Hillary Clinton (born
1947) is an American politician. In 1995 her speech at the 1995 UN
Conference on Women, called Women’s Rights are Human Rights (1995)
showed her “speaking
more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on
Chinese soil” as the NY Times put it. It is often considered one of the landmark speeches in the global struggle for women’s rights, and condemns all abuses of women wherever they occur. It can be read in its entirety here.
Eve Ensler (born May 25, 1953) is an American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues.
This play is made up of various feminist monologues centering around
women’s experiences with their vaginas, based on interviews Ensler did
with various women.
However, it has come in for some criticism, mostly
due to the monologue "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could", in which
an underage girl (thirteen in earlier performances, sixteen in the
revised version) recounts being given alcohol and then having sex with
an adult woman; the incident is recalled fondly by the grown girl, who
in the original version of the play calls it "a good rape." This
monologue is omitted from some versions.
In 1998, Ensler’s experience
performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues, and has raised over $800,000,000 so far.
Susan Faludi (born April 18, 1959) is an American journalist and author. Faludi's 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
argues that the 1980s saw a backlash against feminism in America,
especially due to the spread of negative stereotypes against
career-focused women. Faludi asserts that many who argue "a woman's
place is in the home, looking after the kids" are hypocrites, since they
have wives who are working mothers or, as women, they are themselves
working mothers. This work won her the National Book Critics Circle
Award for general nonfiction in 1991.
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) is an American author and former political consultant. She is most famous for the book The Beauty Myth (1991) which argues that as
women have gained increased social power and prominence, expected
adherence to standards of physical beauty has grown stronger for women.
that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and
that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with
the goal of reproducing its own hegemony.
Rebecca Walker (born November 17, 1969) is an American writer. She
co-founded the Third Wave Foundation, which aims to encourage young
women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. The organization
now provides grants to individuals and projects that support young
women.
Walker is considered one of the founding leaders of third-wave
feminism. She wrote an article for Ms. Magazine called Becoming the Third Wave (1991),
criticizing the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court
justice after he was accused of sexually harassing his employee Anita
Hill. Using this example, Walker addresses the oppression of the female
voice and introduces the concept of third-wave feminism, a term her
article coined. Walker defines third wave feminism at the end of the
article by saying “To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of
equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of life. It is to
search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to
join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand
power structures with the intention of challenging them.”
Riot Grrrl was
an American underground feminist punk rock movement that originally
started in Washington, D.C.; Olympia, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and
the greater Pacific Northwest in the early to mid-1990s. The Riot Grrrl
Manifesto (1991) criticizes male-dominated culture and encourages girls
to build their own alternative. It can be read in its entirety here.
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Part
Six of the feminist literary canon has been expanded to include some
non-American writers. The expanded version is available here.
Also please note that Hélène Cixous was born in French Algeria, which I forgot to write on Feministing.