The Feminist Uses of Psychoanalysis: Beatrice M. Hinkle and the Foreshadowing of Modern Feminism in the United States

Abstract

This article uses the career and writings of feminist psychoanalyst Beatrice M. Hinkle (1874-1953) to explore the impact of psychological thinking on American feminism in the immediate presuffrage and postsuffrage era. Feminism (as distinct from suffragism) first emerged in the United States prior to World War I. Its early adherents, many of whom such as Hinkle belonged to New York City's feminist network, the Heterodoxy Club, used psychoanalytic insights to broaden the definition of the political to include inner personal emancipation and to further women's gains in the postsuffrage period. Hinkle's psychoanalytically informed feminism questioned the significance of formal legal equality alone and prefigured the notion of the personal as political, usually associated primarily with the rebirth of feminism in the 1960s. Her writings constitute an important, if little known, chapter in the intellectual history of modern American feminism.