"Feminism is one of the great and substantial democratic movements, a tradition of thought and action spanning more than two hundred years." The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, by Christine Stansell is a history of feminism, but it's also a much-needed reminder that feminism is vital to democracy, just as democracy is vital to feminism. It's a must-read, not only in the 'this is a good book and you'd enjoy it' sense, but in the 'this should be part of every American history curriculum' sense. In fact, there are so many things I love about this book that I'm having trouble deciding where to start.
Stansell spent nine years researching and writing The Feminist Promise, and the result is complex, thorough, a 'thick understanding' (a term Stansell uses and which I'm stealing from now on) of the tensions involved in the movement variously known as women's rights, feminism, women's liberation. Feminists often need to remind people that women are not a monolith; Stansell reminds us that feminists aren't either, and really never have been. Differences of privilege, position and opinion have divided feminist thought and action, but they've also given us many different avenues of attack.
The Feminist Promise begins with Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution, but the book is mostly focused on feminism in the United States. There are a few detours to Britain and France, and a couple of unfavorable comparisons with Scandinavian labor policies, and the last chapter, which focuses on global feminism in the '90s and later, expands upon the codependent relationship between feminism and democracy, and the difficulties that feminist organizations face in the absence of stable democracy. The history of American feminism is especially bound up with the history of the civil rights movement, which Stansell identifies as another great movement of democracy.
Even though I would consider myself fairly knowledgable about both history and feminism, I learned a hell of a lot from The Feminist Promise. Stansell doesn't mythologize or try to establish an overarching narrative -- she does employ an understanding of some feminist conflicts as mother/daughter tensions, but she does so with a fairly light touch -- she also doesn't demonize or shy away from unfortunate truths. Like a lot of histories, the older material is more slow-moving and spread out, while the chapters become faster-paced and more packed the closer we come to today.
Stansell concludes her history with a personal observation that will seem familiar to many feminists. Writing about becoming a feminist in 1969 she notes "I anticipated a quick exit, but because the cause seemed so indisputably just and the remedies so obvious. Surely it couldn't take too long... Forty years later, the expectation of imminent, thoroughgoing change is gone. And there has been no quick exit, for me or anyone else." She sees a victory in the movement of feminism from the fringes to the center of both culture and policy, but cautions us that this "does not mean that the classic wrongs of women have been righted," and challenges us to not only remember our history but learn from it and move forward.
