Page 119 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

Types of feminism

Virtually, but not quite. Two widely acknowledged sources of intellectual
inspiration for second wave feminism, referred to as such in text after
text, have been: Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), the modernist novelist
and critic, and member of the Bloomsbury Group, whose A Room of
One’s Own was first published in 1929; and Simone de Beauvoir
(1908–86), the leading French existentialist philosopher and novelist,
whose The Second Sex was first published in 1949. Woolf initiated an
enduringly feminist concern with the material constraints on women’s
cultural production; and also a novel redefinition of Arnoldian
disinterestedness as androgynous, which, though by no means
uncontroversial amongst feminists, has nonetheless been seen by some
as representing a first, tentative, step toward a distinctively feminist
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aesthetic. She also registered the possibility of a peculiarly female
type of writing, characterized by a sentence “of a more elastic fibre…
capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles,
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of enveloping the vaguest shapes”. In both her criticism and her
fiction a connection is more or less deliberately forged between women’s
consciousness and modernist literary technique. It is a connection
which has continued to fascinate feminist intellectuals. 7
For de Beauvoir’s feminism, as for Sartre’s Marxism, the central
theoretical conundrum became that of explaining how it is that a
human nature characterized quite fundamentally by radical freedom,
in which humans make themselves only in conscious practice, can
nonetheless be betrayed into the bad faith of unfreedom. How can it
be that woman, “a free and autonomous being like all human
creatures…finds herself living in a world where men compel her to
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assume the status of the Other”? De Beauvoir’s explanation of
femininity as a masculine project, in which men construct women as
objects, a project in which women themselves are often complicit, 9
clearly anticipates much recent feminist debate. Her hope that socialism
might ultimately provide a solution to the problems of women’s
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oppression, a hope which she herself later came to qualify, has
continued to inspire a certain interest in the possibilities for a socialist
feminism, though much more so in Britain than in France.
Woolf and de Beauvoir were both novelists and both also what we
might well term cultural theorists, or at least cultural critics. Writing
about culture, very often quite specifically about literature, has in

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