Elaine C. Showalter

FEMINIST, EDUCATOR, AND WRITER

A pioneer in feminist criticism, Showalter provided a framework for evaluating the work of both British and American women writers.

Early Life

Elaine C. Showalter was born Elaine Cottler in Boston, Massachusetts. Though uneducated, her father, Paul Cottler, was a successful wool merchant. Her mother, Violet Rottenberg, was a housewife. Although the family did not strictly observe Jewish dietary laws, Elaine C. Showalter was sixteen when she ate her first cheeseburger during a lunch with Isaac Asimov, whom she was interviewing for her high school newspaper.

Showalter graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. During her senior year, she broke an engagement to a Princeton math student. Soon afterward, she met English Showalter, who taught French at Haverford College. The couple married in 1963, and Showalter became estranged from her parents, who disapproved of the union because the groom was Episcopalian, not Jewish. Showalter earned a master’s degree from Brandeis University in 1964, and then she began a doctoral program at the University of California, Davis, where her husband was teaching. Completing a dissertation on Victorian women writers, Showalter earned her Ph.D. in 1970 and began to teach part-time at Douglass College of Rutgers University. She was also a member of the National Organization for Women.

Life’s Work

“Literary Criticism,” published in Signs during the winter of 1975, marked Showalter’s entry into the literary scene. This essay introduced the concept of a female subculture within the literary tradition and argued for the reevaluation of minor women writers in light of this subculture. For her first major work, Showalter expanded and revised her doctoral dissertation. In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, published in 1977, she presented the British female subculture as a tradition and traced this tradition chronologically from the works of the Brontë sisters through the work of Doris Lessing. Showalter divides this tradition into three parts: feminine, feminist, and female. In addition to the major figures of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Drabble, Showalter covers minor authors and provides a list of short biographies at the end of the book.

In “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” published in 1979 in Women Writing and Writing About Women, an anthology by Mary Jacobus, Showalter coined the term “gynocritics.” Gynocritics read the work of women writers through a specifically female lens rather than through a lens modified from the male tradition. In her 1981 essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” published in Critical Inquiry, Showalter traced the history of feminist criticism, suggested that women writers be perceived as a muted group within the dominant male culture, and requested that critics focus on the actual work of women rather than on theory.

In 1984, after becoming a full professor at Douglass, Showalter left for Princeton University, where she was hired as a professor of English. She later earned the title of Avalon Professor of Humanities. Showalter moved into cultural studies with the publication of The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture in 1985. Written for a general audience, this book traced the history of female madness in British culture from 1830 to 1980 and suggested that this madness was a hysterical reaction to patriarchal culture.

Showalter extended her thesis on madness to connect the end of the nineteenth-century with the end of the twentieth-century in her 1997 publication of Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. This highly controversial volume compared contemporary instances of chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction to nineteenth-century cases of hysteria and mimicked the structure of Showalter’s 1990 publication, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, which chronicled similar instances of gender struggles at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for both men and women.

In 2001, Showalter published Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage, which chronicled British and American feminist icons, including popular culture figures such as Oprah Winfrey and Princess Diana. Showalter places herself in this chronicle, including much autobiographical information. A digression from gender studies, Teaching Literature, published in 2003, is a practical guide to teaching literature regardless of gender. Showalter retired from Princeton in 2003 (remains Professor Emerita); in 2009, she published A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, which surveys a tradition of American women writers. In 2016, she published The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, a biography of Howe, who was a nineteenth-century writer, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist.

Significance

Showalter is a founder of feminist criticism. Coining the term gynocritics, she invented a new method for reading literature by women authors. In addition, she has brought attention to previously lesser-known writers, enriching the British and American canons. In 1998, she served as president of the Modern Language Association. Importantly, Showalter advocated that critics retain the same high standards in evaluating the work of female authors as they hold in evaluating the work of male authors. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships.

Bibliography

Cassuto, Leonard. “Who’s Afraid of Elaine Showalter Now?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 Jan. 2024, www.chronicle.com/article/whos-afraid-of-elaine-showalter-now. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.

“Elaine Showalter.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 17 Jan. 2026, www.britannica.com/biography/Elaine-Showalter. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.

Flint, Kate. “Revisiting A Literature of Their Own.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, 1 Jan. 2005, pp. 289–96, doi:10.3366/jvc.2005.10.2.289. Accessed 20 Feb. 2026.

Lepore, Jill. “‘The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe,’ by Elaine Showalter.” The New York Times, 29 Feb. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/books/review/the-civil-wars-of-julia-ward-howe-by-elaine-showalter.html. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.

Nagel, Na’amit Strum. “Elaine Showalter.” Jewish Women’s Archive, 30 Apr. 2025, jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/showalter-elaine. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

“The One Hundred Thirty-Six Presidents.” Modern Language Association, www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/The-One-Hundred-Thirty-Six-Presidents. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.

Showalter, Elaine. Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage. Scribner, 2001.

Winkler, Karen J. “The Literary Tradition of Women.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 55, no. 3, 2009, pp. B12–B13.