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  • Feminists Intervene in Early American Studies
  • Mary C. Carruth (bio)

This roundtable developed out of the panel I chaired, "New Directions in Early Americanist Feminist Studies," at the 2007 American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Boston. I had asked the contributors to my critical collection, Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies, published by the University of Alabama Press in October 2006, to use as a heuristic a series of questions that my own process of feminist practice had stimulated. The contributors who could participate on the panel—Jennifer J. Baker, Sharon M. Harris, Tamara Harvey, Marion Rust, and Ivy Schweitzer—generated responses to these questions, which I suggest compose a kind of "feminist metacriticism." If we understand how (or not) we are creating knowledge, we will be better able to secure the strategies necessary for the growth of feminist scholarship in early American literature to 1800.

Like our ALA panel, this roundtable and its sequel in the next issue of Early American Literature engage feminist scholars in self-reflection about how we practice feminist criticism in early periods even as we practice it. I became aware of the value of this reflexivity during my process of thinking through Mary Rowlandson's body, which resulted in my essay in our collection, "Between Abjection and Redemption: Mary Rowlandson's Subversive Corporeality." I had to face the challenge: what was it about Rowlandson's representation of the body that had forestalled critical attention, especially feminist approaches, to it?

This investigation necessarily engaged me in a metacritical process that in itself would become a valuable mode of inquiry. More critical questions emerged, leading me to a broader issue: why was feminist critical practice in early American literature to 1800 so challenging? Was it true, for instance, that feminist work on this early period developed less rapidly than feminist literary scholarship on the nineteenth century? If so why? Did the [End Page 399] reasons lie in the dearth of public texts by women? In the genres of "nonliterary" texts produced? In the viability of the publishing industry in the period before 1800? In our critical tools—especially in our delicate critical balancing of seemingly ahistorical feminist theories with historicism? Do the reasons for the lag in feminist criticism in early periods lie in our own understandings of feminisms and their theories? In short, do the texts, authorships, and cultures of the early Americas elicit a different kind of feminist praxis from their counterparts of the nineteenth century?

All four of the contributors to the roundtable in this issueaddress the overarching issue, "Is it true that the progress of feminist scholarship is more delayed in early periods than in nineteenth century?" Marion Rust, Ivy Schweitzer, and Tamara Harvey answer "yes." Karen Weyler, identifying her academic interests at the crossroads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, answers "both no—and yes." Forthcoming in the next issue of Early American Literature is a second roundtable of contributors focused on "New Directions in Early American Feminist Studies." [End Page 400]

Mary C. Carruth
University of Mississippi
Mary C. Carruth

Mary C. Carruth is the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and adjunct assistant professor of English. She edited Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies (UP of Alabama, 2006), which includes her essay, "Between Abjection and Redemption: Mary Rowlandson's Subversive Corporeality."

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