not have a definitive origin.

As early as the beginning of the fifteenth century Christine de Pizan was cataloguing the
achievements of women and challenging female stereotypes in The Book of the City of Ladies
(1983[1404-5]).

Wollstonecraft – Vindication of the Rights of Woman

However, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1992[1792]) is often

regarded as heralding the beginning of modern feminism in Britain.

Written in the form of a philosophical essay, Wollstonecraft’s provocative call for reform
foregrounded the social, political, and economic marginalization of women

at a time when the question of the “rights of man” was being debated in France and the US.
Key to Wollstonecraft’s argument was her belief that social structures constructed female
inequality as “natural” and that women do not choose to behave as they do, but are instead
enslaved by a society that forces them to behave in certain “sentimental” ways.

In particular, Wollstonecraft identified gallantry and sensibility as major social

fabrications which had been developed (by men) to encourage women’s subordination.

The overarching problem, she argued, was women’s lack of access to education, which held
them in a “state of perpetual childhood” (1992[1792]: 11). ************

Wollstonecraft proposed that Enlightenment principles of rational thought and the ability
to acquire knowledge should be extended to women, and that, in line with Enlightenment
logic, it was irrational to exclude women from the social sphere and to curtail their
political citizenship.

 The Vindication had an immediate international influence.

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 Lucretia Mott – Elizabeth Cady Stanton – NWSA – AWSA – NAWSA – Declaration of
Sentiments – Susan B. Anthony Amendment

In the 1840s, American suffragettes Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton jointly
campaigned for the abolishment of slavery and the granting of suffrage.

Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” which imitated the American Declaration of

Independence (1776), extending the equal rights doctrine to include women, was issued at
the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in July 1848.

In 1869 Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) with Susan B.
Anthony, whose roots were also in antislavery activities.

The NWSA merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) to form the
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890.

The NAWSA played a vital role in ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment, also known as the
Susan B. Anthony amendment, which granted American women full suffrage in 1920.

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 Britain and Feminism & British Suffrage

In Britain, in the second half of the nineteenth century, debates about women’s lack of access
to education expanded into a wider questioning of women’s political inequality, and the
terms “feminism” and “feminist” entered public usage by the 1890s.

The British philosophers and political theorists John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor
developed aspects of Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought, campaigning for women’s
suffrage and equal access to education.

By the latter part of the nineteenth century, underground female discontent had begun to
translate into more radical, public statements and women formed a number of activist
groups.

Incorporating both the lobbying strategies of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Fawcett, and the direct action of the Women’s Social
and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, the
British suffrage movement represented a demand for equality, grounded in political and
legislative reform.

*** The passing of the 1928 Representation of the People Act marked the culmination of
over six decades of political and social agitation, and extended the partial suffrage that
women had received ten years previously in 1918.

The same decades marked a period of literary experimentation and innovation, with
writers such as Virginia Woolf, H. D., Edith Wharton, Zola Neale Hurston, and Djuna Barnes
subjecting the relationship between women and literature, and gender and language, to
new focuses.

 The most influential of these was Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929).

Developed from two lectures that Woolf had delivered to women students at Newnham and
Girton Colleges in Cambridge in 1928, and playfully crossing the boundaries between
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fiction and polemic, the essay tackles the question of “women and fiction” and the various
ways in which this relationship might be imagined.
Her underlying and much celebrated assertion is that “a woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1929: 4).
She (Woolf) is concerned, then, with the relationship between economics, education, and
creativity.
“Women,” she (Woolf) argues, “have served all these centuries as looking-glasses
possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its
natural size”

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own – Characterize the Second Wave of Feminism

Sketching out a critical language for addressing questions about gender and sexuality, the
canon and literary production, and language and subjectivity, A Room of One’s Own presaged
many of the debates that characterize the “second wave” of feminist activity, and remains
one of the most influential texts of the twentieth century.
World War II and its aftermath separate the activities of first- and second-wave
feminism.

 Just as liberal, socialist, and radical politics coexisted in the women’s movement, the
1960s onward saw the emergence of a diverse, and often discordant, body of theoretical
analyses of the social-economic, cultural, and linguistic experiences of women and the
complex and various operations of patriarchal ideologies, as well as innovatory moves
to transform extant structures.

The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan – ‘The problem that has no name’

In 1963, Betty Friedan, one of the pioneers of the US women’s movement, published The
Feminine Mystique, an investigation of the cultural construction of femininity and the
manacles of domesticity.

This landmark study of “the problem that has no name” drew attention to the home as a
prison rather than a stronghold for women and the psychological distress experienced by

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unwaged and bored housewives.

