UNIVERSITY OF JOS

‘Mark on the Wall’

Feminism and ecriture feminine: Trajectories, Gains, and Advances

INAUGURAL LECTURE

BY

KANCHANA UGBABE, Ph D (Australia)

Professor of Literature
Department of English
University of Jos

[28TH JANUARY, 2011]

‘Mark on the Wall’: Feminism and ecriture feminine: Trajectories, Gains, and Advances

Introduction
Vice-Chancellor Sir, and Chairman of the occasion, the Deputy Vice-Chancellors (Academic and
Administration), Principal officers, Deans and Directors, fellow Professors, Heads of Departments,
Members of the University community, students, past and present, distinguished visitors and friends of
the University, Great Josites, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with a deep sense of humility that I stand before
you today to present my inaugural lecture entitled ‘Mark on the Wall’: Feminism and ecriture
feminine: Trajectories, Gains, and Advances.

The term ‘feminism’ elicits varied responses wherever it is mentioned. It is seen by most people as
describing a bunch of aggressive and militant women who want to do away with men, marriage,
childbearing and rearing, who want to rule the world as a colony of women. Perhaps the interpretation
also is that it applies to women who are not in the traditional sense, women. This lecture attempts to
correct this misconception and trace the history of the Women’s Movement in Europe and North America,
and its implications for Africa. It is the gains and advances made by the feminist Movement that has
enabled me to stand on this stage and address this august gathering.
The term ‘ecriture feminine’ refers to women’s writing, the subject of which is often, women. It
refers to an alternate mode of perceiving the world and expressing it, other than what men have been able
to do in their writing. The ‘mark on the wall’ refers to measuring one’s height (and therefore,
achievements) by literally putting a mark on the wall.

Virginia Woolf’s statement in the 1920’s that ‘there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise
height of women’ (A Room of One’s Own 81) is an appropriate starting point in tracing the history of
Feminism and Women’s Writing in Europe and North America from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It took more than two hundred years since women
first made their appearance in pen and paper for Virginia Woolf, on the cusp of change, to point out that
while the achievements of Shakespeare and Milton had been sung of, women writers were trapped in a
narrowly defined category called ‘woman’, the parameters of whose alternative perspective had not been
acknowledged or sufficiently understood. Virginia Woolf’s statement also implies that the existing myths
and maps of women’s ‘meagre’ achievements at the time could not be trusted.

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A Private World
The society of the 17th century was not ready for women’s stories. Women did not form part of the
reading public either as education was largely restricted to upper class males at the time. Education was
regarded as being less important for women. Realism itself was denounced as deception. The women who
wrote indulged themselves in fantasies or resorted to recording their thoughts and ideas privately, in the
form of journals and diaries which had the appearance of writing for oneself. Through this, women were
able to chart the inner and outer events of their lives, find meaning, and tap into their creative resources.
Modesty and temperance were desirable attributes in a woman (Antonia Fraser 45). The idea of a woman
laying bare her thoughts in the form of a creative work (a commodity) was tantamount to prostitution
(indecent exposure) and was met with distaste and contempt. In spite of this Lady Mary Wroath who
wrote Urania (1621), Ann Weamys who wrote a sequel to Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Astell
(1668-1731), and Katharine Philips (1631-1664) who wrote fantasies under the pastoral pen name Orinda,
are worthy of mention. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a prolific dramatist who wrote plays which were
well known at the time. Rules of decorum constrained women in their expression and limited them in the
ways they could communicate their thoughts. The setbacks were many and women had to tread softly and
cautiously in the literary arena. They were expected to be domestic, available when their company was
required, decorative, and amusing. However, writing out of economic necessity brought several women to
the fore in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The writing of autobiographies and biographies (life
stories) was a natural outcome of the diary and the journal – it was a convenient transition point between
fact and fiction. And, as Dale Spender points out in Women In Isolation, it also gave women a definition:
Pen and paper for women have transformed what otherwise might have been a
sentence of solitary confinement; and writing doesn’t have to be published for
it to provide a powerful forum for its author. The history of women’s struggle for identity and
sanity – is often to be found in the pages of isolated women’s journals. (7)

Writing – A Commodity
Many changes occurred between the end of the seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth
century. The 1740’s mark the origins of the English novel as an art form. Realism becomes a reputable
means of approaching the subject matter of the novel. This is the period during which art, far from being
commissioned by the nobility, produced by the artist and received by the elite, becomes a commodity.
This is the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it today. Growth of education (for both men
and women), and the introduction of printing and publishing resulted in an expanded reading public, of
which women, curiously formed the bulk. Housewifely occupations such as the making of soap and

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candles were at the time being taken over by the marketplace. The industrial revolution had begun. The
rise of the novel has a direct relationship with the increase in women’s leisure and women’s taste for
fiction-reading. The novels written by the early male novelists featured female protagonists. Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela was a popular novel at the time. Bearing the subtitle ‘Virtue Rewarded’, the story is
told in the form of letters, from the perspective of a young servant girl who resists her master’s sexual
advances until such a time when he proposes to her and she accepts his offer of marriage. Pamela then
becomes the mistress of the estate where she had served for many years. The case for women’s chastity,
patience, and virtue is strongly made. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana are not flag bearers for
virtue but are presented as resourceful women whose life stories play on the sympathy of the reader,
particularly the woman reader of the time. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792) appeared at a time when women’s voices as fictional subjects were just beginning to be heard. The
stage is set for the woman writer who has been honing her skills on the diary, the journal, and
autobiographical life stories.

Drawing Room Fiction

Jane Austen whose novels have been compared to ivory miniatures marks the triumphant entry of
the woman novelist in the literary marketplace. The opening lines of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth
universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”, defines
the preoccupation of small town life – courtship and marriage. The statement could also be reversed to fit
the bill that ‘a woman in need of a good fortune must be in want of a husband!’ Jane Austen’s women are
capricious, charming, self-centred, and witty – characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Emma, and Fanny Price
cover a spectrum of female temperaments and attitudes. Rather than attempt to take on the world, to prove
the socio-cultural effects of the Napoleonic wars, Austen examines closely the manners and motives of
her men and women in the intimacy of the drawing room. It is a private world that is woman-centred and
marriage-centred. With ironical perspective, she traces the growth of her characters, focusing attention on
their foibles and idiosyncrasies. The intimacy of the setting (the drawing room) is carried over to the tone
of the novelist. In a genteel manner the reader is directly addressed and drawn into the vortex. A woman’s
novel situated in a domestic sphere, dealing with women’s issues (love, courtship, marriage) did not pose
a threat to male writers at the time. Jane Austen’s novels were widely read but the novelist herself in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no writing tradition to fall back upon except a male one; she had
no mentors or forbears to show the way.

