The conference newsletter we were going to distribute in New York earlier this month (you can view/download a .pdf here) included a column of "Member News and Notes" (page 8). At my request Ray Haberski, S-USIH Secretary, had sent out an email to our membership, and I had also posted a notice on this blog, asking for professional news and publication notices from our members. Below are the news items I received by our newsletter print deadline.
I would be glad to post "Member News and Notes" here on the blog in between our newsletter issues. If you are a member of the S-USIH, and you have a brief notice to share with our readers, please send me an email using the subject line "news and notes." - L.D. Burnett
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S-USIH Member News and Notes - Fall 2012
Angus Burgin's book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression, was published in October by Harvard University Press. From the HUP website: "Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world."
George Cotkin's newest book, Dive Deeper: Journeys With Moby Dick, was published in July by Oxford University Press. From the OUP website: "George Cotkin's Dive Deeper provides both a guide to the novel and a record of its dazzling cultural train. It supplies easy-to-follow plot points for each of the novel's 135 sections before taking up a salient phrase, image, or idea in each for further exploration. Through these forays, Cotkin traces the astonishing reach of the novel, sighting the White Whale in mainstream and obscure subcultures alike, from impressionist painting circles to political terrorist cells. In a lively and engaging style, Dive Deeper immerses us into the depths of Melville's influence on the literature, film, and art of our modern world."
Louise (Lucy) W. Knight, Visiting Scholar, Gender Studies Program, Northwestern University, gave a plenary talk on re-interpreting Jane Addams's ideas using a rhetorical analysis at a conference at the University of Dayton titled, "Feminist Pragmatism in Place," October 19-20, 2012.
Drew Maciag's book, Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism, will be published by Cornell University Press next spring.
Mike O'Connor's article "Liberals in Space: The 1960s Politics of Star Trek" will be published this December in the journal The Sixties. In March of next year, Mike will be appearing as a talking head on the television series The Real Story (aired in the U.S. on the Smithsonian Channel) on the episode featuring Star Trek. Since last year's newsletter, he has signed a contract for his book A Commercial Republic: Democratic Capitalism in American Thought. It will be published by the University Press of Kansas in early 2014.
Mark Pittinger's book Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present was published in August by New York University press. From the website of the Department of History at the University of Colorado: "The book explains how social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to 'pass' as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor."
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Louise Knight. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Louise Knight. Tampilkan semua postingan
Jumat, 09 November 2012
Jumat, 16 Maret 2012
Women and Intellectual History
At the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, the first plenary on the evening of November 17, 2011 was on U.S. Women's Intellectual Traditions; a panel instigated by conference chair Mike O'Connor and organized by Louise (Lucy) Knight of Northwestern University.The session was well-attended and the discussion interesting and lively. The panelists impressed me with both their intellectual dexterity (having to speak on a wide range of topics) and the strength of their prose. Following the session, I asked Lucy Knight for a copy of the talks with the intention of posting them on our blog. In light of the recent debate over women, politics, and power, the comments of the panel ring with immediacy.
The panel included: Lucy Knight (moderator and presenter), Megan Marshall, Philippa Strum, Sherie Randolph, and Maria Cotera. Lucy Knight began with introductory remarks, framing the session, and then followed Megan Marshall with a presentation on her specific research projects. Knight, Marshall, Cotera had written remarks that they could submit for this post; Strum and Randolph had spoken from notes. Enjoy!
Opening Remarks
Louise W. Knight
Thank you, Andrew [Hartman], for the introduction and thanks especially to you and your conference committee for proposing this topic for a plenary. We are delighted to take it on, even though it is much bigger than we can do just justice to.
As it turns out, and as some of you know, women and intellectual history has been a hot topic on the USIH blog recently. Lauren Kientz Anderson started the conversation by asking how we should interpret the fact, as she observed it, that relatively few women had posted or commented on the blog. She also raised questions about the place of women scholars in the field. As so often happens in blogs, topics began to ramify. Some asked, and even answered, that perennially thorny question – do women in the field, or even in general, argue or think or analyze differently than men do? Others wondered if the question itself was a red herring left over from antediluvian times, to mix my metaphors. Reading all this, Bill Fine then posted a guest blog to share some facts. He analyzed the content from 1979 to the present of the Intellectual History Newsletter, subsequently transformed into the journal Modern Intellectual History. He reported on the number of articles by women scholars and listed the articles and the authors that addressed how the field has dealt with women’s intellectual history, mostly in the context of cultural studies. His Nov. 15th post is a great resource for those wishing to know about the work of women scholars and the history of the field’s interest in this topic.
Tonight’s topic is women’s intellectual traditions. We’ll be considering, impressionistically, the 200-year history of American women as sources of influential ideas. Thus we will look at: the history of women’s ideas about women and the history of women shaping the intellectual debates of their times. And, while the roundtable participants happen to be women, we might easily have had men as well. The focus here is historical intellectual content, not what gender is doing the scholarship.
Let me begin with the first topic. To state the obvious, women’s ideas about women are diverse and contested across all of American history and the origin of many of these ideas has been women’s rebellion against the status quo. When the nation was founded, women were denied most of their rights, from voting and jury duty, to preaching, popular lecturing, and holding political office, and most roles other than housewife, shopkeeper, servant, farmer, slave, teacher, or charity volunteer.
This situation was supported by a thicket of arguments about women’s limited capacities. Every time a woman embraced a new role, she had to marshal the arguments to justify her unorthodox behavior. Thus Anne Hutchinson and Sojourner Truth had to justify preaching God’s word, Maria Stewart had to justify becoming the first woman to give a public lecture to a mixed audience, Lucy Stone had to justify keeping her surname after marriage; and Jeanette Rankin had to justify serving as the first woman elected to a seat in the U.S. Congress.
We are not yet done with this process. In the near future, when a woman finally receives a major party’s nomination for the presidency, she and her supporters will have to justify that, although it will not be so obvious at first. In our modern enlightened era, she will face the seemingly respectable question, “Is the country ready for a woman president?” when in fact the real question will be whether she, as a woman, is capable of being president. This will become clear when the innuendos about women begin to fly thick and fast.
The traditions that held women back, of course, had their deeper justifications in the canon of (white, male) Western intellectual thought, in which women’s nature was sweepingly and confidently characterized. Women rebutted these arguments too.
When Kant asserted in 1764, “The fair sex has . . . a beautiful understanding [based on sense], whereas ours [men’s] should be a deep [sublime] understanding [based on reason],” Sarah Grimké rebutted. She wrote in 1837, “[Women’s] creator . . . prepared her . . . [to make progress] towards . . . [a] state of high mental cultivation.”[i]
When Hegel argued in 1821 that “[w]omen can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy or certain of the arts, [lacking] . .. a universal faculty,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton rebutted. She wrote in 1892: “Women are already the equals of men in the whole realm of thought, in art, science, literature, and government.”[ii]
And when Sigmund Freud argued in 1933, “[W]omen must be regarded as having little sense of justice,” Gloria Steinem rebutted. She proposed in 1994 that we imagine that Sigmund had been replaced in history by a woman named Phyllis Freud and that Phyllis had written, “Men must be regarded as having little sense of justice.”[iii] Actually, Steinem did not so much rebut as mock Sigmund’s claim, revealing it to be ridiculous by practicing gender reversal. Sometimes wit persuades better than reason.
Finally, women’s ideas about women (as well as about society) have diverged according to distinctions of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other differences. In each of these areas, men’s experiences were, and are, not the same as women’s experiences and women’s experiences differ among themselves. Some women carry the burden of double or triple oppressions. This has led them to incisively deconstruct institutionalized prejudices no one else has noticed. They have particularly unpacked the prejudices that white upper middle class heterosexual women have held, and hold, against those women they considered Other. This is important work, since it shows the error of embracing “universalism.” We have called this panel, “women’s intellectual traditions,” in the plural, to stress that no one group of women can speak for all women. We honor Audre Lorde’s insight that the category of woman is itself full of subdivisions. Tonight we will learn more about the intellectual legacies of women of color from two of the panelists, and perhaps about a few of these other differences as well. Hopefully you in the audience will take up some of these other topics, to help fill in what we do not cover in the panel.
