This document summarizes the development of feminism from the 1960s through the 1980s. It discusses key works that helped launch second-wave feminism like The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Throughout the 1970s, feminist theorists examined the traditional literary canon and discovered examples of male dominance and prejudice against women. They worked to establish a new feminist literary canon that included works by female authors. The document also discusses the work of Elaine Showalter, a pioneering feminist literary critic who developed the concept of gynocritics and analyzed the history of women writers in her book A Literature of Their Own from 1977.

1. Feminism in the 1960s, ‘70s and
‘80s
Elaine Showalter
Geographical Strains of
Feminism: American, British
and French
Present-day Feminist Criticisms 1

2. Feminist concerns once again into the
public arena with the help of two works in
1963:
• American Women
• The Feminine Mystique
2

3. American Women (1963)
• A culminating work of two years of
investigation by the President’s
Commission on the Status of Women.
• Commissioned by President John F.
Kennedy.
• The great inequality between men and
women in the workplace, in
education, and in society as a whole.
3

4. The Feminine Mystique
• As women began to enter the
political arena and articulate
their concerns, a freelance
writer, Betty Friedan,
(1921-2006) published The
Feminine Mystique.
• She articulated two central
questions of feminist
criticism:
4

5. «A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am
I, and What do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and
neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and
children» (The Feminine Mystique).
5

6. «presented cogent arguments against the
philosophical and cultural ideologies that
relegated women to inferior status in society
and in the home. Suddenly there was an
outpouring of books interrogating received
wisdom about women, and the (retrospectively
named) second wave of feminism was born.»
((A History of Feminist Literary Criticism 239)
Simone de
Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex
(1953)
Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique
(1963)
6

7. By 1966, she was elected as the president of
the newly formed National Organization for
Women (NOW)
argued for equal opportunity
for women under the law,
including educational and
employment reforms; the right
of choice concerning abortion;
and a host of other social,
political and personal issues.
7

8. Throughout the 1970s,
feminist theorists and
critics began to examine
the traditional literary
canon, discovering copious
examples of male
dominance and prejudice
that supported Beauvoir’s
and Millet’s assertion that
males consider the female
«The Other»
8

9. Before feminist theorists and critics of
1970s
Stereotypes of women abounded in
the canon:
Women were sex maniacs, goddesses
of beauty, mindless entities, or old
spinster.
Although Charles Dickens, William
Wordsworth, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and
many other male authors found their way
into the established canon, few female
authors achieved such status.
9

10. Before feminist theorists and critics of 1970
Mary E.
Wilkins
Freeman
Sarah Orne
Jewett
were referred to as «local color writers», implying their
secondary or minor position in the canon.
10

11. Before feminist theorists and critics of 1970
The roles of female, fictionalized characters were often limited
to minor characters whose chief traits reinforced the male’s
stereotypical image of women.
Female theorists, critics or scholars such as Woolf
and Beauvoir were simply ignored, their writings
seldom, if ever, referred to by male crafters of the
literary canon.
11

12. Male authors who created and enjoyed
such a place of prominence within the
canon had assumed that their readers
were all males. Women reading such
works could easily be duped into
reading as a man reads.
because most of the
university professors were
men, more frequently than
not female students were
being trained to read
literature as if they, too,
were men.
12

13. Books that defined women’s
writings in feminine terms
flourished.
The existence of female ideal
reader who was affronted by
male prejudices abounding in
the canon.
Questions concerning the male and
female qualities of literary form,
style, voice, theme, and other
aesthetic elements of texts.
13

14. 1962
1969
Having successfully highlighted the importance of gender, feminist
theorists uncovered and rediscovered a body of works authored
by females that their male counterparts had decreed inferior and
unworthy to be part of the canon.
14

15. 15

16. 16

17. • Throughout the universities and in the reading populace, many
readers now turned their attention to historical and current
works authored by women.
• Works that helped define the feminine imagination, to
categorize and explain female literary history, and to articulate
a female aesthetic became the focus of feminist critics. 17

18. 1970s
• Feminist concers were supported in print by
establishment of the Feminist Press in 1972
and journals such as:
• Signs
• Women’s Studies
Quarterly
• Feminist Studies
18

19. • https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/37308 (for WSQ)
19

20. Texts that helped shape the ongoing
concerns and direction of feminist
theory and criticism:
• Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience
and History in American Life and Letters (1975)
• Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards’s The Authority of Experience:
Essays in Feminist Criticism (1977)
• Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to
American Fiction (1978)
• Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about
Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978)
• Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s edited work Shakespeare’s
Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1979)
• Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1979)
20

21. 21
This volume focuses on the
metaphor of 'land-as-woman.‘
It is the first systematic
documentation of the recurrent
responses to the American
continent as a feminine entity
(as Mother, as Virgin, as
Temptress, as the Ravished), and
it is also the first systematic
inquiry into the metaphor's
implications for the current
ecological crisis.

