[Feminism] should persist in seeing itself as a component or offshoot of Enlightenment modernism, rather than as one more ‘exciting’ feature (or cluster of features) in a postmodern social landscape. (Sabina Lovibond, in T. Docherty, ed., Postmodemism: A Reader (1993).)… Read More ›
Second wave feminism is a term used to describe a new period of feminist collective political activism and militancy which emerged in the late 1960s. The concept of ‘waves’ of feminism was itself only applied in the late 1960s and… Read More ›
In the introduction to their book Genders, David Glover and Cora Kaplan make the observation that: ‘gender is a much contested concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, but a site of unease rather than agreement’ (Glover and Kaplan, 2000, ix)…. Read More ›
The Feminist movement in America received great stimulus from the 1960s’ civil rights movement, and in Britain it has had a political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts within a material and ideological context. Thus Anglo-American… Read More ›
Kate Millett was the first notable feminist after Simone de Beauvoir to address the construction of woman within male writing. According to Millett, the man-woman relationship is deeply embedded in power structures with political implications – thus she derived the… Read More ›
Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman… Read More ›
Freud had been widely discredited by early second wave feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. Millett, in particular, had persuasively argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference and reinforce the belief that inferiority was… Read More ›