Second-wave Feminism Research Articles

Mothers and Wives: Representation of Women in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

This article examines the representation of women in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, two classic modernist novels. Second-wave feminism constitutes the conceptual framework of the paper. The paper argues that despite differences in style and subject matter, both novels critique societal expectations and constraints placed upon women in the early 20th century. Both authors highlight the agency and complexity of women while challenging patriarchal conventions through the representation of female characters. The article argues that these works are still relevant in their depiction of the ongoing struggle for the pursuit of women's liberation and gender equality.

The Representation of Men and Women in the Black and White Streams of the Second Wave of Feminism: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis

The Representation of Men and Women in the Black and White Streams of the Second Wave of Feminism: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis

Early Image Processing and Computer Animation in Colorado: Pat Lehman’s Video Vitae in Context

Abstract In 1975, Pat Lehman screened her experimental video, Video Vitae at the New York Women’s Video Festival. Lehman worked in Colorado, where she also started the first video program in the state’s college system. This paper examines Video Vitae as an example of image-processed video and early computer animation in the context of second-wave feminism. The author charts Lehman’s influences and access to the Scanimate computer used to produce Video Vitae, arguing that the significance of Lehman’s feminist narrative and the technology were deeply intertwined. Such explicit feminist narratives were extremely rare among artists engaged in early image-processing and animation.

To the Journal, the American Sociologist

AbstractSociology is a field that examines the social construction of various aspects of human life, including gender and sexuality, and explores how these are produced and perceived by individuals, groups, and institutions. In Italy, despite resistance to institutionalization, Gender Studies have significantly enriched sociology by identifying new research areas and generating innovative analytical categories. Initially linked to second-wave feminism, Gender Studies gained momentum in the Western world from the mid-1970s, exploring the nature-culture-society relationship and its impact on bodies, sexuality, and identity within specific cultural contexts. The Gender Studies section within the Italian Sociology Association was established in 2012 after a prolonged accreditation process. While gender issues entered Italian social sciences in the late 1970s, their integration varied across research areas. Sociology, with its broad analytical frameworks, has played a crucial role in understanding and addressing gender disparities in a country marked by a discriminatory welfare system. The integration of gender perspectives into sociological research has fostered a deeper understanding of Italian social reality and reshaped scientific paradigms. Moreover, sociology’s comprehensive approach to studying social inequalities has been instrumental in highlighting the importance of gender studies within academia. Recent years have witnessed increased attention to Gender Studies in Italian universities, reflecting legislative mandates and evolving cultural attitudes. More scholars, including men, are engaging with gender issues, expanding research beyond women’s status to encompass diverse sexual and gender identities. Approaches like intersectionality promise to broaden the scope of Gender Studies within Italian sociology, offering new avenues for exploration and analysis. The collaboration between sociology and gender studies continues to enhance the academic environment and contributes significantly to the evolution of Italian society.

Feminist publishing projects after Franco: Solidarity through cultural translation

In the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminism promoted important feminist publishing platforms, especially in North American and European countries. After the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), the need to seek foreign ideological mothers led to the emergence of the first feminist series and journals in Spain. In Barcelona, in 1976, the journal Vindicación Feminista(1976-1979) was born, giving voice to many international feminist authors and their publications. A year later, in 1977, inMadrid, the publishing house Debate produced the series Tribuna Feminista(1977-1982). In 1978, in Barcelona, the first Spanish feminist publishing house, LaSal. Edicions de les Dones (1978-1990), was founded. In this article, three post-Francoist feminist publishing projects based on “solidarities” arepresented. All of them were “agents of cultural translation” that shared a main objective: to normalize Iberian feminism by introducing new literary movements, works and authors for theoretical discussion after the National-Catholic-patriarchal regimeof Francoism. The arrival of feminist literature through practices of “solidary cultural translation” was crucial to the social transformations at the time.

