The Feminism Movement: Basic Rights for Womankind - Term Paper Example

The Feminism movement has been one of the most celebrated and also notorious movement of its times. While it began as a simple rebellion to demand basic rights for womankind, it gradually acquired a rather ambiguous and controversial image. By the 1960-1970’s it was replete with cases of blasphemy and sensation. During this time, several female artists flourished and contributed immensely to the movement. Simultaneously, the works of many erstwhile female artists were revived and designated as being feminist in nature. Over the years, the attitude to these art forms has undergone a major change. These essays discusses the lives of two early twentieth female artists and two contemporary ones, and attempts to throw some light on the nature of their art and also how it affected their personal lives. Frida Kahlo, born in 1907 was an internationally acclaimed Mexican painter. Her paintings carried distinct undertones of realism, symbolism and surrealism. Kahlo has gained immense popularity in the past few years, both for her work and her turbulent life. Some critics have even called her the “female Che Guevera” as her life has become synonymous with the triumph of art. The “Kahlo Cult” as it is now called, started in the 1990’s, when her paintings were breaking all records fetching up to $ 1 million in one single auction (Miller, 1999). Since then, she has been the subject of various plays, documentaries, and novels, the latest of which is a movie starring Salma Hayek as Kahlo. Besides that, she has also been designated as the goddess of the women’s movement for her paintings express certain sensitive women’s issues. But more so because of her personal life and her portrayal as the gallant woman sufferer. Tragedy stuck Kahlo at the tender age of 6 when she was diagnosed with polio; nearly twelve years later, she had a fatal accident which left her with a broken spinal column, broken pelvis, ribs and multiple fractures. For months, Frida was encased in a box like plaster cast and the pain and agony that she underwent was later represented in some of her paintings. As a matter of fact, nearly all her paintings are manifestations of her personal emotions. If one wishes to develop a cultural understanding of Kahlo’s work, it become imperative to study her personal life as well. As she herself says, "I paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best. One of her most famous works, “The Broken Column”, portrays her in a back brace, strongly reminiscent of her days after the grisly accident. As if her physical pain wasn’t compelling enough, she was struck with what she calls the second accident of her life, her marriage to Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, to whom she was married for close to 25 years. But their marriage was interrupted by frequent separations and extra marital affairs. Rivera was something of a misogynist and a womaniser, a habit he did not denounce after marriage. Kahlo had her own share of liaisons. Later, she suffered a miscarriage, which again became an inspiration for some of her most gruesome paintings ever (including “My Birth”). These paintings carry characteristic feminist undertones, displaying the inherent curse of being a woman. She is also known for rejecting conventional standards of beauty, Kahlo not only didnt pluck her unibrow or moustache, and she groomed them with special tools and even pencilled them darker. It is paradoxical that her art never received major critical acclaim during her lifetime. She had only two exhibitions, one of which was proposed by Andre Breton, who was a declared admirer of her work. She was involved in several Communist activities until her health deteriorated considerably. In 1954, four days after attending a Communist march, she died in what may or may not have been suicide. For nearly 30 years after that, her art pretty much disappeared from the scene until it was revived by Hayden Herrera’s famous biography in 1983. Since then, she has been the locus of media frenzy, and has been hailed as a key feminist, a claim that is still widely disputed. One of her harshest paintings, "My Birth," or "A Few Small Nips,” is a disturbing image of a bleeding woman lying on a bed with a man standing over her wielding a stiletto. Further, herself portrayal as the innocent female victim, as the heroic sufferer, and as the wronged wife, only heightens the feminist image. As has been mentioned earlier, it were the ordeals that she had to endure that added a sense of glamour to her life. Critics now claim that her personal life has overshadowed her art. There are also ambiguities regarding her surgeries giving rise to a claim that she might have exaggerated her pain in her artwork. But more importantly, there has been a major backlash against her feminist image. A New York Times article blatantly declared that Kahlo was “no feminist”. It further adds that. “ the glorification of her travails keeps alive everything that should be abhorrent to the true feminist.” (Shackelford, 1990) While Frida Kahlo manifested her art in the form of paintings, Virginia Woolf did so in the form of words. Virginia Woolf was regarded as the one of the foremost literary figures of the twentieth century. Woolf was born in 1882 in London to a notable author and critic, Sir Leslie Stephen and a famous beauty, Julia Prinsep Stephen. Both her parents had been married previously and widowed, and had children from their earlier marriages, thus resulting in a large extended family. Due to her father’s eminence as a literary figure, his children were raised in an environment which was heavily influenced by the voices of the Victorian Century England. Like other female artists mentioned above, Woolf also had a troubled life marked by drastic mood swings and frequent nervous breakdowns. The first of these was triggered by the sudden death of her mother when Virginia was 13. The breakdowns continued when her half sister died two years later. Her condition worsened after her father passed away, so much so that she had to be institutionalized. Modern critics suggest that one of the possible reasons behind her mental collapse could have been the sexual assault she and her sister Vanessa suffered at the hands of their half brothers (Lee, 