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 Women began to write more for economic reasons towards the end of the eighteenth century. Also
the middle class woman began to write. Marriage was a means to financial security in Jane Austen’s time
(‘a pleasantest preservative from want’). Feminine accomplishment was regarded as a lure to catch men.
A woman who had failed to find a spouse had only one avenue for financial independence – as a spinster,
she would become a governess. Governesses were not well paid, some were merely provided boarding
and lodging but they had a measure of independence. Women sought ‘good marriages’, and men sought
women of ‘good breeding’ and domestic accomplishment. Virtue continued to be upheld as one of the
chief attributes of good breeding. Tact, diplomacy, a sparkling wit, and manners pleasing to men were
also considered desirable qualities in a woman.

The Pen as a Weapon

Women became the anchor of the reading public in the nineteenth century. The number of women
who entered the arena (as prose writers) also increased during the century. Poetry however continued to
be restricted to men with the exception of writers like Elizabeth Barret Browning, Christina Rosetti and
the American Emily Dickinson who boldly wrote verse. Regarded as a ‘muted minority’ thus far, women
began to speak up, to write, to articulate and express their views. The opposition to this ‘unfeminine’
activity also grew. Dale Spender analyses the private/public domain and the roles permitted to women
(Man Made Language 191-197). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw attention to the battle of the sexes
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to gain control of the ‘no man’s land’, the world of writing
(No Man’s Land). John Stuart Mill’s observation that ‘women who read, much more, women who write,
are in the existing constitution of things a contradiction and a disturbing element’ is indicative of the
resistance faced by women (Spender 192). The pen became a pistol, a weapon of mass destruction, at least
of attempted terrorism on the part of women. The victory and the defeat in this battle which lasted well
into the twentieth century gave rise to fantasies on both sides. Rider Haggard’s novel, She (1883) is one
such a fantasy where the fictitious colony in the novel is ruled by the matriarch, She-Who-Must-Be-
Obeyed and where men are kept as subjects. But every now and then the men rise up in rebellion and kill
off the women to restore order.

Strategies - The Use of Pseudonyms

The writing of fiction gave women power and authority over their own created world. It also gave
them anonymity and continued to be a popular medium in the nineteenth century world of letters. Maria
Edgeworth (1767-1849) was one of the earliest women novelists of the nineteenth century. Margaret
Oliphant (1855), Frances Trollope (1779-1863), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and Harriet Martineau (1802-

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1876) were others who wrote prose fiction. An interesting and crucial addition is the fact that women
writers adopted male pseudonyms which disguised their true identities and gave them an avenue for
publishing. When a manuscript was submitted bearing a woman’s name, the publisher invariably turned it
down. The author was judged as a ‘woman’ rather than as a writer. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans),
Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), Cotton Mather Mills (Elizabeth Gaskell) and George Egerton (Mary
Chavelita Dunne Bright) were some of the names adopted. Virginia Woolf defends the use of
pseudonyms and argues that women had a natural propensity for the modesty of a veiled look and that the
pseudonym was part of this need for anonymity (A Room of One’s Own 49). Whether women were
subdued by male attitudes or otherwise, the strategy worked and the novels by women were hugely
successful. This was the beginning of the emancipation of women through the written word. The story is
told of Charlotte Bronte who tried to get the advice of her male colleague and poet, Robert Southey on her
writing. Southey politely wrote back: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not
to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties the less leisure she will have for it, even as an
accomplishment and a recreation.’(Margot Peters 54) So challenged were the men by women’s writing
skills that even the smallest steps taken by them towards authorship were seen by males as threatening
strides.

The Virtuous Wife

In the novels written by male novelists in the nineteenth century women featured as wives,
victims, seductresses, or sexless virtuous heroines. Dickens’ women are school-marmish, ‘desexualized’,
prim and proper as in David Copperfield, or they are monstrous and cruel as in Oliver Twist. The ‘fallen
woman’ draws sympathy for herself in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Anthony Trollope’s Esther
Waters. The woman in each of these novels is a victim from beginning to end. Virtue becomes
obsessively important in the Victorian period. Women’s clothing and accessories were designed to ‘cover’
even as whorehouses thrived during the period! Marriage was the ‘natural destiny’ of a middle class
woman who in the year 1800 had no vote, no right to the custody of her children and could not own
property.

The general notion was that women were creatures of feeling and emotion, men, the seat of
Reason. Men belonged to the external world of work, women to the domestic and internal world of
emotions. As a result of the industrial revolution, working class women became part of the labour market.
They became wage earners alongside the men while the Victorian moral standards confined the middle
class woman to the home. This brought about a widening of the gulf between the working class women

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who lived in crowded urban slums and worked in factories and middle class women who became the
guardians of domestic and family happiness. The art of the wife (housewife), ‘the bourgeois ideal of
decorative domesticity’ (Patricia Stubbs 35) came to be established. Barred from working outside the
home, childbearing and rearing became the wife’s major occupations besides which she served other
decorative purposes in the home and family. Patricia Stubbs captures vividly the domestic role of the
nineteenth-century woman in Women and Fiction: “Returning home from the pressures of the real world,
economic man was supposedly soothed and elevated by the spirituality, virtue and domestic charm of his
wife”(7).

Venturing beyond the Ideal

The Victorian ideal of women as passive, chaste and asexual begins to change gradually towards
the end of the nineteenth century. There is an awakening on the part of women which moves in the
direction of acquiring self knowledge and self actualization. The dichotomy experienced by the woman
writer between her outer self and her inner being is carried into the novels. The woman who had hitherto
been defined by love, marriage, and motherhood recognizes her limitations and begins to see beyond it.
These changes, and the conflict between women’s role in the public domain and her private desires and
ambitions are amply demonstrated in literature. Society did not take kindly to a writer who transcended
the conventions of the time and offered new roles to women. Publishers and editors stepped in to censor
such material. The Obscene Publications Act (1857) also served to prosecute cases of infringement. In
spite of all these, women continued to be portrayed in literature by women as being independent. Women
too were not entirely comfortable with this image. They suffered from a sense of guilt and vulnerability.
The battle of the sexes gained momentum.

The changing perspectives are evident in the women protagonists in the novels of Emily Bronte,
Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Women become sensual and sexual beings in the novels of George
Egerton (1859-1945), Olive Shreiner (1855-1920), George Moore (1852-1933) and the later Thomas
Hardy. There was a token recognition of the works of some women writers of the period. Others like
Margaret Oliphant (1855),Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), Frances Trolloppe, Mary Shelley and Harriet
Martineau had their works buried in obscurity. The term ‘Women’s Rights’ was gaining coinage with the
publication of books like Caroline Norton’s The Natural Right of a Mother to the Custody of her Child
(1837), and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).

