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Famous Feminists: C-D
Nancy Chodorow (293) A professor at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, Nancy Chodorow has extensively pursued the question of why women desire motherhood. Chodorow believes that the acceptance of the domestic ideal is the foundation of women's oppression. Her theories have been widely influential in contemporary feminist writing. Her works include The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Psychology of Gender (1978). Sites: 1 |
Hélène Cixous (212) Hélène Cixous became involved in exploring the relationship between sexuality and writing, the same kinds of work being done by theorists like Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida, and Irigaray (Shiach). In this time period she composed such influential works as "Sortie," "The Laugh of the Medusa," and "Coming to Writing." Since the authoring of these texts in the seventies, Cixous has become even more mysterious and complex, but has somewhat lessened her radical ideology for a more inclusive exploration of collective identities. She is currently an English literature professor at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes where she has established a center for women's studies and is a co-founder of the structuralist journal Poetique. Sites: 1 |
Combahee River Collective (272) In 1977, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) penned the statement,“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression". In that same treatise, the CRC wrote,“We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community . . ." Sites: 1 |
Communist Manifesto Pamphlet published in 1848 by K. Marx and F. Engels, reflecting their analysis of history as the story of class struggle and the direction they believed society would take. It asserted that industrialization had exacerbated the divide between the capitalist ruling class and the proletariat, which was seen as increasingly impoverished, and called on the proletariat to overthrow the capitalists, abolish private property, and take over the means of production, efforts which would lead eventually to a classless society and a gradual diminution of the need for a state. |
Anna Julia Cooper (91) Born a slave in North Carolina, she dedicated her life to education. She served as a teacher, a high school principal and as president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. Cooper was also an organizer and active participant of numerous organizations representing African American interests |
Mary Daly (Course Reader) A renowned radical feminist and Nag-Gnostic philosopher, is under fire yet again by the "academentia" (her apt description) of Boston College. After 25 years of locking horns with B. C.'s administration due to her radical feminist perspective and her iconoclastic teaching methods, it is time for feminists to once again band together, and give her our support. |
Angela Y. Davis (478) African-American political activist, born in Birmingham, Alabama. She taught philosophy (1969-70) at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles, until she was finally denied reappointment because of her membership in the Communist party and her advocacy of radical black causes. In Aug., 1970, she went into hiding after a gun legally registered to her was used in an attempted courtroom escape in which a judge and three others were killed. Apprehended two months later, she was tried on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping (1972). After months in prison, she was released on bail and later acquitted. She has since taught at San Francisco State Univ. (1979-91) and the Univ. of California at Santa Cruz (1992-). Davis was the American Communist party's vice-presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984. |
Jeannine DeLombard (497) Jeannine DeLombard teaches American literature, with special interests in Afro-diasporic literature and culture, nineteenth-century American culture, slavery and antebellum reform, law and literature, and book history. She is currently completing her book in progress, At the Bar of Public Opinion: Black Testimony and White Advocacy in Antebellum Literary Abolitionism. Her next project will be a companion volume, Last and Dying Words: Black Atlantic Criminal Confessions. Recent publications include "'Eye-witness to the Cruelty': Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass' 1845 Narrative, " American Literature (June 2001) and "Representing the Slave: White Advocacy and Black Testimony in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred," New England Quarterly (March 2002). Sites: 1 |
Andrea Dworkin (Course Reader) Andrea Dworkin (born in Camden, New York) is an American radical feminist and writer. In her numerous books, articles and speeches she has analyzed pornography, prostitution and male violence against women, drawing from her own experience of prostitution and rape. She has met vicious criticism from both right and left, the right vilifying her as man-hater and threat to family values, and the left accusing her of being unreasonably pessimistic, proponent of censorship and against all sex. In response to Dworkin's criticism on pornography, she has been a target of defamation and slander from publishers of pornography, including pornographic cartoons of her in the Hustler magazine. Dworkin, together with the feminist solicitor Catharine MacKinnon, has drafted a proposal for a law, which defines pornography a civil rights violation against women and allows women harmed by it a chance to sue the producers and distributors of pornography in a civil court for damages. In 1983 the law was passed in Minneapolis, but was subsequently overruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1986. Today Andrea Dworkin lives in Brooklyn, New York with her life partner John Stoltenberg, who is also a feminist activist. |
