Virginia Woolf
Culture
See also:
Women's cinema and Women's music
Women's writing
For more details on Women's literature written in English, see
Women's writing in English.
Women's writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly interest relatively recently.
In the West, second-wave feminism prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women's history and women's writing, developed in response to the
belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest.
Virginia Balisn et al. characterize the growth in interest since 1970 in women's writing as "powerful".
Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women.
Studies such as Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's 'The Rise of the Woman Novelist' (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing.
Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation.
In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender's study, issued a companion line of eighteenth-century novels written by women.
More recently, Broadview Press has begun to issue eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works, many hitherto out of print and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women's novels. There has been commensurate growth in the area of biographical dictionaries of women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that "[m]ost of our women are not represented in the 'standard' reference books in the field".
Feminist science fiction
In the 1960s the genre of science fiction combined its sensationalism with political and technological critiques of society. With the advent of feminism, questioning women’s roles became fair game to this "subversive, mind expanding genre".
Two early texts are Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969) and Joanna Russ' 'The Female Man' (1970). They serve to highlight the socially constructed nature of gender roles by creating utopias that do away with gender.
Both authors were also pioneers in feminist criticism of science fiction in the 1960s and 70s, in essays collected in 'The Language of the Night' (Le Guin, 1979) and 'How To Suppress Women's Writing' (Russ, 1983).
Other major works of feminist science fiction have been 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood[ and 'Kindred'
by Octavia Butler.
