Feminism: An Overview

Abstract

‘Feminism’ is a wide range of political movements, ideologies and social movements that share a common goal to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal and social equality of sexes. The underline premise of feminism is to seek women’s equality and justice in every sphere of life and create opportunities for women to have the same access to the resources that are otherwise freely available to men. Since, feminism covers diverse area of inquiry, dealing with the history of women’s oppression and possible means to overcome the ‘anxiety of authorship’ by establishing a literary canon of their own. Feminism is, indeed, a serious attempt to analyse, comprehend and clarify because there are numerous psychosocial and cultural constructs of feminity. This paper, nevertheless, is an attempt to outline some basic assumptions and tenets of feminism and trace the theoretical origin of the movement by exploring few trend setter works in the field of feminist literary theory.