Feminism Between the Wars: The Self Pity of Virginia Woolf - Janice Fiamengo

Feminist icon Virginia Woolf exemplified the direction that feminism would take in the decades after the First World War. No matter how many legal rights and professional opportunities women gained, feminists like Woolf continued to express condemnation of all men and conviction of oppression. In her landmark 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf turned to alleged psychological oppression to justify her deep sense of grievance.  

Sex Insanity Amongst Early Feminists - Janice Fiamengo

Dissident British feminist Wilma Meikle published a book in 1917 to warn against aspects of the contemporary feminist movement that she hoped would not become dominant in the years after the First World War. Although she was proved wrong in her hopes, her book provides a fascinating window onto the roots of feminist sex delirium.

Objectification or Adoration, Love Poems in the English Renaissance Tradition

If it were true that the history of the west were the history of men oppressing women, we would expect to find some significant evidence of such oppression—of male entitlement to women’s bodies, sexual violence, or indifference to women’s pain—in the literature that privileged men wrote.

We would expect that some of the most culturally influential men of their time would at least occasionally reveal their contempt for women and their pleasure in controlling them.

What we encounter instead is a massive body of love poetry stretching back through the centuries in which extended adoration of the woman and expressions of dedicated or hopeless yearning form a major component, and in which the commission of violence is presented as the height of mental malady, as in Robert Browning’s sinister dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” (1842).

Jane Austen’s Anti-Feminism - Janice Fiamengo

Although she is now often recruited by feminist critics to make points about women’s limited life choices, preeminent social satirist Jane Austen wrote to oppose the popular proto-feminist ideas of her time, and her warnings about Romantic self-indulgence remain relevant to our own.

Utopianism and Double Standards in Feminist Foremother Mary Wollstonecraft - Janice Fiamengo

Let us go even further back in feminist history to the late eighteenth century and the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, an acclaimed proponent of women’s rights, whose 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is now widely regarded as the founding document of Anglophone feminism. As I will hope to show, Wollstonecraft’s commitment to the Enlightenment principles of equality and reason is at best skin deep, covering over a foundation of anti-male double standards and irrational hostility that forecast all too clearly the next 230 years of female supremacism.