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The Woman Question
The years 1847 to 1884 saw an increase in feminist activity as both men and women joined the
debate. The ‘Woman Question’ became the subject that occupied the minds of literary theorists, and
professionals in other fields. The ubiquity of the problem is voiced by Theodore Roszak:
By the late nineteenth centuty…this supposedly marginal curiosity called the
‘woman problem’ had become one of the most earth-shaking debates in the Western world, fully
as explosive an issue as the class or national conflicts of the
day. Here, after all, was the world’s largest oppressed ‘minority’ threatening mutiny: something
no man could ignore. And none did… The ‘woman problem’ was argues about, shouted about,
raved about, agonized about, endlessly, endlessly. By the final decades of the century, it
permeated everything. (Gilbert & Gubar 21)

The Suffrage Movement

The Women’s Suffrage Movement started in 1847 by a group of women on both sides of the
Atlantic Ocean served to accelerate women’s demands for social and political rights as a whole. In
demanding for the right to vote, women sought an acknowledgement of their voices, their role in deciding
socio-political issues. The Movement turned out to be more militant in England than in America where
women were captured in literature, visual art, and the print media as ‘battle axes’. The ‘suffragettes’ in
England went on protest marches, undertook hunger strikes, threw bricks at the windows of public
buildings, and used other violent and confrontational methods to bring about change. This caused great
confusion among the male electorate. In America, the ‘suffragists’ were moderate and of peaceful
persuasion. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony signed petitions, formed leagues
and headed the Women’s Rights Convention to muster support for women’s voting rights. Black men’s
right to vote also came under these umbrella organizations. Martha Schofield joined the Movement in
1876 by bringing a new dimension to the struggle – refusal to pay taxes. After being arrested, she wrote
‘paid under protest’ on her tax cheques. Non-violent demonstrations by women across the United States
eventually brought about an amendment in Congress.

Women like the cartoonist Lou Rogers (1879-1952) used the art form of the cartoon to promote
suffrage and enfranchise American women. (Alice Sheppard 77-90) In Rogers’ cartoon called
‘Transferring the Mother habit to Politics: Woman Voter: Are your hands clean son?’, the woman voter is
portrayed as being larger than the diminutive male candidate seeking public office. The woman voter is
presented as a guardian of society, one who wishes to rid society of the ills of corruption. Women also

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sought the ballot to overcome patriarchal oppression and expose corruption in government. Gaining the
vote meant that women could protect themselves and their children from being marginalized. Blanche
Ames’ ‘Double the Power of the Home: Two Good Votes are better than One’ appeared in Woman’s
Journal 23 (Oct 1915). Nina Allender’s ‘Come to Mother’ appeared in The Suffragist 31 (March 1917).
The female cartoonists continued to portray the woman voter as a nurturing mother figure who served as a
protector and guardian of society.

Male cartoonists on the other hand saw the suffragettes as ‘unsexed’, unattractive, bespectacled
old maids with an axe to grind. Rodney Thomson’s cartoon in Life Magazine vol.61, no.1587, March 27,
1913 presents women suffragettes as ruthless militants: ‘As they are; As they Think they are; As they
appear to the Police and Shopkeepers’ (No Man’s Land 19). Frederick Harrison enjoined women in 1891
to preserve their femininity, that ‘to keep the family true, refined, affectionate, faithful, is a grander task
than to govern the state’ (Stubbs 7).

In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed giving American women the right to vote. In
the same year the English political landscape witnessed victory for women – the vote.

The New Woman

The turn-of the-century woman was not only on the way to gaining the vote and the freedom that
went with it, she began to explore other areas of her experience (other than the emotional) in her writings.
The New Woman (as she came to be called), with fewer constraints and greater autonomy, symbolized a
feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Divorce in middle class circles was impossible
for women before 1857 but conventions were being flouted thereafter. By 1870, the first Married
Women’s Property Act had been passed and by 1882, an Act was passed which allowed women the right
to their income. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ came to symbolize the resistance
offered by women to conventional roles assigned them by the patriarchy. This short story, along with
Kate Chopin’s works (The Awakening, ‘The Story of an Hour’, ‘The Storm’) which disappeared from
view during the lifetime of the writers in question, have been reclaimed from the ‘margins and footnotes
of history’ by feminist writers of the later part of the twentieth century. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a
simple and poignant story of a young woman’s descent to madness during the period of post-natal
depression. It is at the same time a complex exploration of a woman’s sense of guilt as an ‘incomplete’
wife and mother, her suppressed desire to ‘write’, to give voice to her innermost feelings, and the world of
the subconscious that manifests itself as insanity when she is denied the opportunity. Kate Chopin’s

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characters stand on the threshold of acquiescence and resistance, exploring psychological states that
betray forbidden desires. ‘My outer self conforms but my inner self rebels’, her characters seem to say.
Unconventional and innovative, the novels and short stories of this nature were not well received at the
time. They were seen as being vulgar and bawdy and their subjects unmentionable. The authors were
silenced as their books disappeared from public view. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an activist in the
Women’s Movement also published Women and Economics (1898), and Herland, a novel. Kate Chopin’s
writings hinted at marriage as captivity, besides giving the women characters the space to explore
candidly alternative life-situations. In an early short story, ‘Emancipation- A Life Fable’, Chopin presents
the image of the caged animal which finds contentment in its condition until the day the cage door is left
open. George Egerton, the woman writer, focused on the runaway wife in ‘Virgin Soil’( Discords, 1894),
and Olive Schreiner wrote of the brutality and cruelty of a husband in The Story of an African Farm
(1883). In the words of the feminist critic, Dale Spender: ‘Women invented fiction as an alternative to
patriarchy, and that in writing and reading women have founded an alternative community, one which
counters some of the isolation of women’s lives and allows us to participate in a culture of resistance’
(Women In Isolation 3).

Feminism
As the Woman Question and the Woman’s Cause gathered momentum towards the end of the
nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the term Feminism (first used in the 1890’s) came to typify
the Women’s Movement. The Movement which grew and developed several ideological branches in the
course of the twentieth century, drew attention to the glaring inequalities in the way society treated men
and women. The different schools of thought came together under the common assumption that Western
society inherently privileged men and subjugated women in every cultural sphere, even to the extent that
women themselves gave support to the subordination of their sex. A proliferation of debates and theories
and subversive writings contributed to consciousness-raising throughout the twentieth century. From the
conservative end of the spectrum to the radical, class, race, and gender theories defined the intersections
and contradictions in feminist interest groups. While there is no defining feminist document, the new
consciousness gave rise to numerous and competing philosophical studies in Europe and North America.

