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Ecofeminism is a practical political movement addressing a broad range of urgent social and political
problems, from pollution, health, and species extinction to economic development, militarism, racism,
and sexual violence. Like all environmentalists, feminist ecologists are concerned with human
relationships to the natural world and intent on discovering relationships--among human beings as well
as between humans and non-human nature--that contribute to a healing, or healthy, planet. Ecofeminists
differ from other environmentalists in their emphasis on the ways that "nature" has been envisioned as
female (or feminine), the parallel and mutually reinforcing oppression of women and nature, and the
ways that environmental problems and issues specifically affect women. Ecofeminists have various--and
often conflicting--commitments to liberal, cultural, socialist, indigenous, and postmodern feminist
theories.

Ecofeminism and Nineteenth-Century Literature

Ecologically centered discipline that critiques the dominant male practices and discourses relating to
nature.

INTRODUCTION

Ecological feminism, or ecofeminism, is an interdisciplinary movement that calls for a new way of
thinking about nature, politics, and spirituality. Ecofeminist theory questions or rejects previously held
patriarchal paradigms and holds that the domination of women by men is intimately linked to the
destruction of the environment. Ecofeminists argue that traditional male-centered approaches involving
exploitation of and supremacy over women are echoed in patriarchal practices and discourse with
respect to the environment. Ecofeminism came into being in the early 1970s in the United States, when a
number of women became disillusioned with the mainstream environmental movement and sought to
create more awareness among feminists about environmental concerns. Feminists before this had seen it
as important to deemphasize the differences between men and women, but ecofeminists embarked on a
study of particularly female ways of being and thinking about nature throughout history. Thinkers in
various fields, from science to anthropology, sociology, history, and politics began to critique traditional
attitudes toward the environment from a feminist perspective. In the 1990s, a field of study called
ecocriticism—an earth-centered approach to literary studies—began to emerge in literature departments
in the United States. Ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature and the physical
environment, asking how nature is represented in literary works. While ecofeminist literary criticism is
similarly concerned with the depiction of nature, it emphasizes how traditional representations often see
the land as innocent, female, and ripe for exploitation.

While ecofeminist literary critics examine literature from all cultures and throughout history to explore
female perspectives on nature, nineteenth-century English and American literature is seen as a
particularly rich area of study. As ecofeminist literary critics have shown, nature writing by women in
both England and the United States flourished in the nineteenth century. The study of flora and fauna,
which could be done relatively close to home, was seen as a respectable occupation for middle- and
upper-class women; thus, a number of them took an interest in writing about their natural environment.
Few of these female nature writers are well-known outside scholarly circles, but they are seen as
important because they offer radically different perspectives on the study of plants and animals than do
their male contemporaries. Also significant is that many of these women regarded nature as a liberating
force, especially in contrast to their confining domestic existences.

For many nineteenth-century women, the sense of place was an important aspect of their writing and
many wrote about the local landscape that was often an integral part of their daily life. One of the best-
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known writers who made place a central element in her fiction was the American novelist Sarah Orne
Jewett. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), for example, is set in the fictional town of Dunnett
Landing on the coast of Maine, and the action of the novel revolves around the town and surrounding
islands. The story is of a young woman writer who spends a summer in the small town, where she falls
in with a group of women who weave a web of stories about the place and its people. Jewett also
portrays this circle of women as a manifestation of nature that seems to arise from the rugged landscape.
Another important, but neglected, work about place is Rural Hours (1850) by Susan Fenimore Cooper,
the daughter of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Rural Hours is one of the earliest examples of
American nature writing and the first by a woman. In this work, Cooper describes an ideal rural society
based on her experiences during her excursions in the local countryside. She also shows how that society
is changing as the wilderness recedes and industrialization looms. Cooper suggests that knowledge of
place encourages people to respect the land, and she discusses the moral obligation of human beings to
create a society that is aware of the natural history of the environment and lives in harmony with the
natural world.

Other female writers wrote about place not because it was familiar but because it was new and different
from what they left behind as they sought a better life in new and distant regions. Many American
frontierswomen left accounts of their travel experiences in diaries and letters which have been collected
and studied by feminist scholars. These documents show how different their perspectives were from
their male contemporaries. For many women, life on the frontier meant further drudgery and hard work
doing domestic chores, and consequently they had a different sense of the possibilities of the landscape
than did their husbands and sons. Other women travelers noted in their writings that despite the promise
of untouched landscapes, women's domestic captivity prevented them from enjoying what the land had
to offer. This is, for example, one of the themes of Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, in 1843
(1844), which chronicles the travels of Fuller and her companions as they visit Niagara Falls, the Great
Lakes, Chicago, and the Wisconsin Territory.

Nineteenth-century nature writing by women took various forms, but one theme that is seen in most of
these works is the importance of the link between human beings and their natural surroundings. For
most female writers, concern with the environment is not tied to a romantic longing for the openness of
the rugged landscape or the withdrawal from society, which are common themes in men's nature writing.
Rather, the earth is seen as the sustainer of human life and relationships, and the fragile boundary
between nature and humanity is emphasized. Critics who study these women's writings have been
particularly interested to show how the “gendered” female landscape that is central to nineteenth-century
male writing about the environment is given more complex expression in works by women. They also
show how female writing about the environment weaves together concerns about ordinary life and
explores questions of community, gender, domination, and exploitation.

Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages | Introduction

Contemporary feminist theory has allowed social and literary critics to observe and reconstruct the past
through the lens of the woman, and more specifically, through that of the woman writer. Looking to the
premodern eras of antiquity and the Middle Ages, feminist scholars have studied women's roles as
artists, leaders, and agents of history. Likewise, they have examined the status of ordinary individuals as
the subjects of social and historical change across the millennia. Importantly, most classicists and
medievalists who employ the tools of feminist theory in their work have been careful to note that
feminism is a decidedly contemporary development, cautioning those who would describe women of the
distant past as feminists to be aware of the consequent anachronism. Nevertheless, in their explorations
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of early literature and past civilizations, these scholars have recognized an emerging consciousness
regarding women's issues. While women writers of ancient Greece, Alexandrian Egypt, or feudal Japan
can scarcely be labeled feminists by contemporary standards, their unique awareness of themselves and
their status in their societies has inspired the endeavor to read and write the history of women in art and
literature.

