The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

The appropriate feminist response to The Feminist Promise is to send truckloads of gratitude to Christine Stansell, professor of history at the University of Chicago, who collected and digested a vast array of material, much of it ephemeral, and put it in a history book. Some of us hang on to the materials of history—like Laura Murra and my late friend Arlene Meyers, who preserved so much of the material base of second wave feminism as it was happening. Others, like Alice Echols, tracked down those of us who lived the history and captured these accounts lost in mainstream versions. The Feminist Promise takes a wider view of this idea, starting with the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and ending with the problematic high profile attained by global feminism in foreign policy.

Neither from the “great woman school” nor the annales philosophy, The Feminist Promise is a narrative history of feminists in both their public and personal lives, and the great opportunities, victories, and defeats of a social movement. Stansell profiles the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Hillary Clinton, Mavis Leno, and other major figures; includes (and misses) some less well-known feminists in this “herstory”; and airs some dirty linen. The material masterfully presented makes The Feminist Promise worthwhile. It’s a long, scholarly, but remarkably rollicking read. My criticisms lie in the tone, the Freudian shaping, and the “promise” of feminism she posits.

A couple of decades makes a huge difference in the tone of even a friendly, and openly participating scholar. There’s a distance not just from lived experience but from living, wild, raw, social movement feminism and the introduction to the shorter anthology focused on sexual politics that Stansell helped edit, Powers of Desire. The Feminist Promise takes a necessarily more comprehensive view. Its changed tone may well result from the trough between feminist waves, the ascendancy of theory over the practice of a lived movement, and historicity itself. She takes note of the periods of lassitude that interrupt the movement forward, while ending on a note of problematic triumphalism with feminism as geopolitics.

Stansell’s organizing trope is the familiar one of mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters, which distorts the complexity of feminism by jamming it into a family drama. (To be fair, she acknowledges in her conclusion that feminism has now moved beyond the family romance.) Feminism’s almost bipolar, cyclic nature, and the back-and-forth between those confronting and those pragmatically working within the system, are two alternative explanatory devices that come to mind. Still, she who collects the records plays the tune. In trying to arrange a marriage between feminism and democracy, the promise of the title, she doesn’t really ask “whose democracy?” though she differentiates between feminisms.

Speaking of lived history, I have long misremembered this quote as from Susan B. Anthony: "Our history has been stolen from us. Our heroes died in childbirth, From peritonitis, Of overwork, Of oppression, Of bottled-up anger. Our geniuses were never taught to read and write, We must invent a past adequate to our ambitions. We must create a future adequate to our needs."

Because I first saw this quote on a poster illustrated with a woodcut of Anthony that hung in the women’s liberation office on Mintwood Place in the District of Columbia, my mind leapt to the conclusion this anonymous quote was Anthony’s, and stuck there. I stand corrected. More important, thanks Professor Stansell for clawing some history back.

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 14th 2010

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Christine Stansell

Princeton University Press

Occasionally, in 'getting to know you' circles, the question of what period you would have most liked to have lived in is brought to the table. Granted, for many, these are not quite as appealing as banally declaring mint chocolate chip is the finest of the flavors, in your humble opinion, but I think the prior question may be more telling about a person. Christine Stansell’s newly revised American Moderns has changed my response to this telling question. For a long time my semi-automated, ice cream flavor-style response would have been the late '60s, specifically 1968: the birth of Hair, the Chicago 10, and all around political radical goodness. Now, it is 1914 and the original teens, if you will: the birth of modern feminism, the New Woman, and all around political radical goodness.

The book sweeps the reader far away to a Greenwich Village full of poetry and literature and so much love, something lost now to NYU bars on McDougall and overpriced faux French bistros pretending to be forbidding and tucked away. Perhaps walking along a brownstone block on a very snowy day, with no one around, you can begin to imagine what it was like back then: cafes brimming with radical thought and discussions of masculinities and feminities, what love means, why we express it the way we do. Maybe that image can stay with you as you walk east to a village that used to be full of immigrants exporting ideas of anarchism and free speech, not a place where CBGB is replaced by John Varvatos, and it is seen as a lesser of possible evils.

Unfortunately, I have found that nearly impossible in the real world, but steeped in the pages of this book that world is real again. Emma Goldman runs from Rochester to the safety of the immigrant bohemia in the East Village and moves from immigrant to anarchist to feminist to patriot, all the while freely falling in and out of love with prisoners and hobos. Margaret Sanger takes on the Comstock laws and fights for free speech and access to information on birth control. (Perhaps one of the few remaining vestiges of this time is the Margaret Sanger Center, still next to the very first Planned Parenthood.) Mabel Dodge returns from years in Italy to cast her husband aside and take on New York society while adopting artists one-by-one. And so many stories of women and men that we never hear of: the writer couples, the forgotten lovers, and the revolutionaries who never made the history books.

The book raised questions about the past and future of feminism, with this striking quote: “Older women's rights leaders had been formed by nineteenth-century notions of sex as fundamentally dangerous to women and were repelled by the new ideas.” Over a century later and we're facing the same exact battles. What kind of movement are we fighting for really? Are the New Women a lost vestige? Is the future of feminism a doomed cycle of repetition until it dwindles to nothing? Magical and immense, this book can stand simply on the surface, but it speaks to the third wave in such a poignant way that it cannot be ignored.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, March 21st 2010