完整综述版-文学理论之女性主义文论（英语）Feministtheory..doc

Feminist Theory Modern Feminism began with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), a work that criticizes stereotypes of women as emotional and instinctive and argues that women should aspire to the same rationality prized by men. A product of the Enlightenment, Woll- stonecraft believed that women should enjoy social, legal, and intellec- tual equality with men and drew for support from the work of progressive social philosophers. Liberal intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor, developed this argument, infusing it with the prin- ciples of individualism that Mill had developed out of the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. In 1866, Mill introduced a bill in parlia- ment that called for an extension of the franchise to women and, in 1869, published The Subjection of Women (1869). In that essay he argued that women ought to enjoy equality in the social sphere, especially in mar- riage, and condemned “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation” (276): “All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yield- ing to the control of others” (271). Mill’s views, influenced strongly by Taylor, marked a significant advance for women and provided the inspi- ration for the New Woman movement at the end of the nineteenth- and the early-twentieth-century suffragette movements committed to social equality and individual freedom. The first phase or “wave” of modern Feminism, then, was concerned primarily with the issue of suffrage (the right to vote). The dominant figures at mid-nineteenth century in the US were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose political roots were in anti-slavery activ- ism and, to a lesser degree, temperance movements. Stanton composed the “Declaration of Sentiments” for the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848, a watershed mo