This lecture surveys post-World War II developments in feminist consciousness and literary criticism, focusing on approaches developed and applied by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics.
The nineteen-sixties were a time of gradually revitalising feminist consciousness, of realization by many women in Western countries that they were seriously disadvantaged in life because they lived in a patriarchy. The initial awakening of feminist consciousness in modern times, named by Kate Millett the “sexual revolution”, and now often called “First Wave” feminism, reached its peak in the suffragette movement of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Feminist consciousness was sustained until about 1930, as seen in the publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in 1929. The continuing vitality of feminist consciousness is indicated in this work by insights that seem contemporary to readers, and by suggestions for reform that are still on the feminist agenda.
Immediately after the Second World War, women who had temporarily replaced men as tradespeople and workers were relegated en masse to domesticity. This subtle and often not-so-subtle suppression was driven by middle-class women’s pre-War role as drivers of capitalist consumerism, which likewise became the basis of post-War growth and prosperity. Women’s confinement to suburbia, where they occupied the traditional “biological” spheres of housekeeping and motherhood, was confirmed in the nineteen-fifties, when the escalating prosperity of Western countries entrenched the diminishing demand for women’s paid labour outside the home. Despite the publication in French in 1949 of Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant and revelatory study, The Second Sex, most women in the West in the nineteen-fifties had lost the awareness of their feminist forebears that they were living in a patriarchal society and the implications of this for their lives. This ignorance was immensely costly to women’s self-confidence. Ignorance of their real condition caused the failure of most attempts by women to solve any problems of personal maladjustment, since they looked for the cause wholly in themselves. The ideology of a patriarchal society had been made invisible.
The revival of a feminist consciousness was signalled by the publication in the U. S. A. in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminist Mystique, and by the republication in English of de Beauvoir’s seminal study. The prosperity of the sixties allowed for tolerance of new attitudes and produced an atmosphere of freedom and defiance of authority. This manifested especially later in the decade in widespread protests in Western countries against the war in Vietnam. A revived feminist consciousness became an important part of the liberalising trend, even though feminism was not necessarily supported by anti-Vietnam activists.
The end of the sixties saw the publication of several pioneering exposés of women’s position under patriarchy. Among the most widely read were Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex (1968); Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970); Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes (1970); Juliet Mitchell’s Women’s Estate (1971); and Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness (1972). Together these books covered most aspects of women’s lives. Most were polemical to a degree, but the most polemical of all was The Female Eunuch, first published in 1971, and written by an Australian academic, Germaine Greer. Other Australian women writers significantly raised women’s consciousness of themselves and of their place in Australian society during these years. Both Anne Summer’s Damned Whores and God’s Police and Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda appeared in International Women’s Year, 1975. An excellent survey of the revitalising of the women’s movement in the late sixties and early seventies and of the developments that followed can be found in Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984.)
The outpouring of publications is only one indication of the tremendous vitality, partly unleashed anger, of the women’s movement between 1968 and 1975–the “Second Wave.” A changed awareness of women’s place in society was achieved for both men and women. In Australia the new awareness led to the formation of “consciousness-raising” groups, the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), and the election for the first time of a sizable cohort of female MPs at both the Federal and State levels. Recognition of domestic violence as a widespread problem initiated the founding of women’s shelters. Divorce laws were reformed to take account of working and non-working wives’ contributions to marriages. The consequences of this change in thinking are still with us, and will probably be significant for years to come, as the “Third Wave’ continues to roll out. A process of slow revolution or reform was set in motion. Fewer women now entirely lack consciousness of the patriarchal society and its effects, and so few are as self-blaming or as lacking in confidence as many of their sisters of the post-World War II generation.
The titles listed above are an indication of “Second-Wave” women’s wide range of concerns, of their attempts to see through ideology and to analyse oppression in most aspects of their lives. As far as literature and literary criticism were concerned, the book which began this task was Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. First published in the U.S.A. in 1969, Sexual Politics participates fully in the polemical anger of other contemporary studies of women’s oppression. On its first appearance it offered a startling revelation of masculine bias in revered modern literary classics, by showing how these works reflected and condoned women’s economic and social oppression and marginalisation. Sexual Politics thereby initiated what became a continuing concern of feminist critical writing, later broadening into a project to uncover masculine bias, not only in literary works, but in the selection of texts for study in educational institutions — the literary canon — and also in literary criticism itself. This continuing strand of feminist critical interest is sometimes known as the feminist critique. It is distinguished by the fact that it usually deals with texts written by men, especially those enjoying the approval of the literary and academic establishment. Over the years, the conceptual tools available to this kind of criticism, in the form of theory and ideas which can be applied to texts, has been refined beyond what was available to Millett, but the task she initiated continues. The raising to consciousness of masculine bias and assumptions, of women’s marginalisation and silencing in “establishment” literature and criticism is still a rewarding, innovatory and socially useful undertaking.
Sexual Politics is even now a valuable book for the feminist critic, or for anyone interested in the nature and historical causes of women’s place in our society. I’ll attempt first to provide a list of Millett’s critical principles and underlying assumptions, before commentingg briefly on the broader achievement of her book.
- Reading “Against the Grain”
Millett’s fundamental act of defiance is to “read against the grain” of the works she chooses to discuss. In particular, she denies authority to such male authors as Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and D. H. Lawrence, in their identification with, and covert approval of, their sexist heroes as these heroes pursue their sexual adventures. These often involve the degradation, domination, or marginalisation of female partners, and suggest a more or less intense misogyny. Perhaps it is difficult now to understand why this anti-authoritarianism, this “reading against the grain,” appeared to early readers of Sexual Politics as such a radical and illuminating activity. The reason was that Miller, Mailer and Lawrence were themselves widely perceived as liberal prophets of the new sexual freedom which characterised the late 1960s, the decade when the contraceptive pill first became available. Millett’s revelation of such authors’ reactionary and negative view of women was therefore a radical re-reading.
