Rising Above The Waves: Redefining Feminist Historiography and Our Organisation of Knowledge
On Saturday, February 27, 1937, twenty-three-year-old labour organiser Myra Wolfgang navigated through the throngs of Detroit shoppers enjoying a sale at Woolworth's five-and-dime. Woolworth’s was the Walmart of the time. The retail giant was a corporate and consumer icon, having proliferated a low-cost retail model through staffing low-wage workers - predominantly young women. The stores were stocked with a vast array of small, low-cost wares, garnished by tidily printed signs reminding shoppers the five-to-ten cent price tag, as promised by the store's name. On the lower level, the relatively inexpensive lunch counters (a precursor to current fast food mega-corporations) presented an opportunity - to white-only customers - for a low-cost treat; a shopping experience summative of the American Dream if there ever was one.
It was, ostensibly, the most ordinary of Saturdays, at the most ordinary of American institutions, as Wolfgang made her way to the middle of the store. However, Woolworth's salesgirls, cashiers, and lunch counter waitresses - the low-cost retail giant's "pink-collar" workers - waited with bated breath. Wolfgang blew a whistle, initiating an 8-day sit-down strike. The "girl-strikers" were occupying the property of one of the largest corporations in the United States and refusing to leave until their demands were met. Strikers presented a list of demands, not limited to union recognition, a 10 cent per hour raise (from 25 cents), and overtime pay after surpassing a 48-hour work week. At the conclusion of the strike, these demands were met in their entirety.
Woolworth's victory in the Spring of 1937 was just one of many campaigns Wolfgang, a career labour unionist for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), led and won. Wolfgang saw the labour and civil rights movements as the most effective vehicle for achieving women's rights, due to the oppression suffered by working-class women in an industry where female sexuality and sociability were cornerstones of the business model.
However, Wolfgang garnered nowhere near Beauvoir or Friedan-esque levels of acclaim for her contributions to women's liberation. This is hardly surprising considering how the integration of intersectional activism into the women's movement challenges much of the commonly proliferated and narrowly defined historical canon, where female-only organisations dedicated singularly to sex equality were regarded as the exclusive bearers of the feminist impulse. This historiographical perspective posits the widely recognised and palatably simplified "wave" model - the first wave, from 1848-1920, of women's suffrage, the second, from the 1960s-90s, of sexual autonomy, the third, from the 1990's to 2010's, of the postmodernist concepts of gender identity and diversity.
From this perspective, the fifty years following the suffrage of white women in 1920 appear as a retreat, or at least stagnation, of the fight for women’s rights, with little more than a dwindling band of white middle-class feminists making minimal headway in a society quick to disregard the issues women faced. Feminism, through the perspective of this historiographical lens, is seen to have faded into relative obscurity for the better part of a century.
Expanding the definition of feminism to include the intersectional activism undertaken to liberate working class women and women of colour, this story of stagnation can be rewritten. Feminist activism did not diminish in the decades after suffrage: rather, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the struggle for intersectional feminism surged forwards.
This article aims to use the feminist movement as a case study to further understand the trade-offs we make by adhering to established historiographical canons and frameworks, and how the enterprise of organising knowledge can deteriorate our collective historical understanding.
The trade-offs made through the organisation of knowledge become apparent through critically analysing the established feminist historical canon of the "wave" metaphor. This had a distinct utility in its own historical context - in the late 1960's, adopting the self-referential "second wave" nomenclature enabled feminists to remind society of feminism's venerable past - tying their new struggle to the historic victory of women's suffrage and raising recognition that the suffrage movement was one aspect of a larger movement for women's rights. Through this deliberate contextualisation, the 1960's push for sexual liberation and bodily autonomy was not seen as a socio-historical aberration but rather an inevitable succession in the feminist movement.
Employing the "wave" metaphor as a historiographical approach also affords the complex and varied history of feminism a straightforward historical progression - an important functionality. This accessibility facilitates a wider understanding of historical knowledge, affording an expanded demographic the opportunity to meaningfully engage with an era-defining social movement. However, considering the inevitable concession that must be made for the widespread dissemination of knowledge is the sacrifice of complexity for accessibility. The greatest asset of this organisational concept is, paradoxically, its greatest liability.