Virginia Woolf – Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf is an iconic figure in the history of feminism and women’s writing. Her statement
that ‘there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women’ serves as a defining moment in

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feminist consciousness. Novelist, essayist and activist, her works include Mrs Dalloway, Night and Day,
Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, Between the Acts, Books and Portraits,
and The Years. The narrative shape of her writing, particularly in Mrs Dalloway has come to be called the
‘stream of consciousness’ method, a method which resists linear narration and moves away from a
coherent narrative shape. In A Room of One’s Own, her feminist manifesto, she explores the nature of
women’s writing and the conditions (constraints included) under which women write. ‘A woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ declares Woolf (6). The author casts her
mind back to the eighteenth-century women who wrote out of economic necessity, and the nineteenth-
century women who wrote amidst the hustle and bustle of the living room and the parlour. ‘If Shakespeare
had a gifted sister called Judith…’ she speculates. ‘Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women
as it must have existed among the working classes’ (48). Both were marginalized and ignored.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf undertakes a historical evaluation of seventeenth-

century women writers such as Lady Winchilsea, Margaret Cavendish, Dorothy Osborne, and Aphra
Behn. She makes the point that women’s achievements went beyond the derogatory stereotypes of harlots
and courtesans, or the upper class woman reclining in the parlour with a fan and a lap dog for company.
The ordinary woman’s life was buried in obscurity. Her activities went entirely unrecorded (84-85).

Virginia Woolf has also contributed substantially to the feminine aesthetic by defining the
contours of women’s writing, and fiction-writing as a whole. ‘Fiction is like a spider web,’ she says,
‘attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is
scarcely perceptible’ (A Room of One’s Own 41). This definition of art as a spider web goes contrary to
male, formalist notions of art as ‘sublime’, ‘objective’, and ‘universal’. Here the form of the web (art) is
scarcely visible, but its function is to trap insects (the economic function of art). Art, women maintain, is
subjective, and embedded in ‘life’, and serves the artist as a means of survival. (Aesthetics in Feminist
Perspective 28) In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf speaks on behalf of originality rather than
convention. ‘Life is a luminous halo’ she says, ‘a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is seen as a classic feminist text
with its silences, gaps, giving expression to the ‘enigmas of female experience.’ (Voyage In 184) Woolf
felt that women were ‘unhistoried’ (mark on the wall, again,) and that the woman writer had to cling to
what was available as the art of foremothers – Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes. Elaine
Showalter, the feminist critic emphasizes the fact that the turn-of-the-century woman writer experimented
with new fictional forms such as the embedded narrative, and also ‘keynotes, allegories, fantasies,

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monochromes or dreams’ (The Awakening 175). Mrs Dalloway, the novel is also innovative in its
‘palimpsestic layering of plots’ in the course of which the author’s subversive intentions are skillfully
hidden in the text, and periodically inscribed. (Gilbert and Gubar) Virginia Woolf maintained that killing
the ‘Angel in the House’ was part of the responsibilities of the woman writer. The Angel in the House
was a popular Victorian image of the ideal (devoted and submissive) wife and woman. Woolf’s
conclusion is that men’s accomplishments were documented and celebrated while women’s
accomplishments were buried in obscurity. ‘Columbus discovered America, Newton the laws of gravity.
Aeroplanes were invented by men. But there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of
women’ ( A Room of One’s Own 81).

Simone de Beauvoir – Sex versus Gender

From the 1920’s onwards, women increasingly questioned the stereotypical roles assigned them
by custom and tradition. At the same time, notions of femininity kept women in bondage of guilt. They
feared success; they hesitated to use their initiative, they under-achieved and feared being branded
‘aggressive’, or ‘shrill and strident’. European and North American women inherited notions of
womanhood and femininity from their middle class forbears. A crucial landmark in feminist publishing is
Simone de Beavoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which maintained that sex was determined by biology and
anatomy, but gender was a societal and cultural construct. It was Western society that had deemed woman
‘minus male’ (female). ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,’ is de Beauvoir’s famous
statement. ‘It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…which is described as feminine’. de
Beavoir’s work highlighted the fact that women themselves were taught to internalize patriarchal
ideologies to such an extent, and over such a long period of time that women believed in their secondary
status. Western cultures nurtured women to be meek, passive, acquiescent, emotional, sensitive and
intuitive while men went out and conquered the world. de Beauvoir’s ground breaking work has given
women confidence and enabled generations of women to re-conceptualize a woman-centred symbolic
order.

‘The Problem that had no Name’

In North America of the 1950’s, the social scenario was almost Jane Austenian in its expectations
for women. Middle class American women assumed the roles of goddesses of the suburban home. Girls
enrolled in college to find husbands. The college campus of the 1950’s became the hunting ground for
marriage partners. The body beautiful received much attention as blonde hair and tight fitting clothes
accentuated its attributes. Once out of college, the young woman settled down to life in the suburban

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home with her husband and four children and the station wagon parked in the driveway. As a suburban
housewife and mother, her dream had been accomplished. Consumer magazines used the figure of the
housewife to advertise labour-saving gadgets and home products. In this dream world, career for women
naturally acquired a bad reputation. It was women who could not find husbands who ‘resorted’ to careers.
Everything spelt happiness for a while as women became ‘experts’ in determining the quality of washing
soap, exchanged cookery tips, and shared child minding rosters. In the late 1950’s a strange emptiness
crept into their lives as they experienced a disconnect between what they were expected to feel (happy,
fulfilled wives and mothers), and the reality of their lives. The ‘problem that had no name’ reared its head.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) gave voice to this problem that women needed something
more than a well-fitted kitchen, a manicured lawn, wall-papered suburban home, and cute, baby doll
clothing to find fulfillment.

The book questioned the woman’s true identity. Did she have a life of the mind? What did she see
when she looked at herself in the mirror each day? It offered women a life-plan which included a career,
and choices in life. The rumblings of discontent grew louder. The glorious suburban home now became a
prison which circumscribed and curtailed a woman’s freedom. Marriage itself became an institution for
asserting male superiority and enslaving women. Housework and child care, which in the earlier days
were the ‘natural’ duties of a woman, now came to be classified as unpaid labour. Women complained
that society took them for granted. They were not appreciated and received no remuneration for their
work in the home. Betty Friedan’s surveys pointed to the problem:

‘I feel empty somehow…’

‘I feel as if I don’t exist’.
‘But who am I…?’

