“Chick Lit” literature is aimed primarily at single,
We prefer to think of this generation
professional women in their 20’s and 30’s. It
focuses on such significant cultural and feminist
issues as:
• the relationship between identity and
sexuality,
• the contemporary fixation on consumer
capitalism,
• the injustice of being measured against
capriciously imposed standards of physical
beauty,
• the potential liberation produced by sexual
freedom,
• the comforts of female friendship, and
• pressures on women to balance work with
intimate relationships.
Young female readers of chick lit like and identify with
fallible heroines who make mistakes at work,
sometimes drink too much, fail miserably in the
kitchen, or “fall for any of the following: alcoholics,
workaholics, commitment phobics, people with
girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomaniacs,
chauvinists. . .,” to quote Bridget Jones (from Helen
Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary first published
in 1996).
Contemporary young women’s view of life
expressed in chick lit is very different from the
views of feminists from the 1960’s and 70’s who
now are university faculty members. For example,
representing academia, Doris Lessing comments “It
would be better, perhaps, if [female novelists] wrote
books about their lives as they really saw them and
not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their
weight.” In contrast, the protagonist of Allison
Pearson’s chick lit novel I Don’t Know How She Does
It (Knopf, 2002) asks, “Back in the seventies, when
they were fighting for women’s rights, what did they
think equal opportunities meant: that women would
be entitled to spend as little time with their kids as
men do?” Even the term “chick lit” embodies this
conflict: contemporary young women embrace it;
feminist professors react to “chick” as demeaning.
“In short, the concerns of the women in chick lit are
not Lessing’s, but they are those of a new generation
of women. This younger generation has been called
postfeminist, which suggests that feminism is no
longer needed, and women have moved beyond it or
retreated from it.
as representing a third wave of feminism. According
to that view, young women are extending or
redirecting the second-wave feminism of the 1960’s
and 70’s and the first wave feminism of the 19th and
early 20th centuries. Whether the new generation’s
concerns are considered a continuation or a rejection
of feminism, however, one thing is clear: What the
young women of today are embracing is not their
mother’s – or their professors’ – feminism.”
The divide between second and third-generation
feminists on campus is most obvious in their
questions, frustration and occasional bitterness.
Faculty members wonder, for example, why students
worry about their appearance more than their
education and dress for sex instead of success.
Students wonder why, if having a choice is what
feminism is about, they are criticized for making the
very real career choice, for example, to become a
pharmacist with a family instead of a neurological
surgeon without kids.
From Ferriss and Young’s perspective, the good
news is that “. . .[chick lit] novels can become an
ideal starting point for intergenerational
discussion of feminism. Bridget Jones’s Diary
raises issues of feminism versus postfeminism, I
Don’t Know How She Does It explicitly tackles the
problems that young women face in trying to “have it
all,” Sophie Kinsella’s “shopaholic” novels lead us to
ask if female consumers are self-actualized agents or
society’s victims. Sex and the City focuses attention
on women’s sexual empowerment.”
In a class where students read both classic women’s
fiction and chick lit novels, students overwhelmingly
preferred classic fiction. They weren’t sure why, but
they were “convinced that although chick lit raises
fascinating cultural issues, it couldn’t compete with
the work of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf
and Zora Neale Hurston.”
Excerpts from “A Generational Divide Over Chick Lit”
by Dr. Suzanne Ferris, professor of English at Nova
Southeastern University, and Dr. Mallory Young,
professor of English and French at Tarleton State
University. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i38/38b01301.htm