No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

Introduction

No Permanent Waves engages the ongoing debates over the adequacy of the “wave” metaphor for capturing the complex history of women’s rights and feminism in the United States. But it also moves beyond these debates to offer fresh perspectives on the diverse movements that constitute U.S. feminism , past and present. The volume brings together seventeen essays—both original and reprinted—to address the connections among movements for women’s rights and gender justice over time as well as the conflicts and divisions within such movements at any one time. The contributors, from different generations and backgrounds, argue for new chronologies, more inclusive conceptualizations of feminist agendas and participants, and fuller engagements with contestations around particular issues and practices than has been possible when using dominant analytical frameworks. They address issues of race, class, and sexuality within histories of women’s rights and feminism as well as the cultural and intellectual currents and social and political priorities that marked movements for women’s advancement and liberation. The concept of waves surging and receding cannot fully capture these multiple and overlapping movements, chronologies, issues, and sites. It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when feminists in the 1960s first identified themselves as part of a “second wave.” The rubric gained popular currency, however, with Martha Weinman Lears’s article “The Second Feminist Wave,” published in the New York Times Magazine in March 1968.1 But the wave metaphor had been wielded much earlier. Irish activist Frances Power Cobbe, writing of social movements more generally in 1884, claimed that some “resemble the tides of the Ocean, where each wave Introduction NANCY A. HEWITT 1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb obeys one uniform impetus, and carries the waters onward and upward along the shore.” Women’s movements, she argued, were the best example of such waves: “Like the incoming tide . . . it [sic] has rolled in separate waves . . . and has done its part in carrying forward all the rest.”2 The metaphor’s origin is less important, however, than the fact that by 1968 feminists in the United States had collectively lumped all their foremothers into a “first wave” that stretched back to the 1840s. Widely embraced by activists, this version of feminist waves also shaped understandings of the movement in the media and among scholars. In the 1990s, younger activists constituted themselves a “third wave,” accepting the metaphor if not the modus operandi of their foremothers. The propagation of new waves was not simply a means to recognize distinct eruptions of activism across time. Rather, feminists in each wave viewed themselves as both building on and improving the wave(s) that preceded them. Thus even as advocates of women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s eagerly sought out foremothers in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman—they also insisted that they were broader in their vision, more international in their concerns, and more progressive in their sensitivities to race, class and sexual politics than early feminists. Indeed, despite the diversity among celebrated foremothers, many feminists and scholars of feminism identified the first wave as comprising largely white, middle-class women focused on achieving narrowly defined political goals, most notably suffrage. In contrast, they claimed the second wave as more inclusive and more transformative. When a third wave emerged, its advocates, too, recognized the advances made by their (more immediate) foremothers but insisted on the limits of the goals and assumptions of second wave feminists. Spokeswomen for the third wave considered themselves broader in their vision, more global in their concerns, and more progressive in their sensitivities to transnational, multiracial, and sexual politics than earlier feminists. In most third wave writings, the second wave appeared as largely white and middle-class and focused narrowly on economic, educational, and political access. In contrast, the third wave viewed itself as championing greater inclusiveness and more transformative strategies. These battles over feminist legacies have influenced popular as well as scholarly understandings. Feminist claims about previous generations have been incorporated into books and articles in many disciplines as well as into NANCY A. HEWITT 2 newspaper and magazine stories, museum exhibits, political rhetoric, and documentary films. In the process, images of the various waves have become circumscribed. Although scholars who work on particular time periods or issues offer compelling stories filled with diverse characters and contentious struggles, these rich histories get lost...