Most people, when they decide to write a book, run the topic past a few close friends. If their friends nod vigorously and say, “Terrific! Go for it!” they proceed.
Christine Stansell is just enough of a contrarian to do the opposite. When she told friends the topic about which she wanted to write, “their eyes glazed over,” she recalls with a laugh.
She wrote about it anyway.
“I thought, ‘That’s wrong. It’s so fascinating,'” says Stansell, whose major history of the women’s movement, “The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present” (Modern Library) was published last week.
Stansell, a history professor at the University of Chicago, was undaunted by the prospect of writing about a large, sprawling subject such as feminism, about which abstractions and platitudes tend naturally to gather. Making an intriguing narrative out of such a vast and complicated history — making it a story, that is, and not a textbook or reference book or collection of bullet points — is quite a challenge, one that Stansell meets and masters.
Calling feminism “democracy’s younger sister,” she moves through the historical events, colorful characters, passionate political battles and cataclysmic cultural shifts central to feminism’s biography. The chapter exploring the coalition formed by abolitionists and women’s rights advocates before and after the Civil War is especially insightful, as it explains how and why African-American men were granted the right to vote long ahead of women.
“Feminism is so much a part of our DNA now that it is overlooked,” says Stansell, who taught at Princeton for 25 years before joining the U. of C. faculty in 2007. “People have much more of a sense of the (American) Revolution and race relations” than they do of feminism’s history, she adds. Thus she worked for nine years researching and writing “The Feminist Promise,” from the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) through the 19th and 20th centuries and up through the 21st. Along the way, Stansell discusses changes in society’s view of marriage and reproductive rights, and the founding of advocacy groups such as the National Organization for Women.
Feminism, she writes, features “an extraordinary, productive, and moving past, and understanding it is part of democracy’s patient work.”
Christine Stansell will speak at 6 p.m. Tuesday at 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th St.
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