University of Tuzla English department

Feminism and Literature

Tuzla, April 2005

Feminist literature in the 1960s

Womens Quest for Equality Throughout the centuries women have, more or less successfully, fought to put a stop to gender based discrimination. However, it would not be before the mid-19 th century that the first wave of feminism commences. This first wave mostly revolved around the campaign to gain suffrage, although works as Kate Chopins The Awakening (1899) and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), both rediscovered by feminist literary critics late in the 20th century, treat the issues of womens need for selfrealization apart from familial life without political thematic. The age of enlightenment started an avalanche of dealing with the issues of human rights which put women authors into action. Mary Wollstonecraft in England, as early in 1791, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman addressing the problem of inferior education as the cause of women-related prejudice. Her book brought inspiration to other activists, such as the American antislavery leader Sarah M. Grimk to write a pamphlet called Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman in 1838, only to be followed, ten years later, by the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions - a joint work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and several other women, written for the Seneca Falls Convention.

Figure 1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Nevertheless, the long struggle of American women for suffrage ended some seventy years later, in 1920, when the 19th Amendment was passed granting women a right to vote. This end turned out to be only a beginning for the campaign to gain other rights. In the early 1920s the National Womens Party undertook the attempt to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution that would make all forms of sex-based discrimination illegal. ERA, however, was not very popular and was even opposed by some women. So far, black movement and feminism, both from the 19th century, progressed at a similar pace and sometimes went hand in hand, but after the WWII feminism faded and all but seemed to have disappeared. Nonetheless, the early 1960s marked the start of a massive reaction against the then popular idea of home-making as the only natural way of women to exist. Many women decided that there was more to life than babies, sparkling dishes and happy husbands. Some women remembered how in the 1940s they had done vital and demanding work in the Second World War. Their contribution had been important and their jobs valued and valuable. (Neil DeMarco, The USA: a divided union? 1917-1980, Longman 2001) The civil rights movement revitalized the womens issue and with the birth of the New Feminism the second wave began.

The Second Wave of Feminism In 1963, four texts jumpstarted the second wave of feminism: () American Women, a report from the Presidents Commission on the Status of Women; The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, a vigorous polemic about a problem that had no name, womens inferior position; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, a novel about a middleclass young woman haunted by both ambition and suicidal depression, which preceded Plaths posthumous book of poetry, Ariel (1965); and finally, The Group by Mary McCarthy, a novel about nine Vassar classmates in the 1930s. (Catherine R. Stimpson, "Literature as Radical Statement") First of all, Kennedy's President's Commission on the Status of Women firmly supported the nuclear family and preparing women for motherhood, but it also acknowledged a national pattern of employment discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequality, and meagre support services for working women that needed to be corrected through legislative guarantees of equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and expanded child-care services. (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005 Deluxe Edition CDROM) Secondly, at this phase, feminist writers attempted to demonstrate that the duties and behaviors thought to be acceptable and appropriate for women actually entrapped them and narrowed their opportunities. A revolutionary work of this time was Friedans The Feminine Mystique. This novel challenged numerous deep-rooted American attitudes, especially the concept that womens fulfillment could be realized only through their role of wife and mother. The phrase feminine mystique alludes to the glorification of the traditional female wife/mother position. According to Friedan, this idolization was just an instrument of the scheme to prevent women from competing with men. Friedan was not only a writer, but also an activist. She and Gloria Steinem were the founders of Womens Political Caucus in 1971 and she founded the National Organization for Women, or NOW, in 1966. Her example shows the ideal of a feminist of that time, writer and activist. Steinem was also a writer and in 1972 she established Ms. a womens magazine which featured articles that taught women of career opportunities and meaningful ways of life.

Figure 2 Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem are signing an "ERAgram" asking President Jimmy Carter to support ERA

Sylvia Plath, American poet and writer, lived an exemplary life. She was Cambridge educated, married to poet Ted Hughes, and a mother of two. However, her literary works are filled with recurring themes of suppression by the figure of her stern father, her husband, the whole male-centered society. Plaths texts also strike the reader with the powerful image of an intelligent, talented woman being caged in the responsibilities of daughter-wife-mother. Her unresolved psychological problems are reflected in her novel The Bell Jar. Some of these problems were personal, while others arose from repressive 1950s attitudes toward women. Among these were the beliefs -- shared by most women themselves -- that women should not show anger or ambitiously pursue a career, and instead find fulfillment in tending their husbands and children. Successful women like Plath lived a contradiction. (Outline of American Literature, http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/oaltoc.htm)

