Afterword: Feminist Histories

Beginning in the 1970s, historians of women elaborated upon the second-wave feminist principle that “the personal is political” by interrogating the construction of gender as a public/private divide. Evident in societies from Ancient Greece, China, and the Middle East to Victorian-era western cultures, this ideal presumed that men enacted valuable forms of politics in the public sphere, while women remained in the less consequential domestic realm. Feminist scholars recognized how this divide served to exclude from historical accounts all but those exceptional women who had access to male-defined power.¹

One feminist challenge to this hierarchy of historical significance sought to validate the private sphere—including the reproductive and productive labor women performed in the home, as well as the social and cultural relationships they forged. Historians drew out the broader importance of once trivialized domestic labors in works such as Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale and Jeanne Boydston’s Home and Work. Influential studies by Nancy Cott and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg took seriously women’s private worlds.² Another intervention broadened the definition of politics from public governance to all relations of power, including interpersonal, familial, and sexual. Linda Gordon and Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck each explored responses to domestic violence, while Sara Evans located the articulation of personal politics among women in the Civil Rights Movement.³ In some formulations, influenced by radical feminism, patriarchal control of women in the home represented the source of all power relations; in others, sexual and economic relations, as well as race, mutually constructed inequalities.⁴

Along with validating and politicizing private relations, feminist historians documented how women resisted these inequalities and sought formal political authority, moving beyond a focus on suffrage. Through temperance, social purity, and racial justice movements, for example, American women mobilized as women and in alliance with men of their race and class. My early work on female-institution building and women’s prison reform, and later in writing about redefining rape, explored how women achieved public authority and influenced law and policy by addressing gender and/or racial inequalities.⁵

The articles in Feminist Histories both recognize the personal and redefine the political, but with a new emphasis on authorial experience. The self-reflective essays in the closing forum illustrate especially well how attention to our own lives, as well as to the private lives of our subjects, can clarify the limits of historical knowledge and enable new conceptualizations. Throughout the volume, the authors cite personal experiences that lead to the study of once overlooked topics—from Renee Romano’s research into the story behind “Dixie,” in response to her son’s refusal to honor the composer; to Yvon Wang’s interpretation of the increased global visibility of transgender identity in the context of his own transitioning; to Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s historical account of fitness culture, inspired by her own changing relationship to the gym. Petrzela encapsulates the validation of new subjects when she writes that “Daring to say that the story of fitness is important in its own right, not only because it partially transpired in the White House or among factory workers …is its own brave act of redefinition.” Conceptually and methodologically, merging the personal and the historical can have what she calls a “profoundly reorienting” effect on scholarship, including her own greater engagement with public audiences.

The importance of humility recurs in these considerations of the personal. Wang’s concerns about retaining humility “in the face of uncertainty” echo in the insights Petrzela presents, in which she recommends transcending, as well as honoring, one’s own experiences while also listening to other, even contrary, voices. Natalie Marine-Street recognizes that for oral historians, “Listening with a feminist spirit necessitates humility, but it does not mean avoiding difficult questions.” Her personal account of recognizing the background voices in interviews—to “remember the piano player in the room”—points to how revelatory it can be to include previously overlooked subjects. Judy Wu’s close listening to archival sources regarding Margaret Chung’s gender and sexual identities reveals how the reluctance to acknowledge unexpected or uncomfortable personal topics homogenizes historical figures.

Paying attention to the personal lives of political subjects deeply enriches accounts of activists as varied as Chung, Rosa Rayside, Mary Darby Fitzhugh, Patsy Mink, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Wu explains that “being attuned to the personal provides the opportunity to chart the multiple and shifting boundaries that structured possibilities for marginalized individuals.” In the process, we learn, for example, about the importance of self-fashioning as a means for women to claim authority; Chung employed self-fashioning in her representations of gender, as did Bethune by delineating her legacy in “My Last Will and Testament.”

Complicating the political side of the equation further distinguishes these new feminist histories. They illustrate well the diversity of women’s politics—geographically, demographically, and ideologically. Renee Romano contributes to the literature on women’s conservative organizing by excavating the mixed politics of Mary Darby Fitzhugh. A former suffragist and future National Woman’s Party member, Fitzhugh’s campaign to honor the composer of “Dixie” built upon the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to memorialize the southern Lost Cause in northern states. In contrast, the political alliances that Katherine Marino and Kim Warren explore through the activism of Rayside and the memorialization of Bethune, respectively, center the personal in black working-class women’s political history. The personal stories submitted to Lesbian Connection in the late twentieth century, Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz explain, helped create national and transnational networks that fueled the politics of lesbian feminism.

In her influential 1986 essay on gender as a category of historical analysis, Joan Scott argued that “Political history has, in a sense, been enacted on the field of gender.”⁶ Two striking illustrations of the ways historians have extended Scott’s premise by incorporating the intersections of gender and race stand out in these essays. Nicole Martin convincingly argues for the central role of the home during the late nineteenth century in politically marginalizing those groups considered deficient in idealized domesticity. A private space designated to both protect and elevate women, the construct of the home in practice justified the exclusion from citizenship of Mormons, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants, based on their alleged inability to produce monogamous patriarchal families. In Kim Warren’s interpretation of two statues honoring Mary McLeod Bethune, we learn how the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) refocused political history and public memory to incorporate the agency of black women. Even before 2022, when Bethune became the first African American person memorialized in the National Statutory Hall, the installation of the 1974 monument to her in Washington’s Lincoln Park literally shifted the political viewpoint. It required the repositioning of the nearby statue of Abraham Lincoln as emancipator, turning the sculpture by 180 degrees. That reorientation, Warren writes, “forced a visual interaction” between Bethune and Lincoln and “provided the corrective that the NCNW wanted”: centering African American contributions to black freedom and civil rights.

Along with the personal as political, a second and overlapping feminist framework pervades the articles in this volume: the “which women” question. That phrase combines a caveat about exclusive and falsely universalizing narratives and an encouragement to understand the multiple identities that intersect with gender. While deeply influenced by and associated with the work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw since the 1990s, intersectional analysis has deep historical roots, from Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper in the nineteenth century to Pauli Murray and the Combahee River Collective in the late twentieth century. The classic history anthology Unequal Sisters, first published in 1990, has highlighted new scholarship on women of color, immigrants, working-class women, and sexual or gender non-conformists. These subjects had long attracted less attention than did the heterosexual, white, middle-class, and elite women more likely to appear in traditional sources.⁷

It is important to remember, however, that women’s history never focused exclusively on more privileged women. One of the theoretical foundations for the new women’s history, Marxism, centered analyses of class that also incorporated race. The few historical accounts of women available when I was a graduate student in the 1970s included the work of scholars steeped in class analysis: Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle, a history of reform that included slavery, abolitionism, and women’s labor organizing, as well as suffrage; Gerda Lerner’s article “The Lady and the Mill Girl,” and her documentary collection Black Women in White America; and Angela Davis’s essay on “The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” Like my peers, I incorporated these texts and their viewpoints in my first women’s history classes.⁸

Over the next decades, historians of African American, Mexican American, Native American, and Asian American women—many of them represented in Unequal Sisters—reoriented scholarship to bring their subjects from the margins to the mainstream. The resulting literature is not merely inclusionary or compensatory but transformational. The best feminist historical projects now recognize not only the racial position of their subjects but also relations of power among women and the mutually constituted identities of race, class, gender, sexuality, as well as nationality.

References to the broad, often transnational, political frameworks that shape intersecting identities recur in this special issue. Well before the post–World War II Left and second-wave feminists of color named “triple jeopardy,” Depression Era communists pointed to “triple exploitation.” For Rosa Rayside and other working-class black women, the old Left encouraged intersectional organizing. Katherine Marino recovers the role of these black women in the history of global anti-fascism, a topic overlooked by most scholars (with the telling exception, she notes, of Angela Davis). Putting theory into action, Rayside helped organize the Domestic Workers’ Union and testified before Congress that New Deal labor laws should extend to black women’s jobs. In her interview with the West Indian–born writer and academic Sylvia Winter, Natalie Marine-Street learned “valuable lessons about anti-colonialism, identity, and intersectionality.” In response to questions about career and motherhood, for example, Winter explained that “growing up in the period I did, in the anti-colonial movement, as far as I was concerned, I could do anything…At that time, being a colonized native was so much more powerful than being a woman.” These examples remind us of the critical influences of anti-racism and anti-colonialism on women’s identities and political consciousness.

