文艺理论：女性主义(Feminist Theory)原版阅读

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, infl uenced strongly by

Taylor, marked a signif icant 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 fi rst phase or “wave” of modern Feminism, then, was concerned

primarily with the issue of suffrage (the right to vote). The dominant

fi gures 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 moment in US Feminism. Modeled on

the US Constitution, the Declaration asserts “that all men and women

are created equal,” and indicts a patriarchal culture for repressing the

rights of women: “T he history of mankind is a history of repeated inju-

ries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct

object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her” (Sourcebook).

Together with Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton wrote the “Decl aration of

95

Rights of the Women of the United States” for the Centennial celebration