Scholars have unearthed, in the early records of antique civilizations from Bronze Age Greece and Old
Kingdom Egypt to ancient China and imperial Rome, suggestions of similar elements within the
diversity of women's literature and social roles. Bringing together numerous common themes, such as
the conflict between women of influence and the strong patriarchal tendency to marginalize the feminine
and codify it symbolically, feminist criticism has offered a new way of looking at the ancient past that
seeks to question some of the underlying assumptions of traditional humanist criticism. By examining
textual and archeological evidence, critics have endeavored to reassess the society, daily lives, and
literary production of women in various cultures of the ancient world. Because women writers of
antiquity tended to be individuals with unique talent, their status is generally viewed as highly
exceptional. Writers such as the Greek poet Sappho, the Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher
Hypatia, and the Chinese scholar Pan Chao (Ban Zhao), in some fashion and for some limited period
enjoyed favorable social or familial circumstances that assisted them in their vocations. For feminist
critics, their rarity and the treatment they received in society—Hypatia, for instance, was murdered in
the streets of Alexandria—suggest a prevalent lack of opportunity and respect for creative and
intellectual women in antiquity. Such conclusions have led scholars to probe the origins of misogyny in
the patriarchal societies these writers represent and to analyze the system of masculine and feminine
semiotics upon which the notion of misogyny rests. Beginning with ancient Greece, commentators have
evaluated the gendered distinction between private and public spheres, usually described as a symbolic
tension between the feminine oikos (household) and masculine polis (city-state or society). Thus,
women of the Athenian classical period in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. were expected to attend to
their domestic duties without mingling in political affairs. Women's ritual lives were also generally kept
separate from those of men, giving rise to the feminine mysteries of ancient Greek religion. Ancient
Sparta, in contrast, promoted a more egalitarian view of the sexes, but a woman's primary role remained
the bearing of strong future warriors to defend the militaristic city-state. In later times, Roman law
placed rather severe restrictions on women, making their legal and social status completely subject to the
authority of their fathers and husbands. In a few cases, however, the position of aristocratic women in
the ancient world may have been somewhat more favorable. In Ptolemaic Egypt, for example, Queens
Nefertiti and Cleopatra appear to have been treated with much the same regard as their male
counterparts. Notwithstanding these rare instances, the lives of most antique women were generally
circumscribed by limits on education, mobility, and vocation precluding virtually all possibilities that
might conflict with either domestic or reproductive responsibilities.

Women's relatively limited social roles are also reflected in the arts and literature of the antique period,
from Athenian vase painting to Homeric verse, which suggest that the most common position of ancient
woman was in the home, occupied with household duties—cooking, weaving, child rearing,—leaving
men to handle political issues, which often meant war. Feminist critics have noted that such
representations of women in the ancient period derive from the patriarchal assumptions of premodern
societies, which were reflected in the symbolic order of the mythic past. Greco-Roman mythology—
embodied for the purposes of literary scholarship here in the Homeric epics the Iliad and Odyssey, and in
Ovid's Latin Metamorphoses—encapsulates classical perceptions of the feminine, depicting women as
powerful goddesses, vengeful queens, cunning witches, and as the objects or victims of male aggression.
Such mythic stereotypes inform an array of world literature and are precisely the sorts of ingrained
depictions of women that contemporary feminists wish to discover and understand. Likewise, classical
drama, perhaps best typified in the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles,
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presents a somewhat divergent view of women, but one that nevertheless betrays antique assumptions
about the nature of woman and man that modern feminists seek to question. Literary depictions of
women in the Bible, additionally, contributed to a reductive dichotomy that informed the fundamental
gender bias of medieval European society and literature. While self-possessed and heroic female figures
such as Esther and Judith are present in the Bible, their stories are usually categorized with the Old
Testament Apocrypha. For the most part, perceptions of women in biblical contexts became
symbolically aligned with one of two poles—the sinning temptress Eve or the flawless Virgin Mary.

Studying continuity from classical and biblical perceptions of women, feminist scholars interested in the
Middle Ages have generally focused on the social roles of women depicted in a wide array of texts, in
the visual arts of the period, and in the works of a growing pool of female writers. The medieval epoch
in Europe and Asia witnessed major developments in women's writings in large part due to the spread of
religious education. Consequently, feminist critics have been drawn to the works of female mystic
writers, among them Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Birgitta of
Sweden. Their writings generally include revelatory visions of Christ and the Virgin Mary, religious
poetry, and similar works of a spiritual nature. Other medieval European writers, such as Marie de
France and Heloise (in her well-known correspondence with Pierre Abelard), offered unique
contributions to the romantic and epistolary genres, respectively. In the Far East, the ninth-century
Chinese poet Yu Xuanji produced some of the finest lyric poetry in her language, while writers such as
Murasaki Shikibu, in her innovative novel The Tale of Genji, and Sei Shonagon, in her Pillow Book,
recorded the flowering and decadence of the imperial court in Heian Japan around the turn of the
eleventh century. Despite such literary accomplishments, the essential social and political status of
women in the medieval period changed relatively little from that of the antique, and in some respects
may even have declined. For the most part, women continued to be valued only for their domestic skills
and reproductive role. Those who protested, and thereby failed to acquiesce to the patriarchal social
order, were often harshly treated at all levels of society. Among the aristocracy, the example of the
twelfth-century Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine demonstrates this point. Scornfully denounced in popular
legend as the embodiment of feminine guile and malevolence for requesting a divorce from her husband,
Eleanor was unfairly burdened with maintaining the integrity of her family at all costs and regardless of
circumstances. Far worse, from the point of view of most men, was that a woman should be guilty of
unchaste behavior—an accusation also leveled against the Queen. Critics have observed that this
common theme in medieval society and literature was probably best articulated by Geoffrey Chaucer in
his Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Ironically in the view of modern critics, Chaucer, with his
compelling description of the Wife of Bath as a self-possessed, outspoken, and boastfully licentious
woman, rendered an epitome of the medieval antifeminist tradition, while at the same time sketching a
figure in whom many have seen the first inklings of an incipient feminist consciousness.

Women in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries | Introduction

Women in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were challenged with expressing
themselves in a patriarchal system that generally refused to grant merit to women's views. Cultural and
political events during these centuries increased attention to women's issues such as education reform,
and by the end of the eighteenth century, women were increasingly able to speak out against injustices.
Though modern feminism was nonexistent, many women expressed themselves and exposed the
conditions that they faced, albeit often indirectly, using a variety of subversive and creative methods.
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The social structure of sixteenth century Europe allowed women limited opportunities for involvement;
they served largely as managers of their households. Women were expected to focus on practical
domestic pursuits and activities that encouraged the betterment of their families, and more particularly,
their husbands. In most cases education for women was not advocated—it was thought to be detrimental
to the traditional female virtues of innocence and morality. Women who spoke out against the patriarchal
system of gender roles, or any injustice, ran the risk of being exiled from their communities, or worse;
vocal unmarried women in particular were the targets of witch-hunts. Anne Hutchinson, who challenged
the authority of Puritan clergy, was excommunicated for her outspoken views and controversial actions.
Anne Askew, a well-educated, out-spoken English Protestant, was tried for heresy in 1545; her denial of
transubstantiation was grounds for her imprisonment. She was eventually burned at the stake for her
refusal to incriminate other Protestant court ladies. Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558, a woman
who contradicted many of the gender roles of the age. She was well educated, having studied a variety
of subjects including mathematics, foreign language, politics, and history. Elizabeth was an outspoken
but widely respected leader, known for her oratory skills as well as her patronage of the arts. Despite the
advent of the age of print, the literacy rate during this period remained low, though the Bible became
more readily available to the lower classes. Religious study, though restricted to "personal
introspection," was considered an acceptable pursuit for women, and provided them with another
context within which they could communicate their individual ideas and sentiments. In addition to
religious material, women of this period often expressed themselves through the ostensibly private forms
of letters and autobiographies.

