Activating Archives in Women's Studies 101: New Stories about Old Feminism and the Future

Abstract

© 2017 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois One of feminist theory’s oldest and most productive critiques has been its analysis of women’s erasure from the historical record and its insistence that what has stood in for the past has in fact been a male-centric version of history. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the history of the feminist movement is likewise often similarly erased, but it’s something that I encountered anew in my Introduction to Women’s Studies course this past year. I had begun the term concerned about reifying the “wave” construction of feminist history, not wanting to create tidy narratives of the past that obscure more than they reveal. Indeed, I had developed my syllabus and many of my lesson plans with this problem in mind, spending ample time complicating common narratives of feminist history and asking students to discuss their own commonplaces and stereotypes of the movement’s past. I was still surprised, however, by the response I got when I asked students to write down what came to mind when they heard the term “second-wave feminism.” When it came time to debrief their writing, students were at first reluctant to share, but as we got going it became clear that this reluctance was borne out of a frustration: they didn’t have any solid conceptions of what the second wave was. A few ventured comments about bra-burning and one mentioned civil rights, but the class discussion quickly turned to students venting their frustration that they had never really been taught anything of note about the history of feminism. One joked that the movement hadn’t even received one of those sidebar graphics so often used to represent groups considered “outsiders” in American history textbooks. But just because students were aware of, and frustrated by, the fact that they hadn’t been taught much at all about the history of the movement isn’t to say that they still didn’t come to the class with their own stories about how the feminism of today relates to the past. A case in point: we had spent the better part of the first month of the course discussing intersectional feminism and the ways that identities construct, and are constructed by, the social world in which we live. As we grappled with this material, it became clear that students were operating with a kind of unstated but powerful sense that today’s brand of progressive feminism, Activating Archives in Women’s Studies 101: New Stories about Old Feminism and the Future