1997). There are also speculations that her husband, Leonard Woolf employed a line of treatment that only exaggerated her mental illness, which ultimately led to her suicidal death. This belief was voiced by Irene Coates in her book Who’s afraid of Leonardo Woolf?. She seems to suggest that beneath compassionate facade lay a pessimistic, repressed, bullying, and hypocritical man, one who may have been responsible for the death of Virginia Woolf (Coates, 2003). But Woolf had strongly denied any such charges during her lifetime. After the death of her father, Woolf moved to Bloomsbury and it was here that the famous literary group of the same name was born. Leonard Woolf, who Virginia would marry later was a core member of this intellectual group. After marriage in 1912, they founded the Hogarth Press , which published majority of Woolf’s literary works, thus laying down the foundation for her literary genius and her feminist proclivities. Woolf authored various fictional novels, short stories and a set of widely acclaimed essays. Among her most noted works are Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas . Though the former two articulated issues of sex and gender vaguely, the latter two had explicit feminist connotations. A Room of One’s Own, which is a series of prolific essays, explores male power and the injustices associated with it; Woolf strongly criticizes the lack of legal rights, educational opportunities, and financial independence for women. As opposed to other female authors of her times, Woolf believed that men should adopt some of the characteristics traditionally associated with women, and not the other way around. The famous dictum contained in the book satisfactorily voices the feminist concerns, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Her work was recognized and critically acclaimed during her lifetime, but it is only now the Woolf texts have been revived by feminist scholars post 1960’s. But there has been debate within the literary section about the speculated feminist nature of these texts. Bennett states that Woolf’s essay is not a feminist work, rejects the idea that Woolf’s discussion of women and fiction may lean towards the political, and reduces the essay’s scope to a collection of musings on women and fiction. Daiches responds to A Room of One’s Own in the opposite way, he claims that Woolf’s work is feminist, and Woolf’s feminism focuses on women and their relationship to fiction, who have not had an opportunity to use it because of their lack of money and privacy. Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that her essays in A Room Of One’s Own do express the limitations imposed on women by the patriarchal society both in their personal and artistic life, probably the reason why she has been hailed as a major feminist voice by the contemporary feminist scholars. Thus, Frida Kahlo and Virginia Woolf gained recognition as feminist voices only after the second wave of feminism gained strength. It would be intriguing to contrast these figures with feminists who wrote during the movement itself. Germaine Greer revolutionised the world by her radical feminist thoughts in her book titled “The Female Eunuch”, and is considered by many critics as the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century (Jardine, 1999). Both her literary creations and her own personal life have been characterised by their controversial nature. Also, as is the case with many of the feminist writings, her books have been defined by a section of the critics as disorganized, self-contradictory diatribes. Some of the critics have even been disgusted by her positions on such issues as female circumcision (pro) and pap smears (con). Germaine Greer was born in 1939 in Melbourne, Australia and attended the University of Melbourne. Immediately after that, she became involved with the Sydney Push social milieu and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians, and it was here that she was heavily influenced by the concepts of anarchy and communism. By 1972, she identified herself as an anarchist communist, close to Marxism (Jardine, 1999). She later went to University of Cambridge, England, where she became a member of the all-women’s Newham College. “The Female Eunuch” was the book that brought Greer in to the international limelight. The book created quite a sensation among the masses, especially women. Its controversial nature can be judged by the fact that  one woman had to keep it wrapped in brown paper because her husband wouldnt let her read it; arguments and fights broke out over dinner tables and copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands (Wallace 1997). Published in 1970, the book soon became an international bestseller. The book propagates that the traditional, suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this devitalizes them, rendering them eunuchs. As Greer herself told New York Times, “Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. Theyve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their masters ulterior motives—to be fattened or made docile—women have been cut off from their capacity for action. Its a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one thats got to be changed” (Weintraub, 1971). But what truly set this book aside from the many other supposedly blasphemous feminist texts is that it used humour and coarse language, and that it is “quirky and sensible, full of bile and insight”. Like several other hard core contemporary feminists, Greer has had her share of public controversies and critical dismissal. While promoting her book worldwide, Greer was arrested for using the words "bullshit" and "fuck" during her speech in New Zealand, which attracted major rallies in her support (Jardine, 1999). Even after the book was published, it created waves of sensation within the masses, but the critical response was mixed. Laura Miller reviewed it as “a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. Its all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive -- which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time”. The Life Magazine went a step ahead and called Greer “the female misogynist”, and though the New York Times did appreciate the book, it categorically mentioned that Greer only builds on the feminist analysis but offers nothing for revolutionary change (Weintraub, 1971). Her own personal life was marked by the same sense of tumult, she once defined herself as a “super groupie” and also stated that “I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they arent possessive about their conquests.”