Feminist Webs, Feminist Magma: New Histories of Women's Activism

Bonnie S. Anderson. Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 277 pp. ISBN 0-19-512623-8 (cl.)

Margaret H. McFadden. Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999. xiv + 270 pp. ISBN 0-8131-2117-5 (cl.)

Karen Offen. European Feminisms, 1700-1950. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. xxviii + 554 pp. ISBN 0-8047-3419-4 (cl.); 0-8047-3420-8 (pb.)

In keeping with our growing awareness of globalization, scholars have focused special attention over the past five years on international aspects of modern feminism. Although some historical monographs from the 1980s, like Anne Wiltsher's Most Dangerous Women, chronicled such twentieth-century movements as the pacifist-feminist efforts during World War I, for the most part individuals and national organizations have gathered the lion's share of scholars' attention. ¹ As the Soviet empire collapsed, ending the most obvious global division, and as postcolonial migration intensified, investigations of the ties and differences among feminists internationally muted the scholarly emphasis on national activism. Thirty years of international women's conferences, beginning in the 1970s, redirected scholarship not only toward seeing feminism as a global enterprise but also toward rediscovering political relationships among women. In this environment, such works as Leila J. Rupp's Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement focused on international connections, especially since the late nineteenth century. ²

As Margaret McFadden understands it, feminism was a web, matrix, or network that metaphorically encircled most of the globe--long before the steamship, telegraph, or telephone had removed some of the strongest impediments to the development of an international feminist sensibility. McFadden details a global, or at least transatlantic, feminist matrix, rich with characters, including adventurers, abolitionists, poets, tourists, theorists, working-class activists, artists, nationalists, translators, and entrepreneurs who came from Russia, Hungary, Finland, Italy, Sweden, and the more commonly studied nations of western Europe and North America. These women wrote letters, treatises, novels, and songs--among other things--and founded societies, provided inspiration to organizers, or merely kept close track of the ideas and activities of women in many nations. Even though not activists themselves, such writers as George Sand gave force to the movement as their writings or other deeds gained international renown. These activities earned them a place in McFadden's account, which regards eighteenth-century writers and travelers as developing the network that continues through time via generational as well as spatial connections. Thus Finnish activists Aleksandra Gripenberg and Maggie Walz, and African American activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett are "granddaughter" figures to women of American suffragist Lucretia Mott's generation, but in no direct or unilinear way. Indeed, for McFadden, "the matrix formed in complex patterns of crossing, overlapping, and repeating. What I have depicted is not a particularly coherent or always intentional phenomenon; indeed much about the matrix is contradictory and haphazard (172)."

This account is persuasive to those who have studied the cultural and intellectual history of middle- and-upper-class women. In it one finds (as does McFadden) rather indefinable but definite relationships constructed around concern for women's circumstances. French writer Germaine de Staël, for example, had international contacts with many women authors who frequented literary circles or were decidedly pro-women. Within five years of Staël's death, the young Hortense Allart, with contiguous social connections, wrote critical essays on Staël's writings, and in the 1830s, joined the middle-class feminist movement in France. Similarly inspired were the pro-women writers Anna Jameson (mentioned in two of the works under discussion) and Lydia Maria Child, as well as numerous others in Scandinavia and the German states. In positing feminism as an amorphous phenomenon, McFadden's thesis is extremely stimulating because it raises two central questions: who belongs in...