The seventeenth century was not an era of drastic changes in the status or conditions of women. Women
continued to play a significant, though not acknowledged, role in economic and political structures
through their primarily domestic activities. They often acted as counselors in the home, "tempering"
their husbands' words and actions. Though not directly involved in politics, women's roles within the
family and local community allowed them to influence the political system. Women were discouraged
from directly expressing political views counter to their husbands' or to broadly condemn established
systems; nevertheless, many women were able to make public their private views through the veil of
personal, religious writings. Again, women who challenged societal norms and prejudices risked their
lives—Mary Dyer was hanged for repeatedly challenging the Massachusetts law that banished Quakers
from the colony. Though their influence was often denigrated, women participated in various community
activities. For example, women were full members of English guilds; guild records include references to
"brethern and sistern" and "freemen and freewomen." During the seventeenth century, women's writings
continued to focus on largely religious concerns, but increasingly, women found a creative and
intellectual outlet in private journal- and letter-writing. Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative,
published in 1682, is a famous narrative written ostensibly for personal use that was made public and
became a popular success.

The eighteenth century brought the beginning of the British cultural revolution. With the increasing
power of the middle class and an expansion in consumerism, women's roles began to evolve. The
economic changes brought by the new middle class provided women with the opportunity to be more
directly involved in commerce. Lower-to middle-class women often assisted their husbands in work
outside the home. It was still thought unseemly for a lady to be knowledgeable of business so, though
some class distinctions were blurring, the upper class was able to distinguish themselves from the rest of
society. The rise in consumerism allowed the gentry to place a greater emphasis on changing fashion and
"display," further distancing them from the middleclass. With the advent of changes in rules of fashion
and acceptable mores within society, some women established a literary niche writing etiquette guides.
Also due to the cultural revolution, mounting literacy rates among the lower classes caused an increase
in publishing, including the rise of the periodical. Men and women of all classes found new means to
express ideas in the wider publishing community. Though women's writing during this period continued
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largely to be an extension of domesticity, and focused mainly on pragmatic, practical issues, women
found a wider market for publication. The act of professional writing, however, was still considered
"vulgar" among the aristocracy. Significant colonial expansion during this period provided would-be
writers with unique subject matter—letters written by women abroad discussed foreign issues and
culture, and offered a detailed view of far-off lands. These letters were often circulated among members
of an extended family, as well as in the larger community. In defiance of social strictures, women such
as Mary Wollstonecraft began to speak out publicly on women's rights, including education and
marriage laws. Though women had better access to education, the goal of women's education was to
attain an ideal "womanhood"—a "proper education" was viewed as one that supported domestic and
social activities but disregarded more academic pursuits. Women such as Wollstonecraft advocated
access to education for women that was equal to that of their male counterparts. Marriage laws, which
overwhelmingly favored men, also spurred public debate, though little was accomplished to reform laws
during this period.

Throughout the world, women took action to advance their political and social rights. Catherine the
Great of Russia devised a coup d'etat to take the throne in 1762, an aggressive act to prevent her son's
disinheritance. Catherine continued to rule in an unconventional, independent manner, withdrawing
from the men who made her ascension possible and remaining unmarried to ensure her power. Catherine
was a shrewd politician, and used wide public support to enact laws that significantly altered the Russian
political system. In France, Olympe de Gouges demanded equal rights for women in the new French
Republic, and was eventually executed by guillotine in 1793. Madame Roland, who also met an
untimely death in 1793, influenced revolutionary politicians and thinkers during the French Revolution
through her famous salon. She, too, was an activist for women's social and political rights and was
executed for treason, largely due to her outspoken feminist ideas. Phillis Wheatley, an African-American
slave, examined slavery and British imperialism in her poetry, and became a notable figure among
abolitionists in America and abroad. Increasingly, women rebuked traditional roles and spoke out against
the social and political inequalities they faced. The century closed with the deaths of visionaries such as
Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine the Great, and the births of a new breed of female writers and
scholars. The political and social changes that took place in the eighteenth century paved the way for
these future writers and activists to advance the cause of women's rights.

Women's Literature in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries | Introduction

With the advent of print in Europe in the mid 1400s, literature began to garner a much larger audience.
The most famous early book was the Gutenberg Bible of 1456, and twenty years later, William Caxton
effectively originated print in England when he set up his press at Westminster. The trend toward literacy
and the wider distribution of texts throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
significantly altered not only the intellectual landscape of Europe, but the role of women writers—as
print made literature more widely available to the middle class and to middle-class women, the focus of
literature changed significantly. Despite often being denied the educational opportunities afforded to
men, far more women were able to express themselves in writing than before this period.

Much early writing, including that of female authors, was devotional in nature. Many women wrote
prayers, translations of religious works originally in Latin, and other texts primarily centered on
spirituality. Notable, and often autobiographical, religious works by authors such as Margery Kempe,
were especially popular. The increasing availability of print gradually allowed literature to focus on
more secular themes, and many women contributed to the body of literature by writing journals, essays,
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and letters. Initially a private genre, letters evolved from a basic form of communication into a
significant public literary style. Epistolary writing by such authors as Margaret Cavendish and Mary
Wortley Montagu elevated the style, contributing to the creation of the epistolary novel genre and to the
development of fiction itself. These and other letters by women are currently studied not only for their
social and historical commentary, but for their literary merits as well.

Nancy Cotton has traced the contributions of women playwrights to the fourteenth century, noting that
the first known woman playwright in England, Katherine of Sutton, rewrote traditional liturgical plays
between 1363 and 1376. Cotton credits the Countess of Pembroke, with her Antonie printed in 1592, as
the first woman in England to publish a play. Angela J. Smallwood examines eighteenth-century British
theater, and notes that the second half of the century was a "heyday of genteel comedy for female as well
as male writers." A playwright as well as a novelist, Aphra Behn is known as the first woman to earn her
living entirely from writing. Her novels, especially Oroonoko (1688) are widely studied to this day, as
are the romantic works of Madeleine de Scudéry, and both authors were highly influential in the further
development of literature. Women also participated heavily in the poetry of the era. As poetry writing
changed from an act practiced by the aristocracy to one available to women of all classes, working-class
women such as Ann Yearsley and Hannah More joined noble-women such as Anne Finch, Countess of
Winchilsea, as published poets. Women made significant contributions to a wide variety of literature and
literary periods, from the rise of the periodical in the sixteenth century to the rise of literary criticism.

