What is Feminism?

 The term ‘feminism’ was derived from the Latin word ‘Femina’ meaning ‘woman’ and
was first used with regard to the issues of equality and Women’s Rights Movement.
 Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share
a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social
equality of sexes.
 This includes seeking to establish educational and professional opportunities for women
that are equal to those for men.
 Feminism is neither a fad nor a logical extension of the civil rights movement, but the
protest against the legal, economic and social restrictions on the basic rights of women
which have existed throughout history and in all Civilizations.

Feminism in Literature

Essentially, feminist literature is concerned with the marginalization of women within

society. Often time’s literature is not considered feminist, but can be looked at through a feminist
lens. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays
the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological
forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have
changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the
canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.

Feminist Approach

This approach “examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of
literary works.” Originally an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism today includes a
number of approaches. The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist and takes as a central
precept that the patriarchal attitudes that have dominated western thought have resulted,
consciously or unconsciously, in literature “full of unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.”

Feminist approach attempts to correct this imbalance by analyzing and combating such
attitudes—by questioning. Other goals of feminist critics include “analyzing how sexual identity
influences the reader of a text” and “examine how the images of men and women in imaginative
literature reflect or reject the social forces that have historically kept the sexes from achieving
total equality.”

Feminist Approach in Literature is the literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of
feminism,feminist theory and/or feminist politics. The basic methods of feminist literary
criticism include:

 Identifying with female characters: By examining the way female characters are
defined, critics challenge the male-centered outlook of authors. Feminist literary criticism
 suggests that women in literature have been historically presented as objects seen from a
male perspective.

 Re-evaluating literature and the world in which literature is read: By revisiting the
classic literature, the critic can question whether society has predominantly valued male
authors and their literary works because it has valued males more than females.

A feminist approach resists traditional assumptions while reading a text. In addition to

challenging assumptions which were thought to be universal, feminist literary criticism actively
supports including women's knowledge in literature and valuing women's experiences.

Embodying or Undercutting Stereotypes

Feminist Approach in Literature recognizes that literature both reflects and shapes
stereotypes and other cultural assumptions. Thus, Feminist Approach in Literature examines how
works of literature embody patriarchal attitudes or undercut them, sometimes both happening
within the same work.

Tools of the Feminist Literary Critic

Feminist Approach in Literature may bring in tools from other critical disciplines, such as
historical analysis, psychology, linguistics, sociological analysis, economic analysis, for
instance. Feminist criticism may also look at how factors including race, sexuality, physical
ability, and class are also involved.

Feminist Approach in Literature may use any of the following methods:

 Deconstructing the way that women are described, especially if the author is male. This
applies to both fictional characters in novels, stories, and plays, and women characters in
nonfiction including biography and history.
 Deconstructing how one's own gender influences how one reads and interprets a text, and
which characters and how the reader identifies depending on the reader's gender.
 Deconstructing how women auto biographers and biographers of women treat their
subjects, and how biographers treat women who are secondary to the main subject.
 Describing relationships between the literary text and ideas about power and sexuality
and gender.
 Critique of patriarchal or woman-marginalizing language, such as a "universal" use of the
masculine pronouns "he" and "him."
 Noticing and unpacking differences in how men and women write: a style, for instance,
where women use more reflexive language and men use more direct language (example:
"she let herself in" vs. "he opened the door").
  Reclaiming women writers who are little known or have been marginalized or
undervalued, sometimes referred to as expanding or criticizing the canon—the usual list
of "important" authors and works.
 Reclaiming the 'female voice' as a valuable contribution to literature, even if formerly
marginalized or ignored.
 Analyzing multiple works in a genre as an overview of a feminist approach to that genre
 Analyzing multiple works by a single author (often female).
 Examining how relationships between men and women and those assuming male and
female roles are depicted in the text, including power relations.
 Examining the text to find ways in which patriarchy is resisted or could have been
resisted

Gynocriticism

Feminist literary criticism is distinguished from gynocriticism because feminist literary criticism
may also analyze and deconstruct literary works of men. American literary critic Elaine
Showalter coined the term gynocritics in her 1979 essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics.”

It refers to the literary study of women as writers. It is a critical practice exploring and recording
female creativity. Gynocriticism attempts to understand women’s writing as a fundamental part
of female reality. Some critics now use “gynocriticism” to refer to the practice and “gynocritics”
to refer to the practitioners.

Gynocriticism wanted to establish a literary tradition of women without incorporating male

authors. Showalter felt that feminist criticism still worked within male assumptions, while
gynocriticism would begin a new phase of women’s self-discovery.

Proponents Who Developed and Used the Approach

First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women

In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or
marginalization of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Mary
Ellmann's Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969).

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and passionate advocate of educational, and social
equality for women. Her literary work, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, is one of the
earliest works of feminism. It is her response to the educational and political theorists of the
eighteenth century who wanted to deny women an education. Published in 1792, she argued that
women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society and then
proceeds to redefine that position, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they
educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere
wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage,
Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as
men.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is considered one of the famous and remarkable modernist literary writers of the
20th century and a symbolic figure of the feminist movement. Her essay, “A Room of One’s Own’
published in 1929, is a keywork of feminist literary criticism. Written after she delivered two
lectures on the topic of ‘women and fiction’ at Cambridge University in 1928, Woolf’s essay
examines the educational, social, and financial disadvantages women have faced through history.
In her essay, she builds the argument that literature and history is a male construct that has
traditionally marginalized women. Woolf refutes the widely held assumption that women are
inferior writers, or inferior subjects, instead locating their silence in their material and social
circumstances.

