Feminism

1. Feminism Theory and Principles

2. How society looked like… “What engages me is the way women are used as extensions of men, mirrors of men, devices for showing men off, devices for helping men get what they want, they are never there in their own right, or rarely. The world of Western contains no women. Sometimes, I think the world contains no women.” --Jane Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow”

3. How society looked like… • For centuries, men have suppressed women, keeping them away from the social, political, and economic centers arena. • Men allowed women little or no voice in the political, social, and economic issues of their society. • In effect, men have made women the ‘non-significant other’.

4. AND SO… • Feminists aspired to change the degrading view of women. And Now! • Woman is a valuable person possessing the same privileges and rights as every man. • Women must define themselves and assert their own voices in the arenas of politics, society, education, and arts. • By personally committing themselves to fostering such change, feminists hope to create a society in which the female voice is valued equality with the male.

5. Emergence and development of feminism • Some think that feminism found its beginning in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, but the true roots of feminist criticism lie in the early decades of the twentieth century. • In 1919, the early feminist scholar Virginia Woolf laid the foundations of feminist criticism in her work A Room of One’s Own. • She declaresthatmen have treated women, and continue to treat them, as inferiors.

6. Emergence and development of feminism • She believed that a female Shakespeare could achieve literary prominence in the twentieth century if women scholars, teachers, and critics would only pave the way. • With the publication of the French writer Simone de Beauvoir’ The Second Sex, feminist interests began to rise again. • She declares that the French and western societies are patriarchal—that is controlled only by men and women are objects whose existence is defined and interpreted by the male.

7. Emergence and development of feminism • So, women must break the bonds of the patriarchal society, and define herself as she wishes to become a significant human being and defy the male classification as the Other. • Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, feminist critics began to examine the traditional literary canon and discovered abundant evidence of male dominance and prejudice. • They also discovered almost only few female writers were canonized.

8. Gynocriticism • Gynocriticismstarted to emerge at the hands of Elaine Showalter. • Gynocriticism: the study of women as writers, which has four models concerning the nature of women’s writings that help answer some of the chief concerns of feminist criticism. • The models are (1) the biological model, (2) the linguistic model, (3) the psychoanalytic model, and (4) the cultural model.

9. Methodology • There are many feminist approaches to texts. • Yet, any female models of literary analysis offers at lease these essential four areas of investigation 1. Images of the female body as presented in a text. Are they just symbols of beauty and objects of pleasure? 2. Female language. Such a concern focuses on the difference between the female and male language. The female language must not be men-dominated.

10. Methodology 3. The female psyche and its relationship to the writing process. It means how the physical and psychological development evidences itself in the writing process through a variety of psychological stages. 4. Culture. By analyzing cultural forces such as the importance and value of women’s role in a given society, feminist critics investigate how society shapes women’s understanding of herself, her society, and her world.