The Importance of Women to Early American Study: A Social Justice Perspective

Too many of my colleagues are, to use today's parlance, "over" the study of early American women. Charged with the odious task of explaining to me why conference committees must exclude proposed panels on early American women's texts, numerous well-meaning colleagues have delivered the bad news politely and apologetically. It seems that conference meeting agendas are full, the range of submissions is broad and the need to be inclusive pressing, and the committee has already accepted another panel on women.¹ As a result, I've developed an odd tic of tallying up numbers, which has led to my discovery that "gender" also means "women." In fact, if my accounting is to match that of program committees, I must expand my definition of women to mean gender.² Imagine my alarm when one of my colleagues, at the 1999 Society of Early Americanists (SEA) meeting, announced that she was also "over" gender. At the 2005 SEA, one panelist praised a feminist book for "free[ing] feminism from its dependence on women." Thank goddess for liberation! Gender is, of course, an important category for analysis and theorization, and scholars must work within a context that acknowledges the social construction of gender, then and now. However, I wish to address how this apparent demotion (by some) of "women" as a useful analytical category misconstrues feminism and its work as somehow less important, more identity-based, more essentialist, and (read between the lines with me here) evidently, for many, passé.

The passé argument is most easily addressed. I and my five favorite feminist early Americanists are not alone in our certainty that able scholars should and will continue to address their energies to women. Nearly one hundred colleagues packed the room at the 2005 SEA meeting for the panel "Women and Early American Studies."³ Far from fossilized dinosaurs, this lively panel of scholars, which included Joanna Brooks, Lorrayne Carroll, Annette Kolodny, Carla Mulford, Ivy Schweitzer, Jodi Schorb, and me, demonstrated our collective failure to recover from women as appropriate subjects of analysis.⁴ To the contrary, the panelists and their arguments illustrated the vitality of a field still in need of exploration, as evinced by Professor Kolodny's list of "five books yet to be written by and about women" in the field. (She insisted that time alone prevented a list of twenty.)

From what legitimacy proceed statements that feminism must be "liberated" from women⁵ or that a professional conference includes too many panels on women? Far from a mere intellectual exercise, feminist early American studies is also the practice of social justice, a movement out of which feminism grew. Without a social justice consciousness and practice, our work loses the resonance of a project that demands and makes change in the academy and in the world. We risk relegating to silence (again) the voices of individual women, whose stories, as Audre Lorde writes, cry out to be heard.⁶ Let us examine briefly the relationships among social justice, the recovery of early American women's texts, the literary and cultural histories generated from that recovery, feminist epistemology, and the language that defines our theoretical processes. By defining the study of early American writers as a social justice project, feminists can position our field for the twenty-first century, making the study of women writers relevant not only to those of us who have committed to this scholarly work but to our students, our communities, and, therefore, the future.

As Sharon Harris has stated simply and yet eloquently, the history of women writers is the history of "recovery and loss, recovery and loss."⁷ (So too, apparently, goes the history of those of us who study them.) If we accept the idea of "enough" panels, courses, articles, books, and scholars on women, we ignore that women are more than half of the human population and that, as women, they might offer interesting perspectives about their experiences in patriarchal culture. In "Patriarchy: The System," Allan G. Johnson explains that patriarchy operates much like a board game in which we all...