In left-influenced analysis, class, race, and gender initially dominated intersectional politics. Since the 1970s, however, feminist historians have incorporated sexuality as another key component of complex identities—making the intimate political. Gay liberation, lesbian feminism, and academic theories of the social construction of sexuality contributed to the historicization of both homosexuality and heterosexuality. Scholars such as Blanche Cook, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Leila Rupp rejected the historical denial of women’s same-sex intimacies in their pioneering accounts of a range of homosocial and homosexual formations.⁹ By the 1990s, social movements related to AIDS, trans identity, and marriage equality encouraged further historical inquiries into the politics of sexuality and gender. Even then, acknowledging non-conformity in the past met resistance. In her research, Judy Wu confronted a “reluctance to identify and explore [Margaret] Chung’s sexuality and gender,” which reflected “a tendency to celebrate the public achievements of past historical figures that naturalizes heteronormativity.” This “selective forgetting,” Wu points out, also contributes to “a narrative of immigrant assimilation and model minority representation.”

Several essays in this issue further illustrate how centering sex and gender can reorient historical analyses and periodization. While a rich literature reveals the political functions of myths about African American sexuality, Nicole Martin’s interpretation of the home articulates the specific sexualized fears that infused cultural constructions of, and political discrimination against, Chinese immigrants, Mormons, and Native Americans. Tweaking late twentieth-century periodization, Blevins and Heinz challenge the narrative of anti-feminist backlash in the Reagan era. Through careful quantitative and qualitative analyses, they make visible the growing national (and international) print networks that sustained lesbian political identity in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent history, Yvon Wang questions the motif of technological progress. While crediting online media for the proliferation of global trans consciousness, Wang points as well to the countervailing technological power of censorship, as evident in the People’s Republic of China.

All these authors productively complicate the analytic lens of identity, forcing us to expand upon the standard canon of race, class, and gender. Along with recognizing the racial homogeneity of Lesbian Connection readers, Blevins and Heinz offer fresh approaches to space, literally mapping how rural, urban, and regional settings shaped opportunities and vulnerabilities for lesbians. They also reconsider class by documenting how lesbians experimented with new economic forms, such as “resource-sharing outside of a traditional capitalist marketplace,” to survive without male breadwinners. Wang questions the stability of gender itself. Through an analogy with the experience of being trans, he draws out “tension between contingency and causality that all historians confront intellectually,” reminding us that like our own lives, “all histories are inevitable and surprising at the same time.” Embracing that surprise and the “sometimes-painful untidiness of human experience” helps us reject narratives that evade “moments of nonconformity or alienation.” By repeatedly framing identities within historical contexts, these essays resist reductionist or essentialist accounts.

In many ways, this special issue epitomizes contemporary feminist histories that build upon foundational frameworks while developing innovative methods and concepts. The work included here, of course, is not necessarily representative of the field. I recognize that, with notable exceptions, my graduate advisees have focused more on the twentieth century than on early America, on social and labor movements more than on party and state politics, on Asian and Mexican American more than African and Native American women, on urban rather than rural settings, on women rather than gender or masculinity, and on sexuality more than reproductive families.¹⁰

Listening for other voices and looking outside the scope of this collection points toward highly productive areas in recent feminist histories. These studies include innovative interpretations of material culture that enrich our understandings of gender, race, and labor. New approaches to disability explore the intersections of gender, race, colonialism, and the body. While Native American women’s history appeared in the first and subsequent PHR special issues on women’s history, in the past generation the field has blossomed to enrich the conceptualization of intersecting identities. I expect that, given their continued salience in our culture, two subjects central to my own work—sexual violence and women’s incarceration—will continue to attract historical attention.¹¹

As I read the complex and beautifully crafted contributions to Feminist Histories from the perspective of the origins of the field, I appreciated anew the importance of reorienting our points of view in each generation. We currently work within political contexts that deeply challenge notions of historical progress. Especially in the face of escalating resistance to critical studies of gender, race, and sexuality, rising feminist scholars have a weighty responsibility. The work collected in this volume gives me hope that a diversity of historical inquiries will continue to inform feminism and to provide insights into overcoming obstacles to all movements for social justice.