Feminism

KATIE GARNER & REBECCA MUNFORD

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. 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]). 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). She 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. … 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.

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 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 is concerned, then, with the relationship between economics, education,
and creativity. “Women,” she 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” (1945 [1929]: 5). … 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.
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 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 was to encourage all women to become
involved in political activity and to challenge the separation between the personal and the
political (see Morgan 1970; Whelehan 1995). 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 … . 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). … 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. Millett was not concerned with how Lawrence and Miller chose to
present women; rather, she undertook to illustrate how the reader responded to the gender
structures inherent in their texts. 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. Greer argued that romance novels were the “opiate of the supermenial” as they
prescribed false models of experience for women (Greer 1970:188). …

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” (Showalter 1979:25). 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 Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (1979). 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. …

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 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. 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” (hooks
1982: 139). 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. 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?” (1987: 150). 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 Cherríe 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 overestimated.
It was the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième 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 Libération des
Femmes from 1970 (Marks & de Courtivron 1981). New French feminist thinkers such as
Hélène 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 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 Hélène 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 (Kristeva 1984[1974]). For Cixous, an alternative mode
could be found in “écriture 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 her self: must write
about women and bring women to writing” (1976[1975]: 875). 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. …

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” (1985; collected in Haraway 1991) 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 (see Brooks 1997). 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.

The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Volume: 2. Contributors: Robert

Eaglestone - Editor. Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell. Place of publication: Malden, MA.
Publication year: 2011.