Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women

by Lori Jo Marso

Overview

Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity explores the lives and theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, Emma Goldman, and Simone de Beauvoir in light of and alongside contemporary feminist work. These historical women are often valorized as thinkers and intellectuals, whose private lives are deemed irrelevant at best, and degrading as worst, or are the subjects of biographies that ignore their political contributions. In contrast, Marso explores the significance that being a woman and the material conditions of femininity had for each of these intellectual women when they tried to live their lives in accordance with their feminist ideals.

Marso argues that the theories of these feminists should not be divorced from the struggles and contradictions of their actual lives. She uses the memoirs and letters left by these women to examine how they criticized the constraints of femininity while simultaneously living within them. Finally, Marso analyzes a few memoirs of contemporary feminist thinkers to show that feminists struggle with the same difficulties today that were encountered by the women who came before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032413181
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/19/2025
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lori Marso is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Feminist Genealogies: Connecting Women's Lives
2. Women's Situation, I: The Material Constraints of Femininity
3. Women's Situations, II: Existential Experiments with the Feminine
4. Love in Exile: Reading the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël
5. A Feminists Search for Love: Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and the Feminine
6. Maternal Genealogies and Feminist Consciousness: Simone de Beauvoir on Mothers, Daughters, and the Potential for Sisterhood
7. Wanting it All: Contemporary Struggles for Freedom and Fulfillment

What People are Saying About This

Mary Hawkesworth

In creating a conversation among pioneering feminist thinkers, who struggled to resist the demands of conventional femininity as a key component of their political activism, Lori Marso makes a critical contribution to building an "imagined community" of women as a strategy for continuing feminist struggles to achieve meaningful freedom. (Mary Hawkesworth, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society)

Editorial Reviews

"In creating a conversation among pioneering feminist thinkers, who struggled to resist the demands of conventional femininity as a key component of their political activism, Lori Marso makes a critical contribution to building an "imagined community" of women as a strategy for continuing feminist struggles to achieve meaningful freedom."

—Mary Hawkesworth, Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

"Creatively exploring the complexities of ‘living as a woman’ and ‘thinking as a feminist’ in the writings of Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, and Simone de Beauvoir, Lori Marso breathes new life into the familiar feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political.’"

—Linda Zerilli, author of Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

"...Marso's work, in my view, exemplifies an admirable tendency in recent feminist scholarship to reconnect and engage with classical feminist authors. The author envisages her project as opening a dialogue with these feminist mothers and potentially inspiring a shared consciousness among women of different races, classes, and cultures of the role that restrictive social norms play in their lives."

—Regina F. Titunik, University of Hawaii at Hilo

From the Publisher