Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (review)

Who would think that an anthology of writings largely by women of the long eighteenth century could provide an optimistic re-vision of our present moment, when democracy is bought by the wealthy and feminism strangled by right-wing religion? That is only one of the surprises and pleasures offered in the pages of the new collection Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions, edited by Lisa Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton, each of whom brings a special expertise to the project. This was a time when revolutionary discourse had a sharp, uncompromising edge, and many women, high born and low, white and colored, deist and evangelical, used it to slice through the contradictions and hypocrisies of masculinist Enlightenment arguments (such as: women are the weaker sex, so they shouldn't be educated, but rather should spend their lives in physical domestic labor—hmm). In the excerpt from A Vindication of the Rights of Women, when Mary Wollstonecraft responds to Rousseau's widely held assertion that "with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour," with the terse retort, "What nonsense!" (269), I nearly leaped up and cheered. Reading through this collection was like chicken soup for the feminist democratic political soul.

The explicit purpose of Transatlantic Feminisms is, as the editors write in their thorough introduction, to collect in one volume a diverse array of voices from the North Atlantic rim of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order "to tune into a lost historic conversation among English-speaking women, to gain a sense of the many origins of feminist thought, and to create a new history of feminism that abandons national frameworks and instead tracks the revolutionary dreams and words of women as those words traveled around the Atlantic world" (6). This ambitious project is the fruit of several important current critical trends and answers a need in the field for primary sources that allow instructors to reconfigure their pedagogy along the lines of these paradigms and their intersections.

First is the turn to "transatlanticism," which the editors describe as "the study of the transnational and intercultural networks of literary and cultural movement around the Atlantic world, including Europe, Africa, and the Americas" (7). Such an approach eschews the prevailing focus on national borders and identities in order to examine how texts and ideas travel across artificial boundaries, how they circulate, cross-pollinate, and transform. Examples abound, but the one that struck me most was the British-born actor, writer, and celebrity Mary Darby Robinson, who in her fiery "Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination" (1799) cites the fact that many indigenous American tribes honor women with important leadership roles. This tradition is exemplified by the speeches of Cherokee "Beloved Woman," Nanye'hi/Nancy Ward from the 1780s, which are also contained in the anthology.

Moore, Brooks, and Wigginton consider themselves feminist literary historiographers drawing inspiration from second-wave feminism's recovery of lost and obscured texts. They accordingly have included works by a wide range of writers detailed below, many of whom are not usually addressed in histories of this period. But they also feel compelled to integrate third-wave feminist concerns with race, class, colonialism, imperialism, and sexuality, concerns that remind us that not every instance of women's writing is a feminist intervention or radical act. Rather, writing inscribes the writer's social, political, and cultural locations. In reading texts by women from various backgrounds organized chronologically, this collection allows us to "reflect," as the editors remark, "on the ways different groups of women came to writing during the eighteenth century and the different purposes that motivated them" (31). In so doing, the volume discloses the multiple and multifarious origins of feminism that have led to a welcome expansion of its definition "to include all women"—and I would add "men" and even the more sex...