Feminism and Gender Studies

As Judith Fetterley puts it, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read. . . [The first act of a feminist critic is] to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us."

One of the basic assumptions or concepts that underlie the diverse ways people think about and use feminist criticism is the view that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal (ruled by the father) - that is, it is male-centered and controlled, and it is organized and conducted in ways that subordinate women to men in all cultural domains (familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, and artistic). It is also widely held that while one's sex is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender (masculinity and femininity) are largely, if not entirely, cultural constructs. Furthermore, this ideology pervades those writings that have been traditionally considered 'great literature' and have been historically written by men for men.

The history of feminist criticism and theory could begin with various critiques of patriarchal culture. Feminist criticism was inaugurated as a distinctive and concerted socio-political approach to literature in the 1960s, but the feminist issues being raised were hardly new at all. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an early proponent of educational equality between men and women, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was the first great feminist document. Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941) concern with feminist thematics are dominant in A Room of One's Own (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and analyzes the differences between women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation. Woolf argued that a change in the forms of literature was necessary because most literature had been "made by men out of their own needs for their own uses."

The second phase might be characterized by what Elaine Showalter has term gynocritics: a concern about the place of female writers within a canon largely created by male publishers and academics and about the specifics of women's creativity and language.

The third phase is a search for an écriture feminine, a way of writing which literally embodied the female, thereby fighting the "subordinating, linear style of classification or distinction.