Feminist Theory and Criticism: 1



Feminist Theory and Criticism: 1. From Movement Critique to Discourse Analysis

Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism

Second Edition 2005

In the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century, feminist literary theory, criticism, and scholarship form one strand of the knowledge produced in the field of feminist studies. Intellectually, feminist studies investigates gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality as categories that organize social and symbolic systems. Institutionally, it comprises some 630 women’s studies programs and 80 campus-based research centers, scores of professional associations, and hundreds of feminist journals and presses. But a vast scholarly field was not what second-wave women had in mind when they began to contemplate how the resources of the academy could be used to fuel the nascent movement in the late 1960s. According to the standard genealogy, the early twentieth-century women’s movements dwindled as the nation lurched from the Great Depression to World War II, cowered under McCarthyite repression, and soldiered through the cold war. Yet during these decades a new feminism was incubating in progressive organizations—labor unions, civil liberties groups, women’s colleges, church councils, and social services—where women were acquiring the ideas and skills to build the second-wave movement.

In 1963, two years after President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, a pair of books ignited public discussion of what was called "the woman question." The commission’s report, American Women, edited by Margaret Mead and Frances Balgley Kaplan, painstakingly documented women’s inequality in education, employment, and public life, and Betty Friedan’s bestselling Feminine Mystique exposed the ideology of domesticity that made middle- and upper-class women economically and emotionally dependent on men. Yielding to intense lobbying by women, Congress added sex to the types of discrimination prohibited by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but federal agencies balked at enforcing the statutes.

After clashing with the agencies, members of the President’s Commission and the state commissions it had spawned concluded that they needed a mass-membership organization to exert pressure on the establishment. Founded by 28 women in 1966 and electing Friedan as president, the National Organization for Women (NOW) grew from 1,000 members in 1967 to 30,000 members and nearly 400 chapters in 1973. Although it attracted primarily white middle-class women, NOW developed a sweeping agenda that called for equality under the law; educational and employment opportunities; codification of reproductive rights; criminalization of rape and sexual violence; policy reform in the areas of taxation, social security, welfare, and divorce; provision of childcare and healthcare; and elimination of sex stereotyping.

Meanwhile, women enlisted in the 1960s movements, flocking to the direct-action events that roiled the South, mobilizing the Berkeley campus in the Free Speech Movement (FSM), organizing poor communities and university students in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), counseling young men on draft resistance in the antiwar movement, and revamping K–12 and college programs in the education reform movement. By the time the movements peaked in 1968 well over 200,000 women were experienced activists who understood the social-change paradigm that had been crystallized by the civil rights movement. It consisted in developing an analysis of systemic oppression that would guide four complementary types of activism: sponsoring political education to recruit members and train organizers; building an infrastructure of alternative organizations to network activists locally and nationally; working the channels of negotiation, lobbying, and litigation to change public policies; and orchestrating events to pressure elites.

Precipitating the formation of second-wave feminism was the sexual politics that occurred in the very same arenas where women were acquiring social-change skills. Memoirs and histories document the tensions around women’s status that festered in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the exclusion of women from SDS leadership. Even more galling was the ongoing denigration of women in both groups. Mary King and Casey Hayden, longtime activists in both groups, wrote a 1964 paper on sexism in SNCC, which they revamped as a 1965 memo on sexism in SDS that was circulated to movement women and printed in the leftist periodical Liberation a year later. Galvanized by the memo and their own brushes with sexism, movement women organized workshops at national SDS conferences, formed liberation groups in several cities, and convened small national conferences.

Concurrently academic feminists were creating toeholds in disciplinary associations and universities. Early in 1969, just months after its 1968 convention had been disrupted by radical and feminist activism, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) established the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession (CSWP), the first such body in any association. During the 1969–70 academic year MLA women formed the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages (WCML) to continue exerting pressure on the association, and instructors taught the first experimental courses on women at a dozen universities. At the MLA convention in December 1970 the CSWP and the WCML hosted sessions that featured papers on feminist criticism, women’s writings, the literature curriculum, and status issues. Three months later the CSWP and feminists at the University of Pittsburgh cosponsored the first national conference on feminist education. These national forums and university courses were the sites where feminists could contemplate academic projects that augment the movement’s analysis and activism.

