ABSTRACT
For many American women’s historians trained in the 1960s and 1970s, interest in the field was inspired by their engagement with women’s liberation. They were compelled by their politics to recover the roots of modern feminism. Many radical feminists initially found foremothers in the likes of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, Crystal Eastman, and other turn-of-the-century socialist and anarchist women. Though women’s historians of this generation were driven by competing visions of feminism and thus embraced different foremothers, many sought to understand the present through a genealogical excavation of the past. This was particularly true for those studying women’s political activism, who moved from contemporary debates about sex equity back through suffrage (socialism too quickly fell by the wayside in the US) and then Seneca Falls. This chapter explores the implications of reaching Seneca Falls through this reverse chronological trajectory, and then suggests how we might rethink the history of women’s activism by re-embedding Seneca Falls in the world of 1848.
