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

As Lucy Delap notes in the introduction to this important and meticulously well researched study, historians of twentieth-century feminism have tended to both equate suffrage activism with feminism and assume “that the main focus of Edwardian feminist politics was the acquisition of the vote” (5). In doing so, the political discourses of Edwardian feminism are reductively homogenized and oversimplified, and the “complexities of affiliation within Edwardian feminism”—complexities that cannot adequately be conveyed by the concept of a left/right political spectrum or a feminist/anti-feminist binary—have gone unnoticed (5). Moreover, because the study of the history of feminism has predominantly been nationally focused, scant attention has been paid to the “avenues of intellectual exchange” between and among individuals and feminist organizations in Britain and the U.S. (3). The Feminist Avant-Garde seeks to correct the historical record in both regards. By analyzing how the “distinctively individualist and elitist” arguments of a transatlantic feminist avant-garde “challenged the politics associated with more conventional aspects of the women’s movement” (e.g., pro-statist maternity policies, theories of women’s rights, and gender equality), Delap demonstrates convincingly why the early twentieth century can’t accurately be characterized as a period of “united ‘liberal-suffrage’ politics” but instead needs to be understood as a “tense and formative period,” “a time of division and conflict between ideas of women’s emancipation” (5). By documenting the “extensive, frequently transatlantic, interaction” between avant-garde feminists in London, Chicago, and New York, she shows how feminism developed idiosyncratically and distinctively in these locations but was also a “shared conversation that spanned the Atlantic”; the firmly Anglo-American intellectual tradition that resulted “was highly influential in defining and shaping the politics of feminism for the entire twentieth century” (3).

Building thoughtfully on the recent work of scholars such as Sandra Stanley Holton, Christine Bolt, and Daniel Rodgers, Delap shows how feminist ideas about the “modern” woman crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, and were transformed dynamically in this process. While Christine Stansell has argued that the transnationalism of early-twentieth-century progressive reformers is best characterized in terms of “inspiration,” Delap gauges quite differently the “development and hybridisation of ‘feminisms’” (95) in the changing political environments of Britain and America in the late Edwardian period. Her work draws attention to the “close working relationships” (95) that American and British feminists established and sustained not only through the discussion groups associated with periodicals such as the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, and the Forerunner, but also through the public lectures, debates, and speaking tours hosted by institutions such as the Hetorodoxy Club, the New York Cooper Union, and London’s Chandos Hall (71). In her view, periodicals and the communities of readers that they created were a more important means of intellectual networking than formal political organizations. And the “‘glue’ for these intellectual networks was provided by close personal associations, friendships, and face-to-face opportunities for discussion” (55) in highly diffuse and ephemeral social venues—a point that underscores the value of the “focus on the local that has been an essential contribution of recent historiography” (328).

But if Delap’s primary goal is to document “an intellectual and political context for the shaping of modern feminism that was richer and more complex than the simple ‘liberal’ concern of equal rights” (321), a secondary goal is “to displace ‘modernism’ as the prime frame in which to understand feminist political argument” (9). Rather than simply “adding to the already substantial [body of scholarship] that examines the troubled inter-relation” of feminism and modernism, Delap seeks to position the “vanguard” feminism of intellectuals such as Dora Marsden, Charlotte Gilman, and Elsie Clews Parson “in a far wider intellectual network” (9) than that of the modernist avant-garde.

In spite of the fact that the production of richer, thicker histories of modernism is a hallmark of the new modernist studies, some readers of...