Feminism In Showalter's Literature

729 Words3 Pages

The reason behind the attempts at recovery of women’s past was also to have an impact within academic institutions. It is noteworthy that many activists in the movement were also students, lecturers, and researchers who began to bring their feminist concerns into their academic work. In fact, the academic world had itself become an arena of struggle for feminists. Women were still a tiny minority of those with secure academic posts and feminists were marginal, powerless and youthful group – but they were gifted with political skills deriving from their activism. They began to organise to challenge the existing male-dominated curriculum, campaigning primarily on two fronts. Within established disciplines, women were caucusing and sharing …show more content…

Reflecting on Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Showalter faces the similar issue of women’s exclusion from the academy. Charting a long history of literary women, she drives attention to undervalued nineteenth-century writers such as Sarah Grand, George Egerton. Rather than defining a ‘universal’ woman’s text, Showalter preferred to identify a female ‘subculture’ which created those texts. She argues that, with the reemergence of a Women’s Liberation Movement in England and in America around 1960s and 1970s, scholarship generated by contemporary feminist movement has led to an increase in sensitivity to the problems of sexual bias or projection in literary history. And one of the most significant contributions has been the unearthing and reinterpretation of “lost” works by women writers, and the documentation of their lives and careers. She, in the book therefore, undertakes a similar task, which according to her was impossible in the past due to the overemphasis on the elite groups of women writers who were valorized. She points out that a similar need was recognized by Virginia …show more content…

It is an international movement, apart from but hardly subordinate to the mainstream: an undercurrent, rapid and powerful. She emphasizes that women have constituted a subculture within the framework of a larger society. They have been unified by values, conventions, experiences and behaviours impinging on each individual. Like the male literary tradition, this tradition is also marked by influences, borrowings, and affinities. But due to the selection of few elite representatives, women writers have been forced to rediscover the past a new, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex. This perpetual disruption has led to a sense of alienation among them and prevented them from a sense of collective identity. Furthermore, she emphasizes social and economic condition of women showing a certain discomfort with the idea of a ‘female imagination’, which, for her, reiterates the familiar stereotypes further suggesting permanence, a deep, basic and inevitable difference between male and female ways of perceiving the world. The female literary tradition instead, she argues, is result of the ‘still-evolving relationships between women writers and their society’. Based on this evolutionary assumptions, she divides the female literary tradition into three main phases, namely, Feminine from 1840s to 1880s, Feminist from 1880s to 1920s and finally female from 1920 onwards, though

Open Document