Content area
Full Text
The History of Feminism
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv + 395 pp. ISBN 0-19506604-9(cl); ISBN 0-19-509060-8(pb).
Students of feminism and women's history have often sought to explain both the emergence of feminist thinking in some periods and its disappearance in others. In this, the second volume of her study of women and history,(1) Lerner addresses this question with a sweeping study of particular themes in women's intellectual history. Lerner argues that from the early Middle Ages onwards there is evidence of feminist consciousness; it did not give rise to a feminist movement until the nineteenth century because of patriarchy's suppression of feminist writings. Without the knowledge of earlier feminist thinkers, individual women had to reinvent the challenge to patriarchy. The exclusion of women's achievements from the history of knowledge meant that women did not learn from one another, but instead each worked in isolation.
This important book is a study of women's relationship to knowledge and authority. Feminist consciousness could only emerge when women found a basis for challenging the established order and using their own voices. They did this, of course, in a society which denied them any place from which to speak, any legitimate, recognized source of authority. Given this, any woman speaking or writing is almost ipso facto a feminist, though she may not have the consciousness with which Lerner is concerned. For Lerner, feminist consciousness is:
the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination (p. 14)
This broad definition enables Lerner to trace the resistance to patriarchy in many unexpected and surprising places, as well as the more familiar ones. She relies here on published writings, though she acknowledges that there might be unwritten forms of resistance as well. Access to education is the key to any resistance, and for Lerner, one of the primary reasons...