French Revolutions in the eighteenth century and the revolution of 1848 in Europe. As Weigel puts it, "It is obvious why there was an increase in the number of women who took to the pen at the end of the eighteenth century, at the time when new possibilities in poetic expression were brought by the aesthetic of the Romantics" (Weigel 67). To put it another way, what was to become modern social revolutionary thinking had to start somewhere, and from that period onward there have been ebbs and flows in the feminist social critique.
It is this social critique, expressed or implied but fully informed by contemporary experience, that forms the basis of any meaningful examination of feminism in contemporary American novels. Modern-day feminists have noted and documented in various ways how resilient and in many ways unchanging that critique has been since 1792--suffused as it is with the concern to equalize social and economic opportunity and status between men and women.
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf addresses the question of whether the assumptions and institutions of literary convention are adequate to explain the undeniable fact that most of the world's profound literature has been created not by women but by men. Woolf takes her subject to be virtually every ancillary issue implied by the phrase "women in fiction," and it is for this reason, together with her position in history, that her work is firmly grounded in the feminist social critique. She deals at length with the concept of women who create (or who would create) fiction, hence the portrayal of women in fiction. Fact and economic circumstance, she concludes, imply that because women are not as a group engaged in the activity of fiction creation, the satisfactory portrayal of them by men can naught but be found wanting. This is what Woolf alludes to when, early in the essay, she notes with what may be perceived as irony, "That a famous library has been cursed by a ...