When it comes to great feminist literature, prominent figures like Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison immediately come to mind. These literary legends can be regarded as feminist pioneers whose artistic creations confront and interrogate patriarchal norms.
But there are other writers who’ve made important contributions to the feminist cause, yet don’t always get the recognition they deserve.
Listed chronologically, the texts explored in this post epitomise the feminist views of their authors, all of whom are linked by their unwavering commitment to the fight for gender equality.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne Brontë
You’ve probably heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as well as Wuthering Heights, the infamously dark debut of her sister, Emily. The youngest of the Brontë sisters, Anne, however, was also an esteemed novelist with two feminist classics under her belt.
First published in 1848, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tells the story of Helen Graham, an independent figure who flees her abusive husband. Helen quickly becomes the subject of controversy among the local community after acquiring residence at Wildfell Hall. Mysterious and enigmatic, her story is documented by a curious neighbour, Gilbert Markhem.
Brontë’s novel challenged Victorian ideas of womanhood by depicting Helen as a working artist. In leaving her husband to pursue safety, Brontë’s novel also critiques the power imbalance which continues to plague many heterosexual marriages.
Despite being widely considered one of the first feminist novels in English literature, Helen’s story remains overshadowed by those of the characters whom Anne Brontë’s elder sisters brought to life.
Keynotes & Discords (1893, 1894) by George Egerton
Unless you’re a scholar of feminist theory, the idea of the ‘New Woman’ may be somewhat foreign.
Originating towards the end of the Victorian era, the New Woman embodied the first-wave feminist belief that women must acquire education and employment to break from traditional gender norms.
Egerton’s short story collections bristle with these early feminist ideas; exploring the psychology of characters that are often rebellious and assertive in their desires for autonomy from the “long crucifixion” that is heterosexual marriage.
Egerton’s connection to contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde is well-documented, and she is often regarded as a early Modernist.
Egerton’s literary contributions, however, remain relatively unknown by the general public.
The Ghetto & Other Poems (1918) by Lola Ridge
Ten years before Virginia Woolf published ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ Irish-American poet Lola Ridge gave her own landmark presentation: ‘Women and the Creative Will.’
Delivered a year after the publication of her first collection, The Ghetto & Other Poems, Ridge’s lecture put forth the ground-breaking argument that women’s creativity is hampered by the pressure of socially constructed gender roles.
The titular poem of Ridge’s debut collection explores these feminist views, honouring the lives of Jewish immigrant women living in the Lower East Side of New York City.
One of these individuals is Sadia Sodos who, despite the pressures of patriarchy, exerts agency through a number of artistic and intellectual pursuits.
Perhaps it was her radical commitment to defending the rights of women, along with those of blacks and homosexuals, that pushed this visionary poet to the back of public consciousness.
Katie Roche (1936) by Teresa Deevy
“The state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved,” reads Article 41.2 of the 1937 Irish Constitution.
A year prior to the publication of the Constitution, Teresa Deevy premiered Katie Roche on the Abbey Stage, a feminist play that interrogates the effects of the Catholic church on the everyday lives of Irish women.
Deevy’s protagonist, Katie, is a spirited young woman whose dreams of freedom, adventure, and overall greatness are cut short by pressures of a strictly religious Ireland and the nationalist fervour that fuelled the influence of Catholicism.
Katie Roche, for all its feminist interrogations, was an international success, later touring the United States. It would, however, be the of Deevy’s plays to premiere on the Abbey stage.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1968) by Ursula K. Le Guin
The genre of science-fiction continues to be dominated by men, protagonists and authors alike. It is within this sea of masculinity that one name stands out, however: Ursula K Le. Guin.
Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is considered a pioneering text of feminist science fiction; a subgenre originating with the 19th century publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The Left Hand of Darkness speaks to certain strands of contemporary feminism which sought to “[eliminate] gender, to find out what is left.” ‘Men’ give birth in the novel, ‘women’ are untouched by the pressures of femininity, as the inhabitants of the planet Gethan are ambisexual.
