M.A.R. Habib
Summary
Feminism is not the twentieth century phenomenon. The history / root of feminism goes to ancient Greece in the works of Sappho and Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. This play presents women in Acroplolis as physically and intellectually superior to the male chorus and ended the use of sexuality as a weapon in masculine project of the Peloponnesian War. Feminism is also reflects in Geoffrey Chaucer’s character Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales, who has experience of five husbands. In the Middle Ages, Christine de Pisan would debate with the male critics. Renaissance had many women poets, as Catherine Des Roches in France and England. Aphra Behn and Anne Bradstreet were the seventeenth century pioneers in literary profession. Mary Wollstonecraft after the French Revolution argued that the ideals of the revolution must be extended to women and their educational access (d). The nineteenth century was rich in female writing in Europe and America from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf ((a, b., c).
In the history, women were deprived of education, financial independence, and had to struggle against patriarchy means male ideology even in the twentieth century that controls programs women making them silence and obedience. Patriarchal literature defined women as angels, goddesses, obedient, mother, tender, kind, weaker, incapable, coward, passive, and subordinator to males. So, feminist literary theory wants to rewrite literary history to include the contribution of the females and define sexuality and the sexual difference; gynocriticism seeing relation between gender and genre. Feminism seeks language that dominates women and the experience of women (f).
Male have defined females; known as ‘patriarchal women’. Males define females, female identity is man-made. Aristotle made binary opposition: male / female. The feminism wants to reject all theories generated by men. It rejects objectivity and neutrality and supports only subjectivity highlighting ‘body’ metaphors rejecting male Cartesian tradition which says that male and female makes no difference but thought and experience makes difference. The pronoun ‘I’ is not allowed in essay writing in high school (f).
Feminism can develop like other theories to voice for the rights, equality, freedom and justice and philosophers as Hegel, Betgson who focused reason and rejected the patriarchy mode of defining women in various cultures; as Fatima Mernissi from Arab, Alice Walker from Afro –American and Gyatri Spivak from Asian heritage.