Modern analyses of women's literature from 1500 to 1800 investigate the effects of social, economic,
and political conditions under which women lived, in addition to studying the literary merits of their
works. For instance, Marion Wynne-Davies demonstrates how women's very lack of status and financial
independence served as an important impetus to publish, since they recognized their literary skills as a
means to earn money. Elaine Hobby contends that women were more suited than men to write religious
meditations, due to the "specifically female advantages of abandoning the world," and its "concerns of
state." Margaret J. M. Ezell explains that women's literature was historically neglected by scholars,
except in the area of nineteenth-century novels, but that literary historians, particularly since the 1970s,
have recovered many previously unknown texts and manuscripts. Isobel Grundy analyzes the many
elements involved in recovering a particular text and explores why a text might have been suppressed in
the past. The recovery of such texts enables the study of early female writers, and the critical study and
popular appeal of these authors continues to grow.

Women in the 19th Century | Introduction

European and American women in the nineteenth century lived in an age characterized by gender
inequality. At the beginning of the century, women enjoyed few of the legal, social, or political rights
that are now taken for granted in western countries: they could not vote, could not sue or be sued, could
not testify in court, had extremely limited control over personal property after marriage, were rarely
granted legal custody of their children in cases of divorce, and were barred from institutions of higher
education. Women were expected to remain subservient to their fathers and husbands. Their
occupational choices were also extremely limited. Middle- and upper-class women generally remained
home, caring for their children and running the household. Lower-class women often did work outside
the home, but usually as poorly-paid domestic servants or laborers in factories and mills.

The onset of industrialization, urbanization, as well as the growth of the market economy, the middle
class, and life expectancies transformed European and American societies and family life. For most of
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the eighteenth century through the first few decades of the nineteenth century, families worked together,
dividing farming duties or work in small-scale family-owned businesses to support themselves. With the
rapid mercantile growth, big business, and migration to larger cities after 1830, however, the family
home as the center of economic production was gradually replaced with workers who earned their living
outside the home. In most instances, men were the primary "breadwinners" and women were expected to
stay at home to raise children, to clean, to cook, and to provide a haven for returning husbands. Most
scholars agree that the Victorian Age was a time of escalating gender polarization as women were
expected to adhere to a rigidly defined sphere of domestic and moral duties, restrictions that women
increasingly resisted in the last two-thirds of the century.

Scholarly analysis of nineteenth-century women has included examination of gender roles and resistance
on either side of the Atlantic, most often focusing on differences and similarities between the lives of
women in the United States, England, and France. While the majority of these studies have concentrated
on how white, middle-class women reacted to their assigned domestic or private sphere in the nineteenth
century, there has also been interest in the dynamics of gender roles and societal expectations in
minority and lower-class communities. Although these studies can be complementary, they also
highlight the difficulty of making generalizations about the lives of women from different cultural,
racial, economic, and religious backgrounds in a century of steady change.

Where generalizations can be made, however, "the woman question," as it was called in debates of the
time, has been seen as a tendency to define the role of women in terms of private domesticity. Most
often, depictions of the lives of nineteenth-century women, whether European or American, rich or poor,
are portrayed in negative terms, concentrating on their limited sphere of influence compared to that of
men from similar backgrounds. In some cases, however, the private sphere of nineteenth-century women
had arguably more positive images, defining woman as the more morally refined of the two sexes and
therefore the guardian of morality and social cohesion. Women were able to use this more positive
image as a means for demanding access to public arenas long denied them, by publicly emphasizing and
asserting the need for and benefits of a more "civilized" and "genteel" influence in politics, art, and
education.

The same societal transformations that were largely responsible for women's status being defined in
terms of domesticity and morality also worked to provoke gender consciousness and reform as the roles
assigned women became increasingly at odds with social reality. Women on both sides of the Atlantic,
including Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Sarah Josepha Hale, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and Frances Power Cobbe, both expressed and influenced the age's expectations for women.
Through their novels, letters, essays, articles, pamphlets, and speeches these and other nineteenth-
century women portrayed the often conflicting expectations imposed on them by society. These women,
along with others, expressed sentiments of countless women who were unable to speak, and brought
attention and support to their concerns. Modern critical analyses often focus on the methods used by
women to advance their cause while still maintaining their delicate balance of propriety and feminine
appeal by not "threatening" men, or the family unit.

Women's Literature in the 19th Century | Introduction

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Modern critical analysis of nineteenth-century women's literature seeks, in part, to understand the
underlying reasons that women authors, especially in America, Britain, and France, were able to gain
such widespread exposure and prominence in an age known for its patriarchal and often dismissive
attitude toward the intellectual abilities of women. In addition, scholars have examined the broad
thematic concerns that characterize much of the literary output of nineteenth-century women writers,
many arguing that it was in the nineteenth century that gender-consciousness and feminist attitudes first
came to the forefront of the literary imagination, changing forever how the works of female authors
would be written and regarded.

The number of published women authors was greater in the nineteenth century than in any preceding
century. Women's access to higher education increased exponentially during the century, providing them
with skills that they could use to develop their art. The growth of market economies, cities, and life
expectancies changed how women in Europe and the United States were expected to conform to new
societal pressures, and made many women more conscious of their imposed social, legal, and political
inequality. Finally, the many social reform movements led by nineteenth-century women, such as
religious revivalism, abolitionism, temperance, and suffrage, gave women writers a context, an
audience, and a forum in which they could express their views. While most scholars agree that many
women writers expressly or tacitly accepted the separate sphere of domesticity that the age assumed of
them, they also argue that as the century progressed, an increasing number of women began to express,
in their writing, their dissatisfaction with gender relations and the plight of women in general.
Throughout the Victorian era, the "woman question" regarding woman's true place in art and society was
a subject that was hotly debated, spurred in large part by the rapid rise in literature by and for women.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, women writers were largely confined to the genres of
children's literature and poetry. The emotionalism of poetry, particularly poetry in which depth of feeling
and sentiment, morality, and intuition were expressed and celebrated, was considered a "feminine
genre," suitable for women writers. As nineteenth-century women increasingly began to write fiction,
however, critical reviews of the age often derided the inferior talents of women novelists, faulting what
they perceived as women's lack of worldly experience, critical judgment, and rationality—traits thought
to characterize men—and dismissing their works as little better than pulp designed to appeal to the
unrefined tastes of an ever-expanding female readership. Many of the century's greatest novelists,
including Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and George Sand, never completely escaped the
condescension of critics whose negative assessments of their works were often based on the author's
gender. Scholars argue that the legacy of this sexism has been a historic dismissal of the work of many
of the age's most popular, gifted, and influential women writers, consistently judged as unworthy of
academic study.

