Feminism and the Politics of Canonisation in American Political Thought 1851-1978

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What does it mean to tell a history of feminism in a feminist way? As an intervention in the history of feminist thought, my research will reconstruct cases that span over a century of political activism to tell a story of conservation and transformation, and of memory and forgetting. This will be centred around the women's liberation movement in the United States, between 1851 and 1978. I will theorise in new ways about the modes through which feminists have told, complicated, and obscured their own history. By drawing together strands of feminist activism, I will explore questions including: What various purposes have the memories of past figures served for activists over time? Have different groups (including working class, black, queer) used memory in contrasting ways? In doing so, my research will contribute to work conducted by feminist academics, especially black feminist academics, including Kimberly Springer, Wini Breines, Ashley D. Farmer, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard. Despite important work conducted by these academics, the history of activists who are feminist, black, queer, and/or working class remains an understudied area. There is extensive room for new findings and synergies - room which this research will inhabit. My project will pay particular attention to reception histories and the way history has served as a resource for activists. I take reception history to mean the study of how historical figures have been memorialised and interpreted by different individuals and groups over time. In the first instance, I will build on research conducted for my MPhil and reconstruct a feminist reception history of Sojourner Truth, an activist for women's rights who emancipated herself from slavery and was prominent and active in political circles between the late 1840s and 1883. In the second instance, I will contrast Truth's reception history with reception histories of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two early women's rights activists that engaged in important historical preservation work - but who, at times, used racist caricatures in telling the history of Black women's rights activists. Moving to a period of radical feminism in the 1960s-70s, I will next consider the work of Florence Howe, a pioneer in Women's Studies who actively sought ways to publish feminist history. I will follow this with a reconstruction of the political thought and practice of The Sisterhood, a group of black women writers and artists who drew strength from feminist history to support their own activism. The section on the Sisterhood will be informed by existing research conducted for my MPhil. I will use the preceding novel excavation work as an occasion for thinking about a series of pressing issues, asking: How have feminists reckoned with an inadequate and often racist history? And what place does historical memorialisation have in contemporary political theorising and activism? The primary research method used in this thesis will be historical, including extensive archival research. This will enable me to contribute to the novel excavation work of feminist history, thereby advancing knowledge of the political priorities and practical methods of feminists and early women's rights activists. This thesis also participates in ongoing efforts by political theorists to reassess what is included in histories of the discipline of political theory itself. This approach is informed by the work of Brandon Terry and Erin Pineda on the Civil Rights Movement, Adom Getachew on Post-Colonial activism, and Kathi Weeks on the Wages for Housework movement. As all of these theorists have asked, what follows from treating activist texts as political theory? Conducted in a contemporary moment in which statues are being torn down and nations are reckoning with their collective histories, this thesis will contribute innovative arguments to ongoing conversations about how history has, could, and should be told.