The world of advertising presented women as all body and no mind, frivolous and child-like in looks and
reasoning. The consumer world got fierce when women complained of fatigue and saw housework as
drudgery. New strategies were invented to tranquillize women with products which would give them a
sense of mastery over their homes. Betty Friedan’s book identified the ‘housewife trap’ and suggested that
women could have a ‘life’ both within and outside the home. The author recommended that women
should focus on themselves first, and next on what they could contribute to society. She reassured them
that there was no conflict in having a career and in being a wife and a mother at the same time.

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The Second Wave of Feminism – Consciousness-Raising
Thus began the second wave of feminism in the late 1960’s. Its full flowering came in the 1970’s
and 1980’s. Throughout this period feminism as a concept developed and expanded to embrace every
aspect of women’s lives. Consciousness-raising (CR) helped to deconstruct and transform the beliefs and
behavior of women. It created intense anxiety among men who felt ‘emasculated’ and ‘unmanned’ by the
myth of the fiery, ‘man-eating’ feminist. Set against the loveless and career-loving feminist, male writing
propagated the picture of the doe-eyed wife and mother cosseted by the family, surrounded by the devoted
husband and loving children.

Militant Feminism- 1970’s

The 1970’s were the most exciting years for the European and North American feminists as they
militantly grasped the wheel and changed the course of their lives. From the symbolic burning of
women’s inner garments in public, to sloganeering, undertaking demonstrations, and the wearing of
badges to indicate allegiance, feminists across the Western world saw a need for urgent and militant
action. Elaine Showalter, the feminist critic observes that the feminist movement of the 1970’s had the
‘urgency and excitement of a religious awakening’. It put more than a sparkle in women’s eyes. Some of
the slogans of the period include:

‘Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not
difficult.’
‘A Woman’s place is in the House - and the Senate’
‘Beware of a man who praises Women’s Liberation. He is about to quit his job’
‘Sisterhood is Powerful!’

Pop songs of the 1970’s carried the message: ‘I am strong. I am invincible. I am woman’ (Helen Reddy).
It was a song which became an anthem for the women’s liberation movement. It reached No.1 on the
Billboard Charts in 1972, won the Grammy Award and sold more than a million copies. It was a song that
expressed the growing passion for female empowerment. Another is Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I will Survive’
(1979).

The feminine mode of dressing was yielded up for trousers and T shirts. Birth control pills and devices
gave women a measure of control over their bodies and their reproductive lives. The Movement came to

14
be starkly called Women’s Liberation in the 70’s. Later decades toned it down to Women’s emancipation,
Feminism, and Womanism (among black women).

Shere Hite’s research in the 1970’s, on sexuality from women’s perspective articulated issues
which had hitherto been one-sided or unmentionable. Her questionnaires provided a framework for
interpreting women’s sexuality and male psychology, and the results were more revealing than those
arrived at by the Kinsey Reports and Masters and Johnson. Women saw great value in the Hite Reports on
Sexuality, Love, and Emotion, but men branded Hite a sex therapist and tried to trivialize her findings.
Hite remains a ‘chronicler and predictor’ of social change in the history of feminism.

Feminist Theories
The leading feminists of the 1970’s who had a lasting influence on the trajectory of the Movement
in subsequent decades include Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Dale Spender.
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970 ) challenged women to be determined in seeking release
from patriarchal oppression. ‘The onus is on women who must not only equal men in the race for
employment but outstrip them’ she said. (135) Her book dispelled the ‘middle class myth of love and
marriage’, branding housewives as ‘slaves’, and women as ‘spiritual cripples’. Shulamith Firestone’s The
Dialectic of Sex (1970 ) adopted a Marxist interpretation of Feminism and saw men and women within the
biological family unit as inherently unequal when it came to the distribution of power. Firestone
maintained that discrimination based on biological and reproductive differences formed the foundations of
a class system where men imposed their tyranny over women and children. She advocated a sexual
revolution to eliminate the underclass (women), and give women control over their fertility and their
reproductive functions. Kate Millet’s book Sexual Politics (1970) adopted the polemical stance by
identifying the subjugation of women as being at the centre of Western society’s cultural arrangement.
Social institutions in the West ‘covertly manipulated power to subordinate women’ she said. Women were
treated as sexual objects by male writers such as D.H.Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and John
Genet. Dale Spender’s Man Made Language (1980) made the radical claim that men have constructed
women’s silence and invisibility through a monopoly of the English language. As inventors and
innovators of language, men have manipulated reality and made spoken and written language work in
their favour.

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The Real Feminists?
In the early 1980’s the male literati came up with the term ‘post-feminism’ to divide the
Movement, make a mockery of its Cause and ultimately silence the followers. It was also the period
when Third World women felt marginalized from the broad tenets of the Movement. Black women did
not identify with the issues of feminism which they saw as being largely white and middle-class. Alice
Walker coined the term ‘Womanism’ – the repudiation of feminism by women of colour. Womanism was
more inclusive in its concerns than feminism was. European and North American feminists continued to
write about women’s rights but more and more, their perspectives became sterile ground of post-
feminism. (Guardian Weekly, May 18, 1997) Third World women rose to meet the challenges of hunger
and poverty. They mobilized and networked in a bid to overcome the forces that threatened their
livelihood and survival. Sheila Rowbotham in the Guardian Weekly article calls them ‘the real feminists’
tackling the world’s ‘real problems’. The example of SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) in
India with a membership of 200,000 women, Women of the Waterfront (the Liverpool docks) and
Women against Pit Closures in England are cited. These women sought the welfare of their families. They
mobilized for a better environment for their children to grow up in. Feminism they felt, was not a
movement of a privileged few but a movement about social rights, about fighting injustice as it affected
thousands of women and their families. They supported their men folk in seeking price cuts, social
improvements and in resisting environmental degradation.

The ‘post-feminist male’ of the 1980’s and early 1990’s was even more confused than his female
counterpart. Robert Bly’s book Iron John (1990) explored the male identity crisis. The book was a
bestseller in the US for forty weeks. Men enrolled in self-help groups and attended seminars to reclaim
their manhood. Men it appeared had no role models in their fathers, Bly maintains, and harks back to
mythology and legend for models.

During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a crack appeared in the relationship between British and
American feminists. Certain American feminists were very visible and their views were heard whether
they affirmed or contradicted each other. Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi Camille Paglia, and Katie Roiphe
were names heard across the Atlantic. Feminism in America was ‘white’ and ‘middle class’, and did not
find sympathizers among black women. Black women sought to address issues concerning race.
Affirmative action was a dirty phrase. Non-Western women were less concerned with identity matters and
patriarchal put-downs than with basic issues regarding their income and how it affected their families.

