Feminism (20 page)

‘preposterous’, even ‘poisonous’, language so often used by 140

academics in general; used even, perhaps especially, by those who address urgently important political issues. ‘University teachers . . .

are great at networking each other but hopeless at communicating with most of the rest of the world, including those who collect their rubbish, deliver their laundry and serve up their hash browns.’ He ends by jokingly quoting a famous remark by Winston Churchill:

‘This is English up with which I will not put.’ It would be all too easy to make the same case specifically against academic feminism.

Fisk’s point is one that we ignore at our peril. If feminism is to be something living and evolving, it will have to begin by re-inventing the wheel – which in this case means finding not just new issues, but a new language. In spite of everything, I still have faith that feminism
will
take us by surprise again, that it will re-invent itself, perhaps in unforeseen ways, and in areas we have thought little about. It will almost certainly come from outside the academy, and will probably – hopefully – challenge us in ways that, as yet, we
Af

te

cannot even glimpse.

rword

141

References

Chapter 1

Hildegarde of Bingen,
Selected Writings
, tr. Mark Atherton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001), especially pp. 163–226.

The Book of Margery Kempe
, tr. and ed. Barry Windear (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986).

Elizabeth Spearing,
Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002 ); for Julian of Norwich, see pp. 175–206 (especially p. 201, on the motherhood of God).

Margaret L. King,
Women of the Renaissance
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Stephanie Hodgson Wright (ed.),
Women’s Writing of the Early Modern
Period, 1588–1688
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002); see especially ‘Jane Anger: her protection for women, 1589’, pp. 2–6; Aemilia Lanyer, ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 1611’, pp. 20–1, and also pp. 22–77; Anna Trapnel, pp. 212–17.

Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’,
Past and Present
, 13

(1958).

Elaine Hobby (ed.),
Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing,
1649–88
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989) is an invaluable collection; she includes extracts from Jane Anger, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anna Trapnel.

H. N. Brailsford,
The Levellers and the English Revolution
(London: The Cresset Press, 1961), especially p. 119 and pp. 316–17.

On Margaret Fell, see Antonia Fraser,
The Weaker Vessel: Women’s Lot
142

in Seventeenth-Century England
(London: Phoenix Press, 1984), pp. 448–60; and Sherrin Marshall-Wyatt, ‘Women in the Reformation Era’, in
Becoming Visible: Women in European History
, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977).

On Eleanor Davis, see Antonia Fraser,
The Weaker Vessel: Women’s Lot
in Seventeenth-Century England
(London: Phoenix Press, 1984), pp. 188–94.

Chapter 2

Queen Elizabeth, quoted in Stephanie Hodgson Wright (ed.),
Women’s
Writing of the Early Modern Period, 1588–1688
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 1.

Bathsua Makin, quoted in Stephanie Hodgson Wright (ed.),
Women’s
Writing of the Early Modern Period, 1588–1688
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 287–93. Also see Hilda L.

Smith,
Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists
Referenc

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

On Lady Mary Wroth, see
The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth
, ed.

es

Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); and a brief but illuminating comment by Germaine Greer in
Slip-Shod Sibyls
(London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 15–16.

On Margaret Cavendish, see Katie Whitaker,
Mad Madge
(London: Chatto and Windus, 2003); and also Dolores Paloma, ‘Margaret Cavendish: Defining the Female Self ’,
Women’s Studies
, 7 (1980).

Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
and
Three Guineas
, with introduction by Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 2001).

Mary Manley, quoted in Antonia Fraser,
The Weaker Vessel: Women’s
Lot in Seventeenth-Century England
(London: Phoenix Press, 1984), p. 409.

On Aphra Behn, see Angeline Goreau,
Reconstructing Aphra: A Social
Biography of Aphra Behn
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Elaine Hobby (ed.),
Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s
Writing, 1649–88
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp. 15–127; and Germaine Greer,
Slip-Shod Sibyls
(London: Penguin Books, 1999), chapters 6 and 7.

143

Chapter 3

On Mary Astell, see Ruth Perry,
The Celebrated Mary Astell
:
An Early
English Feminist
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

On Mary Wollstonecraft, see
Collected Letters
, ed. Janet Todd (London: Allen Lane, 2003). There are many modern editions of
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
; I have used the edition with introduction by Miriam Brody (London: Penguin Books, 1992),
Mary
and the unfinished
Maria; Or the Wrongs of Women
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; or London: Penguin Books, 1992).

There are also several good biographies of Wollstonecraft: most recently, Diane Jacobs,
Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary
Wollstonecraft
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) and Lyndall Gordon,
Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus
(London: Little Brown, 2005).

Chapter 4

Marion Reid,
A Plea for Women
(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1988 [1843]).

Caroline Norton,
English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century
minism

[1854]; reprinted as
Caroline Norton’s Defense
(Chicago: Academy,
Fe

1982).

John Stuart Mill,
The Subjection of Women
, ed. and introduced by Susan M. Okin (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).

For Florence Nightingale, see Cecil Woodham Smith,
Florence
Nightingale
(London: Penguin Books, 1951; revised edn., 1955); and Nancy Boyd Sokoloff,
Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their
World
(London: Macmillan Press, 1982).

For Harriet Martineau, see her
Autobiography
, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman (London: Virago, 1983 [1877]); and R. K. Webb,
Harriet Martineau, A Radical Victorian
(London: Heinemann, 1960).

