Feminist Moments

Reading Feminist Texts

Susan Bruce, Katherine Smits, Susan Bruce, Katherine Smits

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781474230391
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474230407
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

The challenges presented by feminism to traditional understandings of representation, normative values, power relations and the political are not simply the product of late-20th century thinking. Feminist Moments, in examining some of the pivotal texts in the history of feminist thought, demonstrates that these challenges emerge from a long and varied history of feminist writing.

The volume brings together texts from literary and analytical works written by women and men, and from inside and outside the Western tradition, including Mary Wortley Montagu, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, Nazira Zeineddine, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Luisa Valenzuela. The volume is unique in offering close readings of key passages from the selected texts, making it ideal for classroom use; its original essays, all authored by specialists, will also be of interest to more advanced scholars.

In juxtaposing and analysing a wide range of texts which despite their significance are rarely discussed together, Feminist Moments provides a fascinating historical narrative of feminist thought which will be highly valuable to students and scholars of the history of political thought, political philosophy and gender and literary studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A Feminist-Historical Citadel: Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies
• 2. Anne Bradstreet and the Seventeenth-Century Articulation of ‘the female voice’
• 3. Mary Astell’s Critique of Marriage Practices
• 4. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Women’s Coffee House
• 5. Justice and Gender in Revolution: Olympe de Gouges Speaks for Women
• 6. Radical Spirituality and Reason in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 7. Giving Voice to Feminist Political Theory: The Radical Discourse of Anna Doyle Wheeler and William Thompson
• 8. ‘Supposed to be very calm generally’: Anger, Narrative and Unaccountable Sounds in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
• 9. ‘Something Akin to Freedom’: Harriet Jacobs and the Feminist Tradition
• 10. On the Enslavement of Women’s Minds: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women
• 11. German Maternalist Socialism: Clara Zetkin and the 1896 Social Democratic Party Congress
• 12. How Turn of the Century Feminism Finds Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• 13. Ecology and Virtue in Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Sultana’s Dream
• 14. Nazira Zeineddine: Pioneer of Islamic Feminism
• 15. Virginia Woolf, Genre-Bending and Feminist Life-Writing: A Room of One’s Own
• 16. ‘Your sister in the ’gator and the ’gator in your sister’: Judgement in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
• 17. ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’: The Sex-Gender Distinction and Simone de Beauvoir’s Account of Woman: The Second Sex
• 18. Betty Friedan’s Feminist Critique of Suburban Domesticity
• 19. ‘Writing as Re-Vision’: Female Creative Agency in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich
• 20. Complicity and Resistance: Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse
• 21. Before Her Eyes: On Luisa Valenzuela’s Bedside Manners
• Postscript: Feminist Revisions of Political Thought
• Notes
• Feminist Moments: Further Reading
• Index
• Imprint