So far I have focused on women rebels’ ideas about women. But conservative women also have an intellectual tradition. Their arguments have generally centered on family and the individual virtues of self-sufficiency and respect for gendered social roles. Often they have built a bridge between an emerging status quo and traditional values. One thinks of antebellum northerners Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon, two groundbreaking educators of women whose actions were bolder than some of their arguments. Or of the antebellum southerner Louisa Susannah McCord, who, in the words of one intellectual historian, “managed to fend off radical feminism, while still carving out a claim for the intellectual independence of women.”[iv] Or of the turn of the century writer and activist Anna Julia Cooper, who, in the words of one scholar, embodied “the classically southern virtues of home, religion and proper public conduct,” and also became of one the “most widely recognized symbols of the new black woman.”[v] The ideas of conservative women are certainly relevant to our conversation. [During the discussion, panelist Maria Cotera noted that a particular woman may hold views that are a mix of liberal and conservative, making it difficult to characterize her as one or the other.]
Women’s ideas about women also deal with many female-related controversies. These do not define women’s intellectual traditions, but they have certainly generated much thought. Some of the issues – which are all actually more than a century old -- include
· whether biology is destiny,
· whether there is such a thing as feminine thinking and what it might be. And if there is, which many doubt, is it the way all women think? Or is it the way women have historically been encouraged to think? Or is “feminine thinking” a way to refer to a kind of thinking that men and women can both do?
· what constitutes reproductive justice,
· What the place of sexuality is in advancing women’s status,
and, at least among conservatives,
· whether pursuing self-development is selfish, and
· how to define women’s duty.
Women and men have thoroughly debated how these issues apply to women. One waits hopefully for men and women to take up these questions with equal thoroughness as they apply to men.
OK. So women’s ideas about women are what first come to our minds when we think of women’s intellectual traditions, but we cannot stop there. These traditions have also included how women have shaped the general intellectual debates of their times. They have taken part in the long discussions in this country about transcendentalism, liberalism, individualism, socialism, conservatism, democracy, lesbianism, classicism, anarchism, imperialism, internationalism, the role of the state, racism, civil rights, and about constitutional interpretative questions, to name just a few. The panelists here will be providing us with plenty examples along these lines, and I am sure those of you in the audience can supply some more. One thinks of how Mercy Otis Warren wrote eloquently about federalism; Emma Goldman on anarchism, Maria Stewart on racism, Audre Lorde on homosexuality, Eleanor Roosevelt on human rights, and Rachel Carson on environmental ethics. If I have one wish for tonight, is that we all leave here with a fuller sense of the ways that women in history have engaged with and influenced the dominant discourse.
This panel will have a biographical focus. James Kloppenberg noted at the Organization for American Historians meeting last March that in the field of intellectual history, the study of individuals and biography has been and will continue to be very important. In keeping with that observation, each of the panelists here has in-depth knowledge of one or more women intellectuals whose contributions will form the basis of our comments.
To further focus our conversation, we have chosen six questions to address to get started, though we may not each address all of them. They include questions about
· a particular figure’s intellectual courage,
· her contributions to feminist thought,
· a large idea that she made persuasive and
· her influential arguments about, central concepts, and
· her ability to communicate her ideas.
We also will take up the conference theme and consider how our particular figure used narratives in her work or what narratives about that figure we are revising in our own work. [i] Immanuel Kant, “The Interrelations of the Two Sexes,” from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, reprinted in Rosemary Agonito, comp., History of Ideas on Woman: A Source Book (New York: Perigee Books/G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 130-31; Sarah Grimké, Letters on Equality of Sexes, Letter X, “Intellect of Woman,” in Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, ed. Sarah Grimké: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 65.
[ii] Georg Hegel, “Marriage and the Family,” in The Philosophy of Right, reprinted in Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, 167; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, comp. Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol. II, Key Texts of the Early Feminists (New York: Praeger, 1989), 382.
[iii] Sigmund Freud, “Woman as Castrated Man,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, reprinted in Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, 321; Gloria Steinem, Moving Beyond Words (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 35-36.
[iv] Michael O’Brien, ed., All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), 329.
[v] Charles Lemert, “Anna Julia Cooper: The Colored Woman’s Office,” in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, eds. (NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 4.
***
Megan Marshall
The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
It’s a great honor to have been invited to participate in the S-USIH’s annual conference, particularly as my training is in American Literature rather than history, and I publish as a biographer. But this year’s conference theme–narrative–is one that comfortably includes a scholar like me, and is also especially appropriate for the two female public intellectuals I’m going to briefly introduce. Narrative was a device both of them relied on for conveying their ideas and for making certain that those ideas were remembered. Lucy asked us to mention an example of our subjects’ “intellectual courage.” I can think of many examples for both Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. But one that they shared, really a trait more than an instance of bravery, bears mentioning here, because such courage may not be so necessary today. That was simply daring to talk their way into an intellectual scene–the Transcendentalist circle of the 1830s and ‘40s in New England–that was dominated by men, men with credentials these women could never attain.
To digress a minute, I mentioned that I hadn’t trained as an historian–a significant reason for that was the feeling of intimidation I experienced as an undergraduate when I stopped in at history classes in the 1970s at Harvard, then still a predominantly male institution, and with a history department populated almost exclusively by male faculty and students. I couldn’t make myself walk through the door into those classes.
Fortunately, I took one class, relegated to “Social Studies,” in women’s history, taught by the late Barbara Miller Solomon–herself a pioneering female intellectual–in which I learned about both Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, women who would readily have crossed the thresholds that I would not. I made myself a student of these lives over the following decades, and I learned how narratives had helped these women step forward.
Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, was simply an unstoppable force–until her tragic drowning in a shipwreck in 1850 at age 40. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously tweaked Fuller for possessing a “rather mountainous ME”–an enormous ego. Maybe that’s how her contemporaries had to see this unusually assertive woman, whose conversational skills both men and women recognized as superior. Fuller did think pretty highly of herself too, though. Here’s her own description: “a woman of tact & brilliancy like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we get our knowledge, &, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, & fly, & dart hither & thither, & seize with ready eye all the weak
points, like Saladin in the desert.”
Fuller led with her “I”–as a writer. Her first book, a travelogue based on a journey to America’s western frontier, Summer on the Lakes, drew on her first-hand accounts to protest the plight of the Indian and the wasting of natural resources; later her reform-minded journalism for the New York Tribune relied on her personal investigations of prisons, mental hospitals, and orphanages. She did the same with her coverage of the desperate conditions of mineworkers in England, and through the heady days of the first wave of Italy’s Risorgimento.
Fuller once noted that Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman she’d read early on, “was a woman whose existence better proved the need of some new interpretation of Woman’s Rights than anything she wrote.” Fuller’s life was to become so dramatic that the same could be said of her–but that’s another story. Fuller wrote this sentence in her great feminist treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. The book’s most famous line–“let them be sea captains!”–speaks for only a small part of Fuller’s insightful analysis there. One instance of Fuller’s “intellectual courage” in that book, for which she got much grief from reviewers and readers, even from women she’d once counted as friends, was a passage in which she theorizes about the problems of marriage, although she was not herself a
married woman. But Fuller’s disinterested perspective on marriage, her “I,” was what allowed her to point out that “in the majority of instances, the man looks upon his wife as an adopted child.” It took “intellectual courage,” in the same book, simply to write: “Woman can express publicly the fullness of thought and creation, without losing any of the peculiar beauty of her sex.”
Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, but she died halfway through that 100-year span. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, born in 1804, lived almost ninety years, until 1894. The narrative that inspired her as a child, was one she’d “self-created,” as she later said. As a girl she listened to her mother’s stories of the family’s pilgrim ancestors. The little girl mis-heard her mother to say “Ann sisters”–she thought she was descended from a hardy race of women. And Elizabeth Peabody was frequently frustrated by the women she encountered in real life who didn’t share her own enterprising spirit. As a teenager attending women’s Bible study groups led by Rev. William Ellery Channing, she was appalled that no one spoke up. Later she would support herself by teaching college-level history classes for women, encouraging them to form opinions and speak their minds, the precursor of the famous “Conversations” that Margaret Fuller led in the 1840s.
Education was a lifelong interest, and Peabody ran what we might call progressive schools today, organized on principles of Socratic dialogue rather than rote learning. Later she was America’s foremost exponent of the kindergarten movement. But as a writer, Peabody didn’t have a “mountainous ME” like Fuller, rather the opposite. Her memoir has to be extracted from a book she published late in life called The Reminiscences of Rev. William Ellery Channing, which happens also to include accounts of Peabody’s own work as a teacher, as proprietor of a Boston foreign language bookshop where the Transcendentalists met, as publisher of their journal The Dial, as promoter of the group’s utopian community Brook Farm.
So–two different 19th-century New England women, two approaches to personal
narrative. Maybe we’ll consider in our discussion tonight whether it is a particularly useful practice for women, in a patriarchal intellectual climate, to turn to narrative, first-person testimony, as a means of establishing authority when no credentials can be had, and of conveying ideas from a vantage point of relative powerlessness. ***
Louise Knight
Jane Addams
Because the theme about this conference is narrative, I would like to start with the topic of the narratives I am revising about my subject, Jane Addams, a leader of the settlement house movement and the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.The narrative most people know is that she was a philanthropist who cared about the poor; the image they have is of a sentimental, naïve do gooder. It is obvious why this narrative has dominated both academic and popular impressions of her: it fit the gendered stereotypes about an admired woman. Those stereotypes have less dominance now, but the portrait established in print lingers forever. This is especially true in Jane Addams’s case. My new biography of Addams, published in 2010, is the first full life written in thirty-seven years.
The narrative most people don’t know is that she was a labor activist, a major political figure, a feminist, a radical visionary and a public intellectual
In these remarks, I will focus on the last three of these.
FEMINIST
Addams called herself a feminist and by that she meant she supported women’s rights. In fact, nearly her entire reform agenda was shaped by that commitment. She was seeking to empower women not only when she worked on women’s suffrage and women’s trade union organizing but also when she worked on general labor and immigrant legislation and free speech. In 1915, she became the founding president of the Woman’s Peace Party and of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and both of these groups’ platforms were about women’s rights as much as they were about peace. And she had incisive observations to make about the patriarchy.
RADICAL VISIONARY
Addams did not come across to most people as a radical visionary and for good reasons. In politics, she believed in seeking “the best possible” and while her vision for society’s future was radical, she was very skilled at presenting these ideas gently, sort of easing them into people’s minds. However, when you read her work, you s come across fierce sentences that show the radical thinking that behind her positions.
For example, in her famous speech about the Pullman Strike, “A Modern Lear,” she wrote, “Nothing will satisfy the aroused conscience of men short of the complete participation of the working classes in the spiritual, intellectual and material inheritance of the human race.”
And in a commencement speech she gave at a woman’s college in 1895, she rebutted the traditional view of women’s superior moral purity: “Women have not made politics impure, have not corrupted legislatures and wrecked railroads, only because they have not had the opportunity to do so. They have been chained down by a military code whose penalty [for violation] is far worse than the court martial.”
A MAJOR PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
To illustrate Addams’ standing as a public intellectual, let me discuss Addams’s thinking about two ideas central to her thought: democracy and militarism. She wrote a book about each.
Her book about democracy, Democracy and Social Ethics, was published in 1902 when she was 42. It was her first book and was developed out of a series of lectures she gave at several universities.
The way she presented her ideas were characteristic. The book’s apparent argument, captured in chapters about different types of hierarchical personal relationships, is that the ethic of benevolence was becoming old-fashioned. The introduction discusses democracy opaquely; otherwise, the words democracy and democratic are scattered across each chapter as rare passing references. The effect is of a woven tapestry, rather than a linear argument.
In her second book, about militarism, she does something similar. This book, too, is a collection of lectures. Entitled Newer Ideals of Peace, it was published in early 1907, when she was 46.
Despite the title, the book’s apparent argument is about the dangers of militarism. Her original contribution is the meaning she assigns the term. Like Herbert Spencer, she thought militarism was a worldview, but to Spencer it meant barbarism while to her it meant the belief that one group of people was superior to another group, and were willing to use almost any means, including force, to establish and maintain that superiority.
Most of the chapters were either about how militarism influenced city governments in the United States or about how militarism undercut efforts to achieve legislation on behalf of working adults and working children. Yet throughout the book she is also writing about the underlying attitudes that make war possible.
Her other point, strung across the book in passing references, was that the ethic of humanitarianism, the anti-militarist ethic, was spreading around the world and would eventually make war impossible. But by humanitarianism she did not mean having a kindly, helpful attitude towards those who suffered; she meant an ideal that fully honored the “great reservoirs of human ability” of those usually seen as inferior.
Addams can be fairly charged with avoiding linear logic in Newer Ideals. And others noticed. Some did not like it. Her friend George Herbert Mead, the sociologist, wrote, “One does not feel, in reading Miss Addams, the advance of an argument with measured tread.” But William James loved the way she made her case. After reading Newer Ideals he wrote to her that he found it “hard to express the good the book has done me in offering new view points and annihilating old ones. Yours is a deeply original mind and all so quiet and harmless! Yet revolutionary in the extreme.” I think that James, as usual, nailed it.
As you can see from what I have said, studying Addams’s ideas is not a straightforward matter. At times you wish she had made her arguments with what Mead called a “measured tread,” but more often you are grateful that she did not. She loved mystery, and she creates just enough of it on the page to make studying her a great deal of fun.
That said, the way she communicated her ideas -- as William James said, so quietly and harmlessly -- has probably contributed to her failure to attract much serious intellectual scholarship until recently. I can report, however, that prodded by several women scholars, philosophy has embraced Addams’s ideas as worthy of close study. It is my hope that the intellectual historians are not far behind.
