FEMINISM

Feminism is the social, political and economic movement of women for the equality with the
men. Feminist movement has supported and fought for the women’s rights including right to
vote, right to education, right to own parental property and equal wages for equal work.
Feminist theory, which emerged from feminist movements, aims to understand the nature of
gender inequality by examining women's roles in all fields. It has developed theories in a
variety of disciplines (branch of academic study) in order to respond to issues concerning
gender. Accordingly, there are four fields, namely liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical
feminism and Marxist feminism.

Liberal feminism emphasizes on making the legal and political rights of women equal
to men. Liberal feminists argue that society holds the false belief that women, by nature, are
less intellectual and physically less capable than men which further lead to the discrimination
of women in the academy and politics.

Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both
the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression. Socialist feminists assert that
women are unable to be free due to their financial dependence on males. They see economic
dependence as the driving force of women's subjugation to men.

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of
society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts. Radical
feminists view society as fundamentally a patriarchy in which men dominate and
oppress women. Radical feminists seek to abolish the patriarchy in order to "liberate everyone
from an unjust society by challenging existing social norms and institutions."

Marxist feminism is feminism focused on investigating and explaining the ways in

which women are oppressed through systems of capitalism and private property. According to
Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved through a radical restructuring of
the current capitalist economy, in which much of women's labor is not paid.
 The two main focusses of feminism are- first, gender difference is the foundation for
structural inequality between men and women by which women suffer sympathetic social
injustice and second, the inequality between sexes is not the result of biological necessity, but
is produced by cultural construction of gender differences. Feminist literary criticism aims to
study the ways in which literature portrays women. it focusses on the following points

 It is an attempt to describe and interpret women’s experience as depicted in various kinds

of literature.
 It questions the long-standing, dominant male ideologies, patriarchal attitudes and male
interpretations in literature and critical evaluation of literature).
 It attacks male notions of value in literature, by offering critiques of male authors and
representations of men in literature and also by privileging women writers.
 It challenges traditional and accepted male ideas about nature of women about how
women feel act and think or are supposed to feel, act and think and how in general they
respond to life and living.

Feminism came in two waves, first wave came in 18 th century and continued till mid-20th
century and second wave came as the direct product of the women’s movement of 1960s.
First wave consists of the tradition of thought and action possessed in the classic books
which had diagnosed the problem of women’s inequality in society and also refers to their
proposed solutions. The books which played the key role in the study of feminism are Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), which discusses male
writers like Milton, Pope and attacks Rousseau’s Emile which deals with the education and
training of mind of young men; Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour (1911), Virginia
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which vividly portrays the unequal treatment given
to women seeking education and alternatives to marriage and motherhood; and Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (written in French in1949, translated into English in 1953),
which has an important section on the portrayal of women in the novels of D. H. Lawrence.
The male contributions to this tradition of feminist writing include John Stuart Mill’s The
Subjection of Women (1869) and The Origin of the Family (1884) by Friedrich Engels.
 Virginia Woolf held that the growth and fulfilment in a woman’s life can come only
when she gains financial self-reliance in her life. She also emphasizes on proper education
for women. In A Room of One’s Own she refers to the personal space which a woman
should get. The room symbolizes a place free from prying eyes of society that has
traditionally kept an eye on women. A Room of One’s Own is a set of lectures, titled
‘Women and Fiction’, that she had delivered to the student of two women’s colleges of
Cambridge. She in her work talks about the hindrances a woman writer faces. The
hindrances according to her was the result of the wounded ego of male writers who felt
threatened by a woman of intelligence. Virginia Woolf refers to Trevelyan’s History of
England to show how women have been treated inhumanly by men in England. She has
praised women writers especially Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Margaret, Jane Austen, Bronte
Sisters and George Eliot.

Simone de Beauvoir, French feminist critic, who was influenced by Sartre’s existential
theory. She believes that inferiority of women and their roles have been created by a
patriarchal society. She writes:

… humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him;
she is not regarded as an autonomous being… is simply what man decrees: thus
she is called ‘sex’ by which is meant that she appeals essentially to the male as a
sexual being…. He is the Absolute- she is the Other.

Simone de Beauvoir writes, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” i.e. man has
given her the secondary position in the society and family. By this she also means that
becoming a woman, growing with physical or biological development has traditionally
excluded women from participating in culture and production of values. Woman feels that
their body has become a source of embarrassment. In chapter 4 of the second part of her
book, Beauvoir finds the root of women’s situation in Middle Age to 18 th century and
Christian theology. In Part VII, entitled “Towards Liberation” she talks of the independent
women by asserting their rebellious side so that they can prevent the sinking of inner life
and so that they can prevent the sinking of their inner life into nothingness.
 The second wave is marked by the important books such as Mary Ellman’s Thinking
About Women (1968), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969), Elaine Showalter’s A
Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977) and
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
The Nineteenth Century Imagination (1979). The second wave which came with the
‘women’s movement’ of 1960s realized the significance of the images of women
popularised by literature, and saw it as important way to deal with the problem of inequality
and help in questioning their authority and thoughts. In 1970s feminist criticism exposed
the mechanism of patriarchy that is, the cultural mindset in men and women which is the
cause of sexual inequality. Critical attentions were given to the male writers in which
influential or typical images of women were presented. In 1980s feminist criticism derived
their approaches from other kinds of criticism such as Marxist, linguistics, structuralism etc.
Their focus shifted from attacking the male version of the world to exploring the nature of
the female world and their outlook and reconstructing the lost or suppressed records of
female experience. They also focused on the neglected women writers by giving them new
prominence. Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own described the shift of the
attention from the works of the male writers which she termed as androtext to the works of
female writers, which she has termed gynotext, as gynocriticism. Gynocriticism is the study
of gynotext. Gynocritics focused on the subjectivity in thinking, valuing, feeling and
perceiving oneself and the outer world is a distinctive feminine mode. It focusses on
‘woman’s language’ or distinctively the feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence
structure, types of relations between theme, characteristic figures and imagery. The subjects
of gynocriticism are, she says, “the history, styles, themes, genres and structures of writing
by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or
collective female career; and evolution or laws of a female literary traditions.” Showalter
has divided the history of women’s writing into feminine phase (1840-80), feminist phase
(1880-1920) and female phase (1920 onwards). A feminine phase is in which women
writers imitated dominant male artistic norms and aesthetic standards.; a feminist phase is
in which radical and often separatist positions are maintained and finally a female phase
looked particularly at female writing and female experience.

Kate Millett holds that ideological indoctrination (accepting a belief) and economic
inequality are the reason for women’s oppression. She borrows two terms from social
science, namely ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, sex being the biological distinction between male and
female whereas gender refers to culturally acquired sexual identity. She refers sexual
politics to the sex role in the unequal and repressive relations of domination and
subordination. She holds that male authors are compelled by their gender to reproduce the
oppressive sexual politics of the real world in their fiction.

Therefore, the whole movement of feminism and feminist criticism has been rediscovery
of a hidden tradition of women’s writing. It’s an attempt to deal with literature from female
points of view, concerns and values and redefining the images of women in the literary work
written by male as well as female writers.