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.

In the Beginning…

      Women in literature is a relatively new concept. A hundred years ago, Women weren’t in the things that we read in a classroom and it was a brand new concept to incorporate them into the literature we are so commonly reading today. To look at Women and the struggles that they went through, we must start where we can pinpoint a start in the rise of women in literature.

    

        During the first part of the 18th century, women’s writing was scarce, their writing was very private mostly consisting of letters, diaries, journals, and religious tracts, while most of women’s works were mainly published only in newspapers. After the revolutionary war, women’s education was drastically reformed and women were becoming more confident in their writing. Women writers were not very common in this era, but women like Mercy Otis Warren (first American women playwright), Phillis Wheatly (first African American women poet), Judith Sargent Murray (first feminist women of letters) and Susan Rowson (the first American Novelist) introduced the idea of women writing as a profession and encouraged women to be the best they can be. These four women shaped the way women were viewed in a literary audience. In this era, these writers encouraged young women to be educated and “to aspire” and to have ambition to succeed with “avidity application” and study and become the best you can be. And this is where it all began.

Mercy Otis Warren

Phillis Wheatly

Judith Sargent Murray

      

   

Susan Rowson

              To look at the how women effected literature, we must first look at the struggles that women went through to be recognized and be strong at a group. The events and the movement throughout women in history can be separated into three different parts called waves. These waves represent events that occurred in the past centuries that have shaped how women had progressed throughout the decades and fought for equal rights. In the first wave from the late 1700s and the early 1900s, women writers focused on the inequalities of the sexes. During this time activists like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the women's suffrage movement, which leads to National Universal Suffrage in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment

Susan B Anthony

Victoria Woodhull

       

             The second wave feminism was in the early 1960s-late 1970s it focused on the building on more equal working conditions necessary in America during World War II, movements such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist political activism. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for the dissemination of feminist theories put forth action with the American Civil Rights movement.

 

Simone de Beauvoir

       

Elaine Showalter

Lastly the third wave feminism (early 1990s-present): resisting the perceived essentialist ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of second wave feminism. Third wave feminism borrows from post-structural and contemporary gender and race theories to expand on marginalized populations' experiences. Writers like Alice Walker work to "...reconcile feminism with the concerns of the black community and the survival and wholeness of her people, men and women both, and for the promotion of dialog and community as well as for the valorization of women and of all the varieties of work women perform". Women’s writing has not only shaped the way that America has come to have equality with all genders and races, but it changed the way women were viewed and have contributed many great works in literature and changed the way readers read and understand literature. 

Alice Walker

The First of Many.

My name is Becca and I am an English major. I am looking for, researching, and trying to find out more about women in literature. As a college student, I am learning to analyze things using different lenses. When learning about feminist criticism I was very intrigued and wanted to learn more, so when I had to choose a topic for my English paper I wanted to explore not only feminist criticism, but women in literature in general. In this blog, I want to look at the journey that women have taken in order to be where they are today and what lies in the future of women writing.
I want to look at specific feminist authors, popular literary works that have underlying feminist tones, and eventually look at different criticisms that came from feminist criticism, such as queer theory, gay and lesbian criticism, African American criticism, and lastly, gender criticism, to name a few. In the research we will find the impact that women had on literature and initially had on what we read and how we read our literature.