What Friedan termed the “mystique” stood for the inconsistency between women’s real
experience in the home and the idealization of domesticity in marketing and the media.

The 1960s were also a period of direct feminist action, and formed part of the broader cultural
questioning and collective challenges to authority made by civil rights, student, and antiwar
movements.

Drawing on previous suffragette activities, women once again began to form organized
political bodies, including the liberal National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, of
which Friedan was a co-founder.

A key aim of (NOW) was to encourage all women to become involved in political activity
and to challenge the separation between the personal and the political

Consciousness raising (CR) - the practice of women speaking openly about their lives to one
another - was viewed as an important tool for social change.

Of pressing concern to many Anglo-American and European theorists from the late 1960s
onward were the androcentric scripts of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Kate Millet and Germaine Greer – Constructions of woman as lack or

absence – TEXTS OF SECOND-WAVE FEMINIST CRITICISM

1. Constructions of woman as lack or absence are addressed in two seminal texts of

second-wave feminist criticism, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch (both published in Britain in 1970).
2. Millett’s Sexual Politics created a long-lasting trend for identifying evidence of
misogyny in texts, as Millett looked at works by male authors (including D. H. Lawrence
and Henry Miller) and illustrated how each enacted a sexual power politics which
forced women to occupy negative positions.

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3. Millett was not concerned with how Lawrence and Miller chose to present women;
4. Rather, she undertook to illustrate how the reader responded to the gender structures
inherent in their texts.
5. Greer’s The Female Eunuch was in part an extension of Wollstonecraft’s offensive
against “pretty feminine phrases” and social frames in a modern context.
6. Greer argued that romance novels were the “opiate of the supermenial” as they
prescribed false models of experience for women.

 The 1970s saw serious critical attention paid to women’s writing and its traditions, by
Anglo- American academics.

The focus on the sexist ideologies underlying the male authored canon integral to “images
of women” criticism was followed by a female-centered approach

or, in Elaine Showalter’s coinage, “gynocritics,” that is, an approach that was engaged
with “woman as writer - with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history,
themes, genres, and structures of literature by women”.

 In the second half of the decade, three key texts appeared:

Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own: British
Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination.

Offering revisionist literary histories, these works were concerned with rereading women
writers with established literary reputations (such as Jane Austen, the Brontes, Emily
Dickinson, and Ann Radcliffe), but also with extending the female canon to recover
forgotten or marginalized female writers.

Accusation that leveled at second-wave feminist criticism

One of the most frequent accusations leveled at second-wave feminist criticism is that it
attempts to speak on behalf of all women by universalizing the experience of some.

Specifically, it has been taken to task for its failure to attend to the ways in which experiences
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of gender intersect with and are shaped by experiences of class, race, sexuality, religion,
nationality, and ethnicity, alongside other categories of identity.

In trying to reclaim a past for “women,” gynocritics met opposition from black feminists
and women of color, as well as lesbian feminists, for whom the “new history” of women
bore the familiar hallmarks of exclusivity and monolithic assumptions - the very principles
feminists detested about male histories.

BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM (defining a position for black feminists)

In her groundbreaking essay, “Toward a black feminist criticism” (1977), Barbara Smith
discusses the ways in which the literary world ignores or relegates the existence of black
women writers and black lesbian writers and calls for a more rigorous treatment of the
complex ways in which race, sexuality, class, and gender are interconnected.

 The work of bell hooks has played a pioneering role in defining a position for black
feminists.

In Ain’t I a Woman (1982) and Feminist Theory (1984), hooks exposes and redresses two key
political blind spots in white feminisms:

“drawing endless analogies between ‘women’ and ‘blacks’ “; and assuming that the word
woman “is synonymous with white woman”.

Feminist Theory opens by highlighting how Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique constructs a
white, middle-class feminism as a universal feminism that suppresses the link between
race and class - and thus privileges the misery of the bored, middle-class suburban
housewife while ignoring the needs and experiences of women without homes (hooks
1984).

 This prompted other black feminists to propose new theoretical terms to better express
their position, and to challenge the wave model for its Anglo-American bias.

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In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Alice Walker coined the term “womanist” to
refer specifically to black feminist activities. Walker emphasized that “womanist” is not a
separatist term, but encompasses both male and female concerns, as well as those of race.

 An analysis of the complex dynamics of domination and subordination, exclusion and

inclusion, underpins feminist postcolonial studies and US Third World feminisms.

This vital line of questioning is exemplified by the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who
asks “not merely who am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her?”

Spivak relates these questions not only to literary texts, but also to the relations between
First and Third World feminists, and between French and Anglo-American models.

