Elaine Showalter is one of the pioneers of feminist literary criticism and women's studies; A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontδ to Lessing (1977) broke new ground in its analysis of the work of women writers, retrieving some, like Elizabeth Gaskell and Olive Schreiner, from obscurity, and questioning some icons, like Virginia Woolf, about whom she wrote: "Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition. The ultimate room of one's own is the grave." (This analysis was fiercely attacked ten years later by Toril Moi, who accused Showalter of faulty critical perspective and an unseemly belief in bourgeois humanism). Showalter also established one of the first women's studies programmes in the US, at Rutgers University, at a time when the American academic establishment was, at best, indifferent, and at worst, downright hostile to such endeavours.
Showalter is famous outside the world of literary criticism for her examination of British psychiatry's historical mistreatment of women, The Female Malady (1985), which focused particularly on the medical use of hysteria as a way of labelling and oppressing women, and set the agenda for feminist medical history. Over 10 years later, Hystories (1998) seemed to turn her original thesis on its head, characterising a whole raft of afflictions, including serious ailments like chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf War syndrome, as well as daft stuff like alien abductions and Satanic ritual abuse, as, guess what, hysteria. Further, she blames feminist psychologists for introducing and spreading new hysterical disorders among women. She has been under serious, sometimes dangerous attack since its publication, but has remained unrepentant. She has also caused consternation by revealing, in Vogue some years ago, that she likes shopping, lipstick and designer clothes: "For those of us sisters hiding Welcome to your Facelift inside The Second Sex, a passion for fashion can sometimes seem a shameful secret life."
Her new book is a collection of short biographies of women who impress Showalter as feminist icons or exemplars, not only for their contributions as scholars or writers, but also for the quality of their lived experience. She is interested in the tension between an intellectual life and the emotional demands of love, partnership, motherhood and domesticity. This dilemna remains a real one for women today, and deserves all the attention we can give it. Showalter begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) anticipated virtually every tenet of modern feminism. She died giving birth to the future Mary Shelley at the age of 38, having married William Godwin, a philosopher with advanced ideas of his own. The marriage came after a very unhappy love affair and the birth of a child whom Wollstonecraft courageously reared as a single mother. Her book is still a clarion call to all serious thinkers about the place of women in the world. She is an appropriate first entry in a list of this kind.
However, in her introduction, Showalter draws unacceptable, a historical and slightly ludicrous parallels between Wollstonecraft and Diana Spencer, and thus reveals the faultlines in the structure of this book: lack of historical context, far too little attention to the ideas proposed by her selected icons, and a capacity to pander to popular culture by including women who are merely famous, rather than famous for their ideas. Diana Spencer and Jacqueline Kennedy can only be seen as feminist icons if the rich, long-suffering wife, albeit well-dressed, has again become a figure for veneration, which God forbid.
Any list has its gaps, and must of necessity be a product of the listmaker's own preferences, but it seems odd to include Hillary Clinton and not Eleanor Roosevelt, Oprah Winfrey and not Angela Davis, Camille Paglia and not Betty Friedan. Some of Showalter's choices get much less attention than others. It could be argued that Winfrey, who has had a huge effect on black women in the US and the way they are perceived, deserves a lot more than two pages, while Paglia's tedious self-aggrandisement and anti-woman vitriol should have excluded her altogether, instead of netting her 17 pages.
Also, the book is pervaded by a curious anti-intellectualism: we are told that the contradictions in Vera Brittain's life are what make her relevant today, not her books. In the introduction, Showalter states that life stories retain their power when theories fade. Would we be interested in these life stories if those who lived them had not contributed to the ongoing theoretical development of feminism? Why make this list at all, if ideas and theories are less important than lived experience? The evidence is, mercifully, that ideas outlive life stories rather than the opposite.
As a short introduction to the lives of women who influenced the development of feminism from the late-18th to the late-20th centuries, the book is useful. Showalter has a great deal of empathy with her subjects, and women like Margaret Fuller and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the two great American feminist thinkers of the 20th century, emerge clearly and concisely from her treatment. Three of the most interesting women here are the anthropologists Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. It was these who established the intellectual framework for 20th-century feminism, by concentrating their work on the family, sexuality and gender roles. Parsons said, of her frustration with confining sexual roles "It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly".
Showalter includes some of her own experience in the later stages of the book, which cover the period when she was a key player in the development of feminism, and this is interesting, but might be better placed in a longer memoir. Tantalisingly, she sometimes hints at a project which glimmers beneath the surface of this book - an examination of how earlier feminists are seen by their descendants. Biography is one way of looking at this, and there are numerous fascinating examples: Ruth First on Olive Schreiner, Yvonne Kapp on Eleanor Marx, Ruth Benedict on Mary Wollstonecraft. The book is riddled with references back to inspirational figures whose work started their readers thinking and acting to improve the lot of women, proof, if any is needed, that ideas remain powerful long after the sometimes tragic and pitiful lives which produced them.
Catriona Crowe is an archivist in the National Archives of Ireland, and Chairperson of the Women's History Project