22. 22
A wide selection of essays
addressing the problem of
defining feminist criticism
and/or dealing with some
declaredly feminist way with
significant English (Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Moll Flanders ,
Jane Eyre, Mrs. Dalloway,
The Golden Notebook,
Katherine Anne Porter’s
Women etc.) or American
texts.

23. To Fetterley, the American canon is
largely unreadable for women since so
many texts demonstrate man’s power
over women, while the narrative
strategies of these texts oblige the woman
reader to identify as male. The problem of
American culture, says Fetterley, is not
the emasculation of men but the
‘immasculation of women’ (1978: xx).
The woman reader, then, should become
conscious of these narrative strategies,
‘make palpable their designs’ (1978:
xii).
The word ‘designs’ suggests not only the
text’s form, but also ‘designs upon’ the
female reader and, thus, she must be
‘resisting’.
23

24. 24
The essays in this landmark volume
highlight the achievements of
"Shakespeare's sisters," including Emily
Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti,
and others.
An analysis of Victorian women writers,
this pathbreaking book of feminist
literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of
their revolutionary realization in the
1970s that "the personal was the
political, the sexual was the textual."

25. Elaine Showalter (1941, -)
25
• American literary critic
and teacher
• Founder of gynocritics
• She later taught at
Rutgers and Princeton
University and she
retired from Princeton as
professor emeritus in
2003.
a school of
feminist criticism concerned with
“woman as writer…with the history,
themes, genres, and structures
of literature by women” (Showalter,
«Toward a Feminist Poetics»).

26. • Showalter developed her doctoral thesis into her first book, A
Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë
to Lessing (1977), a pioneering study in which she created a
critical framework for analyzing literature by women.
• The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture,
1830–1980 (1985)
• Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle (1990); Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in
American Women’s Writing (1991); Hystories: Historical
Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997) Inventing Herself:
Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001),
• Teaching Literature (2003);
• Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its
Discontents (2005)
• A Jury of Her Peers (2009),
• Showalter edited several volumes, including The New Feminist
Criticism (1985) and Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers
of the Fin de Siècle (1993).
26

27. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists
from Brontë to Lessing (1977)
She chronicles three historical phases of female writing:
The feminine
phase (1840-1880)
The female
phase (1920-
present)
Feminist phase
(1880-1920)
27

28. • Writers such as Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and
George Sand accepted the prevailing social
constructs that defined women.
• These authors wrote under the male pseudonyms so
their works, like male counterparts’, would first be
published and recognized for their intellectual and
artistic achievements.
The
feminine
phase
• Female writers helped dramatize the plight of the
«slighted» woman, depicting the harsh and often cruel
treatment of female characters at the hands of their more
powerful male creations.
Feminist or
second
phase
• Writers have rejected both the feminine social constructs
prominent during the «feminine» phase and the
secondary or minor position of female characters that
dominated the «feminist» phase.
Female
phase
28

29. 29
She observes that feminist
theorists and critics presently
concern themselves with
developing a peculiarly female
understanding of the female
experience in art, including a
feminine analysis of literary
forms and techniques. Such a
task necessarily includes the
uncovering of misogyny in
texts.
A term Showalter
uses to describe
the male hatred of
women.

30. Such exclusion must
cease!
The Wide, Wide
World (1850) The Hidden Hand (1859)
A New England Nun and
Other Stories (1891) 30
The female writers were deliberately
excluded from the literary canon by male
professors who first established the canon
itself. Writers such as Susan Warner,
Emma D.E.N. Southworth and Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman by far the most popular
authors of the second half of the
nineteenth century in American fiction,
were not deemed worthy to be included
in the canon.