For Frances Power Cobbe, see Barbara Caine,
Victorian Feminists
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Chapter 5

Sheila B. Herstein,
A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith
Bodichon
(Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1985): 144

George Eliot is quoted on p. 71, Mrs Gaskell on p. 80, Elizabeth Barrett Browning on p. 82.

Melanie Phillips,
The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette
Movement and the Ideas Behind It
(London: Little, Brown, 2003), chapter 5.

For Emily Davies, see Margaret Forster,
Significant Sisters: The
Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939
(London: Penguin Books, 1986), and also Barbara Caine,
Victorian Feminists
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 3.

Jo Manton,
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: England’s First Woman
Physician
(London: Methuen, 1965).

On Josephine Butler, see Jane Jordan,
Josephine Butler
(London: John Murray, 2001); and Barbara Caine,
Victorian Feminists
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 5.

Roger Manvell,
The Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh
(London: Elek Books, 1976).

Referenc

Chapter 6

Melanie Phillips,
The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette
es

Movement and the Ideas Behind It
(London: Little, Brown, 2003), pp. 98–103, 136–9.

Sheila B. Herstein,
A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith
Bodichon
(Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 156–69 and chapter VI.

Roger Fulford,
Votes for Women
(London: Faber and Faber, 1957), pp. 33–4.

Florence Nightingale is quoted in Martin Pugh,
The March of the
Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s
Suffrage 1866–1914
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 55.

Chapter 7

Martin Pugh,
The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the
Campaign for Women’s Suffrage 1866–1914
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) is essential reading: a detailed, scholarly, and thought-provoking account of the prolonged struggle for the vote.

Also see Melanie Philips,
The Ascent of Woman: A History of the
145

Suffragette Movement and the Ideas Behind It
(London: Little, Brown, 2003); and Paul Foot,
The Vote: How It Was Won and How It
Was Lost
(London: Viking, 2005) includes a brief but cogent chapter on women’s suffrage.

For some memorable (and sometimes witty) examples of the way in which suffragettes expressed their message visually, see the early pages of Liz McQuiston,
Suffragettes and She-Devils: Women’s
Liberation and Beyond
(London: Phaidon Press, 1997).

See also Emmeline Pankhurst,
My Own Story
(London: Virago, 1979

[1914]) and Syliva Pankhurst,
The Suffragette Movement
(London: Virago, 1977 [1931]).

Chapter 8

See Sheila Rowbotham,
A Century of Women
(London: Viking, 1997) on Sylvia Pankhurst, and the effects of the war, p. 64 ff.; and Paul Foot,
The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Lost
(London: Viking, 2005), especially pp. 232–5, on women and the war.

See also Martin Pugh,
Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain
minism

1914–1999
(London: Macmillan Press, 1992), especially chapters 1–6;
Fe

chapter 3 discusses the birth and decay of the idea of a woman’s party; pp. 49–50 and 142–3 discuss the Six Point Group; Rebecca West is quoted on p. 72.

Roger Manvell,
The Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh
(London: Elek Books, 1976).

On Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, see Ruth Hall,
Marie Stopes: A
Biography
(London: Andre Deutch, 1977). On Stella Browne, see Rowbotham, especially p. 194.

Chapter 9

Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
, English translation by H. M.

Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953). Her four autobiographical volumes and her novels are also all available in English translation.

bel hooks,
Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre
(Boston: South End Press, 1984).

Germaine Greer,
The Female Eunuch
(London: Paladin, 1971).

Juliet Mitchell,
Woman’s Estate
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 146

1971) is essential reading for the ideas and strategies of ‘second-wave’

feminism; on consciousness-raising, see pp. 61–3. See also her
Psychoanalysis and Feminism
(London: Allen Lane, 1974) and
Women: The Longest Revolution
(London: Virago, 1984).

Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic of Sex
(New York: Morrow, 1970).

Kate Millet,
Sexual Politics
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970).

Leslie B. Tanner (ed.),
Voices from Women’s Liberation
(New York: Signet Books/New American Library, 1971).

Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
(New York: Bantam, 1976), especially pp. 5, 346, 348; see also Brownmiller’s
In Our Time: Memoirs of a Revolution
(London: Aurum Press, 2000), particularly the essay ‘Rape is a Political Crime Against Women’, pp. 194–224.

Catherine McKinnon,
Only Words
(London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 5, 28, 40.

Chapter 10

Referenc

Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
es

of Colour
, ed. C. Moraga and F. Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983).

Ien Ang, ‘I’m a Feminist but . . . ’, in
Transitions: New Australian
Feminisms
, ed. B. Caine and R. Pringle (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995).

Mai Yaman (ed.),
Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives
(New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds.),
Feminist Postcolonial Theory
:
A
Reader
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); in particular, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’, pp. 49–74; and Reina Lewis, ‘On Veiling, Vision and Voyage: Cross-Cultural Dressing and Narratives of Identity’, pp. 520–41.

‘Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms’, Sonia E.

Alvarez, Politics Department, University of California at Santa Cruz.

CA95064 (
[email protected]
).

Roads to Beijing: Fourth World Conference on Women in Latin
America and the Caribbean
(Quito: Ediciones Flora Tristan).

147

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds.),
Global Women:
Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy
(London: Granta Books, 2003).

Afterword

Natasha Walter,
The New Feminism
(London: Virago, 1999).