The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth-Century (review)

Portraits of Edwardian feminists often entail militant suffragists marching boldly across the public sphere or early modernists adventurously challenging Victorian standards in literature, art, or morality. In The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century, the recipient of the 2008 Women’s History Network Book Prize, Lucy Delap establishes that a flourishing transatlantic intellectual feminist community also contributed to issues in politics, economics, education, and identity during the early twentieth century. According to Delap, “[i]deological divides were relatively porous” at this time (p. 55), and avant-garde, or “vanguard,” members of the women’s movement sought new and multifaceted directions for the developing field of feminism through their individualist and, at times, elitist interests in anticonventionality, antistatist politics, creative experimentation, and economic independence (p. 4). Delap argues that “the extensive, frequently transatlantic, interaction between individuals and groups did constitute an intellectual formation, a feminist network that was highly influential in defining and shaping the politics of feminism for the entire twentieth century” (p. 3). Through innovative research and original archival work, she remaps the early twentieth- century intellectual public sphere by situating avant-garde feminists in conversation with the work of not only modernists and suffragists but also New Women, Fabians, egoists, antistatists, periodical editors, writers, and an elite reading public.

As a transatlantic study, Delap’s work emphasizes the ambitious individualist, elitist, educational, and economic goals of avant-garde feminists—goals that are often overshadowed by the spectacles of suffrage and the egalitarian and collectivist aims of the mainstream women’s movement in the United States and Great Britain in historical studies. By tracing the etymology of the term feminism, the competitions and disagreements among the multiple feminist networks, and the cultural capital of both their leading periodicals and the “bibles” of the women’s movement, such as Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour (1911), Delap shows that Edwardians did not consider feminism to be a “unified entity” (p. 1). Each chapter within this history of ideas considers both the specific historical and cultural concerns that influenced each locality and the intellectual and ideological exchanges among the imagined community of British and American avant-garde feminists. She ardently maintains that there was not a one-sided transmission of theories from the British to the Americans or vice versa. Delap first provides a helpful introduction to prominent avant-garde and mainstream feminists and to the evolution of the women’s movement, suffrage, and feminism during the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century. She then discusses individualism within the political arena; feminist responses to the state, the home, and citizenship; debates surrounding motherhood, feminist utopian thinking and modernity; genius; and the superwoman. The Feminist Avant-Garde concludes with the influence of the World War I upon feminism and a brief look at changes within British and American vanguard feminisms during the interwar period.

The breadth of Delap’s work is both impressive and exciting, for she provides research on a seemingly endless array of often-neglected feminists, writers, periodicals, women’s clubs, and manifestoes. She traces the feminist avant-garde’s connections to suffrage, modernism, politics, and philosophy through her consideration of the theories, conversations, and actions of The Freewoman, The Masses, The Little Review, Heterodoxy, and a broad range of feminists, such as Dora Marsden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, Alice Paul, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Eleanor Rathbone, and Mary Austin. Periodicals play a particularly important role in the evolution, exchange, and translation of avant-garde feminism, according to Delap. Her work on the central positions of Dora Marsden and The Freewoman within her web of vanguard feminists is both a fascinating and skillful means of providing order to this fluctuating and multifaceted sphere. Marsden’s focus upon self-development, rather than self-sacrifice, highlights key differences between suffragists and avant-garde feminists and provides an interesting segue into the debates surrounding motherhood, the home, and the role of the state...