First, according to Showalter, comes an androgynist poetics. Next, a feminist critique and female Aesthetic, accompanied by gynocritics, follows, and these are closely pursued by gynesic poststructuralist feminist criticism and gender theory. Androgynist poetics, having relations and perhaps roots in mid-Victorian women's writing of imitation, contends that the creative mind is sexless, and the very foundation of describing a female tradition in writing was sexist. Critics of this vein found gender as imprisoning, nor believed that gender had a bearing in the content of writing, which, according to Joyce Carol Oates is actually culture-determined.
Imagination is too broad to be hemmed in by gender.
Gender, it could be said, is part of that culture-determination which Oates says serves as inspiration. The female experience, then, began to take on positive affirmations. Writers like Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, emerging out of the Victorian period and influenced by its writings were perhaps the first women to recognize this. There are problems with the Female Aesthetic, which feminist critics recognized. Its very restlessness and ambiguity defied identification as part of its identity.