 Mary Ellmann

Mary Ellmann was an American writer and literary critic. Ellmann is particularly noted for
her book of essays, Thinking About Women (1968), which discusses the evolution of the
representation of femininity in British and American literature, exhibiting sexual analogies
and stereotypes from the texts and contrasting criticism by male and female authors.

 Kate Millet

Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She
has been described as "a seminal influence on first-wave feminism", and is best known for
her book Sexual Politics (1970), which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia
University. The feminist, human rights, peace, civil rights, and anti-psychiatry movements
were some of Millett's principal causes. Her books were motivated by her activism, such as
woman's rights and mental health reform, and several were autobiographical memoirs that
explored her sexuality, mental health, and relationships.

Second Wave Feminism: Gynocriticism

Elaine Showalter pioneered Gynocriticism with her book, A Literature of Their Own (1977).
Gynocriticism involves three major aspects. The first is the examination of female writers and
their place in literary history. The second is the consideration of the treatment of female
characters in books by both male and female writers. The third and most important aspect of
Gynocriticism is the discovery and exploration of a canon of literature written by women;
Gynocriticism seeks to appropriate a female literary tradition.

 Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social
issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia,
developing the concept and practice of Gynocriticism, a term describing the study of "women
as writers". Best known in academic and popular cultural fields, she has written and edited
numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary
criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work
on illnesses.

 Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the
major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century.
Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970),
made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist
movement, the book offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such
as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women are forced to assume submissive roles in
society to fulfill male fantasies of what being a woman entails.

 Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan, christened Bettye Naomi Goldstein, was an American writer, activist and
feminist. She was one of the leading figures in the women’s movement in the United States.
She wrote “The Feminist Mystique”, a founding text of modern feminism published in 1963,
that was ‘widely regarded as one of most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century’,
according to The New York Times. In the book, she hypothesizes that women are victims of
a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through
their husbands and children. Such a system causes women to completely lose their identity in
that of their family.

 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are both distinguished Professor Emerita of English at
the University of California and Indiana University. One of their works that have been
influential in American feminist criticism was “The Madwoman in the Attic” published in
1979. In the book, they are calling for a recognition that male writers have too long
stereotyped as either “the angel in the house” (the woman who lives to care for her husband)
and “the madwoman in the attic,” the woman who chooses not to be an angel. They call for
 writing by women, even a woman s sentence, that will more accurately capture the
complexity of women's lives and nature.

Popular Literature Samples of the Feminist Approach

The Madwoman in the Attic

By: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Published in 1979

The Madwoman In the Attic addresses the struggle that nineteenth century women writers
underwent in order to determine their identities as writers. It analyzes the portrayal of women’s
identity in female authors’ works of fiction and poetry. The book is notable for the incisiveness
and for the clarity with which it recognizes a single theme in women’s literature and for the
encyclopedic extensiveness of information that it contains. The authors faced the stereotypical
images of women from male writers' tendencies to categorize female characters as either pure,
angelic women or rebellious, unkempt madwomen. They also explore the way women were
inhibited in their writing by what they called the Anxiety of Authorship, which is the lack of
legitimating role-models for the nineteenth-century woman writer.

Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism

By: Bell Hooks

Published in 1981

Ain’t I a Woman? Tackles the effects of racism and sexism on black women as well as the civil
rights and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970’s. Hooks examined how black women,
from the seventeenth century to the present day, were and are oppressed by both white and black
men and by white women. She argues that the convergence of sexism and racism during slavery
contributed to black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in
American society. She argues that the stereotypes that were set during slavery still affect black
women today and that slavery allowed white society to stereotype white women as the pure
goddess virgin and move black women to the seductive whore stereotype thus justifying the
devaluation of black femininity and rape of black women. The book also discusses the work
black women have been forced to perform, either in slavery or in a discriminatory workplace,
that would be non-gender conforming for white women has been used against black women as a
proof of their emasculating behavior. Meanwhile, Hooks says, the "feminist movement", a
largely white middle and upper class affair, did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white
women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism.
Men Explain Things to Me

By: Rebecca Solnit

Published in 2014

The book is a collection of seven essays. The essay of this book focuses entirely on the silencing
of women, specifically the idea that men seemingly believe that no matter what a woman says, a
man always knows better. This phenomenon would later come to be called mansplaining, but in
this essay Solnit describes how the silencing of female voices is an infringement on female
liberty and is in fact an abuse of power. With an absence of credibility to female voices in the
male mind issues like violent death, abuse, harassment, and rape are often discounted. In this
way, she argues, female silencing is a dangerous phenomenon.

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

By: Janet Mock

Published in 2014

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More is a memoir and
the debut book by an American writer and transgender activist. With unflinching honesty and
moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and
trans in America, offering listeners accessible language while imparting vital insight about the
unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though
undoubtedly an account of one woman's quest for self at all costs, Redefining Realness is a
powerful vision of possibility and self-realization, pushing us all toward greater acceptance of
one another - and of ourselves - showing as never before how to be unapologetic and real.

Sources:

Britannica, T. E. (2018, June 22). Elaine Showalter. Retrieved from

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elaine-Showalter

Feminist Approaches to Literature. (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://writersinspire.org/content/feminist-approaches-literature

"The Madwoman in the Attic - Summary" Society and Self, Critical Representations in
Literature Ed. David Peck. eNotes.com, Inc. 1997 eNotes.com 20 Nov, 2018
http://www.enotes.com/topics/madwoman-attic#summary-the-work

The Madwoman in the Attic. (2018, July 10). Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madwoman_in_the_Attic

Ain't I a Woman? (book). (2018, September 01). Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_I_a_Woman?_(book)
https://www.thoughtco.com/feminist-literary-criticism-3528960

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_literary_criticism

https://englishsummary.com/feminism-literature/

https://prezi.com/qh5v053rebvl/the-feminist-approach-to-literature/