Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women

Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininityexplores the lives and theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Stael, Emma Goldman, and Simone de Beauvoir in light of and alongside contemporary feminist work, to examine the significance that being a woman and the material conditions of femininity thrust upon one based on the times in which one lives had on their lives and work. These historical women are often valorized as thinkers and intellectuals, whose private lives are deemed irrelevant at best, and degrading as worst, or are the subjects of biographies that ignore their political contributions. Marso argues that the theories of these feminists should not be divorced from the struggles and contradiction of their actual lives. She uses the memoirs left by these women to explore how they criticized the constraints of femininity while simultaneously living within them. Finally, Marso explores a few memoirs of contemporary feminist thinkers to show that contemporary feminists struggle withthe same difficulties encountered by the women who came before.