Feminisms, Past and Future

[...]Sharon Marcus has proposed that the very fact that feminism has become so "solidly entrenched" means that its "success is the very sign of its failure, an indication that it has lost the renegade dynamism of its early days as an upstart outsider in the academy and declined into yet another stale paradigm on the verge of obsolescence" (1722).3 Within early modern studies, Phyllis Rackin has similarly seen the increasing prestige of feminist criticism as a cause for its disengagement with feminist theory and activism: when writing about gender "started to look like a good career move," Rackin argues, the result was that "feminist studies were adopted as a conceptual tool by women and men without a serious political commitment to feminist political agendas" (54-55). [...]whereas conventional feminist analysis of women's relationships with men tends to look for straightforward acts of either oppression or resistance, or for instances of male anxiety, Schwarz focuses instead on how obedience to patriarchal expectations and norms can itself trouble those norms in both practice and ideology. Because so many of the institutions of patriarchy-chastity, marriage, courtship, dynasty, motherhood-depend on women's willing compliance, feminine volition itself becomes both a material threat to patriarchal systems and a theoretical problem.\n And because female compliance forges a bond "between acting good and acting well" (101), misogynist condemnations of feminine hypocrisy threaten to make nonsense of the patriarchal system in which they invest.