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Feminist Literature and Criticism
By admin | December 6, 2008
First time appearance of feminism is considered on 1890s to 1920s in United States and Britain. This First Wave Feminism shouted about women’s right in voting, equal position in law, and equality in work fields. In the 1970s, Second Wave Feminism was occurred. One of its powers was the emergence of feminist literature.
Betty Freidan in her book (Feminine Mystique, 1963) marks the emergence of feminist literature by criticizing the condition where women were put in domestic realm as housewives, child bearers and husband’s servant. She thinks that it reduced women’s identity to sexual and social passivity.
Marry Ellman (Thinking about Women, 1965) initiated modern feminist literary criticism in United States. She criticized the stereotype of women in male-authored texts. Then, feminist literary criticism challenged traditional norms of English, initiated by Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969). She provided first modern principle of feminist literary criticism by embarking sexist assumption in male-authored texts. She also introduced the fundamental term ‘patriarchal’. Patriarchy was defined as a society system which put powers on the hands of men. It is considered as socially, politically, and economically gives privileges and power to men, which deliberately or not, caused women subordination. She also differed sex and gender. Sex was determined biologically, while gender was defined as a psychological concept refers to sexual identity required culturally.
Basically feminism movement tries to break the social political subordination of women. It is generally divided into two aspects. First, it identifies inequalities and injustice in the way women are treated in particular society and the disabilities and disadvantages resulted. Thus, the main aim of feminism is eliminating mistreatment and unequal treatment of women and understanding the different situation of women due to the different culture and stages of history. Second, it asserts value, and values of women, the human dignity and worth of each woman individually and also the different contributions that women make to their culture. Thus it pointing women contribution in field apparently dominated by men that were forgotten and submerged; one of them is literature.
Some scholars argue that feminist literary criticism was established as women’s form of protest toward discriminations in education and literature. Feminist literary criticism attempts to make a global redefinition, reinterpretation, and redeployment of previous literary theories –for instance Marxism, Structuralism, etc. – as an aspect of a revolutionary sexual politics. The previous texts containing such literary theories were considered as only taken account to men’s point of view. Furthermore, works focus on women were aimed for women readers only while works, which focus on men, were considered aimed for general audiences men and women. Thus feminist literary criticism is also trying to break the canonical and literary history, which did not give the same proportion towards women and men authors.
Topics: Religion & Philosophy >< Agama & Filsafat, Social & History >< Sosial & Sejarah | No Comments »
