Feminist Literary History: How Do We Know We’ve Won?

Abstract

This essay pronounces the death of women’s writing as a field of study and then argues for its resurrection. Women’s writing needs a new body; the hard-fought gains in institutional infrastructure for its study—the editing projects, databases, scholarly organizations, journals and curricula—must continue. But its current content, its specific modes of study, has placed the field on a trajectory to scholarly morbidity. We need a new queen of the Amazons. She might resemble her mother in scholarly rigour and attentiveness to intersectional differences, but she will look more like her second-wave grandmother in her theoretical boldness and political commitment.