Feminist Theory
Modern Feminism began with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the
Rights of Women (1792), a work that criticizes stereotypes of women as
emotional and instinctive and argues that women should aspire to the
same rationality prized by men. A product of the Enlightenment, Woll-
stonecraft believed that women should enjoy social, legal, and intellec-
tual equality with men and drew for support from the work of progressive
social philosophers. Liberal intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and his
wife, Harriet Taylor, developed this argument, infusing it with the prin-
ciples of individualism that Mill had developed out of the utilitarian
philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. In 1866, Mill introduced a bill in parlia-
ment that called for an extension of the franchise to women and, in 1869,
published The Subjection of Women (1869). In that essay he argued that
women ought to enjoy equality in the social sphere, especially in mar-
riage, and condemned “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation”
(276): “All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the
belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men;
not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yield-
ing to the control of others” (271). Mill’s views, infl uenced strongly by
Taylor, marked a signif icant advance for women and provided the inspi-
ration for the New Woman movement at the end of the nineteenth- and
the early-twentieth-century suffragette movements committed to social
equality and individual freedom.
The fi rst phase or “wave” of modern Feminism, then, was concerned
primarily with the issue of suffrage (the right to vote). The dominant
fi gures at mid-nineteenth century in the US were Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony, whose political roots were in anti-slavery activ-
ism and, to a lesser degree, temperance movements. Stanton composed
the “Declaration of Sentiments” for the Seneca Falls women’s rights
convention in 1848, a watershed moment in US Feminism. Modeled on
the US Constitution, the Declaration asserts “that all men and women
are created equal,” and indicts a patriarchal culture for repressing the
rights of women: “The history of mankind is a history of repeated inju-
ries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her” (Sourcebook).
Together with Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton wrote the “Declaration of
95
Rights of the Women of the United States” for the Centennial celebration
in Washington in 1876. Though not off icially invited, Anthony read the
address. Anthony and Stanton later founded the National Woman Suf-
frage Association, which in 1890 merged with the more conservative
American Woman Suffrage Association. These organizations were
instrumental in securing suffrage for women – in 1920, with the Susan
B. Anthony Amendment – and served as the foundation for modern
Feminism.
subjectionNot all feminist movements involved political activism in this early
period. Literary Modernism produced foundational feminist writers,
including preeminently Virginia Woolf, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and
Djuna Barnes. Their work dramatized the potentially damaging effects
of the rationalism that Wollstonecraft and Mill proffered as the birth-
right of women and the social entitlement called for by the New Woman
movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. Woolf ’s Room
of One’s Own (1929) was a landmark work in which representations of
women by male authors are roundly criticized and a new model for
female IDENTITY and AGENCY is proffered. Woolf also insisted that women
be allowed the economic and social freedom to follow their aspirations
and to forego the traditional role of serving as an enlarging mirror for
male identity. “How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives,
making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets,
unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the
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