'Belief Rather Than a Memory': The Relationship Between Gender and Trauma in Margaret Atwood's <em>Oryx and Crake</em>

Much of the scholarship surrounding Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake discusses trauma and gender, with emphasis on ecocritical interpretation. It is rarely discussed as a 9/11 novel, although Sutherland and Swan assert that it can indeed be read as a 9/11 text, and deal with trauma briefly amid an assortment of post-9/11 'worries.' I seek to enter the discourse addressing trauma and its cultural relationship to gender as specific causal and effectual grounds in the post-9/11 social clime. I argue that Atwood depicts the gender binary as an empty talisman ('a belief rather than a memory') used by a society in crisis to self-soothe. In this way, Oryx and Crake can be situated in relation to Susan Faludi’s understanding of the aftermath of 9/11 as part of the backlash to second-wave feminism. Oryx and Crake can be viewed as a version of the bleak future Atwood has been imagining since The Handmaid’s Tale, with capitalism instead of Christianity as the driving force and the endemic sexism portrayed more subtly. Specifically, I explore how the novel is a combination of Orwell-style government oppression and Huxley-style consumerist numbing (Kroon), concentrating on how gender interplays these dynamics. The post-apocalyptic hellscape gives the protagonist narrator a chance to reevaluate these ideals as relative and ridiculous. This relativity—asking the question: ‘what would society be like without gatekeepers, where critical thinking was the only way to function and survive?’—is the jumping-off point for a post-truth literature to emerge.

Biting Back at Society

The myth of the lesbian vampire spiked in popularity throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, inspiring erotic horror films, like Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970). While the easing censorship regulations allowed the film to depict more overt scenes of sex and violence, it was the second wave of feminism that allowed the film to be as erotic as it was (Baker 556), as the traditional gender role of men was called into question. Protesting for bodily autonomy, the right to express their sexual identities and overall looking for equal opportunities to their male counterparts, the traditionally superior man was under threat by female bonding. Lesbian vampires like Mircalla were unchained to a male figure and were able to liberate other women through their mental strength, physical beauty and by providing deeper emotional connections than men could. The lesbian vampire presented a reality where women could receive everything from a female partner, rendering the male useless.

She Creates, She Controls, She Commands Respect:

This essay examines how women have been represented in Western rock music through their role as deities. In particular, it aims to understand how these portrayals can reflect the evolution of feminist thought and theory in the Western world. A comparative analysis of Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac and Lazaretto by Jack White aims to demonstrate how these depictions connect with and respond to Western feminist thought from the second wave of feminism in the 1970s to the fourth wave of feminism in the 2010s. Along with musical characteristics, the analysis of these portrayals focuses on spatial and temporal factors regarding the relation of the deity to the narrator while incorporating discussions of systemic issues that have impacted women in both the music industry and general Western society.

Contesting the universal claims of Western feminism: Black feminism and reproductive rights in France and the Overseas Departments (1960s–1980s)

This article sheds new light on the history of French feminism during the crucial period between the 1960s and 1980s, and it does by so opening up the range of actors as well as the geography and chronology considered. More specifically, it reconsiders the battles for reproductive rights: the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and of abortion in 1975. Focusing on the perspective of those sitting on the margins of reproductive citizenship and of the standard narratives of the feminist movement – immigrant women and their organisations in France, and civil society groups in the Overseas Departments ( Départements d’Outre-Mer, DOMs) – as well as addressing the distinct reproductive regimes in the DOMs, allows for a reconsideration of French post-war pronatalism, and breaks away from what has long been the standard narrative of Western ‘second-wave feminism’, globalising and de-centring its history.

"Lacking Members of Play": Sexual/Textual Politics in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

Abstract: This essay considers the divide between two camps of critics responding to the use and potential abuse of a white woman narrator in J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and finds within the novel a critique of contemporaneous feminist discourses. I identify a rhetoric of rape deployed by the novel's protagonist, Susan, against the mute ex-slave, Friday, and consider its effect on Susan's ability to mediate between oppressed and dominant groups, represented by Friday and the author—(De)Foe—respectively. Ultimately, I argue that Susan's curiously masculine sense of desire complicates the charge that Coetzee is simply appropriating the voice of a woman, finding instead that he utilises Susan's attempted penetration into Friday's silence to demonstrate the faults of a second-wave feminism that exploits various categories of otherness.

