When responding to these comments, keep in mind I haven’t looked at this particular anthology (though I will be tracking a copy down in the near future).

I’d be careful to say that Surrealism was proto-feminist. In Breton’s original manifesto of surrealism, not a single woman appears on the list of friends and predecessors whom he considers part of the “movement.” The women involved typically played the role of the muse for this patriarchal literary movement. The women who did write, photograph, and paint and with each other tend to get left out of the history of the movements. A lot of them courted the movement, but not to the extent that they would self-apply the label of Surrealist to their work. Some even outright rejected it later in their lives (I’m thinking of Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington specifically).

Even the Wikipedia page, which has a section on the feminist critique of Surrealism as male-dominated movement, doesn’t mention Varo or Carrington until it gets to the critique. Why wouldn’t these major Surrealist figures be in the main entry? They were both romantically and artistically involved with such “major” figures as Max Ernst and Benjamin Peret and were very much involved with the Surrealist activities in general.

While I do agree that a lot of exploration of the concept of femininity took place during this time, a lot more fetishistic exploration took place. I’m thinking of Dali’s “Burning Giraffe” or Breton’s “Free Union.” When people think of Surrealism today, they’re not thinking of the poems, paintings, and photographs by the women, but the images of the women as depicted by those men.