Some modern critics have continued to disregard the contributions of nineteenth-century women
authors, while others have noted that by the end of the century, women novelists were more prevalent,
and often more popular, than male novelists. Others have focused on representations of women in
literature written both by men and women to illuminate the full spectrum of expectations of and
perspectives on women and their perceived roles in society. Commentators have also compared the
thematic concerns of women writers in England, France, and the United States, recognizing in these
three cultures intersecting movements toward creative and feminist literary expression. In recent
decades, critics have examined the contributions of African American and Native American women
authors, as well as the influence of the nineteenth-century periodical press, analyzing the increasing
radicalism of journals and essays edited and written by feminist pioneers such as Frances Power Cobbe
and Sarah Josepha Hale.
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Toward the end of the century, nineteenth-century women writers expanded their subject matter, moving
beyond highlighting the lives and hardships suffered by women locked in domestic prisons. Instead, they
increasingly expressed their individualism and demanded more equal partner-ships—in marriage, public
life, law, and politics—with men.

United States Suffrage Movement in the 19th Century | Introduction

For two days in July 1848, a convention of women and a number of male supporters met in Seneca
Falls, New York, to publicly address a number of grievances related to the subjugation of women. The
culmination of this gathering was the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, modeled directly on
the language of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and it called for gender equality in relation to
marriage, property rights, legal status, contract law, child custody matters, and, most radically, voting
rights. Undeterred by the chorus of criticism they received from the press and the public at large, women
leaders from the Seneca Falls Convention, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Julia
Ward Howe, and Lucy Stone, began a lifetime crusade to win voting rights for American women. Most
of these early suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth, would not live long enough
to enjoy the right for which they fought so long. Only in 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth
Amendment, were women given federal access to the polling booth.

The most common explanation for why the Seneca Falls convention took place has to do with the
outrage that American women abolitionists felt when they were denied positions as delegates at the
World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. They were forced to sit behind a curtain during
the official proceedings, silently listening to the arguments of men. Spurred by this event, as well as
countless jeers from an audience that overwhelmingly believed it unseemly for a woman to speak in
public, nineteenth-century abolitionists vented their anger about their imposed inferiority in their
declarations of woman's rights at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. There, in the hometown of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women demanded that they be given rights traditionally enjoyed only by
property-owning, white men—especially the right to vote, which Stanton argued was the most important
obstacle in the path of true gender equality. The following year, in 1849, the National Woman's Rights
Association was formed, its membership firmly committed to winning voting rights for American
women.

For the remainder of the century, women's suffrage gradually gained support from an ever-skeptical
public that often argued that American social and national stability would be undermined if women were
allowed to vote. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, momentum for women's suffrage
increased as questions related to whether former slaves should be allowed to vote consumed the nation's
attention. While nearly all suffragists had supported the extension of citizenship, civil rights, and
liberties to freed blacks in the Fourteenth Amendment, their leadership split over whether to support the
Fifteenth Amendment as it was proposed—guaranteeing citizens the right to vote, regardless of their
race—or to campaign for the inclusion of gender in the equal protection clause. In 1869 suffragists
divided into two organizations over this debate: the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by
Howe and Stone, which supported ratification, and the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by
Anthony and Stanton, which argued that although black men should be allowed to vote, any
constitutional amendment which excluded women could not in good conscience be supported. After
passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the rival suffrage organizations continued their work. In 1869 the
National Woman Suffrage Association held its first convention in what would become an annual event
for the next fifty years to build grassroots support for a federal amendment to the constitution, granting
women voting rights. The American Woman Association increasingly turned its attention to state
congresses in hopes of winning female enfranchisement state by state. Their first victory came quickly
 11
in 1869 when the Territory of Wyoming became the first place where women were allowed to vote; in
1870 Utah followed suit. Other western states and territories would continue this trend over the next two
decades, probably due to social conditions in frontier regions where women often assumed roles that
were not available to them in eastern states.

After 1870, women suffragists also became increasingly militant in their tactics to win voting rights.
Victoria Woodhull ran for president in 1872 despite the fact that she and the women she hoped to
represent could not vote. Also in 1872, Anthony tested voting rights in New York by placing her ballot in
a local election. She was promptly arrested for illegal voting, and the following year she was
pronounced guilty in a trial in which she was not allowed to testify in her own defense because she was
a woman. Anthony's eloquent and forceful denunciation of that verdict after the judge asked her if she
had anything to say about her sentence and fine became a lightning rod for fellow suffragists. Over the
next decades, numerous women intentionally challenged the law against voting, using their acts of civil
disobedience and the guilty verdicts they invariably received to showcase the injustice of unequal voting
rights. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, suffragists continued to work for voting rights. In
1890 the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association merged
to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. As many scholars have noted, their tactics
in the last decade of the century were often aimed at gaining popular support for their movement by
making the cause seem less radical than it was commonly perceived. This was done in a variety of ways,
some women stressing that woman's supposed moral superiority would prove itself a boon for social
reform and regeneration through the ballot box. Others argued that women needed the vote to gain
power in relationships too often dominated by drunken, abusive husbands.

Scholars continue to study the language, strategies, and influence of the nineteenth-century woman
suffrage movement, examining in particular the outspoken articulations of women's increasing demand
to be given rights traditionally denied them. These studies have also begun in the past three decades to
focus on lesser-known voices for gender equality and woman suffrage, especially from black women
who suffered the prejudices of both gender and race, even from white women who often excluded black
women from their delegations and conventions either as a result of their own or the perceived prejudices
of their audiences.

Women in the Early to Mid-20th Century (1900-1960) | Introduction

The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed changes in almost every aspect of the day-today lives of
women, from the domestic sphere to the public. The women's movement, with its emphasis on advocacy
of equal rights, newly formed women's organizations, and the rise of a new generation of female artists,
photographers, and professionals, transformed the traditional patriarchal social structure across the
globe. Followed closely by the advent of World War I, these social shifts, which had been set in motion
at the beginning of the century, developed further as women were propelled into the workforce,
exposing them to previously male-dominated professional and political situations. By the midpoint of
the twentieth century, women's activities and concerns had been recognized as a significant element of
the literary, scientific, and cultural landscape of several countries, marking a revolutionary change in the
social and domestic roles of women.

