Feminism Lecture Notes PDF

1/22/2025 1 Page Lecture 2 Feminism Objectives for this lesson: Students will be able to:  Understand the origin of Feminism and its historical development.  Identify Feminism’s assumptions and methodology.  1/22/2025 2 Page...

1/22/2025 1 Page Lecture 2 Feminism Objectives for this lesson: Students will be able to:  Understand the origin of Feminism and its historical development.  Identify Feminism’s assumptions and methodology.  1/22/2025 2 Page INTRODUCTION & HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Feminism is an approach to textual analysis that examines ways in which literature reinforces or undermines the oppression of women economically, socially, politically, and psychologically. Feminists assert that Western societies are patriarchal, being controlled by men. Patriarchy is by definition sexist as it promotes the belief that women are innately inferior to men. There is a difference between sex and gender: o Sex is biologically determined as female or male. o Gender is culturally determined as feminine or masculine. They believe that the inferior position long occupied by women in a patriarchal society has been culturally, not biologically, produced. By not giving voice and value to women’s opinions, responses, and writings, men have therefore suppressed the female. Men defined what it means to be feminine, and thereby de-voiced, devalued, and trivialized what it means to be a woman. Traditional gender roles have been used successfully to justify inequities such as the exclusion of women from equal access to leadership and decision-making positions and paying men higher wages than women for doing the same job. A goal of feminism is to change the degrading views of women so that all women will realize that they are a valuable person possessing the same privileges and rights as every man.  1/22/2025 3 Page Through feminist movement women begin to challenge the concept of male superiority and work toward creating equality between the sexes by: o debunking stereotypical images of women found throughout the literary canon o rediscovering and publishing texts written by females o rereading the canonised works of male authors from a woman’s point of view o engaging in the discussion of literary theory. Men have made women the nonsignificant Other. Feminist literary theory aims to make people understand the classical text which is based on the male discourse through the visual angle of female, which often reveals the patriarchal ideology of the society it exists in. Feminism has three waves: the first wave was in the late 19th early 20th century and it focused on the political and economic equality between men and women and their right to vote and own property, the second wave in the 60s focused on the liberation and equality of women in the personal (domestic) and social spheres, the third wave in the 1990s was a continuation of the second wave but added individualism and identity to their principles in an attempt to fix the shortcomings of the second wave. Present day feminism finds its beginnings in the women’s’ liberation movement in the 60s, however there are women who laid the foundation for feminist criticism like Mary Wollstonecraft in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) where she responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who did not believe women should receive a rational education (i.e women should be treated as human beings). Then in the early 20th century Virginia Woolf wrote her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own (1919) which focused on the need for financial and spatial independence of women in order to thrive intellectually like men. Wolf’s work is particularly  1/22/2025 4 Page important to us as literary critics because she laid the foundation for present- day feminist criticism in her influential work. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), is the “foundational work of 20th century feminism” and is often regarded as the starting point of second-wave feminism. In this work the author discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Beauvoir declares that French society (and Western societies in general) are patriarchal, controlled by males and that it is women’s job to define who they are not men. Kate Millett book Sexual Politics (1970) is said to be "the first book of academic feminist literary criticism" where she follows the writings of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and how they view and discuss sex in a patriarchal and sexist way. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) chronicles what she believes to be the three historical phases of evolution in female writing: o The feminine phase:  Female authors accepted the prevailing social constructs of their day on the role and the definition of women.  They wrote under male pseudonyms. o The feminist phase:  Female authors dramatized the predicament of scorned women.  These authors depicted the harsh and often cruel treatment of female characters as a kind of protest. o The female phase:  Women reject the imitation prominent during the feminine phase and the protest that dominated the feminist phase.  Feminist critics uncover the misogyny (the male detestation and stereotypical view of women) in male texts.  1/22/2025 5 Page She coins the term Gynocriticism to refer to the process of constructing a female framework for analysis of women’s literature. She develops four models based on the study of female experience in texts hat any feminist critic must be aware of: o The biological model which emphasizes how the female body and how it is represented in a text. i.e literary images and tone of the female physical body. o The linguistic model: which  investigates the differences between how women and men use language.  asserts that women can create a language peculiar to their gender and in fact calls for the need for female discourse. o The psychoanalytic model: which  is based on an analysis of the female psyche.  emphasizes the fluidity of female writing as opposed to male rigidity and structure. o The cultural model which focusses on how the society in which female authors work and function shape women’s goals, responses, and points of view. ASSUMPTIONS:  Feminists possess a collective identity.  In this masculine world, the feminists declare that it is man who defines what it means to be human.  Feminist critics want to show humankind the errors in this way of thinking.  1/22/2025 6 Page  Women, they pronounce, are people in their own right; they are not incomplete or inferior men.  feminist critics believe that in order to free themselves from definitional oppression women must analyze and challenge the established literary canon that has helped shape the images of female inferiority and subordination ingrained in our culture. METHODOLOGY 1) Images of the female body as presented in a text: Such an anatomical study, for example, would highlight how various parts of the female body often become significant images in literary works. 2) Female language 3) The female psyche and its relationship to the writing process 4) Culture TECHNICAL VOCABULARY: