Making Women's Histories Pamela S

Making Women's Histories Pamela S. Nadell, Kate Haulman Published by NYU Press Nadell, P. S. & Haulman, K.. Making Women's Histories: Beyond National Perspectives. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/21725 Access provided by The Ohio State University (30 Dec 2016 13:12 GMT) 10 A Happier Marriage? Feminist History Takes the Transnational Turn Jocelyn Olcott Three decades ago, the feminist economist Heidi Hartmann quipped that the marriage of Marxism and feminism had been “like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism.”1 Hartmann called for a “more progressive union” that recognized capitalist structures and patriarchal inequalities. Since then, Marxist and feminist studies have both changed immensely: a new intellec- tual generation has come of age and issued its own progeny; bitter divorces have given way to mellower second marriages. Among these has been the recent union of transnational and feminist history. Perhaps this late-model marriage seems to work better because the two have much in common—they went to the same schools and run in the same circles of friends. Or perhaps it benefits from a prenuptial understanding that both parties will retain some autonomy within the union, even allowing for the occasional extramarital dalliance. Or perhaps the marriage is simply still in its honeymoon period, and the real challenges of long-term partnership lie ahead. For now, this happy and fruitful marriage has generated a field not sub- sumed under a single patronym but rather the scholarly equivalent of a hyphenated surname: transnational feminist history. These two historio- graphic turns share core values, most notably in that they both trouble conventional narratives by decentering those actors and processes that have often dominated historical studies—provincializing the hegemons, jostling structures, and focusing on less powerful figures.2 The literature has developed amid a heightened sensitivity to how we produce knowledge—to the limitations and possibilities of sources and methods—and has benefited tre- mendously from Women’s Studies’ interdisciplinary orientation, borrowing judiciously from anthropology, sociology, and political science and some- what more sparingly from literary and psychoanalytic approaches. Since its genealogy passes through postcolonial studies and other fields that resist totalizing approaches, it would be inappropriate to say that this scholarship offers a paradigm shift. It has, however, offered new perspectives on some >> 237 238 << Jocelyn Olcott of historians’ core analytical categories and insights that should inform even more closely described local and national studies.3 This chapter concentrates on four areas of inquiry important in both fields—periodization, place, iden- tification, and infrastructures—that highlight the cross-fertilization between them. Before getting into some of the payoffs of transnational feminist history, we should describe the contours of these two fields separately. Transnational history explores those phenomena that transcend the boundaries of nations and regions by means other than state-to-state (or international) interac- tions.4 Transnational history also stands apart from comparative history, which has yielded important insights but centers on lining up different historical contexts alongside one another rather than examining the connective tissue between them.5 While many textbooks and edited volumes have taken up a global or comparative approach—developing a global history by aggre- gating a representative sampling of smaller histories—a much smaller body of scholarship has addressed transnational feminism.6 This latter field sets in relief the connections and commonalities following what cultural geogra- pher Cindi Katz describes as “contour lines” that follow elevations of experience and networks and disregard political borders.7 Certainly migration chains follow such contour lines, or communities centered on the production of a particular commodity such as sugar or petroleum, or (more to the point here) feminist networks whose members might experience closer affinities with fellow network members than they do with compatriots, neighbors, or even family members. The term feminism has, of course, sparked countless debates about its provenance, contents, and implications, and even historians of a single vil- lage would struggle to agree upon a complete and exclusive definition. Developments within feminist theory and historiography of the 1990s con- tested the border-patrol practices that had developed when feminist groups fended off their antifeminist detractors.8 While desires for feminist solidarity have remained, feminism’s outlines have become blurred. The historian Bon- nie Smith advocates using the plural feminisms to accommodate this diver- sity, but such a designation still implies discrete, clearly bounded entities or schools of thought.9 In her pathbreaking work on Latin American feminism, the historian Asunción Lavrin argues instead that feminism’s elasticity may be its defining characteristic, making it “capable of evolution and of adapting to changing political realities rather than being a fixed set of ideas.”10 His- torical sociologists Myra Marx Ferree and Carol McClurg Mueller also have called for such a flexible conception of feminism that encompasses many different kinds of women’s organizations that in practice—regardless of their A Happier Marriage? >> 239 principal objectives—challenge women’s subordination and cultivate a feminist consciousness. Restricting feminism to those ideas and movements that center on sex roles and gender hierarchies, they argue, results in policing the boundaries of “legitimate” feminism to exclude movements that have pro- liferated in many parts of the world—movements that focus more squarely on, for example, human rights or economic justice but that incubate feminist ideas and practices.11 Such an understanding underscores a principal insight of both feminist theorizing and the historiography of transnational feminism: that feminism’s strength and resilience depend upon its remaining an arena of critique and contestation rather than hardening into a bounded set of convictions.12 Period Cramps: Marking Time in Transnational Feminist History If one of feminist history’s objectives is to shake things up and dislodge received wisdoms, among its critical strategies has been to interrogate practices of periodization.13 Just as transnational historians questioned the pri- macy of national boundaries, feminist historians—initially under the guise of social history—challenged the demarcation of historical time by wars or presidencies or phenomena (such as the Renaissance or the Industrial Revo- lution) that put men’s experiences at the center.14 As the U.S. historian Alice Kessler-Harris has argued, the turn to gender history invited transnational historians to explore ways that gender ideologies and practices developed apart from national histories.15 In modern Mexico, motorized corn mills had a far greater impact on women’s quotidian experience than the land reform measures that became the hallmark of the Mexican Revolution. Before the introduction of corn mills, women and girls spent hours on their knees every day grinding corn into meal for tortillas; installing a single motorized corn mill in a community freed its girls to attend school and its women to learn to read or to engage in petty commerce.16 If feminist history questioned conventional periodizations (around land reform instead of corn mills, for instance) then transnational feminist history, in the ethos of persistent critique, in turn has challenged feminist periodizations—especially the periodization around “waves” of feminism that labels the suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the first wave and the feminist revival of the 1960s and 1970s as the second. Bonnie Anderson’s study of mid-nineteenth-century women’s activism, for example, renders visible transnational feminist networks that predated what we generally dub feminism’s first wave.17 The gender studies scholar Clare Hemmings further argues that the wave model undergirds a 240 << Jocelyn Olcott distorted, linear account of developments in feminist thought and “stories that claim gender equality as a uniquely Western export.”18 Studies of regional networks highlight the wave model’s limitations. Fran- cesca Miller and Asunción Lavrin have demonstrated that local mobiliza- tions and transnational outreach often escalated in Latin American feminism just as U.S.- and European-based networks quieted.19 Latin American feminists’ decades-long experience with pan-Americanism equipped them to play leading roles in putting women’s rights into the 1945 United Nations Charter.20 As U.S. feminist activism floundered in the 1980s, Latin American women’s organizations—galvanized by human rights concerns, democrati- zation efforts, and challenges to neoliberalism—burgeoned and capitalized on newly created transnational nongovernmental organization (NGO) networks that flourished after the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year (IWY) Conference in Mexico City. Transnational feminist histories have also shown these networks and movements to be chronologically out of phase with the global ebbs and flows of nationalism. While Benedict Anderson has argued that print

Load more