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Feminism and Motherhood
What was the colour or shade of feminism in Britain? The British papers in the 1980’s presented
feminists in all kinds of unflattering ways, as man-haters, as women with unshaved legs and page-boy
haircuts, circulating a confused philosophy. British women, meanwhile, feminists or not, seemed to be
suffering in isolation. Equality at work, equal pay for equal work, and enhanced work opportunities were
at the centre of their concerns. Young British mothers who went out to work experienced a strange
conflict between motherhood (which required their presence at home), and the need to join the workforce
and be economically independent. Childbirth took a toll on them emotionally and they were unable to
cheerfully return to work leaving children behind. Issues concerning women’s post-natal emotional states
and their need to remain at home with infants before returning to work (the Maternity Leave) had to be
addressed. Natasha Walters’ The New Feminism, Melissa Benn’s Madonna and Child: Towards a New
Politics of Motherhood, and Kate Figes’ Life After Birth: What even your Friends won’t tell you about
Motherhood explored women’s life-changing experiences and the change in their outlook with the onset
of motherhood. The working mother’s conflicts, her gains and losses were outlined in Jayne Buxton’s
Ending the Mother War, Starting the Workplace Revolution. The problem of juxtaposing work and family
had been treated lightly in the feminist zeal for work and career. A new kind of feminist emerged, a career
woman who valued the feminine and maternal tradition and did not fit the aggressive battle-axe model.
(Maureen Freely) The problem, women realized could not be addressed by them in isolation. The man
was out at work while the woman had her own career to attend to. In spite of an overwhelming bodily
fatigue and confusion of the mind, the feminist mantra did not lose its appeal – ‘I am whole, loving,
giving, affirming, enlightening…’ The feminists realized that men and women had to jointly face the task
of caring for children and going to work.

Women’s Studies
By the mid-1990’s women had overcome, up to a point, the conflict between motherhood and a
career. They felt fairly secure in their places of work; they found that they did not have to dance through
minefields to progress in their career. They could stop claiming victim-status. They had gone past the
stage of screaming about exclusion. Now they could write about inclusion. Whatever horror stories
women had to tell concerning discrimination could be written down as history of Women’s Studies.
Women’s fashions in clothing changed radically in the 1990’s as the Beauty myth gave way to ‘fitness’
and the need for an athletic body, the major concern being self sufficiency. This was the era of ‘shoulder
pads’ for women’s dresses creating the visual affirmation of strength. Women were ‘empowering’
themselves in more ways than one.

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 A major breakthrough in the progress of the Women’s Movement which could be compared to the
Suffrage movement was the introduction of Women’s Studies as an academic discipline in European and
North American universities. Women’s narratives were consolidated, research into women’s situations
undertaken, and archival material retrieved and re-assessed. Women’s Studies became a respectable
forum for women to actually put a ‘mark on the wall’. It started off as pioneering postgraduate,
interdisciplinary programmes in the early 1980’s. By the end of the decade, Women’s Studies had gained
widespread academic respectability. Existing academic disciplines came under the scrutiny of feminist
perspectives. Gender became a legitimate tool to enable us understand the world around us. Feminism
claimed that the ‘personal is political’ and pushed it as an intellectual pursuit. This included the origins of
sex differences, the relationship between paid and unpaid work, violence against women, women and
reproductive rights, the concept and practice of the family in the Western world, media representations of
women, and so on. Housed in the faculties of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Women’s Studies
served to propagate feminist ideology. It was highly influential in changing legislation in favour of
women.

The Academy, through Women’s Studies fostered a sisterhood among women who held different
shades of opinion but agreed on broad assumptions concerning patriarchy and the subordination of
women. The sisterhood gave women a sense of community, and security in belonging to a group of
likeminded women. The Women’s Studies programmes also encouraged mentoring across generations.
As women began to redefine themselves in the 1980’s and 90’s in a new political and cultural
environment, they acknowledged the strides made by the older feminists which had opened the door for
the empowering of younger women. Feminism was no longer a monolithic Movement or ideology but
occupied the overlapping spaces between postcolonial discourse, race, and ethnicity.

The Third Wave – 1990’s

The third wave of feminism came about in the 1990’s as a hybrid involvement with culture. The
Movement also acquired technological configurations as the feminists used the internet to their advantage.
The vista broadened so that, what was previously restricted as women’s issues now became economic,
ethical, and family issues that were central to both men and women. Some schools of feminism parted
company at this point but others joined and strengthened the various strands of the Movement. It became
a feminist imperative to remove social, political, and economic discrimination based on sex and gender,
and change human consciousness concerning equality. Women’s rights were based on individual
accomplishments as men’s were. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar jointly authored The Madwoman in the

18
Attic (1979), a book which traced the inaccurate representations of women in the Nineteenth century
British novel. Male writers tended to categorize female characters as either angelic or as rebellious
madwomen. Their second book, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth century
(1988) established the on-going battle between the sexes in the world of letters, using the pen both as an
instrument of violence but also as a therapeutic and image-building instrument. Feminist critics also
sought to recover the voices of ‘lost’ women writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, among others. The biographies of women like the suffragettes, Susan B. Anthony and
Abigail Adams served to encourage women. Women academics undertook a ‘re-reading’ and ‘re-
visioning’ of women authors to identify the hidden meanings inscribed in the texts. As Adrienne Rich
puts it: ‘A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse would take the work first of all as a clue to
how we live, how we have been living, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, and how we
can begin to see – and therefore live – afresh.’

