From Suffrage to the Sex Wars
When we proposed a roundtable on Ellen Carol DuBois’ first book, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869, it seemed likely that contemporary politics would provide a Hollywood ending to her career. Women electing the first female president would cap off a life’s work that had illustrated that the battle for woman suffrage was not as previously believed “fundamentally conservative.” In these troubled times, Feminism and Suffrage reminds us that women’s activism is and always was “political” but even more importantly, that our work as historians of women is political.
From her earliest historical writings, on the Grimke sisters published in Women: A Journal of Liberation, DuBois has understood history as equal parts inspiration and caution. As a participant of women’s liberation and the movement for radical history, Ellen DuBois has always known that her historical work is inextricably linked to contemporary political struggles. As she reflected in the preface to the 1999 edition of Feminism and Suffrage, her choice of subject matter was influenced by her “own time and place in history” (7) as well as her appreciation for the ways that “the antebellum reform environment seemed to anticipate … [her] own time” (7).
For more than forty years, DuBois has not shied away from connecting her work to events outside the academy. DuBois ends the acknowledgements to Feminism and Suffrage by thanking “the women’s liberation movement, of which I am a part and which raised the historical questions by book is intended to answer” (12).
While we may look at her acknowledgement as a lovely gesture, in its time, it was a bold move. Linda Gordon’s now classic Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Birth Control in America was excoriated in the scholarly press for revealing such connections between the author and the movement for women’s liberation. In the AHR, reviewer J. Stanley Lemons, lambasted Gordon in a gender-laden sports analogy: “Like baseball and cricket,” the review concluded, “history and political polemics have different rules.” David M. Kennedy in the JAH called Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right “breathtakingly obtuse,” a book that “degenerates into simple cant . . . [and] sneering canards” concluding “This is not history.” Perhaps most upsetting was the review by Edward Shorter in the Journal of Social History who ridiculed “the members of the Bread and Roses Women’s Collective, the Marxist-Feminist Conference Group, and the Radical America editorial board” sniping that, “[these groups] whom Gordon acknowledges fulsomely in the preface, will doubtless beam approvingly” at “her work.”
DuBois viewed Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right work as a model of “a feminist political history, [and] a brilliant rewriting of the history of the birth control movement from the perspective of women’s liberation.” She helped to organize a letter writing campaign in defense of the book. At the OAH in April of 1978, DuBois also defended Gordon in a paper titled “Feminism and Women’s History” which pointedly called out women’s historians who “underplay the role of the feminist movement.” The end result of such histories, she feared, would be “to discredit the validity of the a feminist perspective on women’s history as a whole.” Years later in The Last Suffragist (1998) DuBois recalled what it was like, just as “the field of women history was on the verge of achieving academic legitimacy” to have “the idea of a historical practice influenced by a political movement outside the university” attacked as unprofessional (6). Although Feminism and Suffrage did not suffer the same fate at the hands of male reviewers, James McPherson in the AHR ended his review with the caution that while “DuBois’ feminist perspective” helps enliven her narrative, it “can also be a handicap, for it tends to exclude perspectives.”
Despite the backlashes within the academy, DuBois never stopped connecting women’s history to contemporary politics, despite the risks. In the 1980 roundtable published by Feminist Studies “Politics and Culture’ DuBois remained firmly focused on connecting history written about women’s activism to the contemporary feminist movement . She warned that women’s history risked becoming “depoliticized and academic in the worst sense of the word.”[20] Instead, she argued for a history of women that remained connected to “the feminist perspective on contemporary society.”[21]
She followed this controversial piece with an even greater one. In 1982, she and Linda Gordon co-authored one of the keynote addresses for the infamous 1982 Barnard Scholar & The Feminist conference “The Politics of Sexuality.” In “How Feminists Thought About Sex: Our Complex Legacy” (later published as “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield”) DuBois and Gordon opened Towards a Politics of Sexuality with a cautionary lesson from the past that tied 19th century purity movements to the contemporary anti rape efforts, in an effort to guide “how we conduct feminist campaigns around sexual issues today.”
In an era where academics are cautioned, or indeed often forbidden by their institutions, from wading into politics on social media and when there are too many cases of professors losing their jobs for taking political stands, I’m reminded by Dubois’ work that we wouldn’t have a field in which to get tenured jobs without the willingness of scholars like her to frankly and forthrightly assert the connections between women’s history and feminist activism.
As we move forward, both towards the centennial of woman suffrage and the election of 2020, we would do well to keep her example in mind.
