Dorothea or Jane? The Dilemmas of Early Feminist Criticism

Abstract

I have never forgotten a comment made by a friend at the first feminist meeting, held in Bloomington Indiana, in the spring of 1969: “Nothing travels faster than an idea whose time has come.” We were amazed and thrilled to discover how much we had in common with other women, and how the women's movement in its early stages gave us permission to express in public a variety of extreme emotions. All of us at that meeting were young, untenured faculty and graduate students, and suddenly—or at least so it seemed—we could speak out against authority. And sometimes authority listened. We quickly turned to writing, our natural medium, for we realized that our academic work had an immediate resonance with our political ambitions. How rare and special this moment was for those of us who worked on the literature of dead authors!