UK Feminist Poetry:
● Historically, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was an era of surplus women, who had to work to survive:
by 1911, 77 percent of women workers in the UK were single
● Many British feminist poets sought to emulate the example of Victorian women writers, often expressing their radical political beliefs
through poetry.The first wave of the movement recognized the need for unity. In their eyes, there was no better way to do this than
poetry. To feminists, poetry was essential to telling the stories of women and describing the nature of feminine consciousness (Juhasz)
● Often the writers were not professional poets, but wrote out of necessity, including satirical portraits of politicians, or writings from
prison, as in Holloway Jingles, a collection of writing from imprisoned women collated by the Glasgow Branch of the Women's Social
and Political Union.
● In the inter-war years, British women poets associated with modernism began to find themselves public figures, though their feminist
ideas sometimes came into conflict with the literary establishment which remained a kind of "exclusive male club."
● This was also a period when American women poets living in Britain made an important contribution to the writing of the day: writers like
H.D., Mina Loy, and Amy Lowell all combined radical poetic content with experimentation of form, allowing them to explore feminist
polemic and non-heteronormative sexualities in innovative new modes
● poets of the time like Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, receive less critical attention, but also sought to
challenge and reevaluate tropes of femininity
● During the 1960s, the Women's Liberation Movement in the UK had a great influence on the literary world.[80] Feminist publishers,
Virago (founded in 1973), Onlywomen (1974), The Women's Press (1978), and Sheba (1980), were established, alongside magazines
like Spare Rib
● Poetry of the second wave feminist movement made commentary on society through use of allegory and metaphor. Arguably, second
wave feminism poetry was often born from places of anger or dissatisfaction with an unjust world
● British feminist editors in the 1970s and 80s created landmark anthologies of women's poetry, which foregrounded the variety and
strength of women's writing
● These included Lilian Mohin's One Foot on the Mountain (1979), Jeni Couzyn's The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets
(1985), Moira Ferguson's First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (1985), Kate Armstrong's Fresh Oceans (1989), Jude
Brigley's Exchanges (1990), and Catherine Kerrigan's An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991).
● Historically, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was an era of surplus women, who had to work to survive:
by 1911, 77 percent of women workers in the UK were single
● Many British feminist poets sought to emulate the example of Victorian women writers, often expressing their radical political beliefs
through poetry.The first wave of the movement recognized the need for unity. In their eyes, there was no better way to do this than
poetry. To feminists, poetry was essential to telling the stories of women and describing the nature of feminine consciousness (Juhasz)
● Often the writers were not professional poets, but wrote out of necessity, including satirical portraits of politicians, or writings from
prison, as in Holloway Jingles, a collection of writing from imprisoned women collated by the Glasgow Branch of the Women's Social
and Political Union.
● In the inter-war years, British women poets associated with modernism began to find themselves public figures, though their feminist
ideas sometimes came into conflict with the literary establishment which remained a kind of "exclusive male club."
● This was also a period when American women poets living in Britain made an important contribution to the writing of the day: writers like
H.D., Mina Loy, and Amy Lowell all combined radical poetic content with experimentation of form, allowing them to explore feminist
polemic and non-heteronormative sexualities in innovative new modes
● poets of the time like Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, receive less critical attention, but also sought to
challenge and reevaluate tropes of femininity
● During the 1960s, the Women's Liberation Movement in the UK had a great influence on the literary world.[80] Feminist publishers,
Virago (founded in 1973), Onlywomen (1974), The Women's Press (1978), and Sheba (1980), were established, alongside magazines
like Spare Rib
● Poetry of the second wave feminist movement made commentary on society through use of allegory and metaphor. Arguably, second
wave feminism poetry was often born from places of anger or dissatisfaction with an unjust world
● British feminist editors in the 1970s and 80s created landmark anthologies of women's poetry, which foregrounded the variety and
strength of women's writing
● These included Lilian Mohin's One Foot on the Mountain (1979), Jeni Couzyn's The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets
(1985), Moira Ferguson's First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (1985), Kate Armstrong's Fresh Oceans (1989), Jude
Brigley's Exchanges (1990), and Catherine Kerrigan's An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991).
