What is Feminism?

Hello, I'm Dr Fiona Tolan.

I'm reading contemporary women's writing at Liverpool John Moores University,

and I'm going to be talking about feminist literary theory.

And we'll be thinking about how we can apply a theory that's

rooted in real world activism to a reading of literary texts.

And I'm going to start by asking, What is feminism?

I think it's actually really helpful to always start with the fundamentals,

and the first thing that's useful to keep in mind is that feminism is not a single,

coherent, unified theory.

I'd be cautious, for example, to say, feminists,

argue or feminist theory suggests, because my immediate response would be well,

which feminists, which element of feminism are we working with here?

It might be better, in fact, to think of it in terms of

feminism's

in the plural

feminist literary theory is a kind of umbrella

term under which are a number of debates,

discussions,

arguments and analyses that all circulate around the preoccupation

with gender and the notion of gender equality.

The second thing to keep in mind is that feminist history is

not a single straight trajectory towards the progress of gender equality.

We don't start over here with inequality and

move step by step to ever greater equality.

Instead, the history of feminism is one of progress that happens in fits and starts.

Generally, we refer to feminist history as occurring in waves.

That's a metaphor that speaks to the rise and fall of feminist discourse.

So the first wave of feminism is what we would associate with the suffragettes.

It starts around the mid 19th century and goes on until the early 20th century.

It's particularly concerned with rights the right for suffrage for the vote,

but also marriage, law and property and so on.

If you think about it.

Before the reforms that feminist championed when a woman married,

if she had any independent wealth, it automatically went to her husband.

If she was to leave an unhappy marriage,

that wealth and property would remain as the property of her husband,

and she would also relinquish the right to her Children,

who would also remain with her husband.

So if you think about a novel like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example,

the mother character, Mrs Bennett is very much a comic figure.

She's desperately trying to marry off her five daughters, and she's a figure of fun

in the text.

But actually, underlying that comedy is a very real fact of life,

that marriage is an incredibly important thing for women

to assure themselves a safe and secure marriage.

So whilst we're encouraged to laugh at Mrs Bennett,

there's also a thread of realism in that text about just how crucial marriage was.

Two women

first wave feminism had notable successes particularly, of course,

when suffrage was achieved for women.

That comes in in 1918.

Although it's only partial suffrage,

his own vote is only granted to women over

the age of 30 who meet certain property requirements.

And it isn't until 1928 that universal suffrage is granted

for men and women over the age of 21.

That first wave of feminism really gets disrupted by the two world wars,

and actually, the wars did a lot to disrupt gender roles.

Women, by necessity, left the home. They went to work.

They went to work for in support of the war effort.

So that was a time of real kind of gender progress in many ways, progress for women.

But then, in the post war period,

what we see is quite a conservative push to get women back into the home,

to give up those jobs for men returning from the war and also

just a conservative social movement to sort of shore up traditional domesticity.

So feminism and that period goes into a sort of fallow period.

If you like,

we can think through to the 19 fifties and

how we might associate that period with the fifties housewife

again. That's very much associated with what's happening at the time.

So it's a time of relevant affluence, particularly in America.

But it's also significant in Britain.

Um, there's a push for women to remain in the home,

to spend money on consumer goods for the home.

And just to reiterate that notion that

that feminist progress isn't straight and linear.

If you think about that fifties housewife figure in many ways,

that's much more regressive than the 19 twenties figure

of the flapper with her short hair and trousers,

so things aren't developing smoothly.

A second wave of feminism starts to rise around

the late 19 sixties like first wave feminism.

It's also very rights concerned.

Um, it's particularly influenced by the civil rights movement in America,

but notably,

there is also a significant preoccupation with a

theoretical development of feminism around this time.

Second wave feminism is influenced by philosophy by linguistics,

by sociology and psychology,

and it's perfectly possible, for example, to be a Marxist feminist.

Those those theories work very well together.

Second wave feminism is associated with activism,

particularly with protest marches.

