Feminist Crossings

Feminist theory and practice have long been confounded by individualism. Self-possession and its promise of constitutionally assured rights to hold property, work outside the home, enter into contracts, divorce, vote, and control reproduction have certainly structured and animated women’s push for liberation and equality; at the same time, individualism has been criticized as antithetical to feminist solidarity, an ideal that posits intersubjectivity and mutual responsibility over the radical personalism often associated with hyper-masculinity. This tension between individuality and collectivity is closely covered in Nancy Cott’s influential book on early–twentieth-century U.S. feminism and the emergence of an avant-garde strain in women’s emancipation, a modernist wedge into a social movement that consequently sought group identity and cohesion amidst a new countercultural impulse of libidinal and existential self-assertion. Although she recognizes the “paradox” of a collective dedicated to individuation and how that “fault line” would later hinder women’s causes, Cott tends to emphasize pre–World War I–era feminism’s practical-minded “multifaceted constitution” over its ideological contradictions. “Feminists wanted, soundly enough, to have it both ways,” she writes—pursuing self-development as human beings (unrestricted by feminine stereotypes and conventions) while also mobilizing women by pleading their distinct needs as a sex— “this is Feminism’s characteristic doubleness,” an instrumentalist effort to maintain two, or really several, ideational tracks to meet the wide array of social and political challenges to the movement.¹

It is within this dynamic intellectual culture of the 1910s that Lucy Delap sets her study of avant-garde feminism. Cott provides several points of departure. Her book’s mention of British and European influences among prewar Greenwich Village radicals becomes, in Delap’s hands, a full-fledged effort to chart an Anglo-American feminist network that would help set the movement’s agenda on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. Delap takes Cott’s intriguing footnote on Nietzschean traces found in the hyper-individuality of modernist feminism and turns it into a lengthy chapter on feminist appropriations of the genius and superman archetypes. Delap acknowledges and, to some extent, follows Cott’s delineation of the contradictory beliefs within feminism. A difference arises here, however. Delap finds few figures who cared to mediate feminism’s competing concerns—that is, who pragmatically “wanted it both ways.” In closely mapping feminist discourse, Delap locates each woman in a particular ideological quadrant—anti-statism, for example, with a strong commitment to birth control, self-reliant motherhood, and introspective poetics.

Published in Cambridge University Press’s distinguished interdisciplinary series on Ideas in Context, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century impressively joins intellectual history with political philosophy. Feminist formulations are carefully set out by way of their origin, content, coherence, and, to some extent, consequence. They’re held up beside one another, compared and contrasted, with Delap showing little allegiance to any one position, but also charting critically a conservative bent among self-described “ultra-modern” feminists. The result is one of the most sustained and conceptually rounded historical studies of twentieth-century feminist ideas to date. Delap’s research and analytical mode have their shortcomings. The intellectual history of modern American feminism still has great room to grow, although that work will benefit considerably from this foundational book.

In framing her study, Delap replaces modernism with “avant-garde” as a concept that best gets at her core subjects’ commitment to pushing past suffrage, sisterhood, and conventional politics. Far from marking a cultural movement, Delap writes, “’avant-garde’ indicates a discourse” or, in a compelling term, “a social imaginary” (p. 4). It describes a “textual space,” an idiomatic approach to self that seeks through force of will and personality to transcend preexistent forms of being. This romanticist impulse certainly yielded newfound “emphasis on creativity, art, and playful sexuality” within feminism (p. 304). It also cast liberation as an elitist enterprise—one of solitude, introspection, and...