Much like Woolf’s Orlando, Le Gun’s text can therefore be considered an early exploration of gender fluidity in literature.
The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ
Second-wave feminism had firmly established itself as a major force by the mid-1970s.
Beginning her literary career in the 1960s, Joanna Russ was a writer familiar with the feminist movement, having made a number of contributions to academic study of feminist science-fiction.
The Female Man integrates Russ’ feminist views by exploring the lives of four women living in four parallel universes. There is Joanna who lives in a world similar to that of Russ’ own, Jeannine who resides in a downtrodden New York City that has never known feminist ideas, Janet’s world is an all-female utopia without men and, finally, there is Jael whose dystopian planet is characterised by a literal battle of the sexes.
Russ’ novel, despite being regarded as a landmark text of feminist science fiction, remains somewhat unknown.
The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston
For feminism, the memoir can be viewed as a source of personal power. The writer, by speaking from a place of perfect honesty, can voice the experiences that are often overlooked, or downright silenced, in our patriarchal society.
The Woman Warrior takes this idea one step further.
Kingston’s memoir blends life-writing with Chinese folklore to interrogate pressing issues such as foot-binding and sexual enslavement. This entwinement of perspectives includes, for example, Kingston’s recounting her mother’s tale of Fa Mu Lan which the author uses to draw a connection between her experience with racism and that of the fabled warrior.
The Warrior Woman thus denotes an important artefact of second-wave feminism by critiquing patriarchal structures while simultaneously providing an intersectional lens to the problem of gender inequality.
For Coloured Girls who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf (1976) by Ntozake Shange
Second-wave feminism, despite its many gains and lasting cultural influence, has routinely been the subject of criticism for failing to account for the influence of race on issues of women’s oppression.
Shange sought to compensate for this oversight by writing a series of interconnected monologues that explored subjects such as rape, abortion, and domestic violence, along with how such issues affect black women, in particular.
On the one hand, Shange’s text is a theatrical play, on the other, it is a poetry collection to be read aloud. Due to its mixing of genres, Shange termed her monologues ‘choreopoems’ as the rhythms of music and dance are used to echo the beats of the vernacular style in which Shange wrote.
Shange’s text, despite being the second by a black woman to reach Broadway, has only received its dues in recent years with a 2009 film adaptation being followed by an off-Broadway revival a decade later.
Loba (1970s – 1990s) by Diane di Prima
The Beat poets remain in the public conscious for their rejection of the mainstream to favour themes of transgression. Whereas Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac may be the Beats that most people know today, their literary contributions were witnessed and inspired by one talented woman: Diane di Prima.
Di Prima’s most important work, Loba, was written over the course of nearly thirty years and depicts the poet’s engagement with divine feminine energy, distilled into the symbol of the wolf goddess.
“An epic of language,” the feminist poet Adrienne Rich called di Prima’s text, “a great geography of the female imagination.”
Alongside her poetics, di Prima was involved with socially active organisations such as the Diggers, an anti-capitalist group based in San Francisco, and was, until her death in 2020, a vocal champion of women’s rights.
Stone Butch Blues (1993) by Leslie Feinberg
For a movement that is by its very nature concerned with issues of gender and sexuality, feminism has routinely overlooked the issues faced by the trans community.
Stone Butch Blues delves into the challenges of Jess Goldberg, a stone butch lesbian, as she navigates marginalisation with a patriarchal society that wishes to oppress individuals who do not conform to traditional gender expectations.
Feminist organisations are also critiqued throughout the novel, however, as Feinberg depicts the ways in which feminist groups, often shackled by the demands of heteronormativity, can exclude queer individuals.
Feinberg, who went by ze/hir pronouns, continuously refused to allow the text to be adapted to film, and thus made the novel available for free a mere handful of days before hir death in 2014.
PDF copies are available here.