To initiate the discussion and better understanding let’s start it with some sayings of philosophers.
Silence gives the proper grace to women.
(Sophocles)
Woman is really an imperfect…an
accidental being…a botched male. (Thomas Aquinas)
Frailty thy name is woman. (Shakespeare)
Most women have no character at all.
(Alexander Pope)
A glance at these sayings itself defines feminism, its motives, and its goals. Feminism is a socio-political movement that started around the 19th century with a clear mission to equate women in all respects with men. Feminist chief proponents believe that all people, women, and men are politically, socially, and economically equal.
Recently Obama’s secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke out that ‘it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights. The epoch of history clearly reflects that there was a patriarchal or male-dominant society in terms of every respect from economy to literature. Society revolves around the notion of phallocentrism, (a belief that identifies the phallus as the source of the power in culture and literature with its accompanying male-dominated patriarchal assumptions).
Different
voices were raised with time to balance gender equality and restore and inclusion
of female writers’ work in the literary canon. Some of the chief early
proponents were Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Kate Millett. Feminism
has different phases with respect to geographies like American, British, and
French, and chronicle phases like feminine, feminist, and female.
Basically,
it is the West and its philosophers who underrated and underestimated females
consciously or unconsciously.
Politically
feminist voices for reproductive rights, domestic violence, fairness, social
justice, and workplace concerns including family medical leave, equal pay, and
sexual harassment and discrimination are just a few of the concerns that
feminist political activists are fighting for.
Let’s
throw light on the work of some of the early feminist critics.
Virginia
Woolf
Due
to her work ‘A Room of One’s Own’ she remembers the early founder of
this theory/movement. She opposed the prevailing long-held ideas of male
domination. She says, “Male define what it means to be female and determine who
controls the political, economic, social, and literary structures.”
She
strengthens her point of view that Shakespeare’s sister is equally as gifted as
he but she was a female. Woolf advocates that a female must portray herself
according to what she is, not to the world of men.
Simone
de Beauvoir
French
feminist Beauvoir did work for the rights of women through her writing. She
asserts that western society in general is patriarchal, and controlled by
males. A male considers a female as an inferior and imperfect human, by
depriving the basic rights of expression and participation in outside societal
matters. Women, according to Beauvoir, must regard themselves as independent
creatures. Women must resist the cultural idea that males are the subject or
absolute, while women are the opposite.
Elaine
Showalter
She
was one of the most famous critics and proponents of feminism. She believes
that female writers were deliberately excluded from the literary canon by
males. She says it should be ceased. Showalter proposed different models as well.
Biological model, linguistic model, and cultural model. All the models touch on the different aspects of females and their relationship
with the male-dominated society.
