Elayne Antler Rapping (Essay Date 1975)

SOURCE: Rapping, Elayne Antler. "Unfree Women: Feminism in Doris Lessing's Novels." Women's Studies 3, no. 1 (1975): 29-44.

In the following essay, Rapping explores how Lessing's female protagonists shape feminine identity and experience, especially within the context of a male-dominated society, in The Golden Notebook and Children of Violence.

The men that we call great are those who … have taken the weight of the world upon their shoulders; they have done better or worse, they have succeeded in re-creating it or they have gone down; but first they have assumed that enormous burden. This is what no woman has ever done, what none has ever been able to do. To regard the universe as one's own, to consider oneself to blame for its faults and to glory in its progress, one must belong to the caste of the privileged; it is for those alone...