The literature available on this movement is insurmountable. It is a very daunting task to undertake a rough review of the movement and its basic theoretical assumptions. There are scores of names of leading feminist theorists that keep popping up in front of any reader who attempts to read through the literature available. To show the magnitude of the task, here is a sweeping list of few names that have contributed to the movement in various ways: Dale Spender, Dorothy Richardson, Elaine Showalter, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Helen Cixous, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Jane Gallop, Jane Marcus, Josette Feral, Judith Fetterley, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell, Kate Millett, Luce Irigaray, Marcia Holly, Marry Ellmann, Mary Jacobus, Michel Barrett, Monique Wittig, Nathalie Sarrault, Robin Lakoff, Sandra M. Gilbert, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Gubar, Susan Robin Suleiman, Toril Moi, Virginia Wolf, Xaviere Gauthier.

    Though belonging to the same movement, these intellectuals’ opinions and discourses are not by necessity compatible with each other’s. On the contrary, most of them held opposing positions to each other. As a hint about the diversity of the feminist movement, each of the women mentioned above entrenched herself behind an already existing theoretical position or more such as Bourgeois, Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian, Deconstructive, Structuralist, etc. It does not matter here; who among the feminists listed says what in opposition to whom. A short introduction of this caliber aims at reviewing the movement as a whole focusing attention on its basic tenets that will enable the student to produce a relatively well-informed criticism guided by these theoretical assumptions.

    As a matter of fact, I am wary about using the term theory to refer to the huge body of literature on feminism. I have been using the term movement instead, because, on the one hand, there is no single defined theory to talk about, as I hinted before; and on the other hand, some feminists contested that the rubric “theory” is masculine by nature, and should not be even associated with feminism. Quite a radical point; is not it?

A Brief Historical Overview from Aristotle to the Present

    All through the so-called phallocentric, patriarchal history women have been made to believe that they are second to man. Long before the advent of Christianity, Aristotle asserts that women are imperfect creatures. In Greek mythology, phallocentric by default, evil, jealousy, irrational anger (the Furies), irrationality, and passion are all associated with the female. Power, might, reason and wisdom are associated with the male of the species. Remember names like Zeus, Apollo, Aries, Vulcan, etc. Even in the scope literature, women are not deemed good enough to be tragic heroines in the Aristotelian sense.

    The advent of Judo-Christian religions complicates things further for the female. Firstly, she is not god’s first choice in the story of the creation of the human race. She is made of one of Adam’s ribs as an accessory for him. Secondly, she finds herself suddenly responsible for man’s fall from heaven. Add to all this Saint Thomas Aquinas’s assertions that the woman is an imperfect man with a very negative and passive nature.

    So, all through this period, the culture that emerged has brain washed men and women into believing that women, in essence, are inferior to men. History tells us how women are always treated as commodities. Firstly, they are considered as mere wombs. This is to say, they are mere devices used to maintain the race. Secondly, in case of wars and tribal invasions, women are the first to capture. They are raped, killed, or kept as slaves and concubines. This is evident in world history and documented in the fictitious and factual narratives from Homer’s Odyssey through to the recent Balkan wars in the ex-republic of Yugoslavia.

    Building on all this dim history, generations of feminists incite women against this patriarchal order, or consciousness. They draw distinct lines among the main elements that go into the composition of a feminist being and identity. At the beginning, there is the FEMALE who is a biological product of nature or being. Next, appears the FEMININE, who is a combination of culturally and socially mediated person. And lastly, there is the FEMINIST, who is heavily grounded in ideology, determined at undermining male supremacy.

    To clarify this idea further, the term “female” refers to the biological construct found in nature. Thus, the female is a product of nature, the same way the man is. This product of nature is not left unmediated. The subsequent cultures that emerged and have been dominated by male-oriented societies have defined roles for the natural product to fit in. By adhering to these roles, the female becomes both female and “feminine.” Examples on such roles is that a woman should be beautiful, gentle, soft, weak, knows how to dance, sing, serve at home, please the husband, serve her parents, maintain a low profile in public, etc. Feminists, on the other hand, are those who fight hard to show that these cultural roles and qualities are not intrinsic to the actual natural product called “female, by exposing the falsity of the whole patriarchal history.

    According to some feminists, including Virginia Wolf, who paved the ground for the coming of the so-called French feminists, women were not able to write the way men did because they lacked the social, economic amenity men have. Thus, like many feminist writers, Wolf put the blame on the staggering social conditions women find themselves in.

The Feminist Movement     Categorically speaking, one can roughly place the movement in four basic categories. Read More...