CHAPTER TWELVE
Guinevere, Victim of the Patriarchy
(1960'S—Early 1980'S)
Beginning in the 1960s, the women of the United States and Britain started to advocate for their rights, to demand equality with their male counterparts in the bedroom and the boardroom. Like all of the cultural shifts before it, this focus on women seeped into the Arthurian legend produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. Bonner shows how this affected the stories of this period: “After the women’s movements of the 1960’s [sic]…a different species of Arthurian legend was required. Not only are the female characters of the legends more fully, and some say more realistically, developed, but also some of the legends are now written by females.”371
Female authors and scholars of the period, who for the first time had for
