Feminism in Time

Like the White Rabbit, those of us addressing you from the pages of this special issue on "feminism in time" are late, quite late, for what remains (arguably) a very important date—with a highly enigmatic figure whose continued existence is subject to debate in these and other (related) sets of pages written shortly before and shortly after the turn of the millennium. As a figure, feminism has multiple, changing, and disputed referents. The name in the dominant modern sense given by the Oxford English Dictionary —"advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes)"—came rather belatedly into English: 1894-95, according to the OED 's entries for the substantive and adjectival forms of the word. This philological fact may surprise you (it did me), since many students of feminism, including one in this collection (Laura Mandell), date the birth of feminism in its modern form to the European Enlightenment. Yet more specifically, but also more partially, with reference to the coordinates of "national" language and geography as well as to those of linear time, feminism's "birth" has been (and is here too) provisionally located in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, in particular her famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

"Birth" is in quotation marks because the contributors to the present issue recognize not only that the entity we are calling feminism has multiple incarnations but that even the historical variant best known to Anglophone cultural historians—the feminism of "equality," or "liberal" feminism—is contested and knowable only in relation to other historical constructions, including the ideals of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" formulated during the French Revolution. Like psychoanalysis, Mandell argues, feminism "is both antidote to and child of Enlightenment thought." Mandell studies feminism as a "friend" of psychoanalysis and, in so doing, speculates provocatively on a fragile but "realistically utopian" alliance between (the study of) history and the affective set toward the future that several writers here call hope.

The historical appearance of the word feminism is clearly a belated signal of the developing (international) movement for "Woman's Rights," which Queen Victoria, writing to Sir Theodore Martin in 1870, denounced as "mad, wicked folly." ¹ Both the substantive and the adjective derive from the Latin femina (woman) via French, a language that British and American writers have often associated with dangerous imports. The OED 's first illustration of feminist in the sense suggested in my first paragraph comes from an 1894 issue of the London Daily News, about "what our Paris Correspondent describes as a 'Feminist' group . . . being formed in the French Chamber of Deputies." The name feminism, in the modern incarnations acknowledged by the OED (related terms from the same root include feminity, from 1386; feminivorous —perhaps fortunately, "rare"—from 1820; and feminize, from 1652), seems from the start to be associated with social notions alien to normative Englishness: Ibsen's "femininistic propaganda" is mentioned in a 1902 example of that adjective, and a 1908 example of the noun states that "in Germany feminism is openly Socialistic." Yet another example, also from 1908, announces that "some thinkers in Hungary anticipate feministic developments even in Turkey." Feminism and feminist(ic) cultural tendencies are multinational and potentially dangerous as they enter the time/space of the OED 's representation of English.

Translation across geopolitical borders is a central facet of feminism in its modern incarnation; translation and cultural appropriation, with their attendant political ambiguities, are central also to earlier feminist thinkers, who are often called protofeminist. That word is as debatable, in my view, as the fashionable contemporary term postfeminist ; both prefixes imply that feminism has a single, linear history. ² If you grant, however, that there are different (and, I would argue, ongoing, mutually illuminating, even mutually constitutive) histories of feminism, then you can find traces of both the "equality" and the "difference" versions of feminist thinking (and discursive practices with real social ramifications) in the work...