National Wounds and Gendered Harm: Reframing Abortion Pain in The Worst of Times

In light of abortion’s recurrent political centrality in the United States, examining abortion narratives remains critically urgent. This article analyzes the abortion narratives found in the 1993 anthology The Worst of Times compiled by Patricia G. Miller, which collects individual stories of illegal abortions from the post–World War II years. It analyzes these narratives in the context of the postwar period’s growing sensational political fascination with abortion pain, alongside the second-wave feminist positioning of abortion as the paramount feminist issue and inherent basis of feminist community. Against these discourses, the semi-anonymous narrators of The Worst of Times disrupt hierarchized, universal, and exclusionary models of pain. Rather, this article argues that, in constructing life writing centered around the painful experience of illegal abortion, the narrators’ experiences cohere into relational clusters that evince commonalities while also maintaining differences. In engaging with their painful abortion experiences, these narratives reshape the medical, national, and feminist power structures that attempted to define the pain that abortion signified. In a moment when abortion legislation faces continued assaults, these narratives invite a consideration of how the embodied, personal pain of abortion can facilitate creative models of community that rethink the power structures that restrict reproductive autonomy.

From Lavender Menace to Queer Nation: the transformation of lesbian identity in the baby boom era

Women of the early baby boom years in the U.S. came out into an environment in which same-sex desire was stigmatized and criminalized. For working-class lesbians, the bar scene provided an environment in which women could find companionship and a way to live a life decoupled from traditional heterosexual roles. For middle class women, bar life was fraught with legal and social risk, and some–mostly white–women worked to establish a more “socially acceptable” communal life through organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis. As the women’s movement flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s, women born in the early years of the baby boom (1946–1950) created distinctive lesbian feminist cultures and identities. In contrast to early baby boomers, women born at the tail end of the baby boom (1960–1964) came out in a vastly different cultural context. Second-wave feminism had already peaked, the AIDS epidemic and debates about sexuality changed the context for lesbian identity and activism, and organizing by women of color created the development of an intersectional view of lesbian identity and activism. Through an analysis of feminist magazines, newsletters, and texts of the late 1960s through the 1990s, this paper explores the cultural contexts through which radical lesbian feminist identities arose and, for a period, flourished in the U.S. By the end of the 1980s and 1990s, as second-wave feminism declined, lesbian feminist identity shifted. Over the last decades of the twentieth century, new queer forms of identification emerged, coupled with a decline of lesbian identification among younger people. I argue that these new forms represent both continuity and disruption with earlier forms of lesbian identification.

Disassembling the gendered archetype of the male jazz impresario in the United States

In the United States, jazz impresarios historically inhabited the quintessential cosmopolitan role of (white) male jazz critic and intrepid discoverer of Black musical creativity. This article explores the once entrenched and yet recently challenged gendered and cultural dynamics surrounding the powerful jazz impresario role in an era transitioning from a local individualized coterie of fans and critics with liberal socio-cultural politics to a more specialized, transnationally networked world of professionalized music agents and institutions. To trace this role, the seminal jazz impresarios John Hammond and George Wein are recollected, uncovering their particular embodied enactment of masculinity within the American jazz presentation and festival world. Through second-wave feminist initiatives, a critical counterpoint to this prominent role is explored, including the efforts of pioneering Black musicians and composers Melba Liston and Mary Lou Williams in the 1960s, the first Women in Jazz Festival programmers Carol Comer and Dianne Gregg during the 1970s and 1980s, and the tireless efforts of record label owner, critic, and concert promoter Rosetta Reitz during the 1980s and 1990s. These contrasting legacies set the stage for new avenues of curatorship and jazz presentation which take into account intersectional obstacles and experiences of both women in jazz as well as women behind the scenes in the American jazz music industry.

