초기 영국 여성 작가들의 작품에 나타난 여성의 사랑, 우정 그리고 공동체

Female Friendship, Love, and Community of Women in Early Women Writers in Britain.

In Britain, long before Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of Women’s Rights, many female writers questioned the contemporary society that took it for granted the inferior social status of women. One interesting way of making critique of the male-dominant contemporary society was to emphasize female friendship and love. Katherine Philips, Mary Lee Chudleigh and Aphra Behn assert that love and marriage in the contemporary male-dominant society simply become a means to fulfill men’s desire to rule over women, thereby emphasizing the consolation of female friendship and love. Mary Astell and Sarah Scott go further than this, and they propose a separative community of women based on mutual female friendship. These writers make a significant and poignant feminist critique of men’s oppression of women by locating women outside the very social order and relations of power in which men can exercise their oppressive power over women.