Feminism and Poetry in the 1970s
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2023-05-02T13:17:46-07:00
“Poetry is not only a dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” -Audre Lorde
Women have been raising their voices through poetry by skillfully crafting poems that captivate, disrupt, and move, poems that cry out against injustice and sing from joy. Poetry written by women has been a powerful force for uniting societies in social movements and calling attention to the various form of oppression that women face, but unfortunately in the historically male-dominated fields of education, publication and memory preservation, poetry written by women and centered on women’s experiences has often been discredited, demeaned, underrepresented, ignored, and erased.
In the 1970s, women’s poetry evolved alongside the feminist movement and was a powerful instrument for expressing feminist ideas, often through its descriptions of personal experiences of violence and oppression that women poets endured in their daily lives. Since poetry publication was widely dominated by men, women had to push against the status quo to create a space where their work could be recognized. They often resisted by manipulating poetic form -- or by abandoning structured form entirely and writing in free verse. Women poets in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about topics that were considered “taboo” within poetic context, including sexuality, race, gender, motherhood, reproductive rights, and domestic violence. These poems challenged widely held beliefs that poetry that was too “domestic,” “emotional,” or “navel-gazing,” wasn’t worthy of publication. Feminist poetry in the 1970s instead called attention to the immense value in personal narratives and emotional expressions from all people, especially those whose voices had been traditionally silenced. Poetry written by women during this time frequently made direct callouts to the socio-political movements of the time and served as a unifying force for the second-wave feminist movement, in addition to anti-racist movements, gay liberation movements, Native American activism, and environmental activism movements.
To learn more, check out two of the most influential feminist poets of the era:
Audre Lorde | Poetry Foundation
Maya Angelou | Poetry Foundation