Even so, Millett’s denial of the author’s authority was not so far-reaching as that of theorists such as Roland Barthes, who, at the same time when Sexual Politics was being written, declared the “Death of the Author,” and the text’s availability to the “writing” of each of its readers, in an inexhaustible plurality of meanings. Barthes’ essay on this subject is frequently reprinted. You will find it in David Lodge’s Modern Literary Criticism: A Reader, pp. 167–72. Unlike Barthes, Millett does not deny the biographical relevance of the author to the text; nor her/his role as mother/father of the text. Her point of departure is rather the attitude, either declared or to be understood, of the author towards male/female relationships – the power politics which inform the heterosexual relationships portrayed by these writers. It is with these that she first takes issue in the cases of Lawrence, Miller and Mailer.
2. Reading Literature in its Social Context
Millett analysed literature in its social context, a procedure followed by all subsequent feminist criticism, but one which was a radical innovation in 1969, when criticism in England, the U.S.A., and most Western countries was dominated by the ahistorical practices of I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis. All beginning critics face this choice – between studying literature in its human context, or as an apparently isolated aesthetic creation, i.e., as a formal arrangement. My view is that while the former procedure is potentially productive, the latter when pressed to an extreme can reduce criticism to a mind-game.
3. The Feminist Perspective and “Objectivity”
Millett reads texts from a declared feminist perspective. In this she conforms with contemporary critical theory, and especially with the view (which is obviously correct) that there is no such thing as “objective” criticism: an illusion of objectivity prevailed in most Anglo-American criticism published at the time of Sexual Politics.
4. Not Exhaustive Analyses–New Perspectives
Millett did not attempt exhaustive analyses of every aspect of the patriarchal canonical texts which she chose as her subject, and this was to become a feature of the feminist critique. She forced readers to look at well-known works from a new vantage point, a risky, exciting, adventurous procedure, later followed by many writers of the “feminist critique” school.
5. Gender Inequality: The Most Fundamental Inequality?
Sexual Politics presents ideas of sexual inequality as the earliest-instituted and most fundamental of all inequalities, pervading all institutions – education, the Church, the judiciary, the enforcement agencies, commerce, politics – and preceding and cutting across all other inequalities, of class, caste and race. This means that the place in society of a working-class woman is more oppressed than that of a working-class man, of a black woman than a black man – gender inequalities pervade all other inequalities and intensify them. Millett draws a parallel between colonisation, or imperialism, and the “colonised” position of women under patriarchy.
6. The Pervasiveness of Patriarchal Ideology
Together with many later feminist theorists, Millett sees patriarchal ideology as monolithic and all-pervasive. (See Sexual Politics, p. 58.) A definition of “ideology,” a basic term in feminist, Marxist, and other socially-based criticism, is “a collective representation of ideas and experience as opposed to the material reality on which it is based” (Jefferson and Robey, Modern Literary Theory, p. 169). Ideology is the imagined relationship between people and their real conditions of existence, the imagined relationship which tends to perpetuate power structures. Ideology is all-pervasive, in that it is a deliberate glossing over of cracks and stress-lines in the hierarchical structures of society. It therefore lessens the possibility for revolt and dissent. It makes oppression difficult to see. Ideology attempts to resolve in the imagination potential sources of conflict.
For example, romance, which could be seen as an inherently conservative force in society, is an important aspect of ideology, in that it tends to perpetuate unequal gender relationships. Many romances support the patriarchal institution of marriage. The happy-ever-after ending is a fictional resolution of all conflict; but most people who marry discover that that is not the end of the story.
The function of ideology is to conceal tensions in the social fabric. However, theorists argue that tensions will reveal themselves anyway, in the forms, paradoxically, of an absence or a silence. Such absences or silences can exist in a literary text, as well as they can in a present social text (situation), or a past social text (history).
7. Sex and Gender
Millett explained and popularised the distinction between sex and gender, between a) the biological concepts of male and female, and b) masculine and feminine as social constructs. In Sexual Politics she illustrates the difference between sex and gender by referring to the novels of Jean Genet, in which biological maleness is often transformed, to speak in conventional or social terms, by feminine role-playing, as in the case of the drag queen.
Sexual Politics reflects the continuing interest of feminists in the nature/nurture debate as it affects women, and Millett emphasises the power of social conditioning in determining women’s sense of themselves. A prime insight of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is that “One is not born a women, one becomes one.” Sexual Politics returns often to the psycho-sociological construction of femininity. Millett sees the fundamental error of Freud’s view of women’s development as a confusion between the biologically given– the female – and the social construct – the feminine. Freud, she argues, made such extraordinary errors as seeing the apparent passivity of the ovum and activity of the sperm as models for the innate difference between the genders. Conservative ideology almost always acts to perpetuate this error, to confuse and compound biological femaleness with socially constructed femininity, in pursuit of the idea that “anatomy is destiny” – that there is no rational escape from femininity – the feminine stereotype – because it is identical with femaleness. Theorists later than Millett were to extend her feminist interest in the social-psychological-linguistic construction of femininity.
Conclusion
We have therefore traced seven of the key ideas expounded and made popular by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics. They helped to initiate a feminist revolution in thinking about literary texts that was just as important in its sphere as the new feminist thinking about all social and human issues that characterised the 1960s and 1970s.