So we might think, for example,

about Take back the night as a movement which is protesting

against sexual violence against women or the wages for housework movement,

which is an attempt to make visible the hidden labour

done by women in the home pro choice movements,

for example, or the famous 1970 protests against the Miss World Pageant.

It's very concerned with equality in marriage, in work in parenting, law,

health care and so on.

So that's very much part of a liberal feminist

tradition that's working towards gaining equal rights for women.

Second wave feminism also sees a growing interest in the role of culture

and an attempt to pick thick,

conscious and unconscious sexism that can be discovered at work in advertising,

for example, uh, even in fairy tales,

so there's an interest in the manner in which the

stories we tell right from the nursery actually imbue certain patriarchal

notions and ideas

and of particular interest, of course, for us

in literature and film.

A third wave of feminism starts to rise from around about the 19 nineties

that's associated in many ways with an attempt to address

what were seen as second wave feminism's blind spots,

particularly around race and class.

So this is a much more intersectional attempt at feminist thinking.

Third Way Feminism is also concerned with engaging with

some of the developments put forward by gender theory.

So we might think, for example, of the work done by Judith Butler,

her book Gender Trouble, coming out in the 19 nineties,

which is starting to argue very persuasively that gender is a cultural construct.

That's actually quite a problematic issue for

second wave feminists to engage with.

Because Second Wave feminism is very much around gender based oppression.

It's about unifying women as a coherent group to fight for equality.

So Third Way feminism starts to see more of

an engagement with the challenges posed by gender theory.

And where are we today?

Well, 1/4 wave of feminism is in discussion and debate as with all of these things,

that particular definitions are still under discussion.

The fourth wave, the moment that we're in now is particularly concerned,

perhaps with dealing with the issues thrown up by online digital technologies,

online media and so on.

It's particularly concerned with sexual violence,

so you might think about the me too movement.

For example,

it's engaging with issues thrown up by the fight for trans

rights and thinking through how feminism can engage with trans identities.

So it's much more again, like Third Way feminism.

It's much more prominently intersectional in its concerns.

Just a few issues for us to keep in mind.

First of all, the notion of waves is a metaphor. There are no hard and fast dates.

We can't say a particular wave rises in a certain year and ends in another year.

It's a way of thinking. Through these progress progresses and developments.

There's a danger that the waves metaphor can exclude women

and theorists who don't necessarily fit into that neat trajectory.

Women who are doing very important work but perhaps aren't doing

it during the second wave or the first wave of feminism,

and that relates to issues of feminist canon formation.

So, for example, there are working class women, women of colour,

doing incredibly important feminist theoretical

work that haven't necessarily been defined

as one of the key figures of second wave feminism.

For example,

one key text that we can see is somewhat falling between

the waves would be Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex,

which is published in 1949 and translated into English in the early 19 fifties.

This is an incredibly epic account in which both of our argues that there is a

long history of women being defined as the

second and therefore lesser of the two sexes.

And she traces a whole lineage of that idea across biology, law, religion, culture,

examining the way in which time and time again

women are reduced to a second and lesser sex.

We might see this book coming in the late 19 forties as something

of a bridge between the rights based concerns of the first wave of feminism

and the increasingly theoretical deconstructions

of ideas of femininity and gender

that start to circulate in the second wave of feminism.

In the second sex, Beauvoir arrives at a deceptively simple proposition

when she states one is not born but rather becomes a woman.

With that proposition,

she's suggesting that a woman and all the characteristics by which we

know that creature is not something that is created at birth.

We are not born with feminine characteristics of society, understands them.

But instead a woman is something constructed across time

and as a consequence of social and cultural pressures.

From that proposition, we get again very simple,

but actually very tangled questions such as What is a woman?

In its attempt to respond to such questions,

feminism becomes increasingly fractured and divided.

It also, however, increasingly evolves,

and it strengthens in the attempt to respond to those questions

and when such inquiries are applied to a study of literature.

What we get as a consequence is one of the most influential and

radical of the literary theories that shape

20th and 21st century literary criticism.