Lucy Delap. Feminisms: A Global History.

Abstract

Lucy Delap sets an ambitious agenda in Feminisms: A Global History, tackling nearly three centuries of women’s activism and feminist ideas across a wide variety of contexts. Arriving as it has amid a proliferation of litmus tests and the widespread denunciation of “cancel culture,” Delap offers a refreshing insistence that we consider these feminist histories—warts and all—within their own contexts. While she does not give a pass to the distressing histories of racism, elitism, and transphobia within women’s and feminist movements, she does highlight the contributions of even the most flawed efforts and considers the ways they opened up spaces of critique amid their shortcomings. “Usable feminisms,” she cautions her readers, “must be non-doctrinaire and open-ended, shaped but not determined by the encounter between past and present” (23). Right out of the gate, Delap tackles the question that bedevils historians of feminisms: what to include without doing violence to historical context. It is tempting to end up with a Potter Stewart–esque I-know-it-when-I see-it definition that pulls in not only movements and ideas that predated the term “feminism” but also women who explicitly rejected the label feminist but shared many priorities and values with those who embraced it. Delap opts for a big-tent approach, understanding feminism not as a unified object with a coherent history but rather as an “overlapping, internally complex set of actions, questions and demands” (3), a “conversation with many registers” (20), and a mosaic “built up from inherited fragments but offering distinctive patterns and pictures” that demand looking “not only at the shards and fragments that make up the mosaic, but also at the gaps between the pieces” (20–21). Indeed, among the book’s contributions are its attention to disagreements and exclusions—the gaps between the pieces.