Beyond Gender Hierarchy

Approaching her 70th year in 1982, the US novelist and critic Elizabeth Janeway wrote of the revolution she had witnessed in her own lifetime — a revolution centred on gender: ‘We were part of a reversal of history, an absolute shift in the quality of reality.’1 Born in 1913, the first half of her life had been a time when ‘hopes existed only in the masculine mode’: ‘We copied men in our dreams because there was no one else to copy.’2 What is most interesting about Janeway’s reflections on women’s transition from fantasy and tokenism into a reality where some women at least are visible as free agents — men’s equals in the public world — is her suggestion that within feminist writing at least, ‘nobody says so’.3

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