The roots of feminism in democratic political theory, the first element in this framework, have long been recognized by historians. Since at least the eighteenth century, the shift from hierarchical rule by elites to representative government — based on the theory of the natural rights of man — has in­spired demands for self-representation and full […]

The title of this essay and of my book, “No Turning Back,” refers to the his­torical momentum that has propelled feminism, a word I use to describe broad efforts to achieve full political and economic citizenship for women.3 Feminist movements reject a political theory of patriarchy, which assumes that men should naturally have authority over […]

A central theme in my feminist studies course is that feminism is a process, not an in­herited dogma; only continual reinvention has allowed it to flourish. I also stress this point in No Turning Back, the book based on my course, which documents the histori­cal momentum of women’s activism throughout the world. In class and […]

This essay applies some of the historical lessons about feminism to teaching. Long before the consciousness-raising groups of second-wave feminism, women relied on personal networks and separate organizations to support the work of transforming society. In teaching “Introduction to Feminist Studies,”I sought to have the students, both male and female, rely on each other’s insights […]

In the midst of my tenure case, I was asked to speak to the Committee on Women Historians at the 1983 meeting of the American Historical Association. The previous year, I had filed an internal grievance charging that a Stanford dean’s reversal of my department’s vote to grant me tenure discriminated against me as a […]

Womens prisons differ significantly from voluntary separatist institutions, but they reveal larger patterns in the history of female reform. I had written about the origins of these institutions in my first book, Their Sisters’ Keepers, and a decade later I returned to the subject to write a biography of Miriam Van Waters. By then, an […]

The strength of female institutions in the late nineteenth century and the weaknesses of women’s politics after the passage of the suffrage amendment suggest to me that the decline of feminism in the 1920s can be attributed in part to the devaluation of women’s culture in general and of separate female institutions in particular. When […]

The separate institution building of the late nineteenth century rested on a belief in women’s unique identity that had roots in the private female sphere of the early nineteenth century. Increasingly, however, as its participants entered a public female world, they adopted the more radical stance of femi­nists such as Stanton and Anthony who had […]

The “transition period” that Stanton and Anthony invoked lasted from the 1870s to the 1920s. It was an era of separate female organization and in­stitution building, the result on the one hand of the negative push of dis­crimination in the public, male sphere and on the other hand of the positive attraction of the female […]

In nineteenth-century America, commercial and industrial growth intensi­fied the sexual division of labor, encouraging the separation of men’s and women’s spheres. While white males entered the public world of wage labor, business, the professions, and politics, most white middle-class women re­mained at home, where they provided the domestic, maternal, and spiritual care for their families […]