ABSTRACT
With its specificity of time and place and its moment of collective realisation of the existence of an unnameable something, this little scene could be taken straight out of the opening of a thriller. The fact that it belongs to an argument for feminism, and that a possible word for the mysterious ‘problem’ turns out to be ‘femininity’, is suggestive in more than one way. The troubled relations and mutual definitions of feminism and femininity seem to be a never-ending serial, without the promised conclusion ever being delivered. In what follows, I shall attempt to unravel part of the plot, not so much with regard to the particular predicament of 1959, but in terms of the more general ‘problem’ of feminist argument and feminist ends which this passage, and the book from which it is taken, reveal.
