Abstract
During a cursory glance at the title of Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume 1: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents, the reader may assume that this edited volume is focused on a critical analysis of key moments in the history of feminist movements and community organization both in the United States and abroad from a single perspective. However, the book moves beyond a historical overview and provides readers with the “voices” of the women involved in early feminist movements through a collection of primary documents that were written between the abolitionist movement and World War II. Instead of presenting a content analysis based on the interpretation of the “others,” the editors organized this collection of letters, essays, and speeches around common themes found in the primary documents, which allows the reader to analyze the content within its historical, social, and political contexts and draw their own conclusions.
The editors note in the Introduction: “Our volumes emphasize the international cause and an underrepresented national case, respectively, and by making the ‘feminism’ of our title plural we aim to signal our conviction that there are multiple, overlapping stories of the first wave. [These stories] take [into] account the emergence of ‘women’s rights’ movements over the course of the nineteenth century, concerned as they were with broadly similar social and political goals—higher education, political disenfranchisement, legal reforms, moral reforms—made for the possibility of international collaborations” (p. xxi).
This book takes on the ambitious task of presenting content that represents the diversity and intersectionality of cross-cutting issues during this first wave of feminism while not ignoring the dominant roles of elite white woman and the power dynamics within these movements. The selected documents achieve this balance. For example, Part 3 includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech before the 1869 Women’s Suffrage Convention and a speech by Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights activist whose parents were former slaves, to the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1898 on “The Progress of Colored Women.” These two speeches reflect the tensions among race, class, and gender within a single movement based on their lived experiences. By expanding the critical feminist framework to include this range of perspectives, the editors have made a contribution to scholarship on the history of feminist activism because their edited volume includes both well-known figures in the movement and lesser-known individuals who made an impact during this wave of feminism. Although the editors use a historical framework to organize the central themes of slavery, abortion, women’s rights, imperial (referring to imperialism) feminism, suffrage, nationalism/internationalism, citizenship, moral reform, sexuality, birth control, work, and peace, these documents can provide a lens for understanding how this first wave of feminism has influenced feminist thought in social work and other disciplines.
This book fits nicely within the social work curriculum in social welfare history and policy courses because it provides insights into the historical origins of feminist thought that influenced social policy, as well as the shifting roles, power, and perspectives of women during contemporary struggles. The content is also relevant to macro-focused courses on community organization, social movements, and activism because the selected documents reveal the thoughts and motives for the “calls for action” through the writings of these diverse activists in their own words. This book is an example of how the experiences of the past can be used as a foundation for applying social change efforts in contemporary social work practice.