Cassandra Langer

Beginning in the 1940's with Hollywood's image of the American woman, this book goes on to discuss the images of home, family, and domesticity in the 1950's and the impact of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique on the 1960s generation. Next, it examines the 1970's, the so-called golden age of American feminism, including sexual politics and reactionary rhetoric about lesbians and women who didn't follow the party line. Antifeminist cultural discourses on women's rights, including Susan Faludi's Backlash, are discussed in relation to abortion, equal pay for equal work, and other political, social, and cultural issues. The book assesses the highly charged sexual politicas of the 1990's using the writings of Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, and Katie Roiphe to analyze different levels of post-feminism. With examples from the mass media, film, literature, popular culture, art criticism, this book surveys the impact of the American feminist movement, hot it originated, why certain ideas and images had to change, and how this movement shaped our notions of feminine and masculine over the last fifty years. A Feminist Critique is a fair and much-needed overview of the accomplishments, issues, and goals of the feminist movement and its future course.

How Feminism Has Changed American Society, Culture and How We Live from the 1940's to the Present

What's Right With Feminism

Arlene Raven

From the Preface: "The essays in Feminist Art Criticism are theoretical, and we selected them for several reasons. First, they show a diversity of concerns. These include spirituality, sexuality, the representation of women in art, the necessary inter-relationship of theory and action, women as artmakers, ethnicity, language itself, so-called postfeminism and critiques of hte art world, the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism. Second, the contributors' work has not been either widely disseminated or readily available. Third, the essays, especially arranged as they are (chronologically), demonstrate a continuous feminist discourse in art from the early 1970s through the present, a discourse that is neither monolithic nor intellectually trendy but that rather exhibits many elements, the polemical, Marxist, lyrical, and poststructuralist being only a few."

Cassandra Langer

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