Page 118 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FROM THE FIRST TO THE SECOND WAVE

that: “the woman’s movement virtually died in 1920 and…feminism
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was to lie dormant for forty years”. Allowing for the peculiarities of
the different national contexts, much the same could also be said of
Britain. But just as the sixties’ student movement had refurbished the
New Left, so too it unleashed a new, “second wave”, feminism. The
campus milieu provided support and inspiration to both the new
women’s liberation groups and the new student socialist groups with
which they were occasionally intertwined. In 1971 Germaine Greer,
then still a lecturer in English at Warwick University, had published
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The Female Eunuch, which soon became one of the key texts of the
international women’s movement. Techniques first acquired in student
journalism were put to work to produce a plethora of feminist
newspapers, magazines and journals, the most important of which
would prove to be Feminist Review, published by the independent
Feminist Review Collective from 1979 until 1987, and by Methuen
and later Routledge from 1988 on. Like the New Left, second wave
feminists saw themselves very much as part of an international and
internationalist political movement. Like the New Left, second wave
feminists aspired to a level of theoretical articulacy and sophistication
unimagined by previous radical movements.
Like the New Left, second wave feminists also came increasingly
to define cultural theory itself as a matter of both particular concern
and peculiar political relevance. My major focus for the remainder of
this chapter will, then, be provided by the various types of feminist
cultural theory which developed alongside the women’s liberation
movements of the sixties and after. This is not to suggest that “real”
feminism began only in the 1960s, nor to deny the existence of a first
wave, but only to insist that, to a quite remarkable extent, the later
movement was obliged to pull itself up by its own theoretical bootstraps.
If the feminist movement has indeed rediscovered the legacy of Aphra
Behn or of Mary Wollstonecraft, then this has been much more obviously
a consequence than a cause of its own initiatives. Contemporary
feminism has had no clearly acknowledged intellectual precursors,
no equivalent to what Marx has meant for Marxism, Arnold for
(Anglo-) culturalism, or Saussure for structuralism. So effectively had
patriarchal culture repressed the collective memory of women’s history
that the women’s movement had no real choice but to begin virtually
from scratch.

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