From 1968 through 1970 feminist analysis flowed mainly from liberation and consciousness-raising (CR) groups. First practiced in 1968 by a few liberation groups, CR spread rapidly after Kathie Sarachild outlined the activity at the Women’s Liberation Conference in November 1968 ( "A Program"). During 1969 CR groups were started in some 40 cities, and in 1973 alone some 100,000 women belonged to CR groups, making it the largest women’s political-education initiative in U.S. history (Cassell, Shreve).

According to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, CR was a middle-class adaptation of "speaking bitterness," the revolutionary practice of Chinese peasants, who by voicing the injustices they suffered brought "to consciousness . . . the virtually unconscious oppression" of the group (Woman’s Estate 62). Indeed many 1960s activists had read about speaking bitterness in Mao Tse-tung’s "On Practice" (1937) and William Hinton’s Fanshen (1966)(Sarachild, "Consciousness-Raising" 146, 149) or knew of similar techniques used in Latin America. Carol Hanisch, for instance, reported that Guatemalan guerrillas traded life stories with villagers in order to demystify their seemingly individual problems and motivate them to unite "in the struggle to destroy the conditions of their common oppression" (184). But even more widely credited was the homegrown model of CR. We were, said Sarachild, "applying to women and to ourselves as women’s liberation organizers the practice a number of us had learned as organizers in the civil rights movement in the South in the early 1960s" ( "Consciousness-Raising" 145). By sharing intimate details of their lives they forged affective bonds, by aggregating and analyzing experiential data they limned the features of group oppression, and by expressing anger they catalyzed action. As Sarachild put it, "Our feelings [about our experiences as women] will lead us to our theory, our theory to our action, our feelings about that action to new theory and then to new action" ( "A Program" 274). CR methods showed women that personal problems had social causes and therefore political solutions; CR groups served as the matrix for generating knowledge and power.

Academic feminists brought CR groups to campuses and CR methods into the disciplines where they were used to produce new knowledges. Reflecting on the origins of feminist literary criticism, Ann Rosalind Jones wrote, "It seems clear to me now that the first stages . . . corresponded to this process. . . . Early critics read women characters in men’s books as we read each other in consciousness-raising groups: as women placed in oppressive circumstances" (69). Others described the CR-like practices more vividly. On first reading The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s novel about a woman slowly smothered by patriarchy, Nancy Burr Evans looked "primarily for those ideas and descriptions which most resembled myself" (311), shivered as "I saw my own experiences mirrored in articulated form" (309), and then took the next step of recognizing that what had been portrayed as female pathology was social oppression. A few years later Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson depicted themselves as "textual archeologists" trying "to dig up fragments of attitudes about sexuality, sex roles, their genesis, and their justifying ideologies" in order to piece together the patterns of literary sexism (62).

Second-wave feminists introduced a whole lexicon of concepts that most women had not previously encountered: they exhumed "misogyny" and "patriarchy" from the English literary tradition, analogized "male supremacy" and "sexism" from the discourse of race, and borrowed women’s "alienation" and "oppression" from Marxist theory. These concepts were fleshed out by analyses that circulated in movement publications: manifestos issued by liberation groups, newsletters mailed to NOW members, periodicals edited by collectives, and anthologies produced by the New York Radical Women— Notes from the First Year: Women’s Liberation (1968), Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (1970), and Notes from the Third Year: Women’s Liberation (1971). Among the influential pieces that introduced readers to the workings of sexual politics in everyday transactions were Carol Hanisch’s "The Personal Is Political," Pat Maindardi’s "The Politics of Housework," Anne Koedt’s "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," and Radicalesbians’ "The Woman Identified Woman" (all reprinted in Crow). Yet within a few short years movement critique would be reformulated as scholarly criticism by the vehicles—publishers and universities—that were supposed to carry feminism to wider audiences.

