Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic who was one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in the US. In her 1979 work "Towards a Feminist Poetics", she divides feminist criticism into the woman as reader and the woman as writer, coining the term "gynocritics" for the latter. She outlines three phases of feminist criticism - the feminine phase from 1840-1880, the feminist phase from 1880-1920, and the female phase from 1920 to the present, characterized respectively by women following male norms, visions of female utopias, and a focus on differentiating female from male writing.