***
Maria Cotera
On Boundary-Crossing and Women of Color Intellectuals
In keeping with the theme of the conference, the story I offer up here is a story of narratives that don’t “fit” --- or perhaps more precisely of the ways in which our predominant narratives about intellectual traditions are shaped by the critical boundaries, disciplinary norms, and aesthetic value-systems we have inherited, sometimes unthinkingly. It is also a story about boundary-crossers, women who themselves did not fit and who paid the price, both in terms of their careers and in terms of their legacies. I refer to the three subjects of my first book, Native Speakers, which focuses on the ethnographic and literary work of African American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, Sioux ethnologist Ella Cara Deloria, and Texas-Mexican folklorist Jovita González Mireles, all of whom were highly visible, even celebrated, figures in some of the most important intellectual and social movements of the early 20th century, including the Boasian revolution in social sciences, the popularization of folklore studies, and the various ethnic renaissance movements that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding their high profiles in the 1930s and 1940s, these women were largely invisible by the late 1960s, when new cultural and scholarly currents might well have recuperated their legacies. So this is a story, too, of invisibility, and the ways in which the dominant disciplinary and conceptual frames that we use to categorize the past (even counter-hegemonic frames like feminist and ethnic nationalist optics) make capturing narratives that don’t fit all the more difficult. Deloria, Hurston, and González came of age at a time in the early 20th century when interest in the other was at an all time high. Each capitalized on this interest, becoming celebrated spokeswomen for their communties and engaging in the scholarly and political currents of their time at a very high level. Ella Deloria worked closely with anthropologist Franz Boas, and later, after his death, with Ruth Benedict. For her own part, Hurston had a more contentious relationship with Boas, but she also worked with Benedict and perhaps more felicitously with Melville Herskovits, eventually finding her true home as a folklorist and Harlem Rennaissance writer. Jovita González, though less famous than Hurston, made quite a reputation for herself as a writer and folklorist in Texas, where as a student of J. Frank Dobie, the great white father of Texas Folklore Studies, she rose to become the presdient of the Texas Folklore Society in the early 1930s. While Deloria, Hurston, and González produced innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities and rose to prominence within the related fields of ethnology and folklore studies, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key junctures in their careers, and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women. Hurston’s novels, especially Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), are the most celebrated of the crossover works by these women, but Ella Deloria’s ethnographic novel Waterlily (published in 1988), and Jovita Gonzalez’s co-authored historical novel Caballero (1992), are, like Hurston’s work, vivid articulations of ethnographic and historical research in a different voice. This turn to the literary is not as suprising as it might seem. Indeed, as I argue in my book, it was the turn from “science“ to “fiction“ that enabled Deloria, Hurston and González to activate a feminist imaginary that was simply not possible in the social scientific writing of the 1930s, a mode of discourse that was still very much keyed to the self/other approach to “difference” of Objectivism. Unlike ethnographic narratives in which difference is described and delineated by a putatively distanced observer, literary works enable difference to articulate itself from a position of representational centrality. Which is to say that in Hurston, Deloria, and González‘s novels, difference is the authority and not the object. This boundary crossing, and this keying in to the “voice” of difference, through the mobilization of multiple registers of narrative practice, was for me the primary rationale for bringing these three very disparate intellectuals together.
Native feminist Paula Gunn Allen has argued that women of color intellectuals like Deloria, Hurston, and González have been “disappeared“ from our intellectual imaginary because the “border texts” that they produce in their strategic travels in and between different sites of struggle challenge the disciplinary, aesthetic, and ideological norms of both dominant and counter-hegemonic canons. Hurston, Deloria and González’s "ethnographic novels" offer particularly striking examples of the ways in which border texts surpass the disciplinary and ideological frameworks that constitute canons. Indeed, it is likely that their work remained invisible for so many years, precisely because as both formal experiments and ideological artifacts, they tested the conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of the very institutional formations within which they might have found a home. Too literary to be considered credible "ethnographic texts" and too wedded to realism to conform to the aesthetic norms of literary modernism, Deloria, González and Hurston's ethnographic novels were exiled from both the history of anthropology and normative accounts of early twentieth century high modernism.
Until relatively recently, the prospect of recuperating Waterlily, Caballero, and Their Eyes Were Watching God within either "ethnic" or "feminist" literary canons seemed tenuous as well. Critical approaches to literary studies that arose in the 1960s alongside the establishment of Ethnic Studies programs generally ignored gender in their analyses of resistance narratives, and all too often relied on a binaric understanding of "resistance" and “opposition” that erased the complex and sometimes contradictory discursive and political locations of women of color. It’s worth noting that although Their Eyes Were Watching God was published to some critical acclaim in 1937 (the only one of these novels to be published during its author’s lifetime), the tepid and sometimes hostile reviews it received from the African American intelligentsia consigned the novel to a kind of literary purgatory out of which it did not emerge until Alice Walker and other Black feminists rescued it from the canonical margins in the 1970s. On the other hand, mainstream Anglo-feminist critical approaches emerging in the 1960s and 1970s all to often located “oppression” and “resistance” along an exclusively gendered axis, ignoring the effects of colonialism and racism on the lives of women of color. Waterlily, Caballero and Their Eyes Were Watching God challenge both the feminist and the ethnic nationalist ideological frameworks because they refuse oppositional binaries that center on either race or gender and thus undermine conventional notions of "resistance." While each undoubtedly illuminates difference--ethnic, racial or tribal--this illumination is complicated by a simultaneous attention to another order of difference, namely gender. And though gendered experience is central to each of these novels, they do not follow the common emancipatory scripts that we have come to desire from early 20th century "feminist" literature.
Deloria, Hurston and González’s body of work defies easy disciplinary and ideological categorization, and therefore, to a certain extent, it also defies recuperation, but only if we allow ourselves to remain bounded by the categories and borders that have, until very recently, relegated their substantial contributions to the margins of intellectual history. Reflecting on my own recuperation of Deloria, Hurston and González’s work, I realize now that my approach to visibilizing their work was not simply a function of my political commitments to intersectionality and women of color feminism, but also a strategic response to the “slipperiness” of their interventions. Put another way, their work forced me to adopt their boundary-crossing ways, and articulate my own “border text”: an intellectual history situated in the borderlands between conventional accounts of anthropology, literature, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. In this sense, Deloria, Hurston and González reached across the divide of generations to shape their own history in my hand.
Perhaps the most dangerous border to cross for a scholar committed to the careful analysis of the past is the one that divides our theories about the world that has gone before us from the artifacts that give testimony to that world. To be sure, we construct our narratives about the past from these artifacts, but all to often, we approach them as evidence of the world as we already imagine it—a world organized in and through the boundaries of sense-making into discrete and recognizable units: quasi-familial “circles of influence”, canons, traditions and schools of thought that in their very boundedness cannot capture, much less incorporate, articulations of reality that stand outside of their logics like a kind of excess. But this “excess”, if we are open to its own sense-making logic, can reveal new networks of knowing, and new terrains of consciousness that are perhaps incipient, but nevertheless present in the past.
Kamis, 04 Agustus 2011
Book Review: Knight on Stansell’s *The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present*
Review of Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: The Modern Library, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-679-64314-2. 503 pages. Extensive notes; no bibliography. Reviewed by Louise Knight, Visiting Scholar
Gender Studies Program, Northwestern University
This is a bold book. Just the idea of writing a history of American feminism is bold. Yes, Mary Beard wrote Woman as Force in History in 1946, which was the first book on the history of women’s activism in the United States. Yes, Eleanor Flexner wrote Century of Struggle in 1959, which was the first book on the history of women’s suffrage (revised and expanded by Ellen Fitzpatrick in 1996). There has also been Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), which is a history of women’s movements in the United States between 1910 and 1930, and innumerable histories of the 1960s resurgence of the women’s movement, popularly known as the “Second Wave,” and some about the third wave too. The most comprehensive, thoroughly footnoted book I know of is Estelle B. Freedman’s excellent No Turning Back: The History of Feminism (Random House, 2002), but it is thematically organized and dense with facts. Christine Stansell, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, has had the vision, stamina, and sheer chutzpah to tackle the big subject chronologically, with an emphasis on its contentious intellectual complexity. The Feminist Promise is an important first.
What exactly is it about? At its core the book is a history of a set of ideas that revolutionized American society by restructuring not just gender relations and women’s place in the world but, first and foremost, women’s expectations for themselves. It is about the conceivers of those ideas but also about the people and organizations who pushed for and resisted them, as well as the on-the-ground social change that resulted, or did not. And it is about the arguments within feminism, of which there have been many. As Stansell writes in the Introduction, “Feminism is an argument, not received truth” (xix). The observation is one of the first clues that this is a book that keeps ideas in focus, and does not consider them as a sidelight to social action.
To write such a groundbreaking book, Stansell had to sort through a set of key decisions. The first was about its temporal scope. Stansell and her publisher, The Modern Library, wanted a definitive work, and so they embraced the whole enchilada: from “1792 to the present,” as the subtitle of the book states. However, this grand ambition could not be fully executed in the 400 pages of text that the publisher was willing to provide. Therefore, the book gives short shrift to the traditional “hole” in the history of feminism (though scholars have been filling it for years), 1920 to 1945. And by short I mean very short, like a few pages.
