The New Angels in the House? Feminists as New Victorians

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Notes

Jacqueline Ceballos, President of the New York chapter of the National Organisation for Women, speaking at the Theater of Ideas Debate on Women's Liberation in 1971 (immortalized by Chris Hegedus and Don Pennebaker's documentary film of the event Town Bloody Hall), acknowledged that NOW “is considered the square organisation of Women's Liberation” (see Town Bloody Hall).

See, for example, Bryony Gordon's article “The New Victorians”—one of a number of articles published last year in the UK and US which identified this supposed “trend.”

John Maynard is one who asserts that Patmore's “ ‘Angel in the House’ ” survives as a household word for what he in fact never advocated, the limitation of women to a domestic pedestal” (Maynard 2).

The emergence of populist anti-feminist exposés such as Denfeld's parallels the rise of the term “Third Wave” and Rebecca Walker's important collection, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books 1995) appeared in the same year as The New Victorians. A longer piece of work would have been able to trace some of the parallels, particularly in the shared concern about a “generation gap” in feminism; to make that connection here would be to over-simplify the Third Wave project as it has unfolded and to ignore other important political and analytical distinctions.

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Notes on contributors

Imelda Whelehan

Imelda Whelehan is Professor of English and Women's Studies and Faculty Head of Research at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is the author of Modern Feminist Thought (1995) Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (2000), Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (2002), and The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the City to Sex and the Single Girl (2005). She has co-edited and co-authored a number of other books on feminism and on adaptation studies and is currently completing a new co-authored work on adaptations.