Feminist criticism

The inception and early success of American feminist literary criticism were neatly symbolized by the publication in 1970 of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and in 1985 of Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s monumental Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Over the course of fifteen years numerous women critics, mostly born between 1934 and 1944, took part in the development of feminist criticism, including notably Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Florence Howe, Alice Jardine, Annette Kolodny, Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, Lillian Robinson, Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Catharine Stimpson, among numerous others. What unified the highly diversified methods and works of these feminist literary critics was a threefold commitment: to expose patriarchal premises and prejudices; to promote the discovery and revaluation of literature by women; and to scrutinize the social and cultural contexts of literature and criticism. In general, the focus of American feminists fell more on gender than on sex-more on social than on purely biological factors. In its first phase feminist criticism attacked male sexism; in its second phase it investigated women’s writing; and in its third phase it concentrated on literary, critical, psychosocial, and cultural theory.1 Politically, it was situated at the outset amidst contending programs for liberal and socialist reform, radical separatism, and cultural revolution. Renunciation of all politics was rare, being antithetical to the critical movement. Political differences both energized and fragmented the feminist enterprise from the start. Feminist literary criticism was part of the broader new women’s movement

initiated in the early 1960s, particularly by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), a book that anatomized and criticized the dominant cultural image during the early Cold War era of the successful and happy American woman as a housewife and mother. Promoted especially during the 1940s and 1950s, this mystique made the housewife-mother the model for all women, portraying women’s ideal reality as a narrow domestic round of cooking, cleaning, washing, and childbearing. To find fulfillment and achieve identity in this regime, women had to accept sexual passivity, male domination, and

nurturing motherhood. Simultaneously, women were led to discount earlier feminists who fought for women’s rights to higher education, careers, and the vote. According to Friedan, the post-Depression feminine mystique, “this imagecreated by women’s magazines, by advertisements, television, movies, novels, columns and books by experts on marriage and the family, child psychology, sexual adjustment and by the popularizers of sociology and psychoanalysis-shapes women’s lives today and mirrors their dreams.”2 The task of the women’s movement, therefore, was both to demystify the counterrevolutionary, ubiquitous feminine mystique and to renew the long struggle for women’s emancipation. Like the contemporaneous movements against racism, poverty, and war

and for civil rights, economic justice, and peace during the 1960s and early 1970s, the women’s movement against sex discrimination and for equal rights and the right to abortion manifested itself in the creation of new organizations, the issuing of manifestos, the introduction of new legislation, the staging of public protests and demonstrations, and the publication of widely read books and articles. Among important feminist organizations established were Friedan’s own National Organization for Women (1966) and the National Black Feminist Organization (1973). Manifestos included NOW’s “Bill of Rights for Women” (1967), the “Red Stocking Manifesto” (1969), the “Bitch Manifesto” (1969), and the “Fourth World Manifesto” (1971) by Detroit feminists and Indochinese women. Noteworthy legislation occurred not only with the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the reintroduction in Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment (1970), but also with the liberalization of abortion laws in Alaska, Hawaii, and New York (1970). Memorable protests included the Women’s March on the Republican National Convention in 1968, the Speakout Against Rape of the New York Radical Feminists in 1971, and the release of the “Three Marias” in Portugal after an international feminist campaign in 1974. Among numerous significant books published were Friedan’s The FeminineMystique, Mary Ellmann’s Thinking aboutWomen (1968), Robin Morgan’s edition of Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (1970), and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. Millett’s book was undoubtedly the most popular literary doctoral disserta-

tion published in this period. Focused polemically on four male authors (D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet) and on male supremacy and sexual violence, it opposed reigning critical formalism while modeling the social and cultural critique characteristic of much of later feminist criticism. Like Friedan, Millett depicted the period from the 1930s to the 1960s as counterrevolutionary, recommending a resurrection of earlier feminist radicalism. She too criticized contemporary popular culture and the social sciences, especially Freudian psychoanalysis, for sexist devaluation of women. Assessed as literary criticism, Sexual Politics pioneered both feminist cultural criticism and antiauthoritarian demystification of respected male authors. As a resisting reader, Millett made up in polemical power for what she lacked in sensitivity to thematic nuance and literary style. Politically more

radical than the liberal Friedan, Kate Millett hoped for social revolution rather than reform. “As the largest alienated element in our society, and because of their numbers, passion, and length of oppression, its largest revolutionary base, women might come to play a leadership part in social revolution, quite unknown before in history.”3