Abstract
The Women’s Liberation Movement produced feminist writers and readers. It inspired specialist publishers and small presses, as well as academic study, bolstering further interest in women’s writing. The relationship between artistic creation, political identity, and commerce was both mutually strengthening and deeply problematic. Writers explored what the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ might mean; readers consumed fiction that encapsulated their own experiences in its focus on the previously unrepresented aspects of women’s private lives. This second wave of feminism created ‘monsters’ in the eyes of detractors, and feminists exploited the ‘monstrous’ in a sustained challenge to the notion of appropriate ‘feminine’ behaviours. One feminist theatre group took the moniker ‘Monstrous Regiment’, thus subverting John Knox’s famous sixteenth-century tract attacking female power. Other misogynist terms, such as ‘Virago’ and ‘Shrew’, were rehabilitated and celebrated by feminists with deliberate irony.
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Notes
Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, New Left Review, 1:40 (November–December 1966), p. 11.
Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 137.
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Funded by the Greater London Council. See Miriam Ticktin, ‘Contemporary British Asian Women’s Writing: Social Movement or Literary Tradition?’, Women: A Cultural Review, 7:1 (1996), p. 69.
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© 2015 Imelda Whelehan
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Whelehan, I. (2015). ‘The Monstrous Regiment’: Literature and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In: Eagleton, M., Parker, E. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-29481-4_8
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