Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism: How Progressive Era Feminists Redefined Who We Are, and What It Means Today

by Wendy Sarvasy

Overview

In Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism, Wendy Sarvasy recovers the unacknowledged Progressive Era social democratic feminist refounders who used collective political agency to reshape the body politic. Through intersectional activism, or the bridging of different movements, the refounders, who include Ida Wells-Barnett, Rose Schneiderman, and Jane Addams, created an intersectional, social democratic feminist understanding of democracy that allowed them to imagine their full inclusion.

Sarvasy shows how these activists worked to incorporate women by combining political democracy with the creation of a welfare state. They embedded this nation-state project within a new humanitarian transnational level as they evolved their multileveled social citizenship.

Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism demonstrates how a theory-activist dynamic played out in experimental socializing spaces and democratic conversations. It offers an inspirational method for intersectional activists today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439924242
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	06/17/2024
Series:	Intersectionality
Pages:	317
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Wendy Sarvasy is Lecturer Emerita of Political Science at California State University, East Bay.

Editorial Reviews

“With the theorist’s precision and the historian’s ear, Wendy Sarvasy reclaims a remarkable group of Progressive Era Anglo, Black, and Jewish feminists, including Jane Addams, Mary Church Terrell, and Rose Schneiderman. These intersectional activists became refounders of democracy by envisioning a welfare state that merged social service, women’s economic independence, equal citizenship, and cosmopolitanism. By constructing cross-class and cross-race conversations, Sarvasy offers conceptual and organizing tools for our own refounding moment. Here is intersectionality at its most powerful.”—Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019

“Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism is the first comprehensive study to establish the important role played by Progressive Era social democratic feminists—African American, immigrant Jewish, and white Protestant native-born—in defining American democracy today. Sarvasy is masterful in the genealogical method she applies, drawing on historical literature and primary sources in her study of these women. The intersectional practice of the social democratic feminists is closely examined, as is their ‘theory-activist dynamic,’ with both offering significant conceptual contributions. This book provides fascinating reading for those interested in American democracy and its political thought and, since the reconfiguring of politics by these feminists extended from the local to the global, for scholars of international relations and transnational history.”—Molly Cochran, Reader in International Relations, School of Law and Social Sciences, at Oxford Brookes University, and author of Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach

"In this riveting multilayered analysis, Wendy Sarvasy deciphers the vision of American social democracy that feminists in the 1920s envisioned and implemented.... Sarvasy argues that the social democratic roots of American politics can be found through a feminist genealogy of citizenship.... It is an inspiring work based on thorough research, with a dense and multilayered theoretical argument that uses historical and textual analysis."—Socialism and Democracy
 

"The author’s presentation of intersectional feminism in the early twentieth-century is impressive in its reach and depth.... [and] inspiring examples of feminism in action."—Affillia

From the Publisher