(Wallace, 1997). She did get married once, but the marriage lasted only three weeks, Greer later admitted that she was unfaithful several times. Thus we see that Greer’s life and her literary creations bore signs of the “conventionally shocking” patterns, usually associated with a feminist. Perhaps, that was the reason behind her being labelled as just another feminist by many academic critics. Even in the recent years, she has found herself at the centre of public gaze and several controversies, one of which included assault by one of her female students. A striking contrast to Greer would be Barbara Kruger, who has had a silent life and her art targets a wide range of social issues, feminism being one of them. Nevertheless, she is an important contemporary feminist artist. Born in New Jersey in 1945, Kruger attended the Syracuse University in 1964. After spending a year there, she shifted to New York, where she studied at Parson School of Design. It was here that she was introduced to Diane Arbus, one of the most influential American photographers of the twentieth century. At the young age of 21, she started working with Mademoiselle Magazine, and within a year ascended to the post of a chief designer. Over the years, Kruger’s art has been characterized by the presence of blackened- white photographic images slashed with Futura Bold phrases on rectangles of red. By doing so, she combined the power of words with that of images or as she herself puts it, “I am an artist who works with pictures and words”. The words she used were often raucous, pithy and ironic in nature. These captions almost always used I and You, thus pronouncing the effect on the general masses. Most of her art was a sharp critique of the forces of consumerism, feminism, patriarchal society, and question the institutionalization of power. She incorporates images from popular culture, thus bridging the gap between the lowly art of graphic design and the higher aesthetic form of art. During the second wave of Feminism, she emerged as a major activist with her characteristic art form, challenging the stereotypical beliefs about women propounded by a patriarchal society. She was one of the many post modernist artists who attempted to deconstruct the myths which prevented a better understanding of gender. “She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to.” (Linker, 1996) As has been mentioned earlier, Kruger pioneered the intermingling of words and images, with the phases usually being declaratory or accusatory in tone. As a matter of fact, in some of her feminist artwork, “You” and “I” satirically refer to men and women in general. These renditions of contemporary art suspend the viewer between the fascination of the image and the indictment of the text while reminding us that language and its use within culture to construct and maintain verbs, jobs, jokes, myths, and history reinforce the interests and perspective of those who control it. These phrases achieve twin purposes- they exemplify social clichés regarding women in the society and at the same time critique them. Thus, there is an inherent paradox in her artwork. One of her art pieces portrays a women’s body in a stooped posture signifying subservience, studded with screws that seem to stifle her and prevent any sort of movement. Across this poignant and grotesque image is inscribed the phrase “We have received orders not to move”. This particular image symbolically reveals how women have been enchained in the society, owing to the power equations which naturally grant men power, at the cost of womankind. One of her lesser known untitled works popularly called “Perfect” portrays the torso of a woman, hands clasped in prayer, evoking the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of submissive femininity; the word “perfect” is engraved on the image. Again, the image achieves its purpose by evoking powerful thoughts from the masses and makes provocative commentaries on the issue of female chastity and sexuality. Some other phrases which have come to be synonymous with Kruger herself are “Your body is a Battleground”, and “Your gaze hits the side of my face”. Besides the issue of sexuality, Kruger’s art also deals with corporate greed and anti consumerism. Her artwork found its way to the masses in the form of populist means like posters, t-shirts, mugs and other such utilities. That has in fact been one of the major criticisms of her artwork, that they are propounded by the very means she opposes thematically. The lives and art of these four female artists belonging to different eras presents a rather interesting picture of the movement of feminism itself. It is also symbolic of how the times affected their art. Frida Kahlo and Virginia Woolf wrote in the early twentieth century, an era when feminism hadn’t quite arrived on the scene. It was only later that their art was revived and they were associated with the feminist movement. Germaine Greer and Barabara Kruger on the other hand are examples of artists who were actively involved with the contemporary feminist movement. This also gave their art a kind of impetus and instant recognition. Thus, a united reading of the aforementioned female artists facilitates a detailed understanding of the history of the feminist movements and also makes for an interesting study about the changing attitudes to these artists. Bibliography Coates, Irene. Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf. Soho Press, 2003. Jardine, Lisa. Growing up with Greer, The Guardian, 7 March 1999. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Knopf, 1997Linker, Kate. Love For Sale: Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996 Miller, Laura. Frida Kahlo. Salon. 22 June, 1999. Shackelford, Elizabeth. Frida Kahlo: No Feminist. New York Times. 2 December 1990 Wallace, Christine, Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew. Faber & Faber, 1999 Weintraub, Judith. Germaine Greer — Opinions That May Shock the Faithful, New York Times, 22 March 1971 Read More