A History of Feminist Thought: The Essential Feminist Reader

This book has been on my to-read list for years.  Once I decided to buy it so I could annotate it, it sat on my nightstand for a few more years.

I’ve finally gotten to The Essential Feminist Reader (2007) edited by Estelle B. Freedman, and I loved it!  It is a compilation of feminist writings, some excerpts and some full text, from all continents and cultures from 1405 to present.  It begins with an excerpt from Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a book I read in an undergraduate seminar in humanities, and one that was a delight to revisit through the short version of it included in this anthology.

I worked my way through all of the selections, which include feminist writers and thinkers I knew and some that I didn’t.  I was introduced to Mexican feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz who wrote in the late 1600s and eventually stopped writing because she was threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church.  I learned about Kishida Toshiko, who wrote in Japan in 1883 about not keeping our daughters in boxes.  I reviewed the words of familiar American feminists, such as Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Emma Goldman, who, by the way, makes an appearance in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975).  I made connections to W.E.B. Du Bois’s work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which I read two years ago and wrote about here, to his feminist writings in 1919.  I learned about Mariarosa Dalla Costa from Italy, who argued that we need to redefine “work” to include women’s experiences, a theme I use quite frequently in my own research.

All of these writers and thinkers have helped me to continue to make connections between my work as a scholar and the historical and geographical context of women’s issues throughout the centuries.

Some of my favorite selections included the following:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” (United States, 1848)

Susan B. Anthony, “Social Purity,”(United States, 1875)

Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women (Egypt, 1899)

Emmeline Pankhurst, “Suffrage Speech at Old Bailey,” (England, 1912)

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women,” (United States, 1919)

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (United States, 1963)

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “A General Strike,” (Italy, 1974)

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” (United States, 1979)

Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave,” (United States, 1992)

My favorite poem from the collection (one of the only represented) is this:

“The Day the Mountains Move”

The day the mountains move has come.

I speak, but no one believes me.

For a time the mountains have been asleep,

But long ago they all danced with fire.

It doesn’t matter if you believe this,

My friends, as long as you believe:

All the sleeping women

Are now awake and moving.

(Yosano Akiko, Japan 1911)

The rest of my post is a compilation of some of my favorite quotes from the book.

“I see the endless benefits which have accrued to the world through women and nevertheless these men claim that there is no evil which has not come into the world because of them. . . . Oh how could any man be so heartless to forget that the door of Paradise was opened to him by a woman? As I told you before, it was opened by the Virgin Mary, and is there anything greater one could ask for than that God was made man?” (Christine de Pizan, France 1405, p. 7).

“[T]he mind . . . has no sex. . . . A woman’s mind is joined to her body, like a man’s, by God himself, and according to the same laws. . . . Like us, women hear with their ears, see with their eyes, and taste with their tongues” (François Poullain de la Barre, France 1673, p. 11).

“All working class woes can be summed up in two words: poverty and ignorance; ignorance and poverty” (Flora Tristan, France 1843, p. 53).

“How many more women there are who silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were they not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the proprieties of their sex” (emphasis in original, John Stuart Mill, England 1869, p. 75).

“[T]hese girls are like creatures kept in a box. . . . it is out of love for their daughters that these parents construct these boxes. . . . I intend to create a box without walls. A box without walls is one that allows its occupants to tread wherever their feet might lead and stretch their arms as wide as they wish. Some may object and say: is your box not one that encourages dissipation and willfulness? No, it is not so at all. My box without walls is made of heaven and earth—its lid I would fashion out of the transparent blue of the sky and at its bottom would be the fathomless depths of the earth upon which we stand” (Kishida Toshiko, Japan 1883, p. 100).

“No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, no how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency, they must know something of the laws of navigation” (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, United States 1892, p. 124).

“This evidence of history confirms and demonstrates that the status of women is inseparably tied to the status of a nation” (Qasim Amin, Egypt 1899, p. 146).

