Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979, at the height of the women's movement, an era in which women sought greater political and social equity than they had been afforded in previous decades. In the realm of literature, many authors were concerned with creating strong female characters in their work, and Carter was on the forefront of this trend. Her adaptations of traditional fairy tales sought to subvert the patriarchal leanings of the stories by inserting strong women in the roles of Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty, among others. Ellen Cronan Rose celebrates the ‘‘strong bond between mother and daughter " depicted in ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ as an example of what can happen when ‘‘a female fiction writer’’ takes on ‘‘male cultural myths.’’ Indeed, the image of the mother, who knows by instinct that her daughter is in danger, riding in on horseback to slay the serial killer, seems unequivocally feminist. However, some reviewers felt that her characterizations of the brutal, murderous husband and the vulnerable, fragile heroine who almost becomes a passive victim, seem to follow the traditional paradigm of victim and victimizer. Some feminists questioned whether Carter's revision of the ending is enough to overcome this paradigm.

Critics such as Avis Lewallan, agreeing with Patricia Duncker, Robert Clark, and others, take issue with Carter's feminism, stating that this revision is not enough. The opposition of passive and aggressive found in sado-masochism still dominates Carter's fictional and polemical world, even if some of her female characters take on the role of aggressor. To these critics, the revisionist ending seems backhanded in view of Carter's polemic. Carter's prose is simply too seductive, as is the Marquis's castle, and too aligned with pornography, as is the narrator's position as sexually-awakened potential victim, for the stories to be considered stalwartly feminist. Throughout the late 1980s, Carter's detractors seemed to be winning the debate.

The 1990s have seen a re-emergence of Carter's defenders, or, at the very least, a recognition that the debate demonstrates the complexities of Carter's work. Hers is not an easy feminism, as Elaine Jordan argues, nor a feminism that can be generalized or quickly summarized. Mary Kaiser recognizes this complexity when she argues that Carter's The Bloody Chamber is anti-universalist, in that each story presents a different context for male-female relations. For example, the context of the title story is "fin-de-siecle" French decadence, a context that necessarily raises sado-masochistic specters. Novelist Margaret Atwood, in her analysis of the tiger and lamb imagery in Carter's fiction, reads The Bloody Chamber as '''writing against' de Sade ... as an exploration of the possibilities for the kind of synthesis de Sade himself could never find.’’ One can see how this kind of criticism uses the short story as something other than evidence in a debate; it looks to it as a work of art commenting upon a wider cultural moment.