No Permanent Waves Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

No Permanent Waves bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb No Permanent Waves Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism EDITED BY NANCY A. HEWITT bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA No permanent waves : recasting histories of U.S. feminism / edited by Nancy A. Hewitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978‒0‒8135‒4724‒4 (hbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 978‒0‒8135‒4725‒1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminism—United States—History. 2. First-wave feminism—United States. 3. Second-wave feminism—United States. 4. Third-wave feminism—United States. I. Hewitt, Nancy A., 1951‒ HQ1410.N57 2010 305.420973—dc22 2009020401 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2010 by Rutgers, The State University For copyrights to previously published pieces please see first note of each essay. Pieces first published in this book copyright © 2010 in the names of their authors. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854‒8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America To my feminist friends CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 NANCY A. HEWITT PART ONE Reframing Narratives/Reclaiming Histories 1 From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a “Master” Narrative in U.S. Women’s History 15 NANCY A. HEWITT 2 Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism 39 BECKY THOMPSON 3 Black Feminisms and Human Agency 61 ULA Y. TAYLOR 4 “We Have a Long, Beautiful History”: Chicana Feminist Trajectories and Legacies 77 MARISELA R. CHÁVEZ 5 Unsettling “Third Wave Feminism”: Feminist Waves, Intersectionality, and Identity Politics in Retrospect 98 LEELA FERNANDES vii viii CONTENTS PART TWO Coming Together/Pulling Apart 6 Overthrowing the “Monopoly of the Pulpit”: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States 121 MARTHA S. JONES 7 Labor Feminists and President Kennedy’s Commission on Women 144 DOROTHY SUE COBBLE 8 Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights 168 PREMILLA NADASEN 9 Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Peace Activism and Women’s Orientalism 193 JUDY TZU-CHUN WU 10 Living a Feminist Lifestyle: The Intersection of Theory and Action in a Lesbian Feminist Collective 221 ANNE M. VALK 11 Strange Bedfellows: Building Feminist Coalitions around Sex Work in the 1970s 246 STEPHANIE GILMORE 12 From Sisterhood to Girlie Culture: Closing the Great Divide between Second and Third Wave Cultural Agendas 273 LEANDRA ZARNOW PART THREE Rethinking Agendas/Relocating Activism 13 Staking Claims to Independence: Jennie Collins, Aurora Phelps, and the Boston Working Women’s League, 1865–1877 305 LARA VAPNEK 14 “I Had Not Seen Women Like That Before”: Intergenerational Feminism in New York City’s Tenant Movement 329 ROBERTA S. GOLD CONTENTS ix 15 The Hidden History of Affirmative Action: Working Women’s Struggles in the 1970s and the Gender of Class 356 NANCY MACLEAN 16 U.S. Feminism—Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave 379 EDNIE KAEH GARRISON 17 “Under Construction”: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms 403 WHITNEY A. PEOPLES Notes on Contributors 431 Index 435 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea for this volume originated in two sites of feminist praxis: the Feminist Studies editorial collective, on which I served from 1997 to 2003, and the Institute for Research on Women (IRW), which I directed from 2004 to 2007. I especially want to thank Claire Moses, the founding editor of Feminist Studies, for her efforts to sustain and transform feminist practices while con- tinuing to turn out a wonderful journal three times a year. I owe special appreciation as well to Sharon Groves, who inspired me to move forward on this volume when I had almost given up on it, and to my other colleagues on the Feminist Studies editorial collective who offered intellectual and political insight and inspiration. My constant colleagues at the IRW—Associate Director Beth Hutchison and Administrative Assistant Marlene Importico— provided support, encouragement, and wisdom throughout my term as director. More immediately for this volume, they helped organize the No Permanent Waves Symposium in spring 2005, bringing together scholars, activists, and scholar-activists to address the issues that form the core of this book. They also reminded me regularly of the intimate links among friend- ship, work, intellectual exchange, and good food. Several participants in the IRW symposium contributed to this book—either allowing me to reprint articles published in Feminist Studies or writing original essays—and I thank them for their continued commitment to this project. All those who partici- pated and attended provided ideas and energy that refueled my interest in this