Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers

Lori Marso, Lori J. Marso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317192756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Feminismo y teoría feminista

The feminist thinkers in this collection are the designated "fifty-one key feminist thinkers, " historical and contemporary, and also the authors of the entries. Collected here are fifty-one key thinkers and fifty-one authors, recognizing that women are fifty-one percent of the population. There are actually one hundred and two thinkers collected in these pages, as each author is a feminist thinker, too: scholars, writers, poets, and activists, well-established and emerging, old and young and in-between. These feminists speak the languages of art, politics, literature, education, classics, gender studies, film, queer theory, global affairs, political theory, science fiction, African American studies, sociology, American studies, geography, history, philosophy, poetry, and psychoanalysis. Speaking in all these diverse tongues, conversations made possible by feminist thinking are introduced and engaged.

Key figures include:

• Simone de Beauvoir
• Doris Lessing
• Toni Morrison
• Cindy Sherman
• Octavia Butler
• Marina Warner
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Chantal Akerman
• Betty Friedan
• Audre Lorde
• Margaret Fuller
• Sappho
• Adrienne Rich

Each entry is supported by a list of the thinker's major works, along with further reading suggestions. An ideal resource for students and academics alike, this text will appeal to all those interested in the fields of gender studies, women's studies and women's history and politics.

Acknowledgments

Alyson Claffey at Routledge has been wonderful, answering all my many questions with efficiency and patience. I also thank the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Political Science Department at Union College for financial support. Two undergraduate research assistants, Perry Moskowitz and Sydney Paluch, helped me to attend to several details at key points and kept me sane.

My contributors deserve the credit for the truly amazing document this book has become. Reaching across time zones, generations, fields of study and work, and styles of writing, we collectively present this conversation about feminism’s pleasures, frustrations, antagonisms, and dreams. I thank all of my authors for their incredible expertise, patience, generosity, brilliance, and the much appreciated notes of encouragement that seemed to come at just the right moments.

This book is for Luci whose “Women Who Changed the World” has always been an inspiration.

Abigail Adams (1744–1818)

Patricia Moynagh

DOI: 10.4324/9781315558806-1

Abigail Adams is often held up as a feminist thinker and rightly so. Her most quoted line “Remember the Ladies” appears in a letter, dated March 31, 1776, written to her husband, John Adams, future president of the United States. But at this moment, the United States is not yet united. Just shy of 100 days from declaring its independence from Great Britain, the newly envisioned nation is a messy work in process, a battleground occupied by factious stakeholders. The idea of liberty is unquestionably in the air, expressed loudly in the call for independence from King George III and his occupying army, the redcoats. Yet many contenders express loyalty to the so-called “mother country,” and some, even if they desire independence, fear that freedom for all could bring disorder. The prospect of expanding liberty electrifies some and terrifies others.

Like many, Abigail Adams was directly and adversely affected by these conditions, raising her four children in the war zone that Massachusetts had become. John’s role as a delegate (representing his state) took him away to Philadelphia (often for long periods) where, as a member of the Continental Congress, he was a leading founder of self-proclaimed revolutionary forces formulating ideas about how to govern. In his absence, Abigail played deputy husband. To her role of running the family, finances and farming were added. Referring to the revolutionary movement of which John was increasingly becoming a major contributor, he implored Abigail in 1774 “to take Part with me in this struggle” [1774] (1975, 59).

Join him in struggle she certainly would. Little did he expect her to seek its logical conclusion through expansion of liberty for slaves and women. Their physical separation, while difficult for them, has left researchers a treasure trove. She in Braintree (later named Quincy in 1803) and he in Philadelphia, their only way to connect was through letter-writing. Reading their epistolary exchanges (they preserved 1,160 letters between them) provides great insight into their times and how they differently understood the future of the nation.

Abigail wants women to be positively positioned to live their lives more fully. She contests the many and various laws, barriers, and customs that diminish women to a vassal caste, a subordinate species, legally superfluous. With all this talk of liberty, what of women’s, she asks. Yet even before she gets to her famous command to “be more generous and favourable” to women “than your ancestors,” she condemns slavery. She points to a blatant contradiction. Delegates who are beginning to fight for liberty from Britain are not doing the same for slaves:

I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.

