Power and Politics in Feminism's History--and Future

It is always a daunting task to comment on the work of Joan Scott. Scott produces extremely rich, sophisticated work that is consistently well argued, deeply felt, and intellectually daunting. "Feminism's History" is no exception.

My comments focus on two themes raised in this paper. The first is the question of power in Scott's discussion of feminism's history's future. The second is the issue of politics, or more specifically, visionary progressive politics. I ask if, in the "pursuit of what has not yet been thought," there is a role for imagining the kind of historical practices, theories, and pedagogies, which could lead to more complex imaginings of egalitarian futures.

On the issue of power: Scott argues that the last several decades have seen the increasing success of the feminist project in history. All of the trappings of success are quite visible: More women (although not all women) have been written into the historical record and as a result that record has been profoundly changed and enriched. Women historians hold important positions in departments around the country and in the professional organizations. Many of the leading scholars have successfully produced several generations of equally outstanding students. There are several journals devoted to women's history and the leading journals in the profession now give prominent attention to women's history and the role of gender in historical studies. Yet, no one would doubt that this success is uneven and woefully incomplete. Indeed, it is the unevenness of this success that, in part, makes it so curious that the future of feminism's history is being questioned at this particular time and in this place.

Scott provides several explanations—aging feminist scholar-activists nostalgic for their lost youth; the institutionalization of women's history; the inevitable let down as the outsiders become well represented among the insiders; the fragmented, dispersed women's movement that no longer provides a visibly coherent ally and audience for feminist history; the dulling of a critical edge that came with being on the margins; structural change in the university; and lastly, the domestication of desire that comes with the need to shore up and protect that which has been won.

I agree with Scott that these are surely key reasons why questions about the future have arisen. Yet I detect other anxieties in other voices raising this question in the roundtable in the Journal of Women's History to which Scott referred. In this conversation, while there was concern and worry about being overwhelmed by the volume and diversity of new work in the field, there was also a broad expression of a desire for a "collective" cross-generational discussion about the future. Indeed, it was suggested that such a conversation could be institutionalized via the inclusion of a track on the future at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Yet, if as Sara Evans argued, thinking about the future requires thinking about the present—about what we collectively need, would like to make possible, or would like to change—then the characterization of the present is important to understand. Here, I am not talking about a present constructed as the future of a once-more-activist past but rather a present constructed by the activities that led to the current uneven and incomplete successes of feminist historical projects over the past two decades. I was struck by Evans' comment that "now we have to cope with the fruits of our success." The fruits of our success have variously been characterized in terms that emphasize the negative connotations of fragmentation against a former more positive wholeness. While neither Scott nor the participants in the conversation in the Journal of Women's History argue that the return to grand narratives is either possible or desirable, the desire for some sort of collectivity is palpable. Yet it seems to me that the issue of collectivity is what needs to be theorized with respect to our work. Our present collectivity, I would suggest, is markedly different from the kind of collective experiences that gave impetus to the project of feminist...