ABSTRACT
She illuminates the challenges and accommodations to gender conventions that framed their activism and contrasts these to the arguments for equality made by middle-class feminist organizations. In particular, she notes that working-class women activists sought to end gendered hierarchies but not gender differences. Her account of the fate of labor feminisms demands for an end to unfair discrimination and equal economic citizenship for women cautions us to look more closely at the class-based underpinnings of mid-twentieth-century feminist achievements such as the Equal Pay Act. She concludes that that legislation “failed to solve many of the crucial economic and class issues . . . at the heart of women’s second-class citizenship” (Reading 6). Asking if feminist waves are transatlantic, Michelle Rowley (Reading 7) critiques the pedagogical reliance on feminist waves from the perspective of transnational feminists teaching in U.S. women’s studies classrooms. While the wave metaphor should be discarded, she argues, genealogies are nonetheless important. Drawing on the poetic voice of Etheridge Knight, an Afro-Caribbean poet, Rowley reminds us that our relational connections, past, present, and future, make us who we are and who we may become. She offers Knight’s evocative phrase, “whereabouts unknown,” to posit a new method for composing feminist genealogies, one that recognizes, “the importance of unexpected, diverse, and surprising beginnings.” The wave metaphor, she notes, “frames” the “whereabouts” that “are already known.” In its place, she offers the term “politics and conditions of emergence,” which allows us to “place emphasis on the power dynamics and context that lead to specific feminist issues and responses coming into full force.” In other words, Rowley advocates that we investigate the “whereabouts” of what is “unknown” in order to elaborate the there and then of the conditions spurring feminist action (Reading 7).