31. «Toward a Feminist Poetics»
(1979)
A process she names
gynocriticism
Feminist theorists must
«construct a female framework
for analysis of women’s
literature to develop new
models based on the study of
female experience, rather than
to adapt to male models and
theories»
31

32. Gynocriticism
• She exposes the false cultural assumptions and characteristics
of women as depicted in canonical literature.
• She coins the word gynocritics-
A classification she gives to those critics
«who construct a female framework for
the analysis of women’s literature, to
develop new models based on the study
of female experience, rather than to
adapt to male models and theories».
32

33. Gynocriticism provide us with four models that address
the nature of women’s writing:
• Investigates how
society shapes
women’s goals,
responses, and points
of view.
• Analyzes the female
psyche and demonstrates
how such an analysis
affects the writing process,
emphasizing the flux and
fluidity of female writing
as opposed to male
writing’s rigidity and
structure.
• Addresses the need for
a female discourse,
investigating the
differences between how
women and men use
language.
• This model asserts that
women create and write
in a language can be
used in their writing.
• Emphasizes how the
female body marks
itself on a text by
providing a host of
literary images along
with a personal, intimate
tone.
The
Biological
Model
The
Linguistic
Model
The
Cultural
Model
The
Psychoanalytic
Model
33

34. Geographical Strains of
Feminism
• Historically, geography played a significant role in
determining the major interests of the various voices of
feminist criticism, with three somewhat distinct,
geographical strains of feminism having emerged:
American British French
They no longer serve as distinct theoretical or practical
boundaries but do remain important as historical markers in
feminism’s development. 34

35. American
• According to Showalter, American Feminism at this time was essentially
textual, stressing repression of texts authored by females.
British
• Essentially Marxist, stressing oppression.
French
• Essentially psychoanalytic, stressing repression.
Geographical Strains of
Feminism
The aim of all
groups was similar:
to rescue women
from being
considered «the
Other» 35

36. American Feminism
• Kolodny announced feminism’s major
concern: the restoration and
inclusion of the writings of female
writers to the literary canon.
• Literary history is itself a fiction,
Kolodny restores a realistic history of
women so that they themselves can tell
«herstory».
• In order to tell and write herstory,
female writers must find a means to
gain their voice in the midst of the
dominating male voices seeking
society’s attention.
Annette Kolodny
36

37. • She uses feminist
psychoanalytic theories and
methodologies to assert that
the American colonists
attributed to the land’s
unknown but potential terrors.
• Whereas some males viewed
the American frontier as a new
Eden, female colonists often
saw it as a home and a
«familial human
community».
American Feminism
37

38. • Kolodny provides
evidence that women are
still «outsiders» at
American universities
and on college
campuses.
• She also documents the
rising antifeminist and
anti-intellectual
harassment occuring
against women in higher
education.
(1998)
American Feminism
38

39. • The male voice has, for too long, been
dominant. Because males have had
the power of the pen and the press,
they have been allowed not only to
define but also to create images of
women as they so chose in their texts.
• This male power has caused what
they call «anxiety of authorship» in
women, causing them to fear both
the act of literary creation itself and
writing.
• So female writers believe that literary
creation will isolate them from
society, perhaps destroying them.
American Feminism
391979

40. The Madwoman in the Attic
40
‘Battle for self-creation’ against an
overwhelmingly powerful patriarchal
authority.
Jane Eyre was Everywoman, according to
Gilbert and Gubar, and their readers, they imply,
can make a similar triumphant pilgrimage of
‘escape-into-wholeness’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 49).
Gilbert and Gubar had identified two
dominant metaphors in their texts: escape and
enclosure.

41. Gilbert and Gubar’s
solution is that women
develop a «woman’s
sentence» that can
encourage literary
autonomy. By inventing such
a construction, a woman can
sentence male authors to
isolation, to fear, and to
literary banishment from the
canon, just as for centuries
males have been sentencing
women. By formulating a
women’s sentence, female
writers will free themselves
from being defined by men.
41

42. A woman’s sentence will also free women from being reduced to
the stereotypical images that appear in literature. They identify
two such principal images:
The Angel in the House Madwoman in the attic
42

43. Gilbert and Gubar assert that
either of these images are
unrealistic
representations of women
in society.
The first image canonizes the female,
placing her simultaneously above and
outside her socially constructed world,
the second image denigrates and
demonizes the female, banishing her
to the world of myths and the demonic
while disavowing her rightful place in
both literature and society.
43

