Origins of Modern Feminism and Literature
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The truism that modern feminism is rooted in Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women requires some qualification. It was contemporary with the sea change wrought by the American and French Revolutions and arguably an exercise in the discourse of social revolution on that account, but if it is modern feminism's first manifesto it is also rather different from modern feminism in sensibility and emphasis. For it was also contemporary with nascent Romanticism, which was as much metaphysical and aesthetic, or as it were engaged by "new possibilities in poetic expression" (Weigel, 1986, p. 67) as practical in outlook. The quest for woman's suffrage that, in the United States, began with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, stated that "the same basic and inalienable rights . . . won by the French and American Revolutions should also be applied to women" (Martin, 1972, p. 42). Its orientation was practical, resulting in woman's suffrage in 1920--the culmination of what is often called feminism's "first wave" (e.g., Hoffman, 1981).Subsequent "waves" of feminism have been problematized in contemporary discourse. However, certain key signposts can be identified. Virginia Woolf's 1929 lecture/screed A Room of One's Own is undoubtedly influential in its focus on the social differentials that accrue to men and women and its explanation for the absence of a significantly canonical female literary tradition. It belongs t
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rio of male oppressors and frail female victims." Sommers (1994) makes a similar case against what she calls second-wave feminism as the kind that in the 1960s transformed the first wave of justice-centered, Enlightenment feminism into gynocentric, victim-obsessed misandrism. Hence the "corrective" of third-wave feminism as Sommers formulates it--a proxy for power or materialist feminism.
The cleavage of feminist perspective seems elusive of resolution, complicated as it has become by what seem to be "extrafeminist" sociopolitical ideologies that are more or less socially liberal or conservative in the traditional sense. Even so, it is difficult not to conclude that feminist critique has passed from diffident politesse to assertiveness between 1792 and the 21st century. Where it will lead remains to be seen.
References
Cannon, K. G. (1988). Black Womanist Ethics. American Academy of Religion Academy Series 60. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Diamond, A., & Edwards, L. R. (Eds.). (1977). The Authority of experience: Essays in feminist criticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Friedan, B. (1963; 1983). The feminine mystique, Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Gibbs, N., & Attinger, J. (1992
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