Women's Voices Feminist Visions

Women's Voices Feminist Visions

What evidence denotes that we have entered the third wave? What gains made in the past brought about the current wave, how are third wave women trying to shape the future, and what will mark the completion of the wave. Use evidence from the articles, "forty years of Women's Studies," "Feminist Politics," and "Still needing the F Word to answer.

Not a school, but a set of influential lines of enquiry encouraged by the growth of feminism since the 1960s. Firstly, forgotten women writers, whose work lacked a modern reprint or a properly informed readership, have been rediscovered. Publishers such as Virago, Pandora and The Women's Press have built up lists of such work and laid the ground for a major reassessment of the place of women writers in literary history. Critics have played their part by interpreting the texts, filling in the background detail and, not least, explaining how a dominant male tradition has managed effectively to write them out of its purview. It is no longer a question of admitting a few women (Jane Austen the Brontës, George Eliot) as remarkable exceptions to the rule and otherwise tracing the 'rise of the novel' through a series of great male writers (Aquino, 2002).

Women's experience as it is reflected in various kinds of writing has also been reinterpreted. This requires identifying explicitly with female characters, often against the grain of a dominant ideology which tends to distort, repress or simply ignore their experience. Thus feminist critics have proposed new readings of familiar texts, readings which challenge the established male idea of how women are supposed to think, feel or act. One result has been a revision of previously accepted views of 19th-century fiction, rejecting (for instance) the typecast notion of female 'hysteria' as a weakness peculiar to heroines like Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss.

An obvious question arises: is there such a thing as 'feminine writing' marked by characteristic features of language or style? Some feminists argue that women have access to a realm of experience from which male language is effectively debarred. Virginia Woolf spoke of a 'woman's sentence', as yet barely glimpsed in occasional, fragmentary forms, but holding out the promise of deliverance from male habits of thought. Her novels support the idea by showing men often trapped in a grimly repressive, 'rational' way of thinking while women enjoy a much greater freedom of intuitive sympathy and grasp. Certain critics (e.g. élène Cixous) have developed this theory of an écriture fémininewhich shows women in touch with libidinal energies and drives outside the regimented discourse of male (patriarchal) reason. Men may perhaps gain access to such writing, and may even themselves produce it in rare instances. It could be argued, for instance, that Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Joyce's Ulysses is a more striking example of écriture féminine than anything by Virginia Woolf (Cochran, 2005).

Other feminists reject the very notion of some essential difference between male and female ...