The end of the nineteenth century saw tremendous growth in the suffrage movement in England and the
United States, with women struggling to attain political equality. The suffragists—who were often
militant in their expressions of protest—presented a sometimes stark contrast to the feminine ideal of the
era, which portrayed women as delicate, demure, and silent, confined to a domestic world that cocooned
them from the harsh realities of the world. Despite many challenges English and American women
 12
eventually won the right to vote, in part due to the changed perception of women's abilities following
World War I. As men were called to war, companies that had previously limited employment in better-
paying jobs to white males found themselves opening their doors to white women and women and men
of color. Racial and gender tensions escalated during this time, and many jobs were in fact permanently
redefined as "women's work," including teaching, nursing, secretarial work, and telephone operations.
As well as functioning in the workforce, women actively participated in the political and cultural life of
England and the United States. The early decades of the twentieth century, often referred to as the
Progressive Era, saw the emergence of a new image of women in society which had undergone a marked
transformation from the demure, frail, female stereotype of the late Victorian Era. The women of the
Progressive Era, according to Sarah Jane Deutsch, were portrayed as "women with short hair and short
skirts … kicking up their legs and kicking off a century of social restrictions." Progressive women
smoked, danced in public, held jobs, and generally did most things that nineteenth-century women were
barred from doing. However, Deutsch asserts that this image of the 1920s "flapper" was restricted to
certain portions of the population, namely white, young, and middle-class communities. Women
elsewhere, particularly women from other ethnic backgrounds, such as African-Americans, Asian-
Americans, and Hispanics, lived much differently, struggling in their new roles as mothers and
professionals. The number of women who worked outside the home in the 1920s rose almost 50 percent
throughout the decade. While women still constituted a small number of the professional population,
they were slowly increasing their participation in more significant occupations, including law, social
work, engineering, and medicine.

The presence of a large class of young working women after World War I was reflected in what had
become a major cultural force—the film industry. Nevertheless, films of the era continued to reinforce
outdated stereotypes about women's place in society. While early cinematic storylines often featured
poor women finding success and contentment through marriage to rich men, the films of the 1920s
depicted young, feisty working women who, like their predecessors, could attain true happiness only by
marrying their bosses. Such plotlines helped many to cope with the growing fear that the domestic and
family structure of society was being eroded by the emergence of the new, independent woman. Rarely
did depictions of women in mass media, including film, radio, and theater, convey the true
circumstances of working women. Instead, audiences were presented with images of flappers or visions
of glorified motherhood and marriage.

Women in the early twentieth century were perhaps most active and influential as writers and artists. The
advent of the new century did witness a change in the style and content of women's writing, as well as
an increase in the depiction of feminine images and themes in literature. Male authors such as D. H.
Lawrence and W. D. Howells explored issues pertaining to sexuality and the newly redefined sexual
politics between men and women. Women authors such as Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and
Katherine Mansfield focused on topics pertinent to women, bringing attention to the myriad difficulties
they faced redefining their identities in a changing world. Other major women writers of the period
included Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton. In the arena of
art, the early twentieth century provided growing opportunities for women to exhibit their work. In
1914, for example, the National Academy of Design first allowed women to attend anatomy lectures,
thus providing them with a chance to study draftsmanship and develop drawing skills in a formal setting.
Such artists as Emerson Baum and photographers like Alfred Steiglitz helped promote exhibitions of
women's art, including the works of Imogen Cunningham and Georgia O'Keefe. Many female artists—
among them Dorothea Lange and Claire Leighton—used their talents to highlight the social realities of
their times, and some of the most powerful images of this period, including stirring portrayals of coal
miners and farmers, were produced by these women.
 13
By the mid-twentieth century, women throughout the Western world had completely redefined their roles
in almost every social, political, and cultural sphere. While the fight for equal rights and recognition for
women would continue into the 1950s and beyond, the first major steps towards such changes began at
the advent of the twentieth century, with women writers, photographers, artists, activists, and workers
blazing a new trail for generations of women to follow.

Suffrage in the 20th Century | Introduction

Before suffragists began arguing for legislation that would guarantee women the right to vote,
governments assumed that women's interests should be and were represented by their husbands, fathers,
or brothers. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the movement for women's right to vote
gathered momentum. Led by such charismatic figures as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Christabel, Emmeline, and Sylvia Pankhurst, many women organized into groups, the largest of which
were the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the Women's Social and Political
Union (WSPU), and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Such groups participated in
public demonstrations, parades, marches, and meetings, and circulated literature designed to call
attention to their cause and demand equal treatment under the law. Despite strong opposition from those
opposed to suffrage and the suffragists's own wide-ranging differences in interests, beliefs, methodology,
and ideology, women around the world were successful in increasing awareness of and support for equal
treatment of women under the law, as well as for labor reform and other social issues.

Because of the efforts of members of the WCTU, women of European descent in Australia gained
suffrage in 1902. Susan B. Anthony established the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Berlin,
Germany, in 1904, and Finnish women gained suffrage and the right to hold public office in 1906.
Between 1900 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, British suffrage groups such as the WSPU, led
by Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, engaged in militant tactics to enact social and legislative
change. They interrupted political meetings, held public demonstrations, and subjected themselves to
hunger strikes, arrest, and imprisonment. The British movement was divided mainly along class lines,
with some suffragists calling for support of working-class issues and others focusing on the issue of
suffrage alone, but there were also disagreements over politics (particularly socialism), and peaceful,
lawful protests versus militant, sometimes violent protests. These divisions deepened as Great Britain
entered World War I. Members of the WSPU and other groups left to form other special-interest groups,
such as the Women's Peace Army, founded by Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard, while the WSPU
focused its efforts primarily on supporting the war, rather than on women's suffrage. Women in the
United Kingdom were granted suffrage in 1918.

The American suffrage movement was also somewhat fragmented: women of color, women trade
workers, and women advocating temperance pushed for more activism in support of racial equality,
temperance, and labor reforms in addition to pursuing suffrage, and suffragists disagreed over both
ideology and overall strategy. The right to suffrage was divided along geographic lines as well, as
women in the western United States gained suffrage much earlier than women in other parts of the
country. In 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who had been active in militant protests with British
suffragists and who disagreed with NAWSA leadership over the most effective course of action, formed
the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage, a branch of NAWSA that became an independent
organization the following year. Paul and Burns led many protests, including one in front of the White
House, and a well-publicized hunger strike that brought widespread public attention to the suffragists's
cause. They formed the National Women's Party in 1916, the same year that NAWSA President Carrie
Chapman Catt delivered a speech entitled "The Crisis," in which she revealed what she called her
"winning plan" to focus the group's efforts on a national campaign (versus separate, state-wide
 14
campaigns) for a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. In 1918 President
Wilson delivered a speech pleading for the passage of women's vote legislation as an emergency
measure, arguing that the full support of women's groups was an essential component of the anti-war
effort. Victory came in 1920 with the ratification of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution
guaranteeing women the right to vote nationwide in all elections. After the amendment was signed into
law, the NAWSA was reorganized and named the League of Women Voters.

The suffrage movement generated critical commentary beginning in the late nineteenth century, and
continues to receive widespread scholarly attention. One recent trend has centered on exploring the
global dimensions of the suffrage movement, especially the formal and informal international coalitions
formed by suffragists. Scholars analyze the suffrage movement in the context of Progressive Era politics
in general, identifying how it influenced and was, in turn, influenced by other events of that time period.
Modern scholarship also focuses on the role of women of color and working-class women in the
movement, and biographical research has led to revisionist biographies of some of the key figures of the
suffrage movement. Historians continue to explore the effect of the movement on later labor and social
legislation. Literary scholars examine both written responses to suffrage issues, the representation of
women's issues in literature, and suffragist authors's use of imagery and symbolism as a means of
influencing public sentiment in favor of their cause.

