Women in Literature: The Impact of Feminism on Fantasy Literature, 1950-1990.

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Published date: 01 December 2021

The 1960s and 1970s were a tumultuous time, characterized by several different political movements, including the Women's Rights Movement. The Women's Rights Movement desired not only equality for women, but to change the way women were viewed in the world. In the post-World War II era, women looked to important feminist icons, such as Rosie the Riveter, to push the idea that women could be just as strong and useful as men. The women of the 1960s desired equal pay for equal work, opportunities to advance in the workplace, and most of all to no longer be subjected to the sexual harassment that ran rampant in the workplace. With the emergence of this second wave of the Women's Rights Movement, popular culture started to create projects with a feminist perspective. Women began to use literature as a means to force men to understand that they too were people worthy of respect.

Prior to the 1960s, fantasy literature lacked a female voice. The fantasy genre of literature has existed for almost the entire length of the written word; it has evolved from myths, to fairytale, to the fantasy genre recognized today and yet women only began to break into the genre after the second Women's Rights Movement. Most secondary sources that discuss the repercussions of the Women's Rights Movement on literature focus entirely on the first wave of the movement (1884-1920), and make only a passing mention of how that was reflected in fantasy literature. This paper aims to shed light on how the Women's Rights Movement impacted western fantasy literature genre from the United States and United Kingdom, starting in the 1960s. To begin, this paper will examine fantasy works in the mid-to-late 1900s and how a political movement helped to shape the genre. It will then look at how the women's movement impacted literature in general, and then examine popular fantasy literature before, during, and after the second Women's Rights Movement. Finally, it will demonstrate that the women's movement was instrumental in changing the way fantasy literature was written. Women's Rights Movement

During the 1960s, women began to realize that despite the strides they had made during the Women's Rights Movement of the 1920s, they were still heavily discriminated against in almost every aspect of American life. Feminism includes the belief that gender equality in society means equal representation in popular culture. There was a common belief that it was the movement of the 1920s that led women to become more prominent in literature, but it was not until this second wave of feminism that they were able to break into the fantasy genre in a meaningful way. Fantasy literature is a genre that uses the imaginary and the magical to add a missing element to life. Before the 1960s, the fantasy literature genre was dominated by male authors, writing strong male characters and one-dimensional female characters that added little to the story. The few female authors in the genre followed that same model. The Women's Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s led female fantasy literature authors to write literature with well-rounded, strong female characters instead of maintaining the status quo of strong, male characters and one-dimensional female characters. T.H. White's The Once and Future King (1958) was written from Arthur's perspective, with the only important female characters being portrayed as evil and J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) contained only three notable female characters. Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974) both were tales of heroic wizards, but Le Guin's is a tale of the misdirected, male wizard Ged while McKillip's, written later, is a tale of the kind and powerful female wizard Sybel. During this renaissance of fantasy literature, William Goldman's The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (1973), showed that male authors still viewed women as damsels in distress. As fantasy literature began to progress, authors such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Janny Wurts, and Raymond E. Feist wrote about powerful women and the impact they had on the world around them. Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982) tells the Arthurian legends solely from the perspective of the women. Wurts' and Feist's Daughter of the Empire (1987), tells of a young woman that becomes the leader of her people and works to change the course of a nation. As the feminist movement took root, authors began to change the fantasy narrative from one solely centered on male heroes to one that included both male and female protagonists.

Although many sources have been written about women in literature and the Women's Rights Movement, most of the secondary sources discuss the first women's movement of the nineteenth century and not that of the 1960s and 1970s. Research on the fantasy literature genre is even more sparse and only the history and evolution of fantasy literature has been written about, but not what led to that evolution. Political movements and the impact that popular culture has on them has also been written about to some degree as well as the impact political movement has on popular culture, but not how recent political movements have influenced postmodern literature. Little has been written about the second Women's Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s because most sources focus on the suffrage movement and end the discussion after women won the vote.

The impact of the Women's Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s on various aspects of modern life (i.e., work, family life, and education) has been heavily examined by historians and yet, its impact on the fantasy literature genre has never before been studied. The impact the Second Women's Rights Movement had on the fantasy literature genre and the subsequent development of many strong female characters is an entirely new topic. This topic is entirely new in its approach to how the feminist movement has impacted culture. The Women's Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s led female fantasy literature authors to write literature with well-rounded, strong female characters instead of maintaining the status quo of strong, male characters and one-dimensional female characters. Two historical approaches will be used for this topic. The gender approach will be used to show the way that both genders are portrayed in fantasy literature before, during, and after the Women's Rights Movement. The cultural approach will also be used to show the ways in which the women's movement changed the way that cultures viewed the roles of the two genders and how that in turn shaped the way that authors chose to portray the different genders in their fantasy novels. It is important to show the ways in which changing culture has impacted the way that gender is viewed and the ways in which feminism has impacted culture.

Lack of a Female Voice

Fantasy literature had always been thought to be the province of men, with male authors dominating the genre. Female authors had broken into almost every literary genre since the First Women's Rights Movement, but it was not until the second movement began in the 1960s that there started to be a push for women in fantasy literature, from more female authorship to stronger female characters. The decade before the Second Women's Rights Movement was filled with some of the most well-known and beloved literature of the twentieth century, but those works also showed the view men had on a woman's place within the fantasy genre. T.H. White's The Once and Future King was a popular retelling of the Arthurian legends and yet it only contained five notable female characters--Morgause, Morgan le Fay, Guinevere, Elaine, and Nimue. These women caused no end of trouble for Arthur and his followers and were portrayed as stupid, ugly, or evil. "The Queen is a real one [fairy], and one of the worst of them." (1) Morgan le Fay was a vile, evil creature that was considered to be the Queen of the Fairies, in direct contrast with later retellings of the Arthurian legends, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon where Morgaine is portrayed as a wise and powerful priestess of Avalon. "For one day the priests too will tell it, as it was known to them. Perhaps between the two, some glimmering of the truth may be seen." (2) Male and female authors told the myth of King Arthur and his knights from two entirely different perspectives, but the original myth was likely somewhere...