Risky Business: Feminism Now and Then

I came to feminism in the early 1970s after encountering two women at a small table outside the Indiana University library cafeteria. They were handing out a brave, bold article entitled, as I recall, "Kinder, Kirke, Küche." Reading it was an aha! experience shared by many women at the time. The resulting headiness aroused by finding at long last a label to give to an until-that-time vaguely perceived misogyny propelled me right through the early years of my career and into my first book, The Brink of All We Hate: Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (University Press of Kentucky, 1984). Writing that book was a chancy—and perhaps foolish—venture for an untenured assistant professor. An anonymous reader of the manuscript for a press (not the one that ultimately published it) underscored the dangers that lay ahead when he warned archly, "You are trying to write for two audiences—the one that thinks well of Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir, and the one that asks for evidence from eighteenth-century texts. You may find those audiences in conflict." Yet attracting both of those audiences was exactly what I was hoping to accomplish.

Has the moment passed when that anonymous reader's comment has resonance in suggesting that serious historical critics find little of interest in feminism's insights? I'm not sure that it has. If some assume that feminist methodologies have become so thoroughly embedded in our theoretical and critical conversations that they no longer need to identify them as such, other evidence points toward their erasure and exclusion. For Susan Stanford Friedman, "Feminist analysis is no longer the central conceptual focus but rather a stance that infuses the whole, like a heavy spice flavoring the tea,"¹ while Susan Gubar worries that "the integration of feminist methodologies into nearly all theoretical approaches" might "mean that feminist criticism will wither away as an autonomous intellectual venture or get taken for granted and thus marginalized."² Sharon Marcus tellingly identifies influential books written by male critics that "evince patterns of citation that favor men even when the pool of excellent relevant scholarship amply features women."³ The evidence suggests that the hard-won literary historical work of many feminist critics is frequently slighted rather than cited. Women's intellectual labor in the academy continues to be silently absorbed or ignored but in either case often left uncredited. Parallel bodies of criticism divided by gender continue to evolve. How then can feminist theorists and critics in the twenty-first century hope to cultivate cultural authority? And is that still a goal that we should seek?

In spite of my epiphanal moment in graduate school, it was much later, long after The Brink of All We Hate had been remaindered, when I began to notice that eighteenth-century women such as Sarah Fielding, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Frances Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft (among others) had also been skilled satirists. Satire had until that point in the history of literary criticism been regarded as an exclusively masculine genre. In the terms familiar to the eighteenth century, Juvenalian satire assumed a masculine cast of ruggedness, the "elevated satire by a moral, perceptive outsider," as one critic put it.⁴ Though the muse of satire is female, throwing thunderbolts from the right hand, holding a somber mask in the left, the position of a moral, perceptive outsider possessed of manly vigor and violence was an unlikely one for an eighteenth-century woman to attain. In the opening lines to Samuel Johnson's poem imitating Juvenal, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," the satirist's stance is a comprehensive one: "Let observation with extensive view / Survey mankind, from China to Peru."⁵ The onlooker whose gaze encompasses the world takes the broad and superior view. From his stance on high, he can see the relations among things and can comprehend them whole. This privileged moral stance hinges on wide-ranging experience and broad education. It is, thus, a gendered one: for many centuries, only the polite and aristocratic European gentleman could make claims of impartiality.⁶ The special insight that writing...