'You Can Resurrect Me, but Only Piecemeal': Embodied Texts and the Heterotopian Regeneration of the Cyborg

This article explores Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg through its prosthetic and heterotopian extension in embodied text. With this fractured and ironic ‘cyborg’ figure, Haraway attempted to move feminist theory and politics into a new direction that broke with second-wave feminism’s perpetual reconceptualization of ‘the woman’ as a natural category. However, the text also became the subject of scholarly critique for dissolving the singularities and material contexts of the bodies marginalized by the categories of gender that Haraway’s abstract and utopian metaphor of the cyborg excludes. Unlike these critics’ disposal of the cyborg, this article stays with this monstrous creature and attempts to give her back some embodied singularities, whilst further elaborating Haraway’s concept of ‘cyborg writing’ and close-reading Shelley Jackson’s digital hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (1995). In this hypertext novel, Jackson creates a new myth from the torn-apart body parts of the monstrous female companion of Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s original novel. Readers are invited to cooperate in the infinite tearing apart and stitching together of this female monster and, in doing so, form the text as heterotopian; the embodied practices of readers in actual space are, namely, co-constitutive of the text’s multiple and always changing form. The author argues that focusing on the way Patchwork Girl’saesthetics and literal uses of prostheses endlessly move this—and within this—heterotopian regeneration, makes present how Jackson’s hypertext departs from Haraway’s theoretical text and gives way to the acting out of a queerness that cannot imagine its place in utopia. Like Haraway, Jackson emphasizes the fragmentary nature of bodies and subjectivities. But Patchwork Girl’s never-resting hypertext makes these bodies, and their prosthetic extensions betray the theoretical territory of metaphor and abstraction.

Redrafting Domestic Life: Women Textile Designers and New Professional Enterprises in Early 1970s Britain

This article considers screen printed home sewing kits and domestic items in Britain in the early 1970s, focusing on women designers and their customers negotiating the demands of domestic and working life. The ambiguous status of domestic labour, particularly in relation to clothing and textiles, means this topic is under-researched, even though in this case it coincides with second-wave feminism and attacks on the normalisation of gendered practices. As print initiatives, these businesses can also be evaluated against ‘counter-cultural’ graphic design of the period, showing a similar transition from modern and Pop influences in the late 1960s to folkloric and historical styles. In establishing self-contained business enterprises within family contexts, we see new working lives created by female designers.

The Wheel of Women: Global Female Artists Expound Lifecycle Themes through 'Calendar'

Since the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s, feminist scholars have significantly influenced the study of visual culture, while female artists have made notable strides in exploring form, subject matter, and avant-garde expression. This paper examines the utilization of the "Calendar" motif by several feminist artists as a symbol representing the passage of time. Through this visual language, these artists convey themes intricately linked to the female experience, such as growth, change, maturity, and aging. Their transformative approach extends beyond mere subjects and artistic techniques to encompass a unique perspective characterized by the liberation from external viewpoints and the male-dominated gaze, redirecting attention to the inner world of women. In doing so, female artists offer a nuanced and profound exploration of humanity, emotions, and life experiences, transcending simplistic gender labels and feminist advocacy. The paper explres the evolution of Calendar paintings, shedding light on their depiction of historical and aesthetic shifts in Chinese society. Serving as a hallmark of its era, the Calendar not only chronicles the progression of national capitalism but also mirrors the cultural metamorphosis of old China. Furthermore, the paper explores contemporary female artists' engagement with cyclical themes, illustrating how they navigate the life cycle, natural rhythms, and women's experiences across diverse mediums. Finally, the author's photographic creation is discussed, offering reflections on Chinese women's pursuit of autonomy amidst the interplay of tradition and modernity.

