305 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re looking for original feminist topics to write about, you’re in luck! Our experts have collected this list of ideas for you to explore.

📝 Key Points to Use to Write an Outstanding Feminism Essay

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You may find yourself confused by various theories, movements, and even opinions when writing a feminism essay, regardless of your topic. Thus, producing an excellent paper becomes a matter of more than merely knowing your facts.

You should be able to explain difficult concepts while coincidentally touching upon fundamental points of feminist theory. Here are some starter examples of crucial essay-writing points, which can make your work better:

After you have done your research, drafted an outline, and read some sample works, you are ready to begin writing. When doing so, you should not avoid opposing opinions on topics regarding feminism, and use them to your advantage by refuting them.

Utilizing feminist criticism will allow you to sway even those with different perspectives to see some aspects worthy of contemplation within your essay. Furthermore, it is a mark of good academism, to be able to defend your points with well-rounded counterarguments!

Remember to remain respectful throughout your essay and only include trusted, credible information in your work. This action ensures that your work is purely academic, rather than dabbling in a tabloid-like approach.

While doing the latter may entertain your readers for longer, the former will help you build a better demonstration of your subject, furthering good academic practices and contributing to the existing body of literature.

Find more points and essays at IvyPanda!

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feminist critique essay titles

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Essays by women: ‘How do you use your rage?’

There has been a surge in powerful essays by women published in 2019

In the past few years there has been an explosion of women’s writing. It’s a particular kind of writing that explores the politicisation of the personal, often blending with autobiography. While the essay form is usually considered to be objective, feminists have argued that the female subject has often been excluded from the picture and needs to be put back. Feminism is taking on and adapting conventional wisdom.

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The old adage ‘the personal is political’ is finding truly exciting new applications. The feminist women’s essays of 2019 combine stringent forensic analysis with fearless movement in and out of autobiography. The personal is elbowing its way rudely into the discourse, and altering the definition of being rude. In the process, new kinds of personhood are being created.

Rachel Cusk has written about motherhood and divorce, and has been vilified for her honesty (Credit: Getty Images)

Rachel Cusk has written about motherhood and divorce, and has been vilified for her honesty (Credit: Getty Images)

As Rebecca Solnit says in The Mother of All Questions , 2017: “There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.” Feminism is also increasingly agitating the status quo of masculinity, which is starting to seem like an untenable position. Take Solnit’s advice, and consider refusing the stupid, stultifying old questions.

In 2019 Rachel Cusk published a collection of essays called Coventry , which spans about a decade of her work. I have come to see each new publication by Cusk as thrilling. Although she is arguably a literary giant, she has won few awards, probably because she very wilfully sidesteps categories. (She once joked that she is getting accustomed to being a bridesmaid rather than a bride.)

Cusk is strongly emblematic. Her career began with a series of finely written and relatively conventional novels. But she really began to catch fire, in both senses, when she started writing autobiography. The first of these volumes was an honest look at motherhood. Really honest. She writes of “the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed”. It got her into trouble for many reasons, but mostly for not being ‘motherly’ in the ‘right’ way. Volume two was a portrait of a woman on shaky ground masquerading as a superb work of art criticism. Volume three was an unflinching look at the aftermath of divorce, truly a sidestep too far. She writes that what others call “cruelty” she calls “the discipline of self-criticism”. The third book got such an ugly response that she mused about her “ creative death . . . I was heading into total silence ”. The cruellest of her critics accused her of being cruel.

There has been a surge in powerful essays by women published in 2019

Almost mockingly, in the Outline trilogy, her latest set of books, she embraces silence and passivity. Faye, the anti-heroine of those novels, is like a radio dish, absorbing everything around her in what has been called ‘violent’ detail, and giving almost nothing back. This non-personality throws everyone around her into relief, and especially men, who cannot resist a feminine vacuum. Faye is no-one, but Cusk’s life is woven into her in playful ways. No more presenting an easy target. In Coventry, the title essay of her book of essays, Cusk considers what it is like to be treated as a non-person, and decides there is liberation in it. In the Outline trilogy femininity implodes into a neutron star, invisible and exerting a pull on the essence of everything that approaches it. The effect is profound, dismaying, and liberating.

#MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening – Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit, who published the collection of essays Whose Story Is This? in 2019, has been a superb essay writer for decades, and is certainly one of the most eminent feminist writers alive. She has written on many subjects other than gender politics; she is an environmentalist, political activist, art critic, historian. She is a genuine public intellectual. One of her better-known essays is the sardonic Men Explain Things to Me (2008), which gave rise to the term ‘mansplaining’.

New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey wrote the book She Said, an account of the Harvey Weinstein scandal (Credit: Getty Images)

New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey wrote the book She Said, an account of the Harvey Weinstein scandal (Credit: Getty Images)

Her anger seems to be modulating, maybe because feminism has made leaps of progress in the past few years. In the opening essay of her 2019 book, Solnit talks about how women have been negated and reduced to a footnote in the male story. The position that Cusk weaponises. Women are striving to take control of their own stories, to expand their personhood. “To change who tells the story, and who decides, is to change whose story it is,” she says. New stories are being born; but also, pivotally, new audiences. She observes that “#MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening… One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.”

