Where Do We Go from Here?: Early American Women and the End(s) of Feminist Critique

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Where Do We Go from Here? Early American Women and the End(s) of Feminist Critique Teresa Toulouse (bio) Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Edited By Mary C. Carruth. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 352 pp. Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 500–1800. Edited By Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 280 pp. The New York Times recently ran an article about the beginning of a significant generational shift occurring within the academy. The retirement of humanities and social science faculty trained in the 1960s and ’70s gave the reporter occasion to note a striking lack of intense political passion in the generation of young scholars educated in the 1990s and early 2000s. Admitting that there were exceptions to its broader generalizations, the reporter contrasted what she represented as the ideologically motivated and theoretically driven work of the retiring generation with the more empirical and particularized studies of the current one (Cohen). The introductions to both the collections at hand seem at first glance to support claims about such generational differences. The title of the first, Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies, suggests earlier feminism’s concern with the hegemony of masculinist forms of knowledge from which feminist inquiry has been excluded and to which it should accordingly direct its energies. Drawing on important older work by Sharon Harris, [End Page 195] Cathy Davidson, and Annette Kolodny, the introduction of this collection argues not only that early American studies should be linked to women and gender studies but also that feminist critique, properly understood, should provide the overarching frame applied to all scholarship within the field as a whole, from canon formation through theory. Although the summary of the work of an earlier generation offered here may be useful to undergraduates or certain graduate students, it betrays a certain anxiety, as if there were a danger that something is being forgotten that must be remembered, newly put together, as part of the current critical moment. In many ways, however, the introduction is anachronistic, and that such is the case is of course owing to the fact that the interventions it calls for have been occurring for the past 25 years. Over this period, feminist inquiry has ceased to be an intervention, in the sense of a radically new form of critique, and has become instead a valued and assumed part of the critical work of the academy as a whole. That such is the case in early American studies is owing to the intense labors of two generations of feminist scholars in early American history and literature, many of whom are mentioned in the introduction. A similar generational sense informs the introduction’s definition of feminist inquiry: “In this collection, I define a feminist approach, reformulated over the last thirty years by women of color and “Third World” feminists, as not solely an analysis of gender but of the intersections of gender, race, class, nationality, and other markers of difference that characterize individuals and their relationships to institutionalized power” (xvi). Given the editor’s view that feminism deconstructs hierarchalized power relations, what is curious here is her claim that all approaches to social difference, indeed, to all “markers of difference,” are (to be) read as “feminist.”1 As the introduction proceeds, its broader comments about a feminist “epistemology” yield to more pragmatic remarks about feminist “strategies.” Yet a tonal residue persists here as well. Looking back to feminism’s past as an interventionist outsider that changed both the contents and methods of literary studies, Feminist Interventions, in its introduction, if not, as we shall see, in its contents, betrays an uncertainty about what is to become of past methods of feminist critique in the current critical moment. If the introduction to Feminist Interventions references a preceding generation of feminist criticism, the introduction to Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 appears consciously [End Page 196] to address a new generation of feminist scholars and scholarship. Reading Women exhibits no sense of a split between women’s studies or early modern studies, nor, as its contents suggest, between early American studies or...