Figure 3 Sylvia Plath

Anne Sexton, friend and colleague of Plaths, was a woman who attempted to be a wife, mother, and a poet in the 1960s. Her poems deal with taboo subjects such as sex, guilt, and suicide frequently introducing female topics such as childbearing, the female body, and marriage seen from a female point of view. Both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton committed suicide. On the other side, Adrienne Rich, who explored the theme of motherhood of what it means to be a woman in America, like these two poets, abstained from suicide and transferred her anger to pointed critiques and reenvisionings of society. She published a series of books the first of which was A Change of World (1951). First, her style was formal, but later on she experimented with forms, accepted radical political positions and interrogated Americas assumptions about gender and the ways gender structures our social experience. (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2005) In the 1970s feminist writing centered on social action, such as protesting against male-dominated organizations and representing womens political and social interests. Two representative works of activist feminist writing are Kate Milletts Sexual Politics and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone (1970). The latest trend in feminist writing, so-called cultural feminism, focuses more on the establishment of womens cultures, and reevaluation of politics, literature, and art in

general exclusively from a female viewpoint than on criticism. Robin Morgans essays, collected in Going Too Far (1978), are illustrious examples of cultural feminism. The situation of women in society remained a special theme for many North American novelists through the seventies and the eighties: Marilyn Frenchs The Womens Room (1977) is a study of a married woman who becomes too independent; Play It as It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion; Fear of Flying (1973) Erica Jong, about a woman claiming her independence; Sue Millers The Good Mother (1986), depicts a woman who loses custody of her daughter after a divorce; etc. The race factor The struggle of the white feminists for their cause had been a long and hard one, however, black women found themselves in an even harder position. In the same time they fought two battles racism and sexism. They were also quite alone in their efforts, since, on one side, black males were their allies in the fight for the rights of AfroAmericans but were the dominant sex who generally did not care about or even discouraged feminism, and on the other, white women were their sisters in feminism, but were not involved in racial issues. Many black women, therefore, found it hard to accept white feminists and their call for unity and solidarity, because they believed that they did not care about the problem of racial discrimination. This very problem occurs in Toni Cade Bambaras The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970). She writes:I don't know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns and methods are the same. This suspicion related to white womens ideas put some black women off feminism completely, but others, pursued the ideas the black way and formed unions like the National Black Feminist Organization. Yet, on particular issues, African American feminists and white feminists worked effectively together. Concerning the black feminist authors, then, it is easy to understand the most frequent themes in their works. Sojourner Truth (Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 1850), Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861) and Harriet Wilson (Our Nig, 1859), as the earliest Afro-American authors, speak of the slavery they were born into and of sexual exploitation by their white masters. Truth, especially, advocated womens suffrage being quite influenced by Stanton, but was also a prominent abolitionist.

Figure 4 Sojourner Truth

In the twentieth century, authors like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison dealt with the inherited themes of race and gender. This is perhaps most tangible in Walkers Color Purple (1982), which, typically for Walker, portrays the life of a poor, oppressed African American woman in the early 1900s.

Figure 5 Alice Walker

The Future of Feminism A lot has changed since the 1960s and women today are certainly beneficent of the feminist movements undertakings. Many women are satisfied with concentrating on the building of a career. Nevertheless, others feel that job responsibilities together with home-making present too large a burden and do not want to choose between those two. Post-feminists have appeared as those who are critical of the classic beliefs of feminism and have taken it as a crucial issue to find a balance between work and family. Traditional feminists have also experienced the need for this very thing. Their solutions to this problem are quite different. According to post-feminists, women should shift their priorities from careers to family. Basically, they suggest that women should marry and bear children early in life, stay home to raise their children, and then pursue a career when they are older. Feminists, on the other hand, argue against the notion that women should go back to traditional gender roles. For that reason, they view the problems women experience in trying to balance work and family responsibilities as a sure sign that changes within the workplace and the home must take place. Betty Friedan pointed out that two primary challenges facing contemporary feminism are to reorganize the workplace to create more flexibility for parents, and to amend the assumption that women are those who have to bear more of the child-rearing and domestic responsibilities than men. These opposing viewpoints create new questions to consider. Is feminism outdated? Should it be completely replaced by a new ideology more suitable for the twenty-first century? Or, it should simply adapt to new problems and provide new goals. Whatever the answer concerning feminism, a satisfying end to womens issues and problems is not yet foreseeable.