44. If you are not an angel, then you are a monster. These
stereotypical, male-created images of women in
literature, declare Gilbert and Gubar, must be
uncovered, examined, debunked, and transcended
if women are to achieve literary autonomy.
44

45. British Feminism
• Stressed oppression.
• Leaning toward Marxist theory, British
feminism saw art, literature, and life as
inseparable.
• How a female is depicted in literature directly
affects how women will be treated in real life.
• Particularly in the West, patriarchal society
exploits women not only through literature but
also economically and socially. 45

46. 46
Juliet Mitchell (1940-)

47. 47
Jacqueline Rose (1949- ) Rosalind Coward (1952 - ) Catherine Belsey (1940 - )

48. 48
Cora Kaplan
Mary Jacobus
UK Marxist Feminist
Collective (formed in
1976)

49. • British feminism of this era
challenges the economic and
social status of women, both
in society and as depicted in
the arts, especially in texts.
• The goal of feminist criticism
is to change society, not
simply critique it.
• As early as 1973, The
feminist publishing house
Virago was founded in
London.
British Feminism
49

50. • Yet from the early eighties, both feminist literary
criticism and postcolonial theory were beginning to
find their way into the literature departments of the
more radical Higher Education institutions in Britain, as
had already happened in the States, and were eagerly
seized on by students.
• Writers like the South African Bessie Head, the
Nigerian Buchi Emecheta, the Maori New Zealander
Keri Hulme and the Caribbean Grace Nichols were read
by young women, both black and white, within and
without the academy.
British Feminism
50

51. French Feminism
• Stressed female oppression both in life and art, highlighting
the repression of women.
• The writings of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva
and Michèle Montrelay.
• It is closely associated with the theoretical and practical
applications of psychoanalysis and the theories of
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.
51

52. Freud viewed women as
incomplete males who possess
penis envy, desiring to gain the
male phallus and obtain power.
Lacan rescues psychoanalysis from
Freud’s misogynistic theories.
Language ultimately shapes and
structures our conscious and
unconscious minds, thereby shaping
our self-identity, not the phallus.
Language as it is structured and
understood, ultimately denies
women the power of literature
and writing.
52

53. Jacques Lacan
53
Human psyche consists of three parts,
or what he calls orders: the
imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.
For the girl, entrance into the symbolic
order means submission to law of the
father. Such submission brings
subservience to males. Being socialized
through the discourse of language, the girl
becomes a second-class citizen.

54. French feminists such as Julia Kristeva and
Hélène Cixous borrow and amend elements of
Freud’s and Lacan’s theories to develop their own
forms of feminist criticism.
French Feminism
1937-
1941 -
54

55. Julia Kristeva
• In these works, Kristeva posits that the imaginary order is
characterized by a continuous flow of fluidity or rhythm,
which she calls chora.
• On entering the Lacanian symbolic order, both males and
females are separated from chora and repress the feelings of
fluidity rhythm.
(1974)(1980) (1982)
55

56. • Similar to Freudian slip in which an
unconscious thought breaks through the
conscious mind, the chora, at times,
breaks through into the real order
and disturbs the male-dominant
discourse.
Kristeva’s concept of
«motherhood» has informed much
of her writing because she asks what
she believes to be the central though
complex question of feminist theory:
«How can an enquiry into the nature of
motherhood lead to a better
understanding of the part played in love
by the woman? (58)».
56

57. She argues that women must
eventually «deal» with men,
another woman, or perhaps a
child. How will the rejection or
acceptance of motherhood shape
women?
Julia Kristeva
57

58. Hélène Cixous
She declares that there exists
a particular kind of female
writing she calls
l’écriture féminine,
envisioned in terms of
bisexuality.
She explores a different mode of
discourse that arises from Lacan’s
symbolic order.
Words such as «feminine»,
«masculine», «femininity», and even
«man» and «woman» should be
exorcised from the language.
58

59. L’écriture féminine
59
She asserts that «the ideal harmony,
reached by few, which would be
genital, assembling everything and
being capable of generosity, of
spending».
This kind of writing is the
province of metaphor, not
limited to written words but
also «writing by the voice.»
Characterized by fluidity, such feminine
discourse, when fully explored, will
transform the social and cultural structures
within literature by freeing both women
and men from phallocentrism.

