Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies ed. by Mary C. Carruth (review)

In 2006, in her introduction to Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies, Mary C. Carruth observed that “no critical collection showcasing feminist perspectives has yet emerged” on early American literature (xiii). She answered this “gap in scholarship” with a collection of seventeen essays that “span two centuries, starting with the seventeenth-century English and Spanish colonies and continuing throughout the eighteenth century” (xiii, xvii). These essays focus on well-known authors, from Phillis Wheatley and Catharine Sedgwick to anonymous Southern Quaker women. The essayists cover the non-canonical genres that women traditionally penned, like captivity tales, travel records, letters, and diaries, and more canonical genres like poetry, novels, and drama. In fact, Mary Rose Kasraie mixes the canonical with the non-canonical in her compelling essay on Judith Sargent Murray and her letters, instead of her famous Gleaner essays. Carruth’s introduction underscores the importance of feminist studies not to be “subsume[d]” by early American studies; rather, she and her contributors work tirelessly for these two fields to be equally “link[ed]” (xiii). Carruth cites Sharon M. Harris’s essay “Feminist Theories and Early American Studies,” which is reprinted in the collection, as a commendable example of the collection’s theoretical frame. Harris uses feminist theory to open up the under-studied genre of the infanticide narrative to transform readers’ understanding of early American culture, such as what it means to have a “legally gendered crime” (xiii).

While secondary texts featuring feminism and early American studies and primary texts by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women have been published since this collection, Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies holds an invaluable place in scholarship as Carruth offers seventeen insightful essays as well as an introduction containing a thorough history of the academy’s polemical reaction to feminist studies’ effect on American literature. In her introduction, she cites the work of eminent scholars such as Sharon M. Harris, Annette Kolodny, Cathy N. Davidson, and Frances Foster Smith and their challenges to traditional understandings of American literature and culture. Carruth defines feminist theory “as not solely an analysis of gender but of the intersections of gender, race, class, nationality, and other markers of difference that characterize individuals and their relationships to institutionalized power” (xvi). In particular, Carruth highlights the importance of feminist theory and the discipline’s current push towards transnational studies. She states, “a transatlantic feminist lens would bring to light and historicize the different constructions of masculinity and their interactions with race, class, and culture. . .it would also identify and compare the literary productions, many in nontraditional genres, of diverse women writing in and about the Atlantic world” (xvi). Carruth gives excellent examples of this approach with smart essays by Tamara Harvey, on the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Margo Echenberg, on Sor Juana’s self-portraiture.

In sum, this is a necessary and well-informed collection of essays for any student or teacher of feminist theory and early American studies. Carruth puts it best when she writes that “this collection recovers women’s voices” and “reformulates customary ways of understanding early American life and letters” (xix).