Another decision was to emphasize recent history. Thus the period 1968 to the present takes up half of the book. There are good arguments to support that decision, given the wider interest among scholars and students in the late twentieth century than in the nineteenth but it does make the book lopsided. At the same time, feminists under 50 will want to challenge the book’s claim to cover feminism up to the present, since the only story it tells about the years after 1980 is the rise of global feminism. (One suspects the publisher deserves credit for the subtitle’s claim.)
The inclusion of a whole chapter on global feminism, however, does not change the fact that Stansell’s story is really about the United States. Elsewhere in the book she blurs the parameters a bit by reaching across the ocean to Europe to connect with developments there. This international awareness enriches the book, but does not change the fact that it is a history of American feminism.
Another decision was to focus on the women’s intellectual traditions and deal only in passing with the intellectual traditions launched by men. Liberalism, utilitarianism, Marxism, socialism, and the ideas of the New Left. These all make appearances, reflecting the work of many scholars, but Stansell does not frame her story around them. This seems reasonable, given the complexity of her topic and the originality of her effort, not to mention her larger feminist point – that feminism, in seeking to break with the patriarchal mindframe, often reacted against aspects of these traditions even as it was also shaped by them.
Another interesting choice was to avoid framing this history of feminism as a series of “waves.” Stansell joins Jo Freeman and Linda Nicholson, among others, in finding the wave metaphor un-useful.[1] She does not engage the arguments directly but she makes it clear that the history of feminism is continuous from the 1790s, that feminists have embraced different arguments and reform tasks at different points in their history, and that at no period have all feminists agreed on everything.
Finally there is the sticky question of whether the word “feminist” should be applied, as Nancy Cott has argued, only to those who embrace a specific set of ideas. Her definition has three components: a belief in sex equality, a belief that women’s condition is socially constructed, and a belief that women should work together to achieve equality on the basis of sex solidarity. Cott argues that this feminism emerged around 1900 and is distinctly different than the ideas of the nineteenth-century woman’s movement.[2] Obviously Stansell rejects that argument and adopts the term “feminism” as a transhistorical concept. This makes sense to me.[3] Would we argue that African Americans were not fighting racism until the term was invented and a certain set of specific ideas coalesced around it? Do we identify democracy as rising only when a group of historical actors began using the term in a modern way? Just as democracy has been, and is much, a contested set of ideas, the same is true of feminism. Cott’s definition is about one side of a lively, more than two-hundred-year debate. Taking this broader view, Stansell frames feminism as the whole argument across time.
Stansell works hard to keep women in all their diversity – of race, ethnicity, gender orientation and class – in focus, and does fairly well at this challenging task. Inevitably others would have made different choices. She is especially strong on the ideas and experiences of black women engaged in social justice efforts and the place of gay rights movement in feminist history and vice versa. In my opinion, the labor movement’s contributions to feminism merited more attention. Others might say the same of her treatment of socialist feminism and Latina American and Asian American feminism.
Another key decision for Stansell was about the authorial voice. Would she stand outside feminism and look at it as if she was not herself a feminist? Or would she inhabit the ideas she was writing about? She chose to write it as a feminist. This was not only a more honest choice but also an inspired one. Her pen teaches the reader about feminism by the way it frames the insights of the book. And her honesty is important too because societal truth marches on. No one today would think it right for a scholar, black or otherwise, to write a history of the struggle for racial equality in which he or she treated racism as a respectable idea, or for an historian of gay rights to treat homophobia as just one more viewpoint. Stansell apparently also believes it is time for scholars to stop being afraid of owning feminism. And she succeeds brilliantly in showing how it is done. I have never read a history that inhabits feminism so well. For example, she writes of the 1950s, “To look squarely at the landscape was to confront frank expressions of male dominance, outcroppings of patriarchy supposedly abolished by post-Nineteenth Amendment modernity” (191).
Perhaps one of the most difficult, complicated ideas in the history of feminist thought is that of motherhood. It is at once a biological reality that has enriched women’s lives, and a powerful ideology that has been deployed by men since the dawn of consciousness to elevate and restrict women. At the same time, women have used the idea for their own purposes, including self-aggrandizement within the home, but also to liberate themselves from it. For these reasons, feminist historians have found the idea endlessly perplexing and have sometimes resolved the problem by treating it too simplistically, either as something inherently good or inherently dangerous. Stansell, who is often finely nuanced in her interpretations, treats motherhood with insight and sensitivity in her discussion of the 1960s. “It was not that women’s liberation was anti-mother, or that there were no actual mothers involved, but rather that motherhood seemed a state that was irrelevant, perhaps inimical, to sisterhood” (262).
Stansell is also brilliant in her incisive discussions of the leading intellectuals of feminism. She credits Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) with laying “the intellectual basis for modern feminism” by announcing that “power, not nature, determined the relations of women and men,” and that expectations about how women should think and act “were in truth born of a system of male privilege and tyranny as corrupt as any monarchy” (25-26). Stansell goes on to point out that the intellectual tradition of liberalism was born of that same system. “Feminist theorists,” she notes, “have stressed that liberalism was always premised on women’s subjection, that the female sex was the exception to equality that made equality imaginable….Liberal rights-bearing citizens remained paradigmatically male for more than a century.” As for today, Stansell asserts: “Liberal democracy’s abstract promises … remain… resistant to extending their benefits across the sex line” (26).
Stansell gives generous space and analysis to the major American feminist intellectuals of the nineteenth century: Sarah and Angelina Grimké and Margaret Fuller. She credits the abolitionist-feminist Grimké sisters as being the first to argue for women’s equality based the religious idea of “the absolute moral equality of all human beings”(42). As Sarah Grimké crisply wrote, “Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do” (46). Stansell credits Margaret Fuller with being “one of the first feminists to grasp the importance of expressiveness, reflection, and subjective exploration of women’s emancipation.” Stansell’s next observation sparkles: “This Romantic current would, in future years, nourish American feminism’s ventures into personal transformation that outstripped the liberal paradigm of women’s rights”( 64-65).
Strangely, Stansell does not write much about the two leading feminist intellectuals of the early twentieth century: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams. To be sure, Addams did not write a book about her feminist views, although she did write a chapter about the women’s movement in Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), but Gilman wrote two feminist books: The Home, which Stansell discusses briefly, and Women and Economics (1898), which she does not. Stansell grasps the spirit of the feminists of that time. “Theirs was a feminism that was part of a broad democratic push,” she writes (151). But like many before her, she keeps the focus on the suffrage movement and only touches lightly on these feminists’ impressive efforts on issues affecting working women and working children and on the ideas that infused their cross-class feminism.
As noted earlier, the book’s two halves are lopsided in their treatment of historical time. The second half, which begins in 1968, also lacks the intellectual continuity that fuels the first half. With only 42 years left to cover and with 200 pages available, Stansell no longer sweeps grandly along but instead dives deeper into the details of events, organizations, and personalities. For this reason, or perhaps some other, the book is more fragmented in this half, especially in the three chapters that cover that very fragmented period of 1920-1975. But there are plenty of lively, pointed insights. Writing about the radical feminists of the 1960s, Stansell notes:
Women’s liberation retained the male left’s habits of sweeping indictment, the heavy-handed Marxist-Leninist theorizing, the scorn for compromise, the insistence that life was lived in blacks and whites and not in grays, the penchant for histrionic displays of outrage and suffering, the faith that sheer will power could bring about a perfect- or near-perfect society purged of wrongs (230).
Though Stansell is tough at times on the radical feminists, as she is here, she is not one-sided in her views. She rightly credits the women’s liberation wing of the movement for its important stress on the psychological dimensions of sexism and therefore the need for “consciousness-raising” as the key feminist reform (244).