Gynecriticism – ‘ecriture feminine’

It is during the third wave of feminism (1990 to 2000) that the feminine aesthetic, a
feminine/feminist mode of writing and perceiving the world has come into its own. As a critical tool in
the discipline of literary criticism, feminist criticism has its distinct parameters and attributes. Elaine
Showalter, the feminist critic identifies three phases in the development of women’s writing. The phase
1840 to 1880, she calls the ‘Feminine phase’, when women resorted to oblique, subversive, and ironic
strategies, and the use of pseudonyms to have their voices heard. The period 1880 to 1920, she calls the
Feminist phase when the deferential posture was abandoned for a more assertive and vocal expression,
and coincided with gaining the vote for women. From 1920 onwards Showalter believes that women’s
writing has foregrounded and valourized Female Experience, domestic or otherwise. Showalter proposed
‘gynocriticism’ as a valid tool for assessing women’s writing. The twenty-first century has popularized
expressions and terms such as ‘matrifocal’, ‘matriarchal’, and gynocentric’ with reference to women’s
writing based on the root words gyne (woman) and its opposite andros (man). Gynecriticism as the term
implies is an approach to literature from the female perspective, providing a female structure for the
analysis and appreciation of literature produced by women. Gynecriticism is not hierarchichal but
wholistic and inclusive. It endorses female experience without invalidating the male mode of perceiving
the world. It attempts an analysis of the syntactic and lexical features as well as those attributes termed
‘involved’ in women’s texts. Helene Cixous, Julie Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray have traced and defined
‘ecriture feminine’ or women’s writing as giving free play to the ‘pre-linguistic potentiality of the
unconscious’ (M.H.Abrams 238). It is multidimensional. It subverts the repressed, the logical, the

19
reasoned phallocentric discourse allowing for multiple meanings and a layered texture within the text. The
structures of signification are altered in the female text giving rise to intertextuality (a term popularized by
Julie Kristeva), where allusions and covert references and echoes of previous texts overlap to become a
‘site of an intersection of numberless other texts’.(Abrams, 285)

The concept of an ‘ecriture feminine’ or feminine writing has been proposed and established by
French feminists in the late twentieth century, with Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray in the forefront. In
The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous challenges women to break away from the restrictive definitions
of the past and write with abandon, inscribing the myriad rhythms, metaphors, symbolic resonances, and
sound patterns that are part of women’s natural writing process. (Susan Sellers) She uses the works of the
Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector as an important example of ecriture feminine. The narrative matrix of
women’s writing bears evidence of their ‘awakening’ to a new order which challenges the rules of linear
logic and objectivity. Women’s meanings, on the contrary, are to be found in the buried subtexts, in blank
pages, gaps, borders, spaces, and even silence, all symbolizing women’s absence from culture. Cixous
points out that writers like Lispector do not retreat from the difficult, ugly, or painful but overcome
obstacles by an honest and loving appraisal of the Self and the Other.

Women writers and critics in the first decade of the 21st century see art as deeply contextual and
far removed from the objectivity and depersonalization suggested by male authorities such as T.S.Eliot.
Display of emotion is central to art, be it anger, grief, or frustration, and that art is functional in form and
execution as Virginia Woolf’s spider web so visually signifies. African-American women draw an
analogy between women’s writing and quilt-making. The episodic plot is joined together like the pieces
of a patchwork quilt, creating an effect of extraordinary beauty and complexity. Toni Morrison uses what
she calls ‘re-memory’ and multiple points of view in the story making process. The palimpsestic and
layered texture of women’s art also puts it on a different plane from those produced by men.

Economic Empowerment in the 21st century

Women’s economic empowerment is the greatest social change that has come about in the twenty-
first century. There are two million more women students graduating from American universities than
men. Girls are getting better results than boys at school and university. Women constitue the majority of
the workforce in North America today, juggling motherhood and career, and leadership positions with
great aplomb. They start and run their own businesses as well as heading multinational corporations like
Pepsi Cola. The recession has meant that many men are out of work while their spouses control the

20
finances and do a ‘double shift’ – that of being wife and worker. The two-income family has also
become the norm rather than the exception in the Western world, and in many cases, the women earn
more then men. The concept of the Female Bread Winner (FBW) has become a reality in the
contemporary world. There appears to be less and less of a social stigma attached to husbands and wives
reversing traditional roles in the home. Women are powerful and confident and have gained the right to
choose. Not only has the glass ceiling been shattered, even entire structures have been dismantled.

The beginnings of this change go a long way back as we have seen, from women’s access to
education, the vote, to the industrialization of society as a whole. The contraceptive pill gave women the
means to limit and plan their families. In many homes in the West, there is a partnership, with husbands
and wives contributing in different spheres, but as equal partners. The post-industrial society and
improved technology has provided homes with gadgets such as the vacuum cleaner, dish washer, and the
microwave. Pre-cooked meals, fast food and freezers have taken the sweat out of household chores. The
home is even remotely run from the Blackberry today.

The feminization of the workforce has meant that society’s mindset and expectations have
changed. In the early days of feminism, women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men,
regardless of the constraints of motherhood. Today’s successful women contend that in order to fulfill
their potential, they must not play by men’s rules. They claim that there are skills which come naturally to
women such as flexibility, planning, team work, organizing, and multitasking which they rely upon to
achieve success. Their unique management skills and wisdom are being harnessed to hard work and
perseverance. The new feminists (twenty first century) maintain that they are ‘wired differently from
men.’ (‘Womenomics’, The Economist, January 2, 2010) Rather than being aggressive, they are
consensus-seeking. They are ‘less competitive, more collaborative, less power-obsessed, more group-
oriented’.

As women hit the ground running, and choose to remain on the fast lane, the home and family
have taken on new configurations. Many professional women delay childbearing till they are well
established in their careers. Some have rejected motherhood altogether. In Switzerland, forty percent of
women of childbearing age are childless out of choice. The Scandinavian countries give fathers paternity
leave while mothers go to work. France gives incentives to families that choose to have an extra child.
China has a one-child policy (and that child should preferably be a boy). Female foeticide is punishable
by law but widely practiced in India. In 2010, the Western world is trying to grapple with the social

21
consequences of the emancipation of women – rising divorce rates, single-parent families, surrogate
motherhood, and so on. In Britain and North America, sexism is no longer the issue but motherhood and
childcare. With Mum at the Board Meeting, are children the losers, ask the tabloids.

We Did It!
Is there a mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women’s accomplishments?
Yes, there certainly is! During the Second World War, the British government used slogans like ‘We can
do it’ to enlist women into the workplace while the men folk were at the warfront. Seventy years later, in
every sphere of activity, women say emphatically, ‘We did it!’ Have men welcomed the social change?
Do they feel emasculated? Men have had to reinvent themselves and their masculinity and are learning to
adjust to the notion of being ‘domestic co-laborers’. Economic necessity has driven men to accept the
shift in the marriage bargain and the power configurations within it.

As we look to the future of the family in Europe and North America and its influence over
the rest of the world, one thing becomes clear. As men and women engage in the new partnership, as
women take their place in the workforce, the Art of the Wife, we are told, is fast disappearing. Sandra
Tsing Loh, (New York Times, Jan 24, 2009) speaking on behalf of the twenty-first century professional
woman has the final word on the subject:

‘As the breadwinner, I wish to be the husband, hence what I am looking for
is a wife – a loyal helpmeet who keeps the home fires burning and offers
uncritical emotional support when I, the gladiator return exhausted from
the arena. Who are the men without money who can adapt to such a role?’