[1776] (1975, 120)

As much as two years prior (1774), she had written to John on the same topic: “I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province.” She added:

It allways appeared a most iniquitous Scheme to me—fight ourselfs for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.

[1774] (2007, 47–48)

As the letter continues, it’s clear she is thinking much more widely about liberty and beseeching her husband to do the same. She knows he opposes slavery. She also knows she is his most trusted advisor and confidante. A frequent salutation to each other is “Dearest Friend” and she invokes this appellation over that of “Master” whether in relation to slave or wife, telling him to “give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend” [1776] (1975, 121).

Abigail herself was not oppressed by race or class, but by her sex. But when Abigail advocated on behalf of her sex, John dismissed her as a “rebel” by using the same adjective, “sausy,” to describe her unruliness as he had to depict other “rebels” six years earlier in 1770. At that time, he defended British soldiers who shot and killed five “rioters,” an event that would be dubbed the Boston Massacre. Maybe there was some lawyerly honor in his commitment to show that British soldiers could get a trial in his state (he never regretted this decision, calling it one of the most “gallant” and “manly” of his life), but there is no undoing his words [1773] (2008–2015). In the courtroom, he depicted the crowd that threw oyster shells and snowballs at the soldiers as “most probably a motley rabble of sausy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs” [1770] (2008–2015, 12). Among the “jack tars” was the black seaman, Crispus Attucks. Five of the seven soldiers, along with their captain, were acquitted and the other two were eventually exonerated, while the murdered—those who had acted out against the injustices of the British—could not tell their stories. To John, “rebels,” the category into which John’s wife was quickly descending, were dispensable, but not so the “revolutionaries.” The rebels were the dispossessed, the forgotten, the non-stakeholders. Those who rebelled, rather than revolutionized, did not count in the same way. They counted not, in fact: the new nation would be for the haves.

Responding to Abigail’s letters, John viewed her as impertinently out of line. If Abigail advocated for women she was with the “sausy boys,” but if she kept to her class and race, she was a patriot. Attempting to reach him in yet another way, Abigail declares: “Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex” [1776] (1975, 121). Upon reading her “extraordinary Code of Laws” [1776] (1975, 122–23), John replies: “I cannot but laugh” [1776] 1975, 122–23). After enumerating—in jest-like fashion—all the insubordinate groups such as Children, Apprentices, “Colledges,” Indians and Negroes, that have become “disobedient,” “grown turbulent,” or otherwise “insolent,” John says her letter was “the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented” [1776] (1975, 123).

So close to power was this soon-to-be second first lady (the term had not yet been invented) when she told her beloved to be “more generous” to women than his ancestors had been, Abigail Adams had John’s ear, but it did not matter. She warns him of the hardness of “arbitrary power” which is “liable to be broken” [1776] (1975, 127). Finally she capitulates, while also making her best attempt to save face, by proclaiming “not withstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims,” women have “power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our masters” [1776] (1975, 127). Yet Abigail is not satisfied and reaches out to her friend and playwright Mercy Otis Warren, with whom she long corresponded. She complains about her husband’s response. She suggests how they will together “petition Congress” [1776] (2015). From many a plea, she moves to petition.

What Abigail urged her husband to do in the spring of 1776 remains unfulfilled. A party of one, however close to power, won’t carry the day, not when centuries’ worth of practices and institutions to reinforce them have promoted the diminution of women. It was not then, and is not now, enough to plead with one’s oppressors. Nevertheless, that she spoke up at all and left her letters for her like-minded descendants to read shows that even a party of one is better than a non-existent one. Speaking up should not be underestimated even if the hearer does not like the message.

That the idea to “petition Congress” did not come to pass does not diminish Abigail’s aspiration to transform her party of one into a petition of two. She was on the right track. For women to come together for common cause remains essential for enacting change. Each time members of the “more numerous tribe” speak out and work together for women’s greater freedom, we are that much closer to honoring this aspect of Abigail’s legacy.

