Feminism

Cyntia Ozick's spirited defense of the Orange Prize for fiction--a British literary award given exclusively to women who write in English, brings her to ponder on the meaning of "sexism".

But what I like best in the piece "Prize or Prejudice" is Ozick's reflection on a definition of "feminism" she had once offered:

In an essay titled “Literature and the Politics of Sex,” I once ventured a definition of feminism. “In art,” I wrote, “feminism is that idea which opposes segregation; which means to abolish mythological divisions; which declares that the imagination cannot be ‘set’ free, because it is already free. I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of wood, or the leg of a mosquito. Classical feminism,” I concluded, “was conceived of as the end of false barriers and boundaries; as the end of segregationist fictions and restraints.”