One of the strongest later chapters is that on abortion, birth control, and rape. Titled, “The Politics of the Body,” it covers the huge amount of thought and activism these issues generated from 1965 to 1980, and brings coherence to a period that many of us remember as chaotic. Stansell is at her best unpacking the ideas behind these issues, and narrating some of the most successful grassroots organizing and legal activism in the history of the feminism -- and some of the most effective opposition too. Stansell’s observations about the core idea that fueled the abortion movement is worth quoting at length:
The maxim of a woman’s right to choose lit a fire under a great pile of misogynist and patriarchal assumptions and laws. As it spread, it became one of the most attractive ideas that second-wave feminism bequeathed – not only to the country but to the world. It brought to light an age-old assumption buried in women’s cultures: that it was up to the pregnant woman to decide whether to continue her pregnancy. For another, it moved body politics formally into the regime of rights and pressed the question of self-ownership, raised in the nineteenth century by [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton and [John Stuart] Mill as one of legal and economic standing, into the realm of corporeal dignity. Body politics turned into a political principle with wings, poised to fly across borders and oceans in widening feminist discussions in the 1970s and 1980s (326).
What is interesting, of course, is that we do not know the name of the woman who first argued in a public forum that women had a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It appears this intellectual revolution was entirely democratic, that it arose among the people as a conviction rooted in the liberal tradition of American individualism and made manifest in social action, including, eventually, court cases. (This is one example of how liberalism has served feminism, even as it also remains true that, our liberal democracy has yet to extend its benefits to all women. Liberalism is a constellation of possibilities useful to diverse political positions.)
To be sure, there were thinkers who shaped the recent history of feminism and Stansell attends to them. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), are discussed, the former at length. She credits Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), a book about the place of rape in American culture, with having “presented a comprehensive view of male power in its most violent manifestations” (344). As for Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Stansell acknowledges that it transformed white suburban housewives’ self-awareness and emboldened them to challenge sexist assumptions about the rules of domesticity. “Not since Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home had anyone spoken so baldly of the claustrophobia of domestic life, the tedium of full-time child care, and the housewife’s ennui.” But she also gives the book a fabulously insightful and deserved push off the top shelf of intellectual history, and concludes by dismissing it as a “period piece” full of “heavy-handed rhetoric.” (205).
The last chapter tells the story of how the feminism – American or otherwise – has transformed the lives of women around the world since 1980. The focus is on the work of women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agreements and conferences, like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the four United Nations World Conferences on Women. The chapter makes fascinating reading. Once again, Stansell has shaped events from newspaper headlines and magazine articles into a strong narrative about what is truly an historic development: the way that, in her words, “feminist questions [have] moved to the center of international deliberations” (393).
My main complaint about the chapter is that it is written as if the story began in the last part of the twentieth century. Stansell has traced the origins of the term, “global feminism” to a 1983 Rotterdam conference on international “sexual slavery” (357), but the actual history begins much earlier, as Bonnie Anderson has thoroughly documented in her book Joyous Greetings: the First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). And global feminism continued to thrive, reaching an impressive organizational peak between 1900 and 1914, when there were many international conferences, not only on suffrage but also on other issues, like sex trafficking, and again in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably through the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, whose reform agenda included women’s rights and whose sections stretched around the world. Stansell might have at least nodded in the direction of this history as a way to frame her chapter.
My main complaint about this important book is that, as noted earlier, The Feminist Promise tells the story of American feminism -- aside from its role in global feminism – only through 1980. This leaves unanswered the question, “What is the domestic American feminist history of the last 30 years?” It is not an easy question for an historian like Stansell to answer, an historian who, as she notes, became a feminist in 1969 (395). Those who came along later had some criticisms to make of older feminists, as Stansell acknowledges (357), and often disagreed with their ideas as they understood them. Perhaps it is understandable that, the subtitle notwithstanding, she chose not to tackle that complicated story. Happily, others have. The best book I know, written in a spirit of true cross-generational sisterhood, is Deborah Siegel’s insightful Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).[4]
American women have made enormous progress since 1792, as Stansell notes in her conclusion, but it is also true, as she points out, that “women are still handicapped and excluded in innumerable ways” (396). She lists some of these: women are still underpaid at work; women still do more housework and take care of children more than their male partners do even when they are working just as much outside the home; divorce is still an economic and social calamity for women and children; and men still talk a lot and therefore disproportionately dominate public conversations. Younger feminists would add more issues to the list: girls and women are still denied reproductive rights, including sex education, still forced into sexual slavery, and still suffer disproportionately from domestic violence and sexual abuse.
It is striking that the solutions to all these problems (at least apparently) lie less in the realm of ideas and more in the realm of grassroots organizing, institutional reforms, and legal action. As Gloria Steinem recently noted, “Consciousness goes like the wind, but reforming the power structures takes a long time.”[5] Stansell seems to acknowledge that at the end when she explains her hope for the book: “that it may transport the riches and assurances of the past, along with its sobering lessons, to the women and men who now take up the task of making good on feminism’s democratic promise.”
Alternatively, or in addition, it may be in the twenty-first century, as was the case for abortion rights and global feminism in the twentieth, that the important intellectual achievements -- the breakthrough ideas that transform the impossible into the achievable -- will come from the ground up, from the conversations people have every day. Such a trend suits our intensely democratic times. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder if somewhere a brilliant feminist mind is cogitating and if we will all benefit from its insights soon. Meanwhile, intellectual historians and historians generally are in Christine Stansell’s debt for reminding us how far, and by what means, we have come.
Postscript—A word about the index of Feminist Promise: Unfortunately the index is typical of what publishers these days consider adequate: nearly all the entries are proper names. For any book, this is a huge loss, but for a book of intellectual history, this is a travesty. Authors seem to have no choice but to hire someone to do a better index or to do the index themselves. I found it challenging to write this review until I remembered that I could search for key words in the Google Books snippets edition of The Feminist Promise. But even that useful technology cannot replace a good index.
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[1] Freeman and Nicholson agree about the uselessness of the wave metaphor, but for somewhat different reasons. See “Waves of Feminism,” at Jo Freeman.com and Linda Nicholson, “Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?,” New Politics vol. XII, no. 4 (winter 2010), Whole no. 48.
[2] Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 6-7. Cott does not use the label “individualist” here, but she speaks of feminists’ embrace of “individuality” as one of their principles. In a later short piece, she sharpens this part of her argument. See Nancy Cott, “Comment on Karen Offen’s ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,’” Signs 15, No. 1 (Autumn 1989): 203-205.
[3] Furthermore, by Cott’s own definition, feminism existed in the nineteenth century, as the feminist writings of Lucy Stone or Angelina and Sarah Grimké make clear.
[4] See also Siegel’s excellent essay on third wave feminist theory, “The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave,” Hypatia 12, no. 3: Third Wave Feminisms (Summer 1997): 46-75.
[5] Gloria Steinem interview, “Need to Know” Show, PBS video, July 15, 2011.
Book Review: Knight on Stansell’s *The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present*
Review of Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: The Modern Library, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-679-64314-2. 503 pages. Extensive notes; no bibliography. Reviewed by Louise Knight, Visiting Scholar
Gender Studies Program, Northwestern University
This is a bold book. Just the idea of writing a history of American feminism is bold. Yes, Mary Beard wrote Woman as Force in History in 1946, which was the first book on the history of women’s activism in the United States. Yes, Eleanor Flexner wrote Century of Struggle in 1959, which was the first book on the history of women’s suffrage (revised and expanded by Ellen Fitzpatrick in 1996). There has also been Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), which is a history of women’s movements in the United States between 1910 and 1930, and innumerable histories of the 1960s resurgence of the women’s movement, popularly known as the “Second Wave,” and some about the third wave too. The most comprehensive, thoroughly footnoted book I know of is Estelle B. Freedman’s excellent No Turning Back: The History of Feminism (Random House, 2002), but it is thematically organized and dense with facts. Christine Stansell, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, has had the vision, stamina, and sheer chutzpah to tackle the big subject chronologically, with an emphasis on its contentious intellectual complexity. The Feminist Promise is an important first.