In 1970 American commercial presses began to publish hybrid books that wove movement and academic discourses into a wide-ranging indictment of sex-class oppression. One format was the anthology that painted a composite picture of women’s oppression. The bestsellers among more than a dozen anthologies published between 1970 and 1973 were Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970)and Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran’s Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (1971). The latter contained movement papers, scholarly articles, and creative pieces written by 35 contributors and divided into issue-focused sections. Gornick and Moran explained that they had aimed for analytic hybridity, scope, and forcefulness in order to demonstrate that women’s oppression resulted from a deeply entrenched system maintained by patriarchal institutions (xix). Among the landmark essays in Woman in Sexist Society written by academic women were Elaine Showalter’s "Women Writers and the Double Critical Standard," Linda Nochlin’s "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" and Naomi Weisstein’s "Psychology Constructs the Female," each one examining the institutional production of gender ideology and its subjects.

The other format was the monograph, whose lineage could be traced from mary wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) through simone de beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949)to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)and Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch (1970). Widely known to have been Millett’s dissertation defended earlier that year at Columbia University, Sexual Politics looked like a work of academic criticism because it contained chapters devoted to a hypothesis, a history, and exegeses of literary texts topped off by endnotes and a bibliography. But it did not read like a work of academic criticism because it hybridized radical feminism’s theory of sex-class domination with Beauvoir’s learned tour of the disciplines. Millett defined sexual politics as the "arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another" (23) and then proceeded to show how a host of arrangements—physical, economic, social, psychological, and ideological—maintained the system of oppression.

Reviewers praised Woman in a Sexist Society, commending the authors for their eloquence and close reasoning and the anthology for combining scholarly, creative, and polemical writing in a call to mobilize for social change. But they made Sexual Politics the butt of unprecendented hostility. Flaying the author, reviewers decried her tone as angry, belligerent, and vanguardist, and Time magazine dubbed her "the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation" when it featured her on its August 31, 1970, cover (16). Moreover, it denounced the book for hybridizing movement and academic discourses, sliding from social analysis in the early chapters to literary criticism in the later ones, and making an insupportably broad case for women’s oppression. Typically, Time described it as "a polemic suspended awkwardly in academic tradition" (16) and opined that "it is precisely the broad sweep of that argument that tenders it vulnerable" (20). Why did the features of hybridity, scope, and social commitment that won praise for the anthology damn the monograph? Sexual Politics had crafted a powerful analysis of women’s oppression by crossing the traditionally observed boundaries between movement critique and scholarly criticism, popular and esoteric subject matters, trade and academic readers. The book disempowered the reviewers: confounded by its hybridity and scope, they found themselves incapable of neutralizing its arguments and therefore deterring the readers who were rushing to buy it. Within months of publication Sexual Politics had sold 15,000 copies and gone into a fourth printing, an astounding market penetration for the time.

From this description, four important points can be made about second-wave discourse. First, it soldered affect and analysis to action. Second, the analytic process was tessellation from bits. Experience by experience, insight by insight, and issue by issue, feminists developed a critique of the system of women’s oppression in the United States. Third, "women as an oppressed sex-class" was not simply a conceptual product but a movement-building process. Although later feminists criticized it as a flawed totalizing concept (which, unfortunately, is how it often functioned in academic discourse), later social-movement theory casts it as a necessary articulatory practice because without conjoining statements in political analysis and linking women in political action there could have been no movement. Finally, although commercially published hybrid books spread feminism to broader audiences than movement-based publications could reach, they had no impact on academic canons and curriculums. To mount that challenge, the early feminists had to navigate the preliminaries of earning doctoral degrees, securing faculty positions, and performing the expected research and teaching. Only then could they produce feminist criticism and theory that eventually would have an impact in academic arenas.

In 1970 KNOW Press published a curious item: photocopied on a stack of unbound pages were the syllabi for seventeen courses on women taught in 1969–70 and a brief introduction by Sheila Tobias situating them "in a field that may eventually be called Female Studies" (Female Studies 1 1). The item’s shabby format and small circulation did not suggest that anything would follow. In the next five years, however, nine more volumes of Female Studies were published, four by KNOW Press and five by the Feminist Press, founded in 1970 by Florence Howe, Paul Lauter, and others. This widely read series of curricular materials sparked the development of feminist studies.

