The Grounding of Modern Feminism

"Nancy Cott is one of the founding generation of women’s historians. The Grounding of Modern Feminism traces the arrival of the term feminism in the United States. Feminism as a concept, as an identity, emerged in the United States around 1910 among a group of women who called themselves feminists. These women were younger than the Elizabeth Cady Stanton generation. They had already benefited from the opening of doors to educational opportunities and social reform movements. They were often modernists. Georgia O’Keeffe, for example, was a feminist. Many of the most radical suffragettes were also self-declared feminists. Cott traces the development of this group of feminists and then follows feminist ideology into the 1920s and -30s. She examines the profound paradox of the feminist legacy, which is on the one hand, that feminists celebrated women’s individuality—their membership in what they called the human sex, as fully embodied individuals. But she shows that this concept of individualism is in profound tension with feminists’ sex consciousness. A feminist movement had to be based in women’s status as women and women’s need to fight for their rights as a group. She teases out the long legacy of that paradox. This book’s most important lesson is the fact that feminist leaders were a self-assertive group of women, many of them college-educated, many of whom were fighting to succeed in professional environments. Many were professors and doctors and lawyers. Their embrace of individual achievements and their drive to overcome sex consciousness did not sit easily with activists in the labor movement after passage of the 19th Amendment. This is because if you erase sex consciousness, you risk eliminating safeguards for the many working-class women who benefited from protective labor laws, such as hours limits on work days for women. A huge fight blew up around the Equal Rights Amendment. Many leading women social reformers opposed it because they feared that the sex-specific situation of women as mothers and caretakers would be made harder because the amendment didn’t take into consideration those conditions. Nancy Cott’s exploration of the friction between the interests of feminist leaders and working-class women is one of her book’s most important legacies."