Note to readers

First, anyone who writes about the Adamses is confronted with how to refer to them. Scholarly convention holds that the last name is used. Yet they share a last name (she was born a Smith). I have opted to refer to them by their first names, but with some hesitation because women are so often referred to this way, men less so. Second, Eighteenth Century English is different from our own. I have kept the original letters intact, mistakes and all.

Adams's major writings

• 1975. The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family 1762–1784, edited and with an introduction by Butterfield, L. H. , Friedlaender, Marc and Kline, Mary-Jo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
• 2007. My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, edited by Hogan, Margaret A. and James Taylor, C. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
• 2008–2015. Taylor, C. James (ed.). The Adams Papers Digital Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda).
• 2016. Taylor, C. James (ed.). Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society). www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/letter/

Further reading

• Gelles, Edith B. 2009. Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Harper-Collins).
• Gelles, Edith B. 1992. Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
• Holton, Woody. 2009. Abigail Adams: A Life (New York: Free Press).
• Jacobs, Diane. 2014. Dear Abigail: The Intimate Lives and Revolutionary Ideas of Abigail Adams and Her Two Remarkable Sisters (New York: Ballantine Books).

Chantal Akerman (1950–2015)

Lori Marso

DOI: 10.4324/9781315558806-2

Film auteur Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles premiered in 1975. Mostly silent and presented in what seems like “real time” proportions, the film centers on a Belgian widow going about her day—peeling potatoes, washing dishes, making coffee, brushing her hair, taking a bath, cleaning the bathtub, straightening linens on the bed, shopping for a button, breading veal cutlets, making meatloaf, putting evening meals on the table for her teenage son, caring for a neighbor’s child, eating her lunch alone at the kitchen table, and servicing clients as a prostitute for a half hour on each afternoon of the three days that the film chronicles. The year of the film’s release was, coincidentally, the same year that Silvia Federici published her influential essay, “Wages Against Housework.” In this essay, Federici argued that “not only is wages for housework a revolutionary perspective, but it is the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint” (1975, 16). That same year, Laura Mulvey published her influential, now-canonical and much criticized, essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” arguing that classic Hollywood film conventions are predicated on, as well as reproduce, the male gaze as subject and the female body as object (Mulvey 1975). Jeanne Dielman seemed perfectly poised to answer both Mulvey and Federici. The film can be read as challenging cinema’s male gaze in its breaking with Hollywood’s conventions and instead utilizing long interior takes, very little dialogue, and a minimalist aesthetic that is narratively linear yet remarkably experimental. Some argue that it also provides visual content to rally us to Federici’s feminist revolution by revealing the daily grind of housework on screen.

Born in Brussels, Belgium, to Holocaust survivors from Poland, Chantal Akerman dropped out of film school in the first term to create Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town), a thirteen-minute film that centers on a young girl (played by Akerman) in her apartment. She puts away groceries, makes herself some noodles and eats them, tapes up the doorway, mops the floor, dances a little. Accompanied by her humming and singing, the film is a study in female exuberance, anxiety, boredom, and sensation, chronicling the young woman coming undone. She kills herself at the end by turning on the gas, leaning over the stove, and lighting a match. This was Akerman’s first film, made when she was only 18 years old. The themes of female alienation and isolation, the break from conventional narratives, and the emphasis on ambiguity in meaning, dominate much of her oeuvre. Akerman shot over forty films in all, including several shorts as well as longer features such as Je tu il elle (1975), News from Home (1976), One Day Pina Asked Me (1983), Night and Day (1991), and her final film, No Home Movie (2015). A Couch in New York (1996) is her most commercial film, and stars William Hurt and Juliette Binoche. Je tu il elle, which she created in order to prove she could make a feature length film, contains a brilliant lesbian sex scene (also with one of the roles played by Akerman) that was made 38 years earlier and is far bolder than the much discussed lesbian sex in Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 Blue is the Warmest Color.

No Home Movie features Akerman talking with her mother, Natalia, in her Belgian apartment. Akerman’s mother survived Auschwitz, and while this history clearly weighs on the family, there is little direct talk of the horrific events she must have suffered and witnessed. Instead, we see th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers
• Acknowledgments
• Index