My desire to restore historical consciousness about female separatism has both a personal and an intellectual motivation. As a feminist working within male-dominated academic institutions, I have realized that I could not sur­vive without access to the feminist culture and politics that flourish outside mixed institutions. How, I have wondered, could women in the past […]

The feminist scholarship of the past decade has often been concerned, either explicitly or implicitly, with two central political questions: the search for the origins of women’s oppression and the formulation of effective strategies for combating patriarchy. Analysis of the former question helps us answer the latter. As anthropologist Gayle Rubin has wryly explained: “If […]

At the time I wrote this essay, I had begun to question liberal feminism in light of the separatist “women’s culture” of the 1970s. In the work of Emily Newell Blair, the femi­nist politician who in the late 1920s reconsidered the strategy of integrating women into mainstream political parties, I found historical precedents for applying […]

As a beginning graduate student intent on forging a new women’s history, I had not yet made the analytic link between hierarchies based on gender (that is, socially constructed categories of male and female) and those based on sexuality (that is, erotic and reproductive practices and identities). Two incidents that occurred while I was in […]

My personal history fueled my historical curiosity about feminism. As the “second wave” of feminism washed over American culture in the 1970s, I could not imagine where all that energy had been stored for so long or why it had revived just then. Why had feminism seemingly waned in the 1920s, with so much unfinished […]

As much as my politics and scholarship reflect the formative experiences of the 1960s and the resurgence of women’s history, they also spring from my own background. From my current vantage point, I can reconstruct a personal genealogy that helps explain how I came to question hierarchy and value women. For one thing, growing up […]

I began my graduate training as a historian at a particularly auspicious mo­ment for educated American women. The revival of feminism in the late 1960s stimulated both a curiosity about women’s past and a commitment to advancing sexual equality. By 1970, the year I enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia University, feminism had percolated […]

feminist history calls on us to imagine the world in new ways. It has the power to alter social relations by exposing the undeserved privileges that perpetuate long-standing social inequities. Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics presents my major contributions to rethinking history through the lens of feminist analysis. It explores the origins and strategies of women’s […]

for the past thirty-five years, I have participated in a movement to cre­ate a usable history of women, one that challenges conventional versions of the past and also speaks to the world around us. The essays in this book document this larger historical enterprise and explore connections between the intellectual task and the political practice […]