In this Feminist phase, women's literature had varying angles of attack. Some women wrote social commentaries, translating their own sufferings to those of the poor, the laboring class, slaves, and prostitutes, thereby venting their sense of injustice in an acceptable manner. They expanded their sphere of influence by making inroads into social work. Militant suffragists also wrote prolifically during this protest phase of literature. On the whole, Showalter finds these women's writings not examples of fine literature.
Some writers end up turning inward during the subsequent search for identity.
Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf worked towards a female aesthetic , elevating sexuality to a world-polarizing determination. However, Showalter criticizes their works for their androgynistic natures. This changed when the female novel entered a new stage in the 1960s. With twentieth-century Freudian and Marxist analysis and two centuries of female tradition, writers such as Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt , and Beryl Bainbridge access women's experiences. Showalter's analysis shows how the progress of women's writing reached this phase and expresses all the conflicts and struggles still influencing the current of women's literature.