Focusing the Lens of Feminist Criticism

          When looking at a text through a specific criticism, it’s like taking a lens and looking at a text through it. You can change your lens to different criticisms to look at different texts. As a reader when you look at a particular literary work through a criticism lense, a reader must know what the characteristics of that lense are and how to look at the text through it. The difference between feminism within writing and feminist criticism is that feminism in writing is a literary work written by an author who’s main objective is to look at the suppression of women’s rights and their daily struggles and looking at a text through feminist Criticism is taking any literary piece and looking at it through the common themes of women like their roles in society, how the author view women within their story. Typical questions when looking at a text through feminist criticism is "How do men and women differ?", "What is different about female heroines?" and "Why are these characters important in literary history?" These questions illustrate how to analyze a text through the lens of feminist criticism.

            Feminist criticism came about in the 1960’s and 1970’s within the third wave of feminism when women were changing the literary canon and looking at what we read and how we read it and started changing the way we look at literature. Feminist criticism is a relatively new way of looking at a text that radically changed the way readers analyze literature. Feminist criticism is defined as a distinctive and concerted approach to literature. This criticism is unique because women’s writing over the decades has been suppressed and many of the most popular works were written by men and women’s writing was done secretly in journals and only published through newspapers. Women’s writing has always been taken for granted that the representation reader, writer, and critic of Western literature is male, feminist criticism has shown that women readers and critics bring different perceptions and expectation to their literary experience, and has insisted that women have also told the important stories of our culture.