Women's Literature from 1900 to 1960 | Introduction

The early decades of the twentieth century were filled with dramatic turmoil and change within United
States and abroad, all of which impacted the nascent feminist movement. Two world wars, rapid
industrialization, urbanization, and a depression placed enormous stress on traditional social structures
and domestic relationships, from the workplace to the family. In fact, more women entered the
professional workforce during the first two decades of the century than at any other time in history.
Though American women were granted suffrage in 1920, these were difficult times for the feminist
movement. The issue of suffrage had united many women around a common cause, but once women
gained the right to vote, the movement suffered from conflict and lack of formal organization. The
militant nature of many suffragists also caused the movement to lose momentum in mainstream society,
and for many years feminists were viewed as an extremist minority.

Despite the success of the suffrage movement and the great influx of women into the workplace before
and during World War II, a resurgence of traditional attitudes concerning the home and family would
come to define the postwar period. As many feminists argue, the wars served to both empower and
suppress women, whose newfound freedom and independence during the world wars was almost
immediately ceded to a newly reestablished sense of patriarchy. Women who had supported the war
effort through their labor returned home and were once again relegated to domestic duties and secondary
status. Such restricted gender roles, exemplified by the conformity and traditionalism of the 1950s,
continued to limit the opportunities and experiences of women until the rebirth of the feminist
movement during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Amid such conflicts and evolving gender roles, the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a
flourishing in the literary arts and the development of new media such as radio, film, and, by the late
1940s, television. American drama in particular reached a high point in the 1920s, with dramatists
Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Maxwell Anderson writing many of their best works during this
decade. Meanwhile, poets such as Amy Lowell, H. D., and Sara Teasdale elaborated upon the prewar
modernism pioneered by T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound. By the late 1950s,
however, celebrated poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton would lead a turn away from formal
 15
detachment toward a more emotion-laden subjectivity in confessionalism. During the first half of the
twentieth century many male and female authors also turned to the novel to sketch and satirize the
materialism and anomie of the modern condition. Important novelists of the period include Theodore
Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, along with well-known female novelists Edith
Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter, and Gertrude Stein, whose experimentalism defied classification.

A growing number of women writers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds also emerged during
this time. Drawing upon their varied experiences as Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, many of
these female writers addressed issues of gender and ethnic identity from new and compelling
perspectives. Together, such women provided insight into the lives of women in general and the often
denigrated minority populations of which they were a part. In particular, African-American writers came
to prominence as part of the literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which
reached its peak during the 1920s and 1930s. This movement provided opportunities for many African-
American women writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, to
address issues of race and gender in their works. Such writers also gained appreciation for their
declaration of cultural independence and their contribution to the development of an indigenous
American language and literature.

While women writers and artists participated in the thriving arts and literary movements during these
years, many of them struggled deeply as creators. The world wars had a profound effect on the
generation of writers that witnessed them, particularly women who bore the brunt of the social and
cultural changes that resulted from these conflicts. Caught between their own aspirations as writers and
artists, but confronted with a reality that provided little in terms of equal opportunity or rights, many
female authors felt frustrated during these years. In addition, female literary achievement was largely
downplayed in academic institutions due to the negative backlash against the suffragists and, more
broadly, because of a patronizing and dismissive view of female intellectuals among male cultural elites.

Contemporary critic Elaine Showalter has drawn attention to the conflict, repression, and even decline
suffered by many women writers during the early twentieth century. According to Showalter and other
scholars, the years following the end of World War I were difficult for female novelists and poets in
particular, who were regarded as writers of little substance. Yearning to write about serious issues facing
their times but pushed to the periphery, poets such as Teasdale, H. D., Lowell, and Edna St. Vincent
Millay were unable to find suitable literary models in past female poets. Additionally, the notion of
poetry as an art form that transcends personal and emotional experience, a view expounded by male
poets such as Eliot and Pound, led many female poets to feel that their work was being marginalized.
Faced with stiff reaction against the type of personal and lyrical poetry many of them wanted to write,
Millay and others found it increasingly difficult to continue writing. Some female writers curtailed their
creative work and turned their energies to political causes instead, using alternate means such as
journalism and reporting to express their opinions. Some writers found ways to incorporate political
activism in their fiction and established a model for women writers of the 1960s and beyond.
 16
The Feminist Movement in the 20th Century | Introduction

The feminist movement in the United States and abroad was a social and political movement that sought
to establish equality for women. The movement transformed the lives of many individual women and
exerted a profound effect upon American society throughout the twentieth century. During the first two
decades of the century, women's groups in the United States worked together to win women's suffrage,
culminating in the ratification of a constitutional amendment in 1920 that guaranteed women the right
the vote. During the later twentieth century, women's groups would again band together, this time to
formulate and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Though this proposed constitutional
amendment ultimately failed to gain approval in the late 1970s, it became a rallying point for diverse
women's groups and drew national attention to the feminist cause.

The period between 1917 and the early 1960s was marked by two world wars and a subsequent
economic boom that brought many American women into the workplace, initially to provide labor
during the war, and then to help achieve and maintain a new higher standard of living enjoyed by many
middle-class families. However, as women joined the workforce they became increasingly aware of their
unequal economic and social status. Women who were homemakers, many with college educations,
began to articulate their lack of personal fulfillment—what Betty Friedan in her enormously influential
The Feminine Mystique (1963) called "the problem that has no name."

Other events in the United States, notably the civil rights movement, contributed to the rise of the
feminist movement. During the early 1960s, the civil rights movement gathered momentum, aided by
new anti-racist legislation, and reached a major goal in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Many feminists interpreted the ban on racial discrimination, established by the Civil Rights Act, to apply
to gender discrimination as well. The student movement was also at its height in the 1960s, leading
many younger citizens to question traditional social values and to protest against American military
involvement in Vietnam. Feminist groups followed the example set by these movements, adopting the
techniques of consciousness raising, protests, demonstrations, and political lobbying in order to further
their own agenda.

The founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 marked the formation of an
official group to represent and campaign for women's concerns. Leaders such as Friedan, Bella Abzug,
Shirley Chisholm, and Gloria Steinem pressured politicians to become aware of women's concerns and
to work on legislation that would improve the quality of women's lives. At the same time, many other
organizations emerged to deal with feminist causes, including the National Abortion and Reproductive
Rights Action League, National Displaced Homemakers, the battered women's movement, the Women's
Equity Action League, Women Organized for Employment, and Women Office Workers. In the early
1970s feminist leaders also established a detailed program of proposed political and legal reforms, and
in 1975 the National Women's Agenda was presented to President Gerald Ford, all state governors, and
all members of Congress. In 1977, feminists organized a National Women's Conference in Houston,
where they drafted an action plan that included twenty-six resolutions; the plan was subsequently
distributed to government officials to remind them of their responsibility to female constituents. NOW
and the newly organized National Women's Political Caucus worked to influence politicians and
legislators while continuing their effort to keep women's issues prominent in the media.

