History as strategy: imagining universal feminism in the women’s movement

Abstract

In this chapter we compare six histories from the international campaign for women’s suffrage in 1880–914, the so-called ‘First Wave’ of feminism, with a number of more recent (1980–present) historiographical interventions that address racial exclusion within feminism. In both periods, historical arguments are used as a strategy to imagine and to advocate transnational or universal feminism. However, in their ambition to be solid and authoritative, the first-wave movement histories applied nineteenth-century academic and nationalist historiographic conventions and reproduced racialized ideas about history and progress, positioning white women as historical actors speaking on behalf of other women. Voices, memories, and experiences of non-white women thus disappeared from the image of the history of ‘the’ women’s movement. We conclude that the recent strategies to recover and re-imagine what has been excluded disrupt the traditional boundaries between grassroots and academic history. They cross the boundaries between scholarly history and artistic, popular, and mediatized representations. History from below, histories of marginalization, and oral histories dealing with the experiences and memories of the ‘losers’ of history find their way into research, education, and popular awareness. Ultimately such historiographic interventions allow us to rethink the opposition between memory and history and thus deepen understanding of social movements.