subjection
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: “The 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 “Declaration of
95
Rights of the Women of the United States” for the Centennial celebration
in Washington in 1876. Though not off icially invited, Anthony read the
address. Anthony and Stanton later founded the National Woman Suf-
frage  Association,  which  in  1890  merged  with  the  more  conservative
American  Woman  Suffrage  Association.  These  organizations  were
instrumental in securing suffrage for women – in 1920, with the Susan
B.  Anthony  Amendment  –  and  served  as  the  foundation  for  modern
Feminism.
Not all feminist movements involved political activism in this early
period.  Literary  Modernism  produced  foundational  feminist  writers,
including  preeminently  Virginia  Woolf,  H.D.  (Hilda  Doolittle),  and
Djuna Barnes. Their work dramatized the potentially damaging effects
of  the  rationalism  that  Wollstonecraft  and  Mill  proffered  as  the  birth-
right of women and the social entitlement called for by the New Woman
movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. Woolf ’s Room
of  One’s  Own  (1929)  was  a  landmark  work  in  which  representations  of
women  by  male  authors  are  roundly  criticized  and  a  new  model  for
female IDENTITY and AGENCY is proffered. Woolf also insisted that women
be allowed the economic and social freedom to follow their aspirations
and to forego the traditional role of serving as an enlarging mirror for
male identity. “How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives,
making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets,
unless  he  can  see  himself  at  breakfast  and  at  dinner  at  least  twice  the