Compared with that of other new fields, the institutionalization of feminist studies proceeded at an astounding pace. After the first few courses taught in 1969–70 the number multiplied so quickly that only approximate counts from the next few years survive: 103 courses and 4 programs in December 1970, 600 courses and 17 programs in December 1971, and 4,500 courses and 75–110 programs in the 1972–73 academic year. In light of subsequent developments, it is hard to imagine that those teaching these courses had virtually no status or resources. Most were adjunct instructors or assistant professors who jeopardized their tenuous standing to engage topics that mainstream faculty regarded as unworthy of attention. They did not have a single name for this venture—variously calling it "female," "women’s," or "feminist" studies—or an exacting description to persuade colleagues that it might become a distinctive, let alone distinguished, academic field. They lacked local conveniences, such as library collections and course designators, as well as national conferences and publications.

Nevertheless, in classrooms and libraries these teachers began the work of reclaiming women’s lives and criticizing received knowledges. Feminist courses assigned such texts as virginia woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle (1959), Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), Aileen Kraditor’s Up from the Pedestal (1968), Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968), Leo Kanowitz’s Women and the Law (1969), Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970), Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), William O’Neill’s Everyone Was Brave (1971), and the anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970)and Woman in a Sexist Society (1971). These texts took a synoptic approach to women’s oppression: personal narrative and political commentary in Woolf; historical panoramas in Flexner, Kraditor, and O’Neill; and sweeping critique in Beauvoir, Ellmann, Kanowitz, Firestone, Millett, and the anthologies. By reading them alongside the feminist scholarship that was beginning to appear in journals, teachers were forming the field’s intellectual core with a tension between cross-sector social problems and intradisciplinary analysis.

Feminists in literary studies, like their sisters in other disciplines, began with the projects of reclamation and critique, in both ascending to theory on the crisscrossing paths of scholarship and criticism. The first step in restoring women to literature was to search the libraries and archives for books on female lives and letters. In British history and culture, for instance, they found Catherine J. Hamilton’s Women Writers (1892), Georgiana Hill’s Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times (1896), Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), Joyce M. Horner’s English Women Novelists (1929–30), J. M. S. Tompkins’s Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (1932), John Tinnon Taylor’s Early Opposition to the English Novel (1943), Frances Lee Utley’s Crooked Rib (1944), Mary Beard’s Woman as Force in History (1947), B. G. MacCarthy’s Female Pen: The Later Women Novelists, 1744–1818 (1948), and Ruth Kelso’s Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (1956). Here they rediscovered the sacred revelations and domestic manuals of medieval women; the learning and literature of Renaissance ladies; the spread of female literacy; the political treatises of eighteenth-century women; the popular and high cultures of nineteenth-century women; and the activities of suffragists, birth-control advocates, union organizers, and educators in Britain and the United States.

The next steps were taken simultaneously. Feminists compiled bibliographies, produced editions of out-of-print and never-published female-authored texts, and wrote articles and books, in each of these genres combining reevaluation of female-authored texts with criticism of societal and literary sexism. On average two books a year appeared on British women: Vineta Colby’s Singular Anomaly (1970)and Yesterday’s Women (1974), Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal (1970), Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth (1972)and Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Female Imagination (1972), Martha Vicinus’s Suffer and Be Still (1972), Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (1973), Françoise Basch’s Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel (1974), Joan Goulianos’s By a Woman Writ (1974), and Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976). Scholarship and criticism provided empirical grounding for books that theorized a swath of the literary territory, such as the feminine, feminist, and female traditions in Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977)and phallic authorship in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (1979).

The other project was exposing the forms of sexism that had made it possible to construct the discipline’s androcentric criteria and canons. Tracing literary misogyny through the ages, Katharine M. Rogers’s Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (1966)showed that "expressions of hatred, fear, or contempt of womankind" (xii) appeared in almost every written and oral genre. Concentrating on German philosophy and politics, Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes (1970)probed the connections between will and domination, sexism and racism, categorical absolutism and facist solutions. Investigating the commonplace gender stereotypes that infused modern literary criticism, Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968)remarked that male critics treated books authored by women and men as if they were women or men, their "criticism embark[ing], at its happiest, upon an intellectual measuring of busts and hips" (29) or conversely assuming that the male literary mind "function[s] primarily like a penis" (23). As one of many telling examples, she presented Anthony Burgess’s statement that he could "gain no pleasure" from Jane Austen’s prose because it "lacks a strong male thrust, an almost pedantic allusiveness, and a brutal intellectual content" (23).

