Feminism and Women’s Writing in the US

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 25, 2025

Women’s social movements in the United States can be divided into three “waves” (although these divisions are not strictly chronological or oppositional).

First-wave feminism emerged from the involvement of women activists in the antislavery, temperance, and women’s-suffrage movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Second-wave feminism, associated with the women’s-liberation movement, began in the 1960s and developed through the 1970s as women challenged traditional roles and agitated for equal rights and protection under the law. A rallying cry of 1970s feminism was “The personal is political!” During this decade—the peak of second-wave feminism—women began examining, undermining, and revising the cultural values associated with sex and gender.

Third-wave feminism emerged in the 1990s as a response to the “backlash” (a term popularized by Susan Faludi) against the political and social changes initiated by the women’s movement and the failure of the second wave to incorporate broader definitions of women’s identity. As feminism moves into the twenty-first century, it continues to evolve and to explore the meaning of “difference.” Some feminists believe that gender distinctions are innate; others see them as socially constructed and alterable.

Just as feminisms focus on gender-based social discrimination, feminist literary critics challenged women’s literary misinterpretation, subordination, and exclusion. Early efforts uncovered sexual stereotypes in literature by men. A more central occupation became the recovery of women writers who had been “lost.”

In 1973 the Feminist Press republished Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1899) and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917); and in 1979 a volume of Zora Neale Hurston’s works, edited by Alice Walker, appeared. In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter uses the term “gynocriticism” to describe literary criticism that focuses on ways in which women are portrayed in texts, how the literary canon is formed and revised, and how women’s literary forms and writing techniques are defined.

The influence of second-wave feminism on women’s writing of the 1970s emerges in its challenges to traditional female roles. In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan (who in 1966 founded the National Organization for Women [NOW]) had examined the roots of the dissatisfaction experienced by women who were expected to be fulfilled by being wives and mothers, and in Sexual Politics (1969) Kate Millett had analyzed how negative female images and patriarchal attitudes permeated literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics.

In 1972 Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine to highlight women’s social issues, feminist politics, and news about women. In fiction, too, women sought definition beyond the post–World War II image of the nuclear family consisting of a male provider and a housewife raising the children.

Alix Kates Shulman’s novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972) relates Sasha Davis’s coming of age and attempt to be a proper 1950s wife. The protagonist’s sexual activity shocked audiences, while her emotional and intellectual turmoil dramatized the dilemmas uncovered in The Feminine Mystique and Sexual Politics.

In Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), a poet leaves her husband to overcome her “fear of flying”—a metaphor for independence in both creative and sexual expression. Gail Godwin also creates women who define themselves outside the home. She signals the anomalous situation of her protagonist in the title of The Odd Woman (1974), about a female professor who teaches a course on “Women and Literature.”

Eleven of the seventeen stories in Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) feature women without husbands. Paley’s depictions of close friendships between female characters challenge the notion that women need men in order to have fulfilling lives.

As early as 1970, women of color challenged the notion that all women share the same experience and began to frame feminism to reflect concerns related to racism as well as patriarchy. Works by three important African American women writers appeared that year: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; all three writers continue to publish significant works in the twenty-first century.

Also in 1970, an anthology, The Black Woman, gathered a selection of stories by Black female writers that suggested a tradition separate from that of white women; the editor, Toni Cade Bambara, published a collection of her own stories, Gorilla, My Love, in 1972.

Black women expressed themselves in other forms as well. Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde published important poetry collections in the 1970s, and Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf was the second play by an African American woman to be performed on Broadway when it was produced in 1976.

All of these writers reject hierarchies based not only on gender but also on race—the latter of which they found present in the women’s movement—while celebrating traditions rooted in the African American experience.

Since the 1980s, there has been an explosion of creative works by women engaging in and contributing to feminist efforts and debates begun in the 1970s. Women writers continue to challenge traditional domestic roles assigned to women; but leaving the literal and metaphorical confinements of the home no longer means entering the nine-to-five working world, as it did in women’s fiction of the 1970s.

Women’s liberation movement in Washington, DC, August 26, 1970. | Don Carl Steffen/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

In Housekeeping (1980), for example, Marilynne Robinson merges realism and fantasy to fashion a modern fairy tale about two orphan sisters: Ruth, who embraces the outdoors and a vagabond life, and her younger sister, Lucille, who adheres to a traditional role.

The female wilderness fantasy later informed works as diverse as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them” (1985) and Morrison’s Jazz (1992), and eventually found its way into realist fiction such as Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness (1993) and Waltzing the Cat (1999).

Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992) targets the intersection of gender, poverty, and the abuse of female children. The depiction of women in occupations traditionally occupied by men also challenged traditional roles.

Sara Paretsky’s Victoria Iphigenia “V. I.” Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone offered female versions of the hard-boiled detective and ushered in a new golden age of mystery fiction. Female writers also began to take on violent and disturbing subject matter in a more graphic manner.

Joyce Carol Oates claims for herself a tradition embodied by male writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer in On Boxing (1987), as does Annie Proulx with the Western in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), which includes the acclaimed “Brokeback Mountain.”

The efforts of women of color to expand definitions of American literature to include Black, white, Native American, and Latina experience continue.

Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan, and Wendy Rose explore intersections of Native American life and mainstream culture in their works.

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) directed attention to Latina writers such as Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Cristina García.

The works of these writers, like those of their Asian American counterparts Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Gish Jen and the poets Cathy Song and Janice Mirikitani, depict the confusions, conflicts, and contradictions of female identity within hybrid cultures.

In the 1990s, women emerged as a powerful influence on literary markets both as writers and as readers; by the end of the decade women had become the majority buyers of both fiction and nonfiction.

Empowered by female support and the creativity of women writers, concerns once relegated primarily to women—motherhood, romance, body image, the difficulty of balancing family life and work, female rivalry, rape, and sexual abuse—have become part of mainstream literature and culture.

Several writers have deliberately corrected the absence of these themes in canonical texts. In A Thousand Acres (1991), Jane Smiley retells William Shakespeare’s King Lear (circa 1606) through Ginny, who is based on Goneril, and in Ahab’s Wife; or, The Star-Gazer (1999) Sena Jeter Naslund expands on a detail in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851).

Additionally, women writers refuse to be limited by “female” themes and the narrative structures associated with them. Rather than focusing on the conflicts created by differences in gender, class, race, or sexuality, these writers are now more inclined to celebrate such differences.

They are also more likely to explore simultaneously two sides of an issue that earlier writers felt were mutually exclusive: female identity as innate and as socially constructed.

As feminists work toward broader definitions of women’s identity, activities, and desires, so do women writers. No longer required to justify themselves in the literary marketplace, women are free to write what and how they wish. This statement should not, however, be taken to suggest that feminism or the ideas associated with its various “waves” are no longer useful. A more productive approach is to understand the multiple and innovative ways in which women writers seek to revise the conventions and themes of American literature.