American Woman's Literature in the Twentieth Century: A Survey of Some Feminist Trends

Abstract

One might argue that the history of American women's literature in the twentieth century began some time in the 1880s, or even earlier.* The American feminist movement got under way in the decades before the Civil War, and the radical feminists in the United States today are the latest manifestations of a long-standing national tradition of political struggle for the rights of women. In its origins, American feminism was part of a broad current of social reform in which abolitionism was the central cause and which also included movements advocating, for example, prison reform, socialism, temperance and the establishment of public schools. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became famous American suffragettes during the nineteenth century, and in The Woman's Bible (1898) Stanton criticized the dominance of male perspectives in the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. Feminism often leads to criticism of the established religions, then as now. In her recent work, Beyond Power: On Men, Women and Morals (1985), Marilyn French proposes that Christianity is a product of a patriarchal social order that the male sex imposed upon humanity several thousand years ago. In the late nineteenth century Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerged as a prominent American feminist and author. She divorced her husband and gave him and his new wife custody of her daughter in order to obtain the freedom she felt she needed in her life as a writer and agitator for women's rights. Such difficult decisions sometimes had to be made in an age when it was all but impossible for women to combine careers and family life. Gilman's Women and Economics (1898) is a feminist classic which demonstrates that the financial dependence of women on men makes it nearly impossible for them to develop the full range of their talents. She also wrote a kind of feminist