Mary Wollstonecraft: The first feminist writer

While many aspects of feminist theory date back to ancient times, the
person widely acknowledged as the first feminist philosopher and author is
Mary Wollstonecraft, a former governess and lady’s maid (and the mother
of fellow author Mary Shelley) who became an innovative political and
social writer in England during the late 18th century. One of the first
women to openly publish under her own name, Wollstonecraft is most
famous for 1792’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a philosophical
text advocating for the education of women.

Alice Walker

Rather than identifying as a “feminist”, novelist Alice Walker (author of

The Color Purple) calls herself a “womanist”. “‘Womanist’ is to
‘feminist’ as ‘purple’ is to ‘lavender’,” Walker explains, meaning that
‘womanist’ takes a more inclusive approach to women’s rights, rather than
perpetuating only the model of feminism advocated by white women
during the 20th century and beyond. Walker embodies this ethos both in
her own life and through the sharply-drawn and profoundly moving female
characters she creates.

Bell hooks :Gloria Jean Watkins

Unlike Alice Walker, who dislikes the term “feminist” because of its
exclusionary implications, writer bell hooks embraces it, asserting that
“feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and
oppression,” and that anyone who believes in these principles can identify
as a feminist. hooks weaves her own personal life experiences into her
pieces, turning texts like All About Love: New Visions into candid,
revealing, and intensely thoughtful works.
Other imp works :

● Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism

Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism is a 1981 book by bell
hooks titled after Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech. hooks
examines the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights
movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. She
argues that the convergence of sexism and racism during slavery
contributed to Black women having the lowest status and worst conditions
of any group in American society.

● Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

● Talking Back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black. Between the Lines
● Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics
● Remembered Rapture

Oppositional gaze :

The "oppositional gaze", first coined by feminist, scholar and social

activist bell hooks in her 1992 essay collection Black Looks: Race and
Representation, is a type of looking relation that involves the political
rebellion and resistance against the repression of a black person's right to
look. As hooks states, white slave-owners would punish their slaves
regularly simply for looking at them. The oppositional gaze is a tool that
black people use to disrupt the power dynamic that white cinema uses to
perpetuate the Othering of blackness in media.The oppositional gaze
works by creating a representation of blackness in media by developing
independent black cinema. It works as black media by black creators for
specifically black audiences. hooks' essay is a work of feminist film theory
that criticizes both the male gaze through Michel Foucault's "relations of
power"and the prevalence of white feminism in feminist film theory.
Laura Mulvey :

British feminist film theorist

Mulvey incorporates the Freudian idea of phallocentrism into "Visual

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" written in 1973 and published in 1975
in the influential British film theory journal Screen. Using Freud's
thoughts, Mulvey insists on the idea that the images, characters, plots and
stories, and dialogues in films are inadvertently built on the ideals of
patriarchies, both within and beyond sexual contexts.Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema" helped to bring the term "male gaze" into film
criticism and eventually into common parlance. It was first used by the
English art critic John Berger in his seminal Ways of Seeing, a series of
films for the BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his
analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting.

To account for the fascination of Hollywood cinema, Mulvey employs the

concept of scopophilia. This concept was first introduced by Sigmund
Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and it refers to
the pleasure gained from looking as well as to the pleasure gained from
being looked at, two fundamental human drives in Freud’s view.

Simone de Beauvoir :

French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist

activist.

Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiographies, and

monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She was known for
her dissertation, The Second Sex (1949), a detailed analysis of women's
oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She was
also known for her novels, the most known including She Came to Stay
(1943) and The Mandarins (1954). Her most enduring contribution to
literature is her memoirs, notably the first volume, Mémoires d'une jeune
fille rangée.

The Second Sex, first published in 1949 in French as Le Deuxième Sexe,

turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a
feminist one : One is not born but becomes a woman" With this famous
phrase, Beauvoir first articulated what has come to be known as the
sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction between biological sex and
the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant
stereotypes. Beauvoir argues that "the fundamental source of women's
oppression is its [femininity's] historical and social construction as the
quintessential" Other.

Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined
as inferior to men. She pointed out that Aristotle argued women are
"female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities", while Thomas Aquinas
referred to women as "imperfect men" and the "incidental" being.

● The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

● Les Inséparables

Elaine Showalter :

American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues.
She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia,
developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the
study of "women as writers".

Duke University-based Toril Moi, in her 1985 book Sexual/Textual

Politics, described Showalter's as a limited, essentialist view of women.
Moi particularly criticized Showalter's ideas regarding the Female phase,
and its notions of a woman's singular autonomy and necessary search
inward for a female identity.

Showalter's Ph.D. thesis is called The Double Critical Standard: Criticism

of Women Writers in England, 1845–1880 (1969) and was later turned into
the book A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (1978), which contains a lengthy and much-discussed
chapter on Virginia Woolf.

Towards a Feminist Poetics (1979) traces the history of women's

literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:

1) 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".
2) 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.
3) 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".

Gynocritics
Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" to describe literary criticism based
in on a female perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives
of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:

In contrast to [an] 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.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture,

1830–1980 (1985) discusses hysteria, which was once known as the
"female malady" and according to Showalter, is called depression today.
Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about proper feminine
behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity
from the Victorian era to the present.

Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) outlines

a history of the sexes and the crises, themes, and problems associated with
the battle for sexual supremacy and identity.

In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997)

Showalter argues that hysteria, a medical condition traditionally seen as
feminine, has persisted for centuries and is now manifesting itself in
cultural phenomena in the forms of socially and medically accepted
maladies.

Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001)

surveys feminist icons since the 18th century, situated mostly in the US
and the United Kingdom. Showalter covers the contributions of
predominately intellectuals like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman and Camille Paglia.

Feminist Criticism in Wilderness : The essay by Elaine Showalter is an

attempt to study the field of literary criticism from the feminist point of
view. Showalter has tried to study the various aspects of feminist criticism
while also pointing out the aims it should be trying to attain, the problems
it faces and the reasons for these problems.The essay considers the fact
that like feminist creative writers, feminist critics also face certain
obstacles which have got highlighted after the rise of feminism. Showalter
has tried to analyze in detail the belief that feminist criticism is in
wilderness, which means, feminist critics are not capable enough to
produce coherent speculations.

Sylvia Plath :

As with Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath’s legacy is heavily influenced by the

tragic circumstances surrounding her death. However, Plath’s poetry and
novels count among the most emotionally-raw, exquisitely-phrased, and
unapologetically feminist in American literature. Educated at Smith and
Cambridge, Plath’s confessional poetry tackled dark subjects like anger,
physical pain, and mental illness, also a major motif of her most famous
novel, The Bell Jar. Her willingness to confront these topics from the
perspectives of female characters set her apart from her contemporaries
and make her a continuing literary force. Sylvia Plath, who suffered from
depression, also is known for her 1963 suicide. In 1982, she became the
first poet to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for her
"Collected Poems."

Kate Chopin : Author of short stories and novels, which included "The
Awakening" and other short stories such as "A Pair of Silk Stockings,"
and "The Story of an Hour," Chopin explored feminist themes in most of
her work.

Christine de Pizan : Author of "The Book of the City of Ladies," de

Pizan was a medieval writer whose work shed light on the lives of
medieval women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman : A feminist scholar whose best-known work

is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," about a
woman suffering from mental illness after being confined to a small room
by her husband.
Lorraine Hansberry : Lorraine Hansberry is an author and playwright
whose best-known work is the 1959 play "A Raisin in the Sun." It was
the first Broadway play by an African American woman to be produced on
Broadway.

Zora Neale Hurston : Writer whose best-known work is the controversial

1937 novel "their eyes were watching god".

Judith Butler : American philosopher and gender studies writer whose

work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of
third-wave feminism,queer theory and literary theory.

Butler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional
notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This
theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship.