Historical Background

This chapter sketches out the background of second wave feminism, the notion of gender as learnt, cultural behaviour, the development of women’s studies in the 1970s and 1980s Anglo-America, and the turn toward a focus on language and language-use by and against women living in patriarchal worlds. It describes the work by late 20 th century women writers to take over conventional language, point out the inherent misogyny and creatively feminize it. It emphasizes the experimental work of young Quebec women writers in this domain. When Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 “on ne naît pas femme, on le devient” and when E.M. Parshley translated this in 1953 as “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” both Beauvoir and Parshley were talking about gender. Though the term did not actually come into use at the time of these texts, it was undergoing rapid development twenty years later, and its users and adapters often referred back to Simone de Beauvoir’s work on women’s socialization.