In the final analysis, Tsing Loh says we all want a wife.

Women Writers in Africa

The history of European and North American women writers over a period of three hundred years
gives us a perspective to view the works of African women writers. Historically African women
participated fully in the production and dissemination of oral literature and other art forms. Their artistic
expression and involvement have been multifaceted and diverse. Weaving, dyeing, pottery, beadwork,
leatherwork, wall-painting, basket-making – these are some of the art forms through which African
women have expressed their skill and imagination. Their creativity has resulted in works that are

22
functional, that serve a purpose for the women themselves, the village, and the community. As
composers, they present marriage songs, lullabies, songs to tease young girls, and songs for festive
occasions and for funerals. Women have their place as oral narrators, telling stories to children and adults
and recreating myths and legends. The general picture that emerges indicates that African women have
always had their autonomy. They have played a part in palace administration, they have headed women’s
groups and societies, have formed their own groups, associations and title societies. They have led
resistance groups against the colonial administration and have had economic independence through
farming and trading. Pre-colonial African women, the historical records maintain, occupied positions
complementary rather than subordinate to men.

In postcolonial Africa, women experience the positive and the negative alongside the men. They
have been at the receiving end of neocolonialism, urban migrations, and cultural transitions. Wars and
conflicts, successive military regimes and their squandering of public funds, depleted economies, floods
and famine – they all have women at their centre, striving to keep their families alive and together. Unlike
Western women, African women have not had the luxury of being solely writers until perhaps the 21st
century. They have had to tend to the land, grow vegetables, attend to the needs of the extended family,
and incidentally, write. Postcolonial African women have resisted feminist labels though in practice they
have transcended stereotypical roles assigned to them and occupy positions alongside the men.

In the anthologies of the 1960’s and 1970’s African women’s writing did not find a place.
Women’s presence was marginally acknowledged in African literature of the time. In the past thirty years
though, an increasing number of African women writers have taken up the pen. Education for women has
become more widespread in Africa. Many African countries have taken up the girl child as a project, to
nurture and raise women to occupy managerial and leadership roles in the public sphere. Charlotte
Bruner’s Unwinding Threads (1983), and African Women’s Writing (1993) gave exposure, for the first
time to emerging and established women writers on the continent. African women had a distinctive voice
which became audible not only in women’s gatherings but in their short stories, novels, drama, and
poetry.

What did African women writers model their writings on? Like their early European and North
American counterparts, African women writers had no foremothers (in fiction) to look up to for
inspiration. They found themselves in uncharted territories. It is the educated African woman who has
access to publishing as she tries to do what her male colleagues have done, or what women in other parts

23
of the world have done. Her originality expressed itself in her choice of themes (a female world presented
with feminine intuition) and in the use of the English language.

African women have largely written about themselves and their immediate concerns. Tradition
and social institutions have posed a threat to the well being of the African woman. Women value tradition
and seek to preserve it where its blind practices do not oppress them. Polygamy, motherhood,
widowhood, female circumcision rites, among others have assigned women prescribed roles, some of
which are seen as being negative and retrogressive practices.

The constraints that the European women faced and had to overcome were many. It is not that the
African woman was free of constraints but the constraints in her case did not outweigh the freedoms.
Patriarchy has not overtly stood in the way of women’s writing and publishing on the continent.
Marginalization through neglect has largely been responsible for the fact that women are latecomers to the
publishing scene. The constraints faced by the African woman are more to do with the choices she has
had to make- the priority of husband, children, and extended family commitments over writing. Virginia
Woolf’s recommendations of a space and money of her own as prerequisites for women’s writing does
not always work in Africa. Women write while sharing a communal space. Largely speaking, African
women have no common oppressor or foe, no perceived enemy of progress except poverty and
underdevelopment.

Conclusion - Appreciation
I would like to thank the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jos for giving me this opportunity
to present my work before this august gathering. The Inaugural Lecture series at the University of Jos has
provided a platform for the town and gown to meet, and to be informed of the scholarly work that is being
carried out at this institution. My appreciation goes to the Inaugural Lecture Committee, headed by
Professor Nasir, the PRO of the University of Jos, Mr. Otowo, and the Publications division.

I started work as a young, impressionable, foundation member of the University of Jos in 1979
when the University was still in the town campus in Gangare, Jos. As the University grew and developed,
moved to the Bauchi Road campus, and then to the Permanent site, I too grew with it. Several generations
of students have been responsible for my growth, some of them completed their higher degrees and came
back to join me as colleagues in the English department. Some have gone on to become distinguished
novelists, politicians, academics, and even feminists! Over the past thirty odd years, I have benefitted

24
from academic interaction with several brilliant and outstanding scholars of the University of Jos. I would
like to humbly acknowledge the debt I owe to Professors Gerald Moore, Ayo Mamudu, Nicholas
Pweddon, and Francis Ngwaba, among others. The Administration of the University of Jos has always
been cooperative and encouraging, lending strong support whenever and wherever needed. The University
has stood for the highest standards of excellence in academia – I am proud to have belonged to this
institution and to have had my entire career shaped by it.

As for feminism – I believe in the equality of men and women, and that both have to be measured
and assessed by the same standards. I have lived through and experienced the historic changes to the
position of women outlined in this paper. The University of Jos is one of the few institutions in this
country and continent with an operative gender policy. I am not a victim of patriarchy, nor a casualty of
male supremacy. Male colleagues, male students, father, husband, and sons (and daughters) have
anchored me, given me moral support, and rejoiced with me in my achievements. In the course of my
years at the University of Jos, I have helped to produce Ph.D’s of differing shades of feminism, radical,
conservative, and accomodationist and they have taken their place in the world. My thanks go also to the
women of this University, the sisterhood of female colleagues and female students who have been a
source of constant inspiration for me.

I would like to express my appreciation for my colleagues in the English department. Over the
years, the department has functioned like a family.

My IT-savvy children have always been there for me, setting up PowerPoint presentations,
undertaking internet research, sharing ideas with me, and helping me to make the transition to the
technological age. I am grateful to Onche, Isaac, Lauren(daughter-in-law), Padma, and Zara.

My gratitude goes to my husband whose male strength and companionship and concern for the
family enabled me to pursue my career with confidence. I am grateful to him for pointing me to
excellence, for being my fellow-traveller on my journey, an unfailing mentor to look up to and depend on,
for paving my pathway with flagstones for smooth walking, and for being there at the end of the road to
celebrate with me. He is a unique man and a true feminist.

I give glory to God for His infinite mercies.

25
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