Literary representations of women

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139167314.009

6 - Literary representations of women

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Mary Eagleton

Edited by

Gill Plain and

Susan Sellers

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Mary Eagleton: Affiliation:
Leeds Metropolitan University
Gill Plain: Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Susan Sellers: Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland

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Summary

‘THE “TOTALIZING” STUDIES’

Eva Figes introduces her study, Patriarchal Attitudes, with some bemusement as if, inexplicably, the book has escaped her control: ‘To begin with it was intended that this should be a book about women in relation to society as a whole, on the traditional role they have played for so long, the reasons for it, and the ways that I think this role should now change. It has turned out to be a book largely about men’ (Figes, 1970/1987: 10). Kate Millett's opening to Sexual Politics is similarly less than encouraging to her reader:

Before the reader is shunted through the relatively uncharted, often even hypothetical territory which lies before him, it is perhaps only fair he be equipped with some general notion of the terrain. The first part of this essay is devoted to the proposition that sex has a frequently neglected political aspect. I have attempted to illustrate this first of all by giving attention to the role which concepts of power and domination play in some contemporary literary descriptions of sexual activity itself.

(Millett, 1969/1972: xi)

Nonetheless, both these introductions tell us something significant about what Juliet Mitchell refers to as ‘the “totalizing” studies of the oppression of women’ (Mitchell, 1974/1975: 300–1) that were so important in the emergence of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mitchell includes, alongside Figes and Millett, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970).

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Type: Chapter
Information: A History of Feminist Literary Criticism , pp. 105 - 119

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167314.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2007

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