FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM does not appear until the mid-1970s, nearly a quarter century after the rise of modern feminist writings such as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (originally published in France as Le Deuxieme Sexe in 1949; in the United States in 1953). Of course, feminist writing has a long and varied history that can be traced back centuries. Two treatises in English, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1797) and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) are foundational.

Feminist Criticism of Emily Dickinson: Its Birth and Flowering

Despite the widespread influence of Beauvoir's book, augmented in the following decade by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Andrew Sinclair's The Emancipation of the American Woman (Original title, The Better Half, 1965), it wasn't until the 1970s that modern feminist literary criticism took root.