60. THEORISING BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM
60
Alice Walker
‘In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens’ in Ms. magazine in
1974 and ‘Looking for Zora’.
‘Saving the Life That Is Your Own:
The Importance of Models in the
Artist’s Life’ (1976), Walker
describes her ‘desperate need to know
and assimilate the experience of
earlier black women writers, most of
them unheard of by you and me, until
quite recently’ (Walker, 1983: 9)
‘Womanism’

61. 61
THEORISING BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM
The Combahee River Collective’s ‘A Black
Feminist Statement’ and Barbara Smith’s
‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’ both date
from 1977 and were the first attempts to theorise
systematically.
The Combahee River Collective’s
‘Statement’ functioned as an empowering
manifesto for black feminist literary
critics.

62. 62
«I do not know where to begin. Long
before I tried to write this I realized that I
was attempting something
unprecedented, something dangerous
merely by writing about Black women
writers from a feminist perspective and
about Black lesbian writers from any
perspective at all. These things have not
been done«. (Smith, 1977/ 1982: 157)

63. 63
Deborah McDowell’s 1980 essay,
‘New Directions for Black
Feminist Criticism’,
McDowell questions this assumption, noting that, while she
uses the term ‘black feminist criticism’ in much the same way
that Smith does, she leaves open the possibility that black
women critics might choose to analyse a variety of literary
works, not only those written by women of African
descent.

64. Present-Day Feminist Criticism
Contemporary feminist criticism is not composed of a
single ideology, many subcategories or approaches have
developed, each creating its own sphere of concern while
often intersecting not only with other forms of feminist
criticism but also with other schools of literary criticism,
such as:
• Psychoanalysis
• Marxism
• Deconstruction
64

65. Some scholars categorize feminist criticism
into four groups:
• Virginia Woolf, Judith Fetterley, Annette Kolodny,
Nina Baym, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and
Susan Gubar.
Anglo-American
Feminism
• Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clement, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Monique Wittig, Hélène
Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Joan Scott.
Poststructuralist
Feminism
• Juliet Mitchell, Michele Barrett, Jacqueline Rose,
Rosalind Coward, Toril Moi, Catherine Belsey,
Katie King, Donna Haraway.
Materialist
Feminism
• Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Chandra
Mohanty, Uma Narayan, Mary Daly, Gloria
Anzaldua.
Postmodern
Feminism
65

66. Third-World Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism
Second-wave feminist criticism (1960s and 1970s) in the West had two main
aims:
1) to analyse literature as vehicle for reproducing and contesting
patriarchal images of women in fictional texts.
2) to identify and analyse the specificity of women’s writing.
The tendency to focus on the work of white,
middle-class, Western, heterosexual women,
often under a general heading of ‘women’s
writing’,
By the 1980s, this process was questioned by women
critics.
silencing or
marginalisation of issues of
class, heterosexism, racism
and the colonial legacy as
they affected women’s
cultural production.
66

67. The Eurocentric gaze, the sovereignty of intentional
subjectivity, authorship and untheorised appeals to global
sisterhood and to women’s experience.
• Third-World Feminism, Postcolonial
Feminism
Barbara Smith spoke warmly of being part of a ‘Third World’
feminist movement: ‘And not only am I talking about my sisters
here in the United States – American Indian, Latina, Asian
American, Arab American – I am also talking about women all
over the globe... Third World feminism has enriched not just the
women it applies to, but also political practice in general’
(Smith, 1984/1995: 27).
67

68. A site for analysing images of colonial societies, for
understanding the discursive production of colonial
forms of subjectivity and for challenging these.
• Third-World Feminism, Postcolonial
Feminism
«Literature written on both sides of the colonial divide often
absorbs, appropriates and inscribes aspects of the ‘‘other’’
culture, creating new genres, ideas and identities in the process.
Finally literature is also an important means of appropriating,
inverting or challenging dominant means of representation
and colonial ideologies» (Loomba, 1998: 70–1).
68

69. 69

70. 70

71. Works Cited
• Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
2nd ed. New Delhi: Viva books, 2008. Print.
• Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism : an Introduction to Theory and Practice.
Upper Saddle River, N.J. :Prentice Hall, 1999. Print.
• Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Twentieth anniversary edition. Norton,
1983. Online.
• Gilbert, Sandra M. The Madwoman in the Attic : the Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven :Yale University Press,
1979. Online.
• Gill Plain. A History of Feminist Criticism. Scotland: Cambridge University Press,
2012. Online.
• Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
• Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë
to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1977. Online.
• Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Routledge,
2006. Print.
71