The pioneering anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Chicana feminists
Cheme Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldua, represented a move to expand the meanings of
“feminism” and feminist solidarity.

 Moving across a range of genres, the contributions redefined the meanings and
modes of feminist theoretical discourse.

Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) articulates what she describes as a “new mestiza
consciousness,” a hybrid and plural consciousness that expresses the tensions between
different identities.

 The importance of French thought to the history of feminist criticism cannot be

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 overestimated.

It was the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949), translated
into English as The Second Sex in 1953, which began work on the demystification of
“woman” and female stereotypes that became the theoretical focus of much feminism
in the second half of the twentieth century.

De Beauvoir separated “human females” from “women” and made the famous
proclamation that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1953[1949]: 295),
which established a binary distinction between sex and gender.

Her existentialist philosophy informed her argument that women do not possess an essential
characteristic of “femininity”; rather, the notion of “femininity” is itself constructed
through certain cultural, social, and linguistic practices.

Her assertion that gender was culturally constructed produced a marked shift in feminism,
away from previous essentialist arguments that viewed gender as biologically determined
and toward a social constructionist understanding of gender.

“New French feminisms” emerged from the politicized intellectual and activist events of
1968, and the radical women’s groups that were referred to as the Mouvement de Liberation
des Femmes from 1970.

New French feminist thinkers such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and
Monique Wittig do not represent a theoretically coherent body of thought, nor do they
represent the totality of French feminist intellectual thought.

They are, however, committed to a radical critique and deconstruction of phallocentrism

which places man as the central reference point of Western thought and the phallus as a
symbol of male cultural authority.

Making use of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, their work moves
across the domains of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and philosophy, attacking androcentric

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linguistic and cultural regimes.

In spite of their divergences from its existentialist feminism, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
remains an important cornerstone for new French feminist thinking. Her argument that
throughout history “woman” has been constructed as the “other” of man and, as such,
she has been denied the right to her own subjectivity, informs Helene Cixous’s and Luce
Irigaray’s explorations of otherness.

Cixous’s landmark essay “Sorties: out and out: attacks/ ways out/forays” (1986[1975])
opens with a series of binary oppositions arranged around the central opposition of “man/
woman.”

 Cixous proposes that this system of ordering and understanding the world is
hierarchical in structure.

In other words, it consists of two poles - and one of these poles is always more privileged; it
is given more status and more power than the other.

Perhaps the most significant proposal by the French feminists was their search for a mode
of feminine discourse that could disrupt or subvert phallocentric language, and bring the
body back into discourse.

The French-Bulgarian linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva proposes a distinction

between the semiotic and the symbolic order.

The semiotic is a pre-Oedipal, bodily drive characterized by rhythmic pulses and the
movement of signifying practices, and associated with the maternal body.

It precedes the subject’s entry into the symbolic order, associated with the structure of
signification (that which makes meaning possible), but erupts into and is present in the
symbolic.

For Cixous, an alternative mode could be found in "ecriture feminine” a term which translates
as either “female/feminine writing,” or “writing on the body.” The duality of the phrase
encapsulates Cixous’s belief, expressed in her essay “The laugh of the Medusa,” that
“woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing” .

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Cixous argues that every instance of female writing is a new, or even first, “utterance” and
implies that women’s entrance to language is always a painful struggle.

THIRD WAVE

What has been described as a “third wave” of feminist activity and theorizing emerged in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Moving away from second-wave feminist identity politics, third- wave feminist ideas about
identity embrace notions of contradiction, multiplicity, and ambiguity, and emphasize the need
for new feminist modalities in the twenty-first century.

Third-wave feminism is influenced and informed by postmodern theory, as well as other anti-
foundationalist discourses, such as postcolonialism and poststructuralism.

Donna Haraway’s landmark essay “A cyborg manifesto” offers an irreverent critique of

feminist orthodoxies and essentialist categories.

Combining postmodernism and politics, Haraway conceptualizes the figure of the

“cyborg” as one that embraces otherness and difference.

Insofar as thinking about and describing a “third wave” implies that second-wave feminism
is over, it is sometimes conflated with “postfeminism” (or post-feminism).

An ambiguous and contested term, postfeminism has two key meanings. Within an academic
context, it is sometimes used to describe feminism’s intersection with poststructuralist,
postmodernist, and postcolonial theorizing.

However, this account is often eclipsed by the media-defined notion of postfeminism

which, since the 1980s, has been used to imply that (radical) feminism is outdated and no
longer a productive practice for a society which offers women varied channels of
expression.

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