Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up. Margaret Atwood, cited Women Know Everything! 2007
When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women. Sally Kempton
Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society. Rush Limbaugh, 35 Undeniable Truths of Life
I’m a huge supporter of women. What I’m not is a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women’s movement – especially when walking behind it. Rush Limbaugh, 3rd February 2010
My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures. Starhawk
Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. Elaine Showalter, Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness
In contrast to angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture. Elaine Showalter, Toward a Feminist Poetics
Yet when feminist criticism allows Ophelia to upstage Hamlet, it also brings to the foreground the issues in an onging theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation. Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’
‘Of all the characters in Hamlet’, Bridget Lyons has pointed out, ‘Ophelia is most persistently presented in terms of symbolic meanings ... Ophelia’s symbolic meanings, moreover, are specifically feminine’. ibid.
Clinically speaking, Ophelia’s behavior and appearance are characteristic of the malady of the Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melanchology, or erotomania ... On the stage, Ophelia’s madness was presented as the predictable outcome of erotomania. ibid.
These Pre-Raphaelite images were part of a new and intrinsic traffic between images of women and madness in late nineteenth-century literature, psychiatry, drama, and art. ibid.
On the Victorian stage, it was Ellen Terry, daring and unconventional in her own life, who led the way in acting Ophelia in feminist terms as a consistent psychological study in sexual intimidation, a girl terrified of her father, of her love, and of life itself. ibid.
In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter traces the history of women’s literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:
Feminine: In the Feminine phase (1840–1880), ‘women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female nature.’
Feminist: The Feminist phase (1880–1920) was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.
Female: The Female phase (1920–) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, ‘Women reject both imitation and protest – two forms of dependency – and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature.’ Wikipedia November 2013
Feminist critics seem particularly reluctant to define themselves to the uninitiated. There is a sense in which our sisterhood has become too powerful; as a school, our belief in ourself is so potent that we decline communication with the networks of power and respectability we say we want to change. Nina Auerbach, Feminist Criticism Reviewed
All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts; and, at the same time, her right to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant because she is, after all, asking new and different questions of it. In the process, she claims neither definitiveness nor structural completeness for her different readings and reading systems, but only their usefulness in recognizing the particular achievements of woman-as-author and their applicability in conscientiously decoding woman-as-sign. Annette Kolodny
Women have been left out of history not because of the evil conspiracies of men in general or male historians in particular, but because we have considered history only in male-centered terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have asked questions of history which are inappropriate to women. To rectify this, and to light up areas of historical darkness we must, for a time, focus on a woman-centered inquiry, considering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female experience over time and should include the development of feminist consciousness as an essential aspect of women’s past. This is the primary task of women’s history. The central question it raises is: What would history be like if it were seen through the eyes of women and ordered by values they define? Gerda Lerner, The Challenge of Women’s History
Feminism is the whole issue, political enfranchisement a branch issue, and the methods, militant or otherwise, are merely accidentals. The Freewoman, editorial 1911
The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. Susan B Anthony
If society will not admit of woman’s free development, then society must be remodelled. Elizabeth Blackwell
If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it. Harriet Beecher Stowe
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men. Gloria Steinem
Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie. Gloria Steinem
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. Gloria Steinem
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them – and for my daughters, too. Louise Brown
The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it. Eleanor Roosevelt
There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few. Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre
The great religious art of the world in every country is deeply involved with the female principle. (Art & Civilisation & Female) Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 7/13: Grandeur & Obedience, BBC 1969
Semitic legend describes Lilith as having a ‘base’ nature and a taste for biting Adam and drinking his blood. She had refused to submit to Adam’s authority ... Lilith has become a symbol to many feminists of the independent woman who refuses to submit to the control of men ... She is Death, and this cannot be ignored when working with her magically. Aleister Crowley, The Invocation of Lileth