What exactly is it about? At its core the book is a history of a set of ideas that revolutionized American society by restructuring not just gender relations and women’s place in the world but, first and foremost, women’s expectations for themselves. It is about the conceivers of those ideas but also about the people and organizations who pushed for and resisted them, as well as the on-the-ground social change that resulted, or did not. And it is about the arguments within feminism, of which there have been many. As Stansell writes in the Introduction, “Feminism is an argument, not received truth” (xix). The observation is one of the first clues that this is a book that keeps ideas in focus, and does not consider them as a sidelight to social action.
To write such a groundbreaking book, Stansell had to sort through a set of key decisions. The first was about its temporal scope. Stansell and her publisher, The Modern Library, wanted a definitive work, and so they embraced the whole enchilada: from “1792 to the present,” as the subtitle of the book states. However, this grand ambition could not be fully executed in the 400 pages of text that the publisher was willing to provide. Therefore, the book gives short shrift to the traditional “hole” in the history of feminism (though scholars have been filling it for years), 1920 to 1945. And by short I mean very short, like a few pages.
Another decision was to emphasize recent history. Thus the period 1968 to the present takes up half of the book. There are good arguments to support that decision, given the wider interest among scholars and students in the late twentieth century than in the nineteenth but it does make the book lopsided. At the same time, feminists under 50 will want to challenge the book’s claim to cover feminism up to the present, since the only story it tells about the years after 1980 is the rise of global feminism. (One suspects the publisher deserves credit for the subtitle’s claim.)
The inclusion of a whole chapter on global feminism, however, does not change the fact that Stansell’s story is really about the United States. Elsewhere in the book she blurs the parameters a bit by reaching across the ocean to Europe to connect with developments there. This international awareness enriches the book, but does not change the fact that it is a history of American feminism.
Another decision was to focus on the women’s intellectual traditions and deal only in passing with the intellectual traditions launched by men. Liberalism, utilitarianism, Marxism, socialism, and the ideas of the New Left. These all make appearances, reflecting the work of many scholars, but Stansell does not frame her story around them. This seems reasonable, given the complexity of her topic and the originality of her effort, not to mention her larger feminist point – that feminism, in seeking to break with the patriarchal mindframe, often reacted against aspects of these traditions even as it was also shaped by them.
Another interesting choice was to avoid framing this history of feminism as a series of “waves.” Stansell joins Jo Freeman and Linda Nicholson, among others, in finding the wave metaphor un-useful.[1] She does not engage the arguments directly but she makes it clear that the history of feminism is continuous from the 1790s, that feminists have embraced different arguments and reform tasks at different points in their history, and that at no period have all feminists agreed on everything.
Finally there is the sticky question of whether the word “feminist” should be applied, as Nancy Cott has argued, only to those who embrace a specific set of ideas. Her definition has three components: a belief in sex equality, a belief that women’s condition is socially constructed, and a belief that women should work together to achieve equality on the basis of sex solidarity. Cott argues that this feminism emerged around 1900 and is distinctly different than the ideas of the nineteenth-century woman’s movement.[2] Obviously Stansell rejects that argument and adopts the term “feminism” as a transhistorical concept. This makes sense to me.[3] Would we argue that African Americans were not fighting racism until the term was invented and a certain set of specific ideas coalesced around it? Do we identify democracy as rising only when a group of historical actors began using the term in a modern way? Just as democracy has been, and is much, a contested set of ideas, the same is true of feminism. Cott’s definition is about one side of a lively, more than two-hundred-year debate. Taking this broader view, Stansell frames feminism as the whole argument across time.
Stansell works hard to keep women in all their diversity – of race, ethnicity, gender orientation and class – in focus, and does fairly well at this challenging task. Inevitably others would have made different choices. She is especially strong on the ideas and experiences of black women engaged in social justice efforts and the place of gay rights movement in feminist history and vice versa. In my opinion, the labor movement’s contributions to feminism merited more attention. Others might say the same of her treatment of socialist feminism and Latina American and Asian American feminism.
Another key decision for Stansell was about the authorial voice. Would she stand outside feminism and look at it as if she was not herself a feminist? Or would she inhabit the ideas she was writing about? She chose to write it as a feminist. This was not only a more honest choice but also an inspired one. Her pen teaches the reader about feminism by the way it frames the insights of the book. And her honesty is important too because societal truth marches on. No one today would think it right for a scholar, black or otherwise, to write a history of the struggle for racial equality in which he or she treated racism as a respectable idea, or for an historian of gay rights to treat homophobia as just one more viewpoint. Stansell apparently also believes it is time for scholars to stop being afraid of owning feminism. And she succeeds brilliantly in showing how it is done. I have never read a history that inhabits feminism so well. For example, she writes of the 1950s, “To look squarely at the landscape was to confront frank expressions of male dominance, outcroppings of patriarchy supposedly abolished by post-Nineteenth Amendment modernity” (191).
Perhaps one of the most difficult, complicated ideas in the history of feminist thought is that of motherhood. It is at once a biological reality that has enriched women’s lives, and a powerful ideology that has been deployed by men since the dawn of consciousness to elevate and restrict women. At the same time, women have used the idea for their own purposes, including self-aggrandizement within the home, but also to liberate themselves from it. For these reasons, feminist historians have found the idea endlessly perplexing and have sometimes resolved the problem by treating it too simplistically, either as something inherently good or inherently dangerous. Stansell, who is often finely nuanced in her interpretations, treats motherhood with insight and sensitivity in her discussion of the 1960s. “It was not that women’s liberation was anti-mother, or that there were no actual mothers involved, but rather that motherhood seemed a state that was irrelevant, perhaps inimical, to sisterhood” (262).
Stansell is also brilliant in her incisive discussions of the leading intellectuals of feminism. She credits Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) with laying “the intellectual basis for modern feminism” by announcing that “power, not nature, determined the relations of women and men,” and that expectations about how women should think and act “were in truth born of a system of male privilege and tyranny as corrupt as any monarchy” (25-26). Stansell goes on to point out that the intellectual tradition of liberalism was born of that same system. “Feminist theorists,” she notes, “have stressed that liberalism was always premised on women’s subjection, that the female sex was the exception to equality that made equality imaginable….Liberal rights-bearing citizens remained paradigmatically male for more than a century.” As for today, Stansell asserts: “Liberal democracy’s abstract promises … remain… resistant to extending their benefits across the sex line” (26).
Stansell gives generous space and analysis to the major American feminist intellectuals of the nineteenth century: Sarah and Angelina Grimké and Margaret Fuller. She credits the abolitionist-feminist Grimké sisters as being the first to argue for women’s equality based the religious idea of “the absolute moral equality of all human beings”(42). As Sarah Grimké crisply wrote, “Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do” (46). Stansell credits Margaret Fuller with being “one of the first feminists to grasp the importance of expressiveness, reflection, and subjective exploration of women’s emancipation.” Stansell’s next observation sparkles: “This Romantic current would, in future years, nourish American feminism’s ventures into personal transformation that outstripped the liberal paradigm of women’s rights”( 64-65).
Strangely, Stansell does not write much about the two leading feminist intellectuals of the early twentieth century: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams. To be sure, Addams did not write a book about her feminist views, although she did write a chapter about the women’s movement in Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), but Gilman wrote two feminist books: The Home, which Stansell discusses briefly, and Women and Economics (1898), which she does not. Stansell grasps the spirit of the feminists of that time. “Theirs was a feminism that was part of a broad democratic push,” she writes (151). But like many before her, she keeps the focus on the suffrage movement and only touches lightly on these feminists’ impressive efforts on issues affecting working women and working children and on the ideas that infused their cross-class feminism.
