The Grounding of Modern Feminism by Nancy F. Cott (review)

382 Shorter Book Reviews events and names. Probably something of an "official" history can do no more, especially for an institution that disdained official norms. Harris suggests the legacy of BMC is not a style or orthodoxy, but wider acceptance of experimental creativeness, an attitude diffused by a network of sympathetic students and artists. The education of the individual for life was the College's goal, not the perpetuation of its own influence. Disdaining traditional academic forms and standards, it was clearly on the side of free process and against planning or institutional rationality. Thereby Black Mountain College forfeited the kind of enduring influencewhich more traditional institutions value. Erich Hahn Department of History University of Western Ontario Nancy F. Cott. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. xii + 382 pp. Illus. Historians attempting to accountfor the apparent demise of feminism in the years after women won the vote have erred, Nancy Cott maintains, in lumping together two different, although allied, social phenomena: the suffrage movement as the final manifestation of the nineteenth-century "woman" movement, and the feminist movement of the twentieth century. Only in the 1910s did ''Feminism'' come into the American voe:abulary,and those calling themselves "Feminists" did so to distinguish their broader and more sweeping demands from the more limited goals of the suffragists. "What historians have seen as the demise of feminism in the 1920s was, more accurately," Cott tells us, "the end of the suffrage movement and the early struggle of modem feminism" (10). Her persuasive interpretation will almostcertainly recast scholarship on the history of women in the l920s and beyond. Cort's first book, The Bonds of Womanhood (Yale University Press, 1977), identified that time, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in which the ideology of a distinctive woman's sphere became widely accepted~ simultaneously constraining women by its notions of appropriate female roles, and empowering them by making them aware of themselves as a distinctive group. The Bonds of Womanhood described the conditions and the consciousness which encouraged the establishment of the woman movement of the nineteenth century. Picking up at the historic turningpoint at the beginning of the twentieth century, at which the nineteenth-century fictionof homogeneous womanhood lost credibility in the face of a more diverse reality for women, The Grounding of Modern Feminism traces the beginnings of this century's feminist movement. Its title, like that of the first book, is ironic. Shorter Book Reviews 383 Benefiting from the proliferation of options and opportunities that permitted women of their generation more varied lives than those of their mothers, those calling themselves Feminists in the 191Osset ambitious goals. They insisted on female individuality (as opposed to being thrust indiscriminately into a category called "woman"), full political participation, economic independence, and sex rights (by which they meant the complete expression of women's sexual natures). Most of Cott' s book is devoted to the efforts of those who sought, in a wide variety of ways, to achieve these goals in the 1920s. And those efforts were much more extensive and multifaceted than previous historians have recognized. Ina series of fascinating chapters, Cott imaginatively and systematically examines every route tried by feminists of the I920s, from the careful focusing of energies on the achievement of legal equality tried by the National Woman's Party, to the varied, often contradictory endeavors to improve women's situation as wage-earners. She explores women's attempts (which were fiercely resisted) to undermine the economic bargain on which marriage, as interpreted by case law, continued to be based, as well as their retreat into the acceptance of companionate marriage as the equivalent of a subversion of gender hierarchy. The optimistic assumption of female professionals that they could make substantial gains for women by adhering to impartial standards of excellence , thereby making gender an irrelevant category, is also the subject of a chapter. The decade saw few obvious successes. Not only were there the problems posed by the "persistent structures and ideologies of male dominance," but for many women, "feminism was an impulse that was impossible to translate into a program without centrifugal results" (282). The concept of a woman's bloc...