"Researching Around Our Subjects": Excavating Radical Women

Excavating left-wing women is vital to our understanding of women's political diversity and the radicalism that has often been foundational to feminism. In Progressive Era California, socialist-feminists made important contributions to social reform, including women's enfranchisement, the construction of the early welfare state, and the gendered integration of partisan politics. But because few radical women left archival materials, researching them has proved difficult. This article details a method of "researching around our subjects" I developed in order to reconstruct and interpret their activism. This methodology is certainly not unique; in fact, it may characterize the process by which much of the research on little-known or "marginalized" women must, by necessity, proceed. For me, this process involved mining the small number of manuscript collections and oral histories of my subjects, and then working outward in concentric circles of related sources. Integrating these layers of materials enabled me to piece together the fabric of early-twentieth-century socialist-feminism. Yet these fragmented sources provided few clues regarding their personal lives (and the relationship between personal and political). Still, the "researching around" methodology is indispensable to the recovery of marginalized political voices.