Abstract

In Femininity to Feminism, Susan Rubinow Gorsky combines social history research--including statistics about family life, women's education, and women in the work force--with an examination of the way these issues are presented in literature by and about women. Gorsky's work illuminates women's lives and writings in relation to the cultural attitudes that influenced their creation. Focusing on the intensity of women's struggle to find their own literary and political voices and to be heard in the public sphere, Gorsky traces the emergence of a shared self-consciousness that began to express itself in literary and social resistance to patriarchy.