From Germaine Greer and Hélène Cixous to Simone De Beauvoir, Naomi Wolfe, Doris Lessing, and Andrea Dworkin, Karen Krizanovich outlines the key women at the forefront of women’s rights as the new movie Suffragette arrives in UK cinemas on Monday 12 October

The vital new movie Suffragette arrives in UK cinemas on Monday 12 October, telling the remarkable and thrilling untold true story of the real foot soldiers of the Suffragette movement.


Hélène Cixous

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Novelist, literary critic and poet Cixous is famous for her analyses of the unconscious, bisexuality and l’écriture féminine. Best known for her 1975 essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, which was a timely prod for women to take themselves and their own intellect seriously, she holds that ”the origin of the metaphor is the unconscious”, and the unconscious, which is associated with the repressed, is also associated with the feminine. Considered a difficult read even in French, Cixous is noted for using wordplay and punning to explore language and gender.

Simone De Beauvoir

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De Beauvoir is considered one of the main founders of the modern feminist movement, mainly for her landmark text,Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), 972 pages of analysis of women in a society that considers them unequal to men. Still controversial, de Beauvoir’s work was called pornography and forbidden by the Vatican. She said: “All oppression creates a state of war.”

Naomi Wolfe

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Wolfe made an impact with her 1991 bestseller, The Beauty Myth, which was a must-read for the third wave of feminism. Listed as one of the 70 most influential books of the 20th century by The New York Times, Wolfe’s argument that beauty is a social construct determined by men was endorsed by generations of men and women. A cultural commentator and serial author, her latest book, Vagina: A New Biography is unflinching in its analysis: “Every woman is wired differently. Some women's nerves branch more in the vagina; other women's nerves branch more in the clitoris. Some branch a great deal in the perineum, or at the mouth of the cervix. That accounts for some of the differences in female sexual response.”

Germaine Greer

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Most famous for The Female Eunuch, which argued that women have been repressed and alienated from their own bodies and sexuality, and that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. A leader of the second wave of the women’s movement of the Sixties and Seventies, Greer now feels feminism has not gone far enough. She believes that women are now “settling” for less than total equality.

bell hooks

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hooks (who takes her uncapitalised name from her maternal great-grandmother) is one of America’s most widely published black feminist scholars. Her book, Feminism is for Everybody, is a wildly popular, man-friendly proposal for common sense feminism that is sensible and wise. Calling for unity to tackle societal ills, hooks is savvy but also outspoken as a cultural critic, education theorist and English professor. “Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.”

Doris Lessing

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The oldest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2007, Lessing was called an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Her first novel was published in 1950, but it was Lessing’s 1962 groundbreaking novel, The Golden Notebook, that made her famous, touching on politics and gender in a new way. She has said: "I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.”

Andrea Dworkin

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A radical feminist and activist famous for being boldly outspoken, writing and saying what others could only think. With the publication of her book, Woman Hating (1974), Dworkin assailed the gender war’s pretence of civility with brutal acumen. Criticised for being a lesbian and a feminist, she is often seen as a man-hater and for being passionately against pornography. “Men know everything – all of them, all the time – no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.” Her viewpoint is often compared to that of feminist linguist Mary Daly.

Malala Yousafzai

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Yousafzai became the youngest (shared) winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. The Pakistani schoolgirl is famous for advocating girls schools, writing for the BBC about Taliban rule in her town. She was shot in the head in 2012 and recovered, carrying on her quest for female education. Yousafzai was on Time magazine’s 2013 list of the globally influential people. She says: "I believe it's a woman's right to decide what she wants to wear and if a woman can go to the beach and wear nothing, then why can't she also wear everything?"

Gloria Steinem

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A leader in the second wave of feminist activists and writers, Steinem was a founder and editor of one of the first feminist magazines – Ms – until its closure in 1987. Her collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, is a classic of its time. Vocal about women’s rights, Steinem has espoused feminism on TV, together with lectures and articles. She has also written on topics such as Marilyn Monroe and politics. Steinem says: “Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.”

Roxane Gay

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Author of the essay collection, Bad Feminist (2014), Gay is a commentator, editor, writer and professor of English who is at the forefront of feminist multiplicity. Gay, far from having an academic style, speaks plainly about how feminism intersects with race, religion, context, location, history and heritage. In her TED talk, she says she is “a mess”, failing as a woman and as a feminist while encouraging others to find new ways to make genuine change for equality. “When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement,” she says.



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