december:
OK, origins of feminism. Let’s limit this the modern (“second wave”) era of feminism, as it would be rather unfair of me to go back to the Wollstonecraft era when college professors simply were not female…
• Gloria Steinem, author of exposé of the Playboy bunny clubs and founder of Ms. Magazine in the early 1970s. Non-academic. A newspaper reporter who got wound up in the lefty politics of the time, then got disenchanged with the male left.
• Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will (1975). Nope, non-academic. An SNCC and CORE activist and a staffer for Newsweek.
• Marilyn French, fiction author, had a major impact with her book The Women’s Room although I suppose you could argue that fiction isn’t theory. In this case it was theory by illustration, though. When was that, 1971?
• Elizabeth Janeway, author of Man’s World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology 1971. Nope, a staffer with the NY Review of Books and a sort of academic dilettante but no professor, she.
• Valerie Solanas, your worst nightmare, SCUM Manifesto, 1971. Hanger-on amidst the art groupies gathered around Andy Warhol and totally unconnected with academia.
• Dorothy Dinnerstein, Mermaid and the Minotaur, 1971. Yep, she was an academic, psychology department. That’s one so far.
• Betty Friedan, The Feminist Mystique, founder of NOW and its first president. By no means an academic. A housewife who became a theorist.
• Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch 1970. Nope. A grad student and a bohemian who got a lot of media attention for saying women’s orgasms were important. Not a college professor.
• Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex 1970. Not her. She was a Chicago native who became an activist after the 1968 riots and drifted from Marxism to feminism.
• Carol Hanisch, originator of the phrase “The Personal is Political” and co-organizer of the Miss America pageant protest from which came the phrase “bra-burners”. No, she was a ‘Redstocking’, and as a Marxist saw women as one more oppressed group until around 1970 when she was part of a sort of “sea change” in which several lefty women started to see women’s oppression as the fulcrum, not the oppression of the “working class”. At any rate, no college professor here.
• Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex in 1968. She wanted to study theology and could not enter a single doctoral program in theology in America (none would accept women) and traveled to Europe to complete her education. Soured on Christianity and conventional religion shortly after. She’s an academic of a rather formidable sort at Harvard Divinity nowadays but in 1968 just a grad student, and her theory came from her own experiences.
• Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1970, another grad student. This book was in fact her dissertation. She had an uphill battle getting faculty to server on her committee on this project, if I recall correctly.
• Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful editor, 1970, and inventor of the feminist emblem that shows a clenched fist within a female symbol. A reporter for lefty alternative press who quickly radicalized over women’s issues and how the male left was treating women. They took over some kind of male-run countercultural journal for an issue which set the stage for Notes from the First Year. A poet, editor, newspaper person, not an academic.
• Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s Place, 1973. Yes, an academic, this one, I forget which department. Somewhere in Britain I think.
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, definitely an academic (a professor of philosophy and a contemporary and associate (and girlfriend) of Jean-Paul Sartre. But her writings had very little effect until about 20 years later when the new feminist movement looked backwards and popularized what she had written back then. We’ll count her though.
What’s the score?
Oh, did you perhaps have a different set of feminist theorists from the early days of feminism in mind? By all means list the ivory-tower faculty members whose theories rocked the world and brought feminism into being!!