Abstract:Hundreds of books on women's issues have been published in the past twenty‐five years. Topics include feminist theory, women and education, women and the family, women in the workplace, and women and ...Hundreds of books on women's issues have been published in the past twenty‐five years. Topics include feminist theory, women and education, women and the family, women in the workplace, and women and religion. But except for a few well‐known bestsellers, from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (Norton, 1963) to Susan Faludi's Backlash (Crown, 1991), these books are read mainly by a few academics and dedicated feminists. Much more widely read are the many recent novels by women writers that deal with women's lives and women's issues. Some of these are explicitly feminist in content, attacking specific problems or showing the results of the oppression of women, thus in effect arguing for social change. Other novels are indirectly feminist in that they simply portray the conditions under which women live in the world, from women's points of view. This may not sound revolutionary, but with some notable exceptions, until the past twenty‐five years, novels by women with women as the focus were in the minority and were not widely read in schools or respected by literary critics. Many women readers felt that novels showed life mostly through men's eyes. The current wealth of well‐written, illuminating novels by women writers about women's lives can be a powerful force for social change. Although most literary critics would argue that the major function of literature is artistic rather than political, there is a long tradition of great literature throughout history that treats such themes as war and peace, forms of government, religion, and race. Note that because historically these are male primarily concerns, their political nature may be hidden. Shouldn't great fiction also grapple with the conditions of women's lives and with the status of women in the world?Read More
Publication Year: 1993
Publication Date: 1993-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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