There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism. The first mode is concerned with women as a reader, and this is termed Feminist Critique. The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gyno-critics.
Feminist critique is a historically grounded enquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literature. It is political and polemical and has affiliations to Marxism. The subjects of study are mainly the image of women in literature, omissions and misconceptions of them. According to Elaine Showalter, Feminist Critique is an interpretation of texts from a feminist perspective to expose diche's, stereotypes, and negative images of women. Generally focusing on male literary and theoretical texts, it also calls attention to the gaps in a literary history that has largely excluded writing by women. This approach dominated feminist criticism when it first emerged in the 1970s and is strongly linked to the decades political agendas; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), for example ties the mistreatment of women in fiction by Henry Miller and others to the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. As early as 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson associated such readings with the "righteous, angry" first stages of feminist criticism. Showalter would go on to suggest that by continuing to emphasize writing by men, the strategy of feminist criticism remained dependent "on existing models" of interpretation. It did, however, lay the foundation for what she identified as the second, "gynocritical" phase of feminist criticism, focusing on women as writers with values, methods, and traditions of their own. It has also led to more fully elaborated theories of women as readers, and continues to be an important tool in exposing the operation of sexism in culture and society.
