How Feminist Conformism Ruined Women's Poetry
Can good poetry result from rejecting the body?
This week, literary critic Susan Martin discusses liberal feminism’s influence on women’s poetry. Can lyric poetry survive the push to refashion women’s writing and women’s bodies in accord with conformist activism?
How Feminist Conformism Ruined Women’s Poetry
Susan Martin
On my mother’s bookshelves, volumes of Dickinson’s poetry stood next to the manifesto of feminist icon Betty Friedan. When The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963—when I was two years old—it seemed logical that feminism would champion women’s literature and that women writers in turn would enjoy greater artistic freedom, and chronicle the greater equality afforded to women by anti-discrimination law.
Unfortunately, the mutual illumination of art and feminist theory turned out to be very one-sided. Feminist theory consumed women’s writing as its fuel, but as it burned brighter, the damage became clear: a woman writer could write only by splitting off her sexed body—the one vulnerable to assault, the one designed for fertility—from her mind.
This Week: Beauvoir's Insight, Success Reconsidered, and the Pimp Lobby
This week: Featured Author Rachel Lu on what Beauvoir gets right, Patrick T. Brown on reconsidering the 'success sequence', Julie Bindel on Canada's pimp lobby, Rachel Cusk, Lia Thomas, feminist films, FD recommends a book—and more!
From the Archives
ICYMI: an evolutionary biologist points out some of the biological roots of sexual difference—and discusses how far we can reasonably take arguments from biology.
Sex and Violence: The Evolution of Male Aggression
Angus John Bateman, Jr.
“There are limits to absolute equality between the sexes precisely because there are biological roots for the behavioural differences between them. To deny this is to deny reality.”