“God did not divide the universe, making one part of it to be enjoyed by women alone and another to be enjoyed by men, working in it segregated from women. In fact, He created the burdens of life to be shared and controlled by both men and women” (Qasim Amin, Egypt 1899, p. 149).

“This proves clearly that it is no more appropriate for a woman to cover her face than for a man to cover his. How strange! If men feared that women would be tempted, why were not men ordered to wear the veil and conceal their faces from women? Is a man’s will considered weaker than a woman’s? Are men to be regarded as weaker than women in controlling their desires? Is a woman considered so much stronger than a man that men have been allowed to show their faces to the eyes of women, regardless of how handsome or attractive they are, while women are forbidden to show their faces to men, from the fear that men’s desires may escape the control of their minds, and they may thus be tempted by any woman they see, however ugly or disfigured she be? Any many who claims this viewpoint must then admit that women have a more perfect disposition than men; why then should women always be placed under the protection of men? If however, this viewpoint is incorrect, what justified this traditional control over women’s lives? (Qasim Amin, Egypt 1899, p. 150).

“What I do recommend, however, is the preparation of our daughters for this change, starting in their childhood. This early preparation will gradually accustom them to independence and to the belief that chastity is an inner spiritual quality, not the result of a garment which hides the body” (Qasim Amin, Egypt 1899, p. 152).

“Regardless of all political and economic theories, treating of the fundamental differences between the various groups within the human race, regardless of class and race distinctions, regardless of all artificial boundary lines between women’s rights and man’s rights, I hold that there is a point where these differentiations may meet and grow into one perfect whole” (Emma Goldman, United States 1906, p. 169).

“Pettiness separates, breadth unites. Let us be broad and big” (Emma Goldman, United States 1906, p. 173).

“After visiting their peons, she should explain to her husband the state and conditions of these unfortunate souls that produce her family’s capital and obtain a salary increase for them, and she should do so discreetly and frugally instead of using fancy garments and other useless adornments on her body or in her home. She should go to them consoling and healing the sad homes of those victims of exploitation. Take them clothes, footwear, books and attempt to instruct them by reading to them and making sure that there are schools in the neighborhood to educate the children of these employees. How beautiful and comely she would be, woman sowing goodness, fulfilling her obligation to humanity!” (Luisa Capetillo, Puerto Rico 1911, p. 189).

“Use your brain, and make a habit of doing so” (Ding Ling, China 1942, p. 241).

“[W]e must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh. . . . For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens” (Simone de Beauvoir, France 1949, p. 261).

“The level of civilisation which any society has reached can be measured by the degree of freedom that its members enjoy. The status of women is a test of civilsation. . . . We women share with our menfolk the cares and anxieties imposed by poverty and its evils. As wives and mothers, it falls upon us to make small wages stretch a long way. It is we who feel the cries of our children when they are hungry and sick” (Federation of South African Women, South Africa 1954, p. 264).

“[M]enstruation is normal . . . We found that, for many of us, beginning to menstruate had not felt normal at all, but scary, embarrassing, mysterious. We realized that what we had been told about menstruation and what we had not been told, even the tone of voice it had been told in—all had had an effect on our feelings about being female” (Boston Women’s Health Collective, United States 1973, p. 296).

“It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. . . . Write!” (Hélène Cixous, France 1975, p. 324).

“For difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. . . . Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. . . . Without community, there is no liberation. . . But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist” (Audre Lorde, United States 1979, p. 333).

“Only be remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. . . . [she] copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Gloria Anzaldúa, United States 1987, p. 388).

“Women have always worked, in all societies—and at all times” (Gro Haarlem Brundtland, Norway 1995, p. 413).

“If that freedom is bestowed by others, it may be seized and violated any time” (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, Afghanistan 2004, p. 429).

 

If you’re looking to learn more about feminist thought, especially from a historical perspective, this is a great introduction to it.  It covers all types of feminism from many perspectives, some of them clashing.