Content area
Full Text
The 1960s and 1970s were a tumultuous time, characterized by several different political movements, including the Women's Rights Movement. The Women's Rights Movement desired not only equality for women, but to change the way women were viewed in the world. In the post-World War II era, women looked to important feminist icons, such as Rosie the Riveter, to push the idea that women could be just as strong and useful as men. The women of the 1960s desired equal pay for equal work, opportunities to advance in the workplace, and most of all to no longer be subjected to the sexual harassment that ran rampant in the workplace. With the emergence of this second wave of the Women's Rights Movement, popular culture started to create projects with a feminist perspective. Women began to use literature as a means to force men to understand that they too were people worthy of respect.
Prior to the 1960s, fantasy literature lacked a female voice. The fantasy genre of literature has existed for almost the entire length of the written word; it has evolved from myths, to fairytale, to the fantasy genre recognized today and yet women only began to break into the genre after the second Women's Rights Movement. Most secondary sources that discuss the repercussions of the Women's Rights Movement on literature focus entirely on the first wave of the movement (1884-1920), and make only a passing mention of how that was reflected in fantasy literature. This paper aims to shed light on how the Women's Rights Movement impacted western fantasy literature genre from the United States and United Kingdom, starting in the 1960s. To begin, this paper will examine fantasy works in the mid-to-late 1900s and how a political movement helped to shape the genre. It will then look at how the women's movement impacted literature in general, and then examine popular fantasy literature before, during, and after the second Women's Rights Movement. Finally, it will demonstrate that the women's movement was instrumental in changing the way fantasy literature was written.
Women's Rights Movement
During the 1960s, women began to realize that despite the strides they had made during the Women's Rights Movement of the 1920s, they were still heavily discriminated against in almost every aspect...