[July 19-20 marks the 175th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts. Leading up to this weekend post on our 21st century movement!]
We all
know the myriad challenges facing American women in 2023, but fortunately we
have a phenomenal group of activists of all types helping fight them. Here are just
a handful of them (add more in comments, please!):
1)
Terry O’Neill: The closest
thing we have in the 21st century to the women’s rights conventions
of the 19th is organizations like the National
Organization for Women (NOW). Any one of NOW’s recent leaders would be well
worth highlighting in this slot, but I’m gonna go with O’Neill, the
organization’s president from 2009 to 2017. Anybody who got their start in
politics fighting against
David Duke’s campaign for Louisiana Governor gets a gold start in my book,
and O’Neill has also become a leading
voice against transphobia, which it shouldn’t need saying is also a 21st
century women’s rights issue (but too often seems to).
2)
Judy
Chicago: While this week’s series focused specifically on a social and
political event, the women’s rights movement has always been driven as much by
artists and cultural figures as by political ones. For more than half a
century, one of America’s foremost feminist artists has been Judy Chicago,
whose art
installations in particular have traced many of the issues, debates, ideas,
and identities at the movement’s heart across
those decades. The upcoming New
Museum retrospective promises to capture much of what has made Chicago such
a key part of the women’s movement for so long.
3)
Roxane Gay:
One of my favorite not-yet-written ideas for a column or post or whateveryagot
would be to put Fanny
Fern, one of our greatest journalists and writers, in direct conversation
with the late 1840s & early 1850s women’s movement (of which she was an
exact contemporary as she was first rising to striking
prominence). When it comes to 21st century journalists and
writers, none are more talented nor more interconnected with the women’s
movement than Roxane Gay—and that’s despite (or really more related to) her calling
one of her first books Bad
Feminist (2014). If historians and the world are around 150 years from
now, they’ll be reading Gay alongside today’s movement just as much as I’d put
Fern alongside her era’s.
4)
Jane
Fonda: Most of the women involved in organizing the Seneca Falls convention
continued to be active in the movement for decades after, a reminder that any
one moment is part of a much longer continuum (for individuals and movements
alike). If anything, advances in medical care and other factors have allowed
folks not only to live longer on average than ever before (and certainly than
in the mid-19th century), but to remain hugely active as they do.
And no one embodies that trend more than Jane Fonda, whose activism in her 80s—activism
which has consistently been
on behalf of women’s rights, although not limited
to any one issue or angle to be sure—is as impressive as that of any 21st
century figure.
5)
Jacqueline
Wernimont: Obviously I was gonna include a public scholarly voice and
activist in this list, and I don’t know any who is doing more interesting and
meaningful women’s rights public scholarly
work (among many other subjects) than Wernimont. To cite just one particularly
influential example, her co-edited (with Elizabeth Losh) book Bodies of
Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018)
offers a vital model for how to link feminism, DH scholarship and work, theory
and practice, and more, reminding us that scholars and researchers have our own
role to play in every social and political movement, including the 21st
century women’s movement to be sure.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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