This chapter explores the post–World War II period in the United States, charting the postwar feminist essay in three directions: first, as a site of consciousness-raising during feminism’s second wave; second, as a space for feminist critiques of feminisms during the so-called third wave; and third, in its contemporary iteration in a revived consciousness-raising context: the #MeToo essay. The chapter draws together formally and contextually diverse texts into a longer conversation about how the essay can be read as a politicized and politicizing literary form. These texts include nonfiction subgenres often thought to be subordinate to the essay: an article, a collectively authored set of papers, a prose poem, a memoir, and a victim impact statement. The chapter argues that what makes these texts “feminist” and “essays” – despite significant formal differences – is their shared engagement with critical, documentary, and experiential literary modes and their stakes in connecting the individual to politically invested collectives, past and future. These five essays explicitly address gender and contingent forces of oppression that both bond and trouble emancipatory collectives.

This chapter presents the history of essayistic writing by Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among critics. Encompassing work by writers who have migrated or are descended from Latin America or the Caribbean (including writers who identify as Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, Nuyorican, or Afro Latino), the Latinx essay reflects this heterogeneity, as authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage social and political debates. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, opening a dialogue with the reader as they show their thought processes on the page. While Latinx authors blur the boundaries among different types of essays, this chapter explores three broad strands: the crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.

Chapter 2 considers some moderate and radical feminist theories from Latin America. It begins with the early vindication of equal rights for women by Sor Juana de la Cruz. Since her feminist theory did not claim that obtaining such rights is contingent on a drastic change of the sociopolitical and economic order, it belongs in the same category of moderate feminism widely advocated by women at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter contends that, unlike Sor Juana’s feminism, the present-day “scientific” feminism of Roxana Kreimer, also in the moderate category, lacks the support of plausible arguments. Contra Kreimer, no evidence is found for her claim that many inequalities between the sexes amount to inequities (i.e., unjust inequalities). To debunk radical feminisms, Kreimer needs to take a close look at these doctrines, something that this chapter undertakes by focusing on the liberationist feminisms of Ofelia Schutte and Enrique Dussel. Each of these comes out as closer to ideological propaganda than to philosophical inquiry.