Mirror, mirror

Speaking of which, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein story and helped catalyse the #MeToo movement, published their account of it this year as a book entitled She Said . They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their investigative work. The book is a detailed anatomisation of how Weinstein used the corporate and legal framework around him to silence his alleged victims, to “manipulate, pressure, and terrorise women” – but also how he attempted to use the same framework on the NYT itself, even up to the last moment. ‘Non-disclosure agreements’ are emerging as the legal vehicle of choice for male supervillains who want to de-personalise their female targets and stop them from telling their stories. That lid, and many others, blew off volcanically on social media.

The word ‘confessional’ is often trotted out, as if the personal mode is a sort of confession of sins, like a purging

Irish writer Emilie Pine’s unassuming courage and clarity of thought has enchanted me. Notes to Self is her book of “personal essays” that critics have heaped superlatives on – they said it would make me cry, and it did. She resolves to write about things “you never tell anyone”, to invite us deep into her head, and yet somehow she holds the ship steady. In a chapter on her self-centred, self-destructive father, in whose orbit she has been trapped for most of her life, she comes to a realisation: “I need to write my own narrative”.

Pine’s words are transformative. The word ‘confessional’ is often trotted out at these moments, as if the personal mode, and especially the one in recent use by women, is a sort of confession of sins, like a purging after which one can wipe one’s mouth and get on with the day. But Pine doesn’t want to expiate her sins; she is annexing the hidden parts of her story and giving herself permission to live in them.

In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about identity, the internet and womanhood (Credit: Elena Mudd/ Penguin Random House)

In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about identity, the internet and womanhood (Credit: Elena Mudd/ Penguin Random House)

By far the most exciting essay collection I’ve read this year is Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion . She is a 31-year-old US-Filipino millennial who has worked for feminist websites like The Hairpin and Jezebel, and now writes for The New Yorker. She brings her exceedingly powerful mind to bear on problems of identity, particularly those associated with late capitalism and the internet. Her signature approach is to dig into things (the architecture of the internet, female self-optimisation as a form of marketing, the US’s scam culture), and nuance them relentlessly. Although she is a digital native, and up to her neck in social media, she has also said that she put a blocking app on her phone that prevents her from using it more than two hours a day.

If feminism this year was about letting the personal into the political, then Tolentino questions how the personal is constructed in the digital age. Is sharing the personal on social media really being personal, or just corporate manipulation? Is #MeToo also partly a phenomenon created by the trick mirror of the internet? How are we encouraged to package and perform ourselves, and for whom? From her point of view, feminism is in danger of being reduced to “ideological pattern recognition”.

Audre Lorde’s books Zami, 1982, and Sister Outsider, 1984, have recently been re-issued (Credit: Penguin)

Audre Lorde’s books Zami, 1982, and Sister Outsider, 1984, have recently been re-issued (Credit: Penguin)

Tolentino refers to “this dead-end sense of my own ethical brokenness”. The challenge as she sees it is to navigate through the millennial experience. She doesn’t seem convinced that the world can be fixed, though her unstoppable intelligence and gallows humour say otherwise.

There were many other extraordinary women’s essay collections published in 2019:  all are intensely ‘personal’, but it is personality as a process of radical re-definition. Michelle Tea is a fierce, elemental, foul-mouthed intelligence on the loose, and she pulls us after her in Against Memoir . The title is ironic: at one point she talks about getting interested in Buddhism but then realising this involves negation of the self, she observes: “I refuse to drop my storyline”.

Samantha Irby runs the torrential blog Bitches Gotta Eat, and writes about her life, transmuting gold into even more gold. Her collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life , is grounded, hilarious, and diamond sharp. Last but not least, Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything  is an entertaining collection of essays about the culture wars, and about how identity politics is beginning to eat itself. Only Daum would have the courage to write a book like this – she’s a free thinker in the truest sense, a master of the unspeakable (the title of another of her collections).

Author Audre Lorde described herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ (Credit: Getty Images)

Author Audre Lorde described herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ (Credit: Getty Images)

And with a synchronicity that can’t be accidental, Penguin this year reissued Sister Outsider , a collection of Audre Lorde’s essays. She described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, and firmly grounded her politics in personal honesty. Her strange, lyrical, visceral prose defines her as one of the gods of feminism and political activism. In one of her essays she asks, “How do you use your rage?”

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feminist critique essay titles

235 Feminism Essay Topics

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StudyCorgi . (2023) '235 Feminism Essay Topics'. 4 February.

Human Rights Careers

5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

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“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “wokeness” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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COMMENTS

  1. 305 Feminism Title Ideas & Essay Samples

    The Great Gatsby: Analysis and Feminist Critique The feminist critique is an aspect that seeks to explore the topic of men domination in the social, economic, and political sectors. Metropolis’ Women: Analysis of the Movie’s Feminism & Examples

  2. Essays by women: ‘How do you use your rage?’

    The old adage ‘the personal is political’ is finding truly exciting new applications. The feminist women’s essays of 2019 combine stringent forensic analysis with fearless movement in and ...

  3. 235 Feminism Essay Topics & Research Titles at StudyCorgi

    Best Essay Topics on Feminism. Important Issues in the Feminism. The important issues in the feminism are the term of socialist feminism, to examine the issues of the dualistic typification, beauty ideals and the beauty industry in the context of the feminism. Rhetoric and Stereotypes: Feminists, Tattooed Persons, Politicians, and Senior Citizens.

  4. 5 Essays About Feminism

    v. t. e. Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination ...