What does it Mean to Periodize a Theory? Three Feminist Encounters with Theories of the Nineteenth Century

Victorian anthropology of marriage was both an object of twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist scholarship and an antecedent of the feminist theories that informed that scholarship. This essay considers three different feminist approaches to nineteenth-century theories about sexual and social relations. Rosalind Coward (1983), Talia Schaffer (2017), and Elizabeth Grosz (2011) present us with three very different ways of thinking about the relationship between present and past theories about sexual and social relations. Their readings of Victorians like Henry Maine, John McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Charles Darwin complicate the question of what it means for a theory to be "from" or "about: the nineteenth century, and of what it means to historicize theory and theorize history.