During the 1980s, American society was colored by an increasingly conservative political climate and
the feminist movement experienced a backlash within their ranks and from anti-feminist detractors.
Feminism had always been criticized for being a predominantly white, upperclass movement and for its
failure to adequately understand and represent the concerns of poor, African-American, and Hispanic
women. The movement had already splintered in the 1970s along the lines of liberal feminists, who
 17
focused on the rights of women as individuals; radical feminists, who aligned themselves with
revolutionary groups, viewing women as a disenfranchised class of citizens; and lesbians, who had been
very much a part of the early feminist movement, but now found more in common with the gay
liberation movement. Legislative gains achieved in the 1970s—notably Congress's passing of the ERA
amendment and key judicial decisions, chief among them Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed women's
reproductive rights—were under attack by conservative and religious antiabortion coalitions and an
organized anti-ERA effort led by Phyllis Schlafly. Some state legislatures backtracked under pressure,
overturning or diluting court decisions made in the previous decade. President Ronald Reagan also made
his opposition to the ERA public. Due to a combination of political and social factors, the amendment
failed to pass in the individual states. In addition, some women who had subscribed to the tenets of the
feminist movement now voiced their displeasure at being negatively labeled anti-male and expressed
regret at the loss of personal security that traditional women's roles offer. Their concerns echoed in the
neoconservative writings of authors such as Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, and Camille Paglia.

Nevertheless, feminists pressed on, maintaining pressure on legislators to address women's issues such
as reproductive rights, pay equity, affirmative action, sexual harassment, and the handling of rape
victims in the courts. In retrospect, the early 1960s has been termed the "first wave" of the feminist
movement, and the activists of the 1970s and 1980s have been called the "second wave." In the 1990s
there emerged a "third wave" of feminists, still concerned with many of the same problems as their
predecessors, but now wishing to work from within the political and legal establishments rather than
criticizing them from the outside. This mostly younger generation of feminists would also stress the
need to broaden the scope of feminism, emphasizing global networking, human rights, worldwide
economic justice, and issues pertaining to race, gender, and class.

Women's Literature from 1960 to the Present | Introduction

In several lectures she gave during the 1930s and later, writer Virginia Woolf reflected upon the
challenge she and her fellow female artists faced at the beginning of the century—Woolf noted that
although women had been writing for centuries, the subjects they had written about and even the style in
which they wrote was often dictated not by their own creative vision, but by standards imposed upon
women by society in general. Advances in women's issues, such as the right to vote, the fight for
reproductive rights, and the opportunities women gained during the first half of the century in the arena
of work outside the home were major developments. Despite these changes, women artists during these
years continued to feel restricted by imposed standards of creativity. It would take, notes Elaine
Showalter in numerous essays detailing the growth and development of women's writing in the twentieth
century, several decades before women would completely break the mold of respectability under which
they felt compelled to write. Fuelled by the feminist movement of the early twentieth century, many
women authors began to explore new modes of expression, focusing increasingly on issues that were
central to their existence as women and as artists. By the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the
1960s, with the rise of the second wave feminist movement, women artists began expanding their
repertoire of creative expression to openly include, and even celebrate their power and experiences as
women. Works such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
(1971), and others by authors like Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Marilyn French all helped to
awaken the feminine consciousness, paving the way for later writers to explore the reality of women's
experience in their writings openly and freely. Works of literature by women authors during the 1960s
and later thus began to focus increasingly on women's viewpoints, with issues such as race and gender,
sexuality, and personal freedom taking center stage. Additionally, these years also witnessed the
emergence of feminist literary theorists, many of whom set about redefining the canon, arguing for
inclusion of women writers who had been marginalized by mainstream academia in the past. The latter
 18
half of the twentieth century also provided fertile ground for growing recognition of women writers of
color. Lesbian literature has also flourished, and women have openly explored concerns about sexuality,
sexual orientation, politics, and other gender issues in their works.

Prior to the mid-1960s, women writers who ventured beyond the established feminine stereotypes were
regularly characterized as "outcasts," denounced as vulgar or, in the case of Simone de Beauvoir, even
"frigid." Nonetheless, many of them persisted in exploring new ways of expression, and poets such as
Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and others continued to write works articulating the struggle they faced as
authors who could choose to "write badly and be patronized or to write well and be attacked," according
to Show-alter. Another aspect of this struggle to gain respect as independent artists was the fight
between women who felt compelled to "transcend" their femininity, opting to write as androgynous
artists—Woolf chief among them—and others, including Erica Jong, who felt strongly that unless
women could find the means to express themselves openly and clearly, they might as well not write at
all. Eventually, many women writers in the 1960s and later broke through the stereotypical and
restrictive paradigm of female authorship, creating and publishing works that abounded in an open
celebration and exploration of issues that were central to women's existence, including sexuality. By the
1990s, critical and academic opinion had shifted, and works such as Eve Ensler's The Vagina
Monologues, which deals directly with women's physical and emotional experiences, were hailed as
both innovative and literary.

A similar, yet different path to progress marks the writing of women authors of color, who eventually
gained critical recognition for their efforts as chroniclers of their cultures, races, and gender. Although
there were numerous black female authors writing during the early part of the century, especially during
the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, black feminist authors's exploration of both race and gender
issues in their writing kept them outside the American feminist discourse that was dominated by either
black male activists or white feminists. Scholars have also pointed to the fact that while works such as
Friedan's The Feminine Mystique did much to draw attention to the emerging feminine consciousness,
they did not address the needs and issues significant to women of color. Further, the narrative strategies
used by such pioneering black authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, whose works focused primarily on
the private and domestic domain, were, until the 1970s and 1980s, dismissed by both white feminists
and black male intellectuals because of the perception that their focus was too limited and narrow. Later
critical opinion, however, has reevaluated the writing style and strategies used by many female authors
of color to recognize that the personal narrative is a powerful and uniquely expressive mode of
extrapolating and commenting upon the state of the world inhabited by these writers. Asian writers have
used these strategies particularly well to counter stereotyped images of their own culture and gender. In
several anthologies published in the late-twentieth century, including Aiiieeeee!! Asian writers, both
male and female have attempted to create new images of Asian American literature. Asian women
writers have been faulted for creating what are perceived as unrealistic portrayals of Asian American
culture, especially images of the Asian woman as powerful and dominant, often seen in the works of
such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Mitsuye Yamada has addressed this conflict in her
writing, arguing for a cohesive creative vision and the space to express it.

Modern women's writing continues to explore new genres and means of expression, and women writers
today participate fully in both the creative and scholarly process. Women's studies, feminist literary
theory, and women's mode of writing and expressing are now established areas of academic
environments, and women are exacting continued and growing control over their own literary and social
spheres.
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CHAND
RA SEKHAR PATRO