The Roots of Feminism: A Review Essay

Abstract

THE ROOTS OF FEMINISM: A Review Essay James P. Louis The recent reflowering of feminism on a scope and with a degree of intensity and priority to justify definition as a movement derives from a confluence of three autonomous developments. The longest single strand in the root system, effecting a synapse with the earlier movement that had secured the Nineteenth Amendment, were the persistent and aggressively feminist activities of the National Woman's Party in behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment which it drafted in 1923. Secondly, Betty Friedan's anguished polemic The Feminine Mystique struck a startlingly responsive chord among middle-class housewives and careeroriented women from its publication in 1962 and prompted a presidential commission on the status of women. Finally, the tone of this revived feminism was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement that crested in the early Sixties. Before fragmenting into a series of particularistic efforts and squabbles over priorities, this popular crusade had engendered among its adherents a broader range of social awareness, a tradition of militant activism, and an enthusiastic search for exploited minorities and social issues. In combination with the much-publicized search for a distinguishing collective identity and value system on the part of college-aged youth, these stimuli were particularly pronounced among the youthful recruits who came to constitute the quasiradical New Left. The coalescence and intermingling of these developments have occasioned a reemergence of concern with the status of women in American society and a spectrum of ameliorative, if not revolutionary, proposals which find their extreme expression in Women's Liberation. Set against this background, the past decade's upsurge of interest in the nineteenth-century origins and development of the Women's Rights Movement is an almost perfect illustration of the essential interaction of present and past in the definition, presentation, and analysis of history. The most obvious instance is the inclination to select for attention subjects or aspects of the past which are relevant to the concerns and developments of contemporary society. Such presentism always carries with it the inherent danger of distortion by merely clothing the past in modern garb; in this case, of simply equating the nineteenth -century Women's Movement with the more radical Women's Liberation. It has the advantage, however, of permitting the historian to understand and present the past with a more sharply-focused perspective than was available to the contemporaneous actors themselves, caught up as they were in the swirl of surrounding circumstances. The historian must nevertheless be careful to maintain, and to con162 vey to his present audience, an awareness of the purely contemporaneous context within which the developments that form the object of his analysis existed and to which they responded. The Women's Rights Movement, past and present, again constitutes a particularly pertinent example. In a pattern markedly similar to recent developments , the Women's Rights Movement had its origins in the humanitarian reform efforts of the 1830's, especially in the antislavery and peace movements, and developed an awareness of the need for a separate identity with the refusal to seat women delegates to the 1840 London World Anti-Slavery Conference. When the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments established at least nominally the political and social equality of Negroes, but not of the women, the suffrage issue emerged as the central preoccupation of avowed feminists until its own realization with the Nineteenth Amendment a half-century later. A third interaction between present and past as it affects the renewed interest in feminism is also worthy of note: that of historical interpretation . Concurrent with the civil rights movement's irresistible drive to secure federal guarantees of black voting rights as well as economic and social non-discrimination, historians were inclined to accept unquestioningly the primacy of woman suffrage as at least the appropriate symbolic cause of the Women's Rights movement and, hence, to deem that movement a "success." As the civil rights movement gave way to a more diffuse social activism, doubts as to the efficacy of that focus and the validity of that judgment began to emerge among historians of the earlier Women's Movement. At first only implicit in Aileen Kraditor's The Ideas of...