project despite numerous delays. I especially want to thank Lori Ginzberg, Leslie Brown, and Temma Kaplan for their contributions to the symposium and to my thinking about histories of feminism and women’s activism over many years. This project was supported by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000–2001, which allowed me the freedom to reimagine narratives of women’s history, woman’s rights, and feminism. xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS During that year, I wrote the first versions of what turned out to be the introduction to this volume. I also revised my ideas about the Seneca Falls– to-suffrage story, which I had originally conceived while a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences in 1996–1997. The essay that appears here, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?” benefited from questions and critiques provided by audiences at numerous invited lectures, especially at California Polytechnic State University—San Luis Obispo, the Southern Association of Women Historians Conference, DePauw University, SUNY–Brockport, Canisius College, the University of Rochester, and the University of Florida. I also want to thank the friends who ensured that No Permanent Waves made it into print. Nancy Cott allowed me to test out the ideas that frame this book at the Schlesinger Library’s 2008 Summer Institute on “Sequels to the Sixties.” Anne Valk and Dorothy Sue Cobble provided generous advice at critical moments and often on short notice, reminding me that sisterhood, however flawed as a concept, can still be critical in practice. I also owe a special thanks as well to Allison Xantha Miller, whose editorial skills, technological expertise, and good humor saved me on more than one occa- sion. And Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar generously agreed to allow me to reprint an expanded version of an article by Dorothy Sue Cobble originally published online as “The Labor Feminist Origins of the U.S. Commissions on the Status of Women” on the Scholar’s Edition of Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, 13, no. 1 (March 2009), at http://asp6new.alexanderstreet.com/was2. I could not have found a better home for this book than Rutgers University Press. Marlie Wasserman and Leslie Mitchner are marvels in many ways. They and their staff provided support, guidance, and enthusiasm throughout this project. A special thanks to Beth Kressel, Marilyn Campbell, and Pamela Fischer for seeing this book through production and offering such expert and gentle counsel. Rutgers University offered support as well by making research funds available to help offset the ever-rising costs of publication. And finally to Steven Lawson, who rightly considered this one project too many, I thank you once again for your love and forbearance. No Permanent Waves bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Introduction NANCY A. HEWITT No Permanent Waves engages the ongoing debates over the adequacy of the “wave” metaphor for capturing the complex history of women’s rights and feminism in the United States. But it also moves beyond these debates to offer fresh perspectives on the diverse movements that constitute U.S. feminism, past and present. The volume brings together seventeen essays—both original and reprinted—to address the connections among movements for women’s rights and gender justice over time as well as the conflicts and divi- sions within such movements at any one time. The contributors, from differ- ent generations and backgrounds, argue for new chronologies, more inclusive conceptualizations of feminist agendas and participants, and fuller engage- ments with contestations around particular issues and practices than has been possible when using dominant analytical frameworks. They address issues of race, class, and sexuality within histories of women’s rights and feminism as well as the cultural and intellectual currents and social and political priori- ties that marked movements for women’s advancement and liberation. The concept of waves surging and receding cannot fully capture these multiple and overlapping movements, chronologies, issues, and sites. It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when feminists in the 1960s first identified themselves as part of a “second wave.” The rubric gained popular currency, however, with Martha Weinman Lears’s article “The Second Feminist Wave,” published in the New York Times Magazine in March 1968.1 But the wave metaphor had been wielded much earlier. Irish activist Frances Power Cobbe, writing of social movements more generally in 1884, claimed that some “resemble the tides of the Ocean, where each wave 1 2 NANCY A. HEWITT obeys one uniform impetus, and carries the waters onward and upward along the shore.” Women’s movements, she argued, were the best example of such waves: “Like the incoming tide .

Load more