Feminism

Feminism is an attempt by the women-folk to universally liberate itself from male chauvinism and patriarchy. While the shift is not intended to cause gender terrorism, it aims at making the position of women at home, at work, at school, in the street etc more challenging to themselves and their men-folk in the social phenomenon. This iconoclastic and radical approach pursues the ambition of making women to gain equality with men. The radical posture of Feminist criticism is reflected in its dissatisfaction with the place of women in global social and cultural situations. Because of its interest in social issues, Feminism, like Marxism, is historical, political and it proposes a dynamic ideological commitment.

The Feminist literary critic’s interest is to pursue the cause of women in literary texts. This is accomplished as women authors write novels, plays and poems. Furthermore, the Feminist literary writers feature and make women characters and ideas dominant in their works. Such writers endeavour to propagate Feminist thought, female concerns, ideas “and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times”. Jerome Beaty (2002:A25). Prominent  among Feminist critics are Virjinia Woolf and Betty Raynolds, the American authors of Contemporary Writers (1965), and Setting the Record Straight (2001) respectively, the Jamaican novelist and the author of A Small Place (1988), Jamaica Kincaid, the British feminist theatre practitioner and critic and the editor of Feminist Theatre and Theory (1996) - Helene Keyssar.

In the African Feminist literary scenario, we have the Ghanaian playwright and theatre practitioner and the author of The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) Ama Ata Aidoo, the Nigerian playwright, theatre practitioner and the author of Old Wives are Tasty (1991) - Zulu Sofola, the Nigerian novelists and the authors of The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Condolences (2002) - Buchi Emecheta and Bina Nengi – Ilagha respectively. An endearing and enduring peculiarity of these Feminist critics and writers is their ability to design a concept best referred to as ‘Feminocracy’ – the art of the women, by the women and for the women.

An interesting aspect of Feminism is the conscious or unconscious interest of male writers to assert the position of women in the social phenomenon. For instance, a critical reading of Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1962) and Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (1964) would be shallow without paying attention, to the influence of the women-folk in the strike action in the novel and the roles played by Sidi and Sadiku in the play respectively.