EVOLUCIJA ODNOSA MAJKE I KĆERKE U ITALIJANSKOM FEMINIZMU DRUGOG TALASA

With the development of feminist emancipatory concepts, the maternal figure as a symbol of the patriarchal structure becomes a frequent object of criticism. The search for identity has meant the discovery of the female side, that in patriarchy has been subordinated and manipulated for a very long time. The approach towards the mother has undergone many changes, from rejecting the mother in the late sixties when the mother was perceived as part of an authoritarian system, to viewing the mother as a victim of repression, as seen by feminists in the seventies. Critical analysis of philosophical, mythological, religious, and psychoanalytic theories linking motherhood to biology, nature, and submission has led to a change in the perception of motherhood, which over time begins to be seen as a source of creative inspiration. The paper provides an overview of the basic characteristics of Italian second-wave feminism and its most prominent representatives. It then seeks to analyze the evolution of the mother-daughter relationship, primarily through the principles and development of the feminist continental wave, and the influence that the most significant Italian feminists have had on the literary corpus and culture of this country.

Różne marginesy

The article contains a review of bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984; Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa 2013, second edition 2022). The text by the American scholar presents groundbreaking theses for the development of the Black feminism movement – she was one of the first to draw attention to the need to take into account various social determinants of violence against women. At the same time, it emphasizes the exclusionary and marginalizing assumptions of second-wave feminism that dominated in the mid-twentieth century. In my review, I reflect on the importance of republishing a theoretical book that examines the systemic violence faced by Black women in a patriarchal and white society. For me, it is important to ask about the relevance of hooks’ reflections and the role they play in thinking about feminism in contemporary capitalist society. I also reflect on the applicability of hooks’ theory in Polish feminism context.

«По прозвищу Моисей»: литературные интерпретации жизни Харриет Табмен

The article is devoted to the formation of Harriet Tubman's image in the US literature. Two books belonging to the spread of Afrocentrism and the second wave of feminism — A. Petrie's non-fiction novel A Girl Called Moses: The Story of Harriet Tubman and M. Heidish's novel A Woman Called Moses — are chosen as the material for analysis. The article analyzes the main qualitative characteristics identified as early as in S. Bradford's book Harriet, Moses of Her People that form the discourse of race and gender in the mentioned narratives about Tubman, and identifies the main transformations of these characteristics. Thus, the work of African-American author A. Petrie reflects to a greater extent the sentiments of all her fellow women in the 1950s-60s Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States: while remaining within the generally accepted gender framework of feminine virtues, at the same time, the black woman was stepping out of her allotted racial limits. Furthermore, she shows that slavery is a cultural trauma that still defines how the African American community sees itself and its place in the society and how slavery is remembered as a means of self-identification within the African American community. Created by the white writer M. Heidish in the mid-1970s, during the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement, the novel reflects the very sentiments that characterized this movement and shows the view of a sympathetic Other on the issue of race. Thus, the article establishes the fact that Harriet Tubman plays a very important role in the African-American and women's discourse in the United States as an image that is given the necessary functions and qualities for its time based on the socio-cultural context contemporary to the interpreter.

Moving Mothers of Women: Virginia Woolf Simone de Beauvoir, and Motherhood in Motion

This article builds and expands on the notion that Virgin-ia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir are the ‘mothers’ of sec-ond-wave feminisms. It comprises three interrelated move-ments. First, Simone de Beauvoir’s paraphrase of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is explored, in particular through the ‘myth’ of Judith Shakespeare. This movement naturally leads to a discussion of the women’s literature anthologies of the 1970s and 80s in the United States. An intermezzo attempts to show the inherent plurality of the category of ‘second-wave feminism’ by mapping Beauvoir’s trajectory in France, the United States, and Britain, beyond the rather long shadow of a feminism of difference. The third and final movement investigates the reception of Woolf and Beauvoir among second-wave feminist critics and activists through the notion of ‘feminist Bible’ and through that of matrilin-earity.By adopting an overtly transnational perspective, this article shows how the very idea of (intellectual) motherhood ought to be understood in its border-crossings and its movements across time, space, languages, and disciplines.