Feminist theories first emerged as early as 1794 in publications such as
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by
Mary Wollstonecraft, "The Changing Woman",
[10] "
Ain't I a Woman",
[11] "Speech after Arrest for Illegal Voting",
[12] and so on. "The Changing Woman" is a
Navajo Myth that gave credit to a woman who, in the end, populated the world.
[13] In 1851,
Sojourner Truth addressed women's rights issues through her publication, "Ain't I a Woman". Sojourner Truth addressed the issue of women having limited rights due to men's flawed perception of women. Truth argued that if a woman of color can perform tasks that were supposedly limited to men, then any woman of any color could perform those same tasks. After her arrest for illegally voting,
Susan B. Anthony gave a speech within court in which she addressed the issues of language within the constitution documented in her publication, "Speech after Arrest for Illegal voting" in 1872. Anthony questioned the authoritative principles of the constitution and its male-gendered language. She raised the question of why women are accountable to be punished under law but they cannot use the law for their own protection (women could not vote, own property, nor themselves in marriage). She also critiqued the constitution for its male-gendered language and questioned why women should have to abide by laws that do not specify women.
Nancy Cott makes a distinction between
modern feminism and its antecedents, particularly the
struggle for suffrage. In the
United States she places the turning point in the decades before and after women obtained the vote in 1920 (1910–1930). She argues that the prior
woman movement was primarily about woman as a
universal entity, whereas over this 20-year period it transformed itself into one primarily concerned with
social differentiation, attentive to
individuality and diversity. New issues dealt more with woman's condition as a
social construct,
gender identity, and relationships within and between genders. Politically this represented a shift from an ideological alignment comfortable with the right, to one more radically associated with the left.
[14]
Susan Kingsley Kent says that Freudian patriarchy was responsible for the diminished profile of feminism in the inter-war years,
[15] others such as
Juliet Mitchell consider this to be overly simplistic since
Freudian theory is not wholly incompatible with feminism.
[16] Some feminist scholarship shifted away from the need to establish the origins of
family, and towards analyzing the process of
patriarchy.
[17] In the immediate postwar period,
Simone de Beauvoir stood in opposition to an image of "the woman in the home". De Beauvoir provided an
existentialist dimension to feminism with the publication of
Le Deuxième Sexe (
The Second Sex) in 1949.
[18] As the title implies, the starting point is the implicit inferiority of women, and the first question de Beauvoir asks is "what is a woman"?
[19] A woman she realizes is always perceived of as the "other", "
she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her". In this book and her essay, "
Woman: Myth & Reality", de Beauvoir anticipates
Betty Friedan in seeking to demythologize the male concept of woman. "
A myth invented by men to confine women to their oppressed state. For women, it is not a question of asserting themselves as women, but of becoming full-scale human beings." "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", or as
Toril Moi puts it "a woman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied situation in the world, or in other words, through the way in which she makes something of what the world makes of her". Therefore, the woman must regain subject, to escape her defined role as "other", as a
Cartesian point of departure.
[20] In her examination of myth, she appears as one who does not accept any special privileges for women. Ironically, feminist philosophers have had to extract de Beauvoir herself from out of the shadow of
Jean-Paul Sartre to fully appreciate her.
[21] While more philosopher and novelist than activist, she did sign one of the
Mouvement de Libération des Femmes manifestos.
The resurgence of feminist activism in the late 1960s was accompanied by an emerging literature of concerns for the earth and spirituality, and
environmentalism. This, in turn, created an atmosphere conducive to reigniting the study of and debate on matricentricity, as a rejection of
determinism, such as
Adrienne Rich[22] and
Marilyn French[23] while for
socialist feminists like
Evelyn Reed,
[24] patriarchy held the properties of capitalism. Feminist psychologists, such as
Jean Baker Miller, sought to bring a feminist analysis to previous psychological theories, proving that "there was nothing wrong with women, but rather with the way modern culture viewed them".
[25]
Elaine Showalter describes the development of feminist theory as having a number of phases. The first she calls "feminist critique" – where the feminist reader examines the ideologies behind literary phenomena. The second Showalter calls
"Gynocritics" – where the "woman is producer of textual meaning" including "the
psychodynamics of female creativity;
linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career and
literary history". The last phase she calls "gender theory" – where the "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the
sex/gender system" are explored".
[26] This model has been criticized by
Toril Moi who sees it as an
essentialist and
deterministic model for female subjectivity. She also criticized it for not taking account of the situation for women outside the west.
[27] From the 1970s onwards, psychoanalytical ideas that have been arising in the field of
French feminism have gained a decisive influence on feminist theory. Feminist psychoanalysis deconstructed the phallic hypotheses regarding the Unconscious.
Julia Kristeva,
Bracha Ettinger and
Luce Irigaray developed specific notions concerning unconscious sexual difference, the feminine, and motherhood, with wide implications for film and literature analysis.
[28]
