Feminism

Behn is renowned not only for being the first woman in England to earn a living as a professional writer but also for her colourful life, which included a spell as a clandestine government agent.

Writer and feminist leader. As a result of surveys of female college graduates, she came to identify certain problems that women were experiencing in their lives.

Although Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a notorious public figure in her day and despite a review article in the Journal of Political Economy (Hill, 1904), her work was neglected from her death in 1935 until her rediscovery in 1956 by historian Carl Degler, and has only recently become a focus of interest for feminist economists.

From 1911 West became involved in women's suffrage campaigns and turned to journalism; throughout her life she continued to contribute to leading British and American periodicals, beginning with the feminist Freewoman (which her mother had forbidden her to read). She joined The Clarion the following year as a political writer and later reviewed novels for The New Statesman and contributed to The Daily Telegraph.

Long noted as a journalist, critic, and feminist associated with the American transcendentalism movement, Margaret Fuller remains relevant today in part because her work continues to exert a powerful influence on America's sense of, and attitude toward, the environment.

Since her rediscovery by the women’s movement during the 1970s, Mary Wollstonecraft has been championed as the seminal voice in the long struggle for women’s emancipation in Britain. A courageous but at times deeply troubled and unhappy woman, she rebelled against the social strictures of her time, twice choosing to live openly with the man she loved.

Maya Angelou is a prolific autobiographer, poet, and playwright, as well as an accomplished producer, director, actor, performer, and singer. The themes that emerge in her autobiography series are the struggle for civil rights in the United States and Africa, Angelou’s involvement with the feminist movement, her ongoing relationship with her son, and her awareness of the difficulties of living in the U.S. lower classes.

From Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography: Best known as the author of the founding text of second-wave feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, [The Second Sex]), Simone de Beauvoir has been called the “emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century.”

In addition to her novels Virginia Woolf produced a great variety of other work – short stories, criticism, and biography – despite recurring bouts of depression, which had begun early in life after her mother's death. Her best critical essays are contained in The Common Reader (1925; second series, 1932). A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are feminist classics.

American poet, novelist and short-story writer. Since her death in 1963, her controversial life story and writings have become battlegrounds on which biographers, critics, feminists, anti-feminists, psychoanalysts and others have all fought to stake their differing claims.