The most popular approach to literary sexism, called "images of women," was subsequently disparaged as naive representationalism. But this objection was not entirely on the mark because most feminists read the images as manifestations of gendered conventions that in turn buttressed ruling-class interests. Consider three essays that appeared in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Susan Koppelman Cornillon (1972). In "What Can a Heroine Do? Or, Why Women Can’t Write" Joanna Russ inverted the sex of protagonists in order to demonstrate that plots were gendered: "A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear" and "A young man who unwisely puts success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch" (3). In "Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel" Ellen Morgan contrasted the typical female Bildungsroman about an unruly girl who finally conforms to the dictates of femininity with a feminist version that would present her "progress toward the goal of full personhood" (185) through struggle with institutionalized sexism. The goal of such criticism, Lillian Robinson and Lise Vogel argued in "Modernism and History," is "less to demonstrate that literature does convey ideas than to show that those ideas have a class origin and class function," namely, the function of perpetuating the naturalized order (298).

Progress toward that goal was not straightforward, as a 1971 feminist issue of College English shows. In one essay ( "The New Feminist Criticism") Annis Pratt summarized the four main tasks of feminist criticism: rediscovering women’s works, "judging the formal aspects of texts" (873), understanding what literature reveals about women and men in their socioeconomic contexts, and describing "the psychomythological development of the female individual in literature" (877). But in another essay ( "Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective"), Lillian Robinson retorted that Pratt was merely reiterating the bourgeois modes of biographical, formal, sociological, and archetypal criticism. Using their criteria, feminist critics would be mired in the structure of evaluation they wanted to dismantle, the one that required them to acknowledge that a virulently chauvinistic text was beautifully crafted or that a "historically useful" feminist text was "artistically flawed" (888).

As they traveled along the paths of reclamation and critique, feminist literary critics began to see through the disciplinary knowledges to the paradigms that mainstream practitioners used to select, interpret, and evaluate texts. At that time literary studies was ordered by two basic paradigms: interpretationism and new criticism. Interpretationism, an open method of drawing on ideas and methods from other discourses such as history, sociology, psychology, and myth, allowed sex stereotypes to seep into and steep critical practices. Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson reported that they had been trained to read "all works in the light of the conventions of the male critic. . . . Not only did we ignore the absences [women’s texts and experiences] . . . not only did we defend the sacrifice of women as only natural . . . but we also assumed that any male writer must be writing from the Freudian convictions of the male critics and professors who taught us" (65).

In contrast to interpretationism’s leaky boundaries and gender-saturated practices, New Criticism prevented other discourses from entering its domain and imposed stringent methods. Practitioners were expected to select a short but complex text (preferably a poem), perform a close reading, and mark the features that conduced to its structural unity. They were not supposed to refer the text to anything outside of the text—the author’s life, the social context, or the themes recapitulated from other discourses—or to introduce their own viewpoints, feelings, and judgments. As Selma R. Burkom explained, her professors had directed her to "deal only with the empirically verifiable" and rationally analyzable "elements of the text, to be objective, and to control, if not eliminate, most subjective responses" (17). Going straight to the heart of the paradigm, Fraya Katz-Stoker pointed out that New Critics regard "literature as a privately created world completely independent of its social and political contexts" (321) and analyze texts as if they were like "bubbles floating in a cloudless, Platonic sky" (316). "Feminist criticism," she declared, must be "a materialist approach to literature which attempts to do away with the formalist illusion that literature is somehow divorced from the rest of reality" (326). Similarly, Lillian Robinson and Lise Vogel criticized formalism for placing "an overriding emphasis on the autonomy of the work of art and its formal characteristics, on the permanence of modal change, and on the independence of critical judgment" (278). Its cultural program of aestheticizing literature and esotericizing knowledge fits into the larger system of distributive injustice.

The work of restoring women to literary history and exposing literary sexism, criticizing disciplinary paradigms and formulating feminist ones, prepared the way for feminist theories that would model the coproduction of subject, social, and knowledge formations in the 1980s.

