Feminist Consciousness in Historical Perspective

The notion of feminist consciousness seeks to reveal how women, both individually and collectively, sought to question and challenge their rights, roles, and status in pre‐modern society. Pre‐dating the emergence of the term “feminism” (c. 1830s), feminist consciousness allows historians, literary critics, and others, to more fully understand proto‐feminism, uncovering both trends and individual responses to the medieval and early modern status quo. Feminist consciousness can be traced in numerous sources from personal accounts to police records, thus enriching our understanding of the history of gender relations, the construction of gender identity and consciousness, and the emergence of a self‐aware and recognizable feminist movement in the modern era.