Feminism

Abstract

Feminism Jo-Ann Wallace, Professor Emeritus / Past Editor, esc When I wrote my PhD field exams in Modernism, there were only two women writers on the list: Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. I think now of Woolf, whose relationship with her father was ambivalent. On the one hand, she was clearly his intellectual heir and she had free run of his extensive library. But he also denied her the formal education that was the birthright of her brothers. In a diary entry written twenty-four years after her father’s death, Woolf speculates that, had he not died, “His life would entirely have ended mine. What would have happened? No writing; no books;—inconceivable.” I think of this when I think about what the last forty years of English Studies would have been like without the rise of second-wave feminism and its impact on the academy. Yes, women students would have had free access to the canon … but: no Djuna Barnes? no Dorothy Richardson? no Jean Rhys? no Nella Larsen? Inconceivable. [End Page 3] Jo-Ann Wallace, Professor Emeritus / Past Editor, esc English and Film Studies, University of Alberta Copyright © 2015 Association of Canadian College and University Teachers