Discuss the quest for gender equality as reflected in feminist literature and art

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As with the struggle for racial equality, women over the world have struggled for gender equality. While women make up the majority of the population in many cultures, they have exercised little significant political or economic power. In the twentieth century, the quest for female liberation took the form of an international movement.
Although the history of feminismreaches back at least to the fourteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that issues of female equality took a forward place in the arts. In the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Angelina Grimké, and Virginia Woolf, misogyny and gender inequalities were highlighted, arguing for equal opportunity for education and economic advantage. Woolf, in her novels and essays, proposed that women could become powerful only by achieving financial and psychological independence from men. Freedom, she argued, is the prerequisite for creativity: for a woman to secure her own creative freedom, she must have money and the privacy provided by "a room of her own." Building on Woolf's ideas of psychological independence, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that it is women themselves who complacently accept their subordinate position. De Beauvoir called on women everywhere "to renounce all advantages conferred upon them by their alliance" with men.
American feminist writers and artists took inspiration from the civil rights movement, and fought gender discrimination. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which claimed that American society—and commercial advertising in particular—had brainwashed women to prefer the roles of wives and mothers to other positions in life. Further, women began to decry the fact that women were woefully underrepresented in the history of culture and the arts. Change is happening, however, and since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of women in the visual arts—sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, photographers Ana Mendieta and Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, are a few examples—has been greater than ever before in history.