As noted earlier, the book’s two halves are lopsided in their treatment of historical time. The second half, which begins in 1968, also lacks the intellectual continuity that fuels the first half. With only 42 years left to cover and with 200 pages available, Stansell no longer sweeps grandly along but instead dives deeper into the details of events, organizations, and personalities. For this reason, or perhaps some other, the book is more fragmented in this half, especially in the three chapters that cover that very fragmented period of 1920-1975. But there are plenty of lively, pointed insights. Writing about the radical feminists of the 1960s, Stansell notes:
Women’s liberation retained the male left’s habits of sweeping indictment, the heavy-handed Marxist-Leninist theorizing, the scorn for compromise, the insistence that life was lived in blacks and whites and not in grays, the penchant for histrionic displays of outrage and suffering, the faith that sheer will power could bring about a perfect- or near-perfect society purged of wrongs (230).
Though Stansell is tough at times on the radical feminists, as she is here, she is not one-sided in her views. She rightly credits the women’s liberation wing of the movement for its important stress on the psychological dimensions of sexism and therefore the need for “consciousness-raising” as the key feminist reform (244).
One of the strongest later chapters is that on abortion, birth control, and rape. Titled, “The Politics of the Body,” it covers the huge amount of thought and activism these issues generated from 1965 to 1980, and brings coherence to a period that many of us remember as chaotic. Stansell is at her best unpacking the ideas behind these issues, and narrating some of the most successful grassroots organizing and legal activism in the history of the feminism -- and some of the most effective opposition too. Stansell’s observations about the core idea that fueled the abortion movement is worth quoting at length:
The maxim of a woman’s right to choose lit a fire under a great pile of misogynist and patriarchal assumptions and laws. As it spread, it became one of the most attractive ideas that second-wave feminism bequeathed – not only to the country but to the world. It brought to light an age-old assumption buried in women’s cultures: that it was up to the pregnant woman to decide whether to continue her pregnancy. For another, it moved body politics formally into the regime of rights and pressed the question of self-ownership, raised in the nineteenth century by [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton and [John Stuart] Mill as one of legal and economic standing, into the realm of corporeal dignity. Body politics turned into a political principle with wings, poised to fly across borders and oceans in widening feminist discussions in the 1970s and 1980s (326).
What is interesting, of course, is that we do not know the name of the woman who first argued in a public forum that women had a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It appears this intellectual revolution was entirely democratic, that it arose among the people as a conviction rooted in the liberal tradition of American individualism and made manifest in social action, including, eventually, court cases. (This is one example of how liberalism has served feminism, even as it also remains true that, our liberal democracy has yet to extend its benefits to all women. Liberalism is a constellation of possibilities useful to diverse political positions.)
To be sure, there were thinkers who shaped the recent history of feminism and Stansell attends to them. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), are discussed, the former at length. She credits Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), a book about the place of rape in American culture, with having “presented a comprehensive view of male power in its most violent manifestations” (344). As for Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Stansell acknowledges that it transformed white suburban housewives’ self-awareness and emboldened them to challenge sexist assumptions about the rules of domesticity. “Not since Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home had anyone spoken so baldly of the claustrophobia of domestic life, the tedium of full-time child care, and the housewife’s ennui.” But she also gives the book a fabulously insightful and deserved push off the top shelf of intellectual history, and concludes by dismissing it as a “period piece” full of “heavy-handed rhetoric.” (205).
The last chapter tells the story of how the feminism – American or otherwise – has transformed the lives of women around the world since 1980. The focus is on the work of women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agreements and conferences, like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the four United Nations World Conferences on Women. The chapter makes fascinating reading. Once again, Stansell has shaped events from newspaper headlines and magazine articles into a strong narrative about what is truly an historic development: the way that, in her words, “feminist questions [have] moved to the center of international deliberations” (393).
My main complaint about the chapter is that it is written as if the story began in the last part of the twentieth century. Stansell has traced the origins of the term, “global feminism” to a 1983 Rotterdam conference on international “sexual slavery” (357), but the actual history begins much earlier, as Bonnie Anderson has thoroughly documented in her book Joyous Greetings: the First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). And global feminism continued to thrive, reaching an impressive organizational peak between 1900 and 1914, when there were many international conferences, not only on suffrage but also on other issues, like sex trafficking, and again in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably through the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, whose reform agenda included women’s rights and whose sections stretched around the world. Stansell might have at least nodded in the direction of this history as a way to frame her chapter.
My main complaint about this important book is that, as noted earlier, The Feminist Promise tells the story of American feminism -- aside from its role in global feminism – only through 1980. This leaves unanswered the question, “What is the domestic American feminist history of the last 30 years?” It is not an easy question for an historian like Stansell to answer, an historian who, as she notes, became a feminist in 1969 (395). Those who came along later had some criticisms to make of older feminists, as Stansell acknowledges (357), and often disagreed with their ideas as they understood them. Perhaps it is understandable that, the subtitle notwithstanding, she chose not to tackle that complicated story. Happily, others have. The best book I know, written in a spirit of true cross-generational sisterhood, is Deborah Siegel’s insightful Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).[4]
American women have made enormous progress since 1792, as Stansell notes in her conclusion, but it is also true, as she points out, that “women are still handicapped and excluded in innumerable ways” (396). She lists some of these: women are still underpaid at work; women still do more housework and take care of children more than their male partners do even when they are working just as much outside the home; divorce is still an economic and social calamity for women and children; and men still talk a lot and therefore disproportionately dominate public conversations. Younger feminists would add more issues to the list: girls and women are still denied reproductive rights, including sex education, still forced into sexual slavery, and still suffer disproportionately from domestic violence and sexual abuse.
It is striking that the solutions to all these problems (at least apparently) lie less in the realm of ideas and more in the realm of grassroots organizing, institutional reforms, and legal action. As Gloria Steinem recently noted, “Consciousness goes like the wind, but reforming the power structures takes a long time.”[5] Stansell seems to acknowledge that at the end when she explains her hope for the book: “that it may transport the riches and assurances of the past, along with its sobering lessons, to the women and men who now take up the task of making good on feminism’s democratic promise.”
Alternatively, or in addition, it may be in the twenty-first century, as was the case for abortion rights and global feminism in the twentieth, that the important intellectual achievements -- the breakthrough ideas that transform the impossible into the achievable -- will come from the ground up, from the conversations people have every day. Such a trend suits our intensely democratic times. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder if somewhere a brilliant feminist mind is cogitating and if we will all benefit from its insights soon. Meanwhile, intellectual historians and historians generally are in Christine Stansell’s debt for reminding us how far, and by what means, we have come.
Postscript—A word about the index of Feminist Promise: Unfortunately the index is typical of what publishers these days consider adequate: nearly all the entries are proper names. For any book, this is a huge loss, but for a book of intellectual history, this is a travesty. Authors seem to have no choice but to hire someone to do a better index or to do the index themselves. I found it challenging to write this review until I remembered that I could search for key words in the Google Books snippets edition of The Feminist Promise. But even that useful technology cannot replace a good index.
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[1] Freeman and Nicholson agree about the uselessness of the wave metaphor, but for somewhat different reasons. See “Waves of Feminism,” at Jo Freeman.com and Linda Nicholson, “Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?,” New Politics vol. XII, no. 4 (winter 2010), Whole no. 48.
[2] Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 6-7. Cott does not use the label “individualist” here, but she speaks of feminists’ embrace of “individuality” as one of their principles. In a later short piece, she sharpens this part of her argument. See Nancy Cott, “Comment on Karen Offen’s ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,’” Signs 15, No. 1 (Autumn 1989): 203-205.
[3] Furthermore, by Cott’s own definition, feminism existed in the nineteenth century, as the feminist writings of Lucy Stone or Angelina and Sarah Grimké make clear.
[4] See also Siegel’s excellent essay on third wave feminist theory, “The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave,” Hypatia 12, no. 3: Third Wave Feminisms (Summer 1997): 46-75.
[5] Gloria Steinem interview, “Need to Know” Show, PBS video, July 15, 2011.
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