By 1972 four powerful forces were driving specialization within feminist studies. First, universities were structured by departmentalized disciplines. Administrators allocated material and decision-making authority in faculty and curricular matters to mainstream departments and regarded feminist studies as low-priority programs that would have to rely on department-based faculty to teach their courses. For decades the programs had to patch the curriculum together from disciplinary offerings supplemented by a few core courses and to "outsource" graduate training to friendly mainstream departments. As a result of university structure, feminist studies was slow to realize its interdisciplinary objectives.

Second, two converging trends spurred the production of specialized research during the 1970s. Universities heightened their faculty publishing requirements just as commercial presses were acquired by media conglomerates that expected them to hew to such corporate principles as carving out market niches, packaging and pitching their books, and making a profit on each and every title. Squeezed by the media empires, university presses tried to preserve their intellectual capital by publishing work that measured up to the most exacting scholarly criteria and addressed the most important disciplinary topics. As a result they published little more feminist work between 1970 and 1980 than a dozen books in literary studies and another two or three dozen in all other fields.

Third, needing venues that could bestow legitimacy on the new field, feminists launched the first scholarly periodicals in 1972. They immediately carved out specialisms: historical scholarship was featured in Ann Calderwood’s Feminist Studies, literary scholarship in Wendy Martin’s Women’s Studies, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies in Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft Newsletter (later retitled Women and Literature ), bibliographical data in Florence Rush’s Women’s Studies Abstracts, and program resources in the Feminist Press’s Women’s Studies Newsletter. Although hardly entering a crowded arena when it debuted in 1975, the interdisciplinary Signs presented itself as the most rigorous journal. Its methods of quality control, along with its adoption of conventional formats (the article, the review essay, the citation apparatus), turned what might have been sociopolitical critique for general readers into scholarship and criticism for academic ones.

Finally, the discursive template for generating knowledge in feminist studies was a crosshatched grid of disciplines, social identities, and political ideologies. Each axis generated its own specialisms and also mutated new specialisms wherever it crossed the others. Consider, for example, research on the topic of transsexualism: it could produce a history of medicalization or a sociology of the movement (discipline-based specialisms), a study of transsexuality in Native American or African American communities (identity-based specialisms), a celebration of private lives or a critique of public policies (politics-based specialisms).

And so what happened was that no sooner did feminists gain toeholds in the higher-education system, which provided resources for their research and teaching, than the system’s structure began to organize their knowledge-producing practices. As feminist studies attracted more scholars, they generated more knowledges that grew more particularized by political ideology, social identity, and disciplinary specialism. To synthesize the partial and sometimes discordant knowledges, feminists formulated overarching theories of subject and social formations, but these theories in turn were criticized by feminists based in different disciplines and subscribing to different realist, constructivist, and poststructuralist assumptions. The criticisms in turn sparked a metadebate about how to produce more adequate criticism and theory that, once produced, would send feminist scholars spinning through the same routines. These developments completed the transformation of feminist discourse: movement feminists had cast social change as a practical objective to be achieved through collective analysis and action, and academic feminists had recast it as the subject matter of academic research. By the late 1970s the "social problems" academic feminists addressed were fabricated at the sites where esoteric theories collided, abstract categories ruptured, and arcane knowledges avalanched.

In 1971 Lillian Robinson had a premonition of what would come to pass: "I am not terribly interested in whether feminism becomes a respectable part of academic criticism; I am very much concerned that feminist critics become a useful part of the women’s movement. . . . In our struggle for liberation, Marx’s note about philosophers may apply to critics as well: that up to now they have only interpreted the world and the real point is to change it" (889). Her cautionary words appeared at a pivotal moment when, as Alice Echols later observed in Daring to Be Bad (1989), the focus of feminism was shifting from oppositional struggle to female culture, from political activism to intellectual inquiry, from integrative categories to differential ones. The institutionalization that made it possible for academic-feminist scholarship, criticism, and theory to flourish from 1973 on also disciplined an insurgent political project.

Ellen Messer-Davidow

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Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (1975).

Alma Garcia1989 (The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980Gender and Society, vol. 3).

Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (1998).

Ann Rosalind Jones1993 (Imaginary Gardens with Real Frogs in Them: Feminist Euphoria and the Franco-American Divide, 1976–88Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, Gayle Greene and Copplia Kahn).

Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (2002).

Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Women’s Movement Changed America (2000).

Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1990).

Anita Shreve, Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising Movement (1989).

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