Freedom Fighters

About a half century ago Eleanor Flexner published a general history of the American woman's rights movement, Century of Struggle, which until now was unsurpassed for narrative sweep, engagement with the large themes of American history, the incorporation of different classes and races of women, and an ability to balance the historian's judiciousness with an unabashed commitment to women's freedom. When Flexner wrote, there were few other historians on whom she could rely. She had few secondary sources to work with; much of the book rests on her own extraordinary labours in the archives.¹

Unlike Century of Struggle, Christine Stansell's magisterial new history, The Promise of Feminism, has behind it decades and libraries full of women's history research, on which she has drawn to great effect to produce the first serious modern history of American feminism in a very long time, arguably since Flexner. The Feminist Promise is forceful, confident, lovely and provocative — all the characteristics that Stansell shows to be true of the feminist tradition at its best. The writing in this book is particularly impressive — original and assured, a fine example to other feminist writers, myself included.

Thankfully, Stansell is too much the historian to offer another one of those hundred-word efforts to pin down such a heterogeneous and moving target. 'Feminism is an argument,' she writes, 'not received truth' (p. xix). The invention of the word itself occurs midway through her narrative. Derived from the French in the late nineteenth century, this neologism conveyed more passion and romance than the reigning Anglo-American phrase 'women's rights' (or the German heaviness of the Marxist 'woman question'). When the term first appeared, 'feminism was an approach to sexual equality that was at once political and psychological' (p. 153). As such, 'feminism' put a name to a historical tradition of female aspiration and vision that Stansell traces back at least as far as Mary Wollstonecraft. Stansell uses the term broadly and inclusively for the entire sweep of history she covers. Establishing a political tradition, she demonstrates, is an act of historical imagination as well as excavation.

As Stansell portrays it, feminism is an evolving political conversation which circles around women's discontent within the 'family romance' of democracy. (Early on she describes feminism as 'democracy's younger sister'. [p. xiii]) 'Family romance', a concept which she has adapted from Lynn Hunt's path-breaking use of it to describe the French revolutionary challenge to the ancien regime, signifies, at the very least, that patterns of power and authority learned at the family hearth are in dynamic relationship to the larger structures of the polity.² Indeed, the very term 'government' long contained an ambiguity about whether it described civil authority or the father's rule over his household. As such, Stansell's framework also owes something to Carole Pateman's notion of 'the sexual contract', by which women's subordination in the family translates into their foundational exclusion from modern liberalism.³ But for Stansell, the family link is less determined, more ambiguous, promising freedom as well as frustrating it. As Stansell uses the concept, feminism announces the intention both to bring women as equal citizens into the large public democracy and — more elusively — to bring democracy back into the home, emancipating women within what John Demos memorably called 'the little commonwealth'.⁴

Within the broad and flexible framework of feminism as family argument, Stansell crystallizes two positions which she uses to trace shifting feminist ideas and strategy: the feminism of the mothers and the feminism of the daughters. Let us start by observing that the dual characterization pointedly ignores the position of the sister, indeed it is probably intended as a critique of the assumptions implicit in the slogan, 'sisterhood is powerful'. The unity of women is, for Stansell, a politically useful fiction, even if at extraordinary moments it becomes historical reality. To move the story of feminism ahead, differences among women are more salient than similarities, and...