Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literacy Theory: Part 1 communicates how specific feminist theorists have impacted the Anglo-American women's movement and literary theory. For each theorist highlighted within the reviews Moi discusses and summarizes the work and the methodology. She specifically focuses on the effectiveness of ideas on the academic world and social politics.
             My favorite Anglo-American piece was Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women. Her focus of this essay was to expose the foolish and illogical nature of this sexual form of thought. She focused on the stereotypes of women's roles in literary works and explained how they are often preceded by a concept of women constructed of the traits which they embody. She points out certain characteristics associated with a woman's typical role in a literary work. Ellmann describes the way women are seen as "formless" which symbolizes a soft body equals a soft mind. This can only lead one to believe that a woman's intellect is inferior to the male's clarity and precision of thought. Two other evident traits that define a woman in literature are "confinement" and "compliancy". Confinement allows women to thrive in innocence, purity, and seclusion. This is almost the extreme opposite of what defines masculine in literature, a range of character. Compliancy in women takes various forms according to Ellmann. Women are compliant as submissive daughters, wives, mothers and even whores. They all share the same sense of submission and obedience.
             I enjoyed her work because I found it more assessable to the audience because she chose to use first person plural. Her essay proved to be more "user friendly" and easier to understand due to her positioning herself on the same level as the reader. Ellmann also uses 'anchoring points' or straightforward sentences that explain the main...