The narrow definition of feminism implicit in the "wave" categorisation -with strictly defined limits that exclude the multifaceted and intersectional movements pertaining to women of colour and working-class women - perpetuates incomplete historical narratives. From the historiographical perspective of the "waves" of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement is naturally excluded as a separate entity from the fight for women's rights. However, African American women, who were integral contributors to the National Council of Negro Women, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and NAACP, fought for the rights of Black women on the basis that women’s rights to good schools, jobs, and protection from physical and sexual assault were essential pillars of the overarching struggle for Black freedom.
Labour rights activists, such as Wolfgang, who fought for representation and consideration of women, are similarly excluded through the implementation of the wave framework. Movement defining events such as a successful campaign to unionise Playboy Club waitresses, or “Playboy Bunnies” occurred at the convergence of class and women’s rights, recognising that transformative change must be enacted intersectionally. With union backing, the six-year campaign culminated in national contracts, guaranteeing fair wages and improved working conditions for the previously marginalised workers. This intersectional, class-conscious activism accounted for the fact that a method of women's oppression was specific to the industries in which they predominated - retail, hospitality and customer service relied on the "feminine" traits as foundational elements of the business model yet denigrated women's work as lesser to other industries. This multifaceted activism recognised the gender-specific issues faced by working-class women and underscored the necessity of dismantling oppressive structures at their roots. The idea that struggles for women's rights encompassed not only gender equality, but also economic justice does not conform with the narrow confines of the wave framework. Thus, this historiographical approach repudiates fundamental aspects of the intersectional nature of women's liberation.
Compounding these issues is the fluidity of historical realities. In the framework, feminism is reduced to a singular and monolithic "wave" exhibiting homogenous beliefs and goals. Thus, viewing feminism through the fixed and linear "wave" framework negates the inherent dynamism of the movement in its entirety, a display of historiographical reductionism. Feminism's evolution to its contemporary state was far from a singular trajectory, and the notion of a linear progression oversimplifies the interplay between different branches of feminism, and the intersectional nature of class and race-based struggles, disregarding the complexities of internal debates and diverse aims that have characterised the movement over time. The nuanced debates within feminist circles regarding the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) typifies this inherent complexity. The central contention lay between "equality-focused feminism" and "social justice feminism." This divergence goes beyond mere semantics, speaking to the multifaceted nature of the goals and methods that different players in the movement employed. Advocates of the former, embodied by the National Women's Party, underscored the imperative of formal legal parity as an essential progression in the feminist movement. To elucidate, their rallying cry of "equal pay for equal work" meant that equal salary should be codified into law for identical employment. In contrast, "social justice feminists," exemplified by groups like NOW and the Feminist Majority Foundation, argued that legal equality alone couldn't rectify systemic disparities. In reference to equal pay, "social justice feminists" recognised that the industries in which women were most prevalent would continue to be subject to unfair pay structures, and "equal pay for comparable work" and a set minimum wage would be necessary to ensure workplace equity: the systemic change required to advance women's rights necessitated the address of underlying structural socioeconomic inequities that legal parity alone could not resolve. This contentious ERA discourse, and the wider ramifications surrounding methods of institutionalising and codifying feminism, highlighted feminism's dynamic, multifaceted, and even contradictory nature. The "wave" framework's inadequacy in accommodating these complexities epitomises the trade-offs that occur as a result of its adoption.
Inevitably, we are confronted with the difficult task of reconciling with the notion that frameworks we put in place to facilitate understanding may inadvertently restrict our knowledge. While the metaphorical "wave" framework had distinct uses in historical context, it does not represent an effective way in which to organise historical knowledge. The reductive nature obfuscates the historical specificity of feminist activism, failing to account for or represent the continuous, dedicated, and intersectional struggles from labour and civil rights activists in a time when, according to the wave theory, feminism ebbed.
We must collectively engage with feminist activism with more nuance through acknowledging the diverse and ongoing nature of gender equality struggles, as well as applying this critical analysis of the organisation of knowledge. This is pertinent in ensuring that the trade-offs we make when simplifying and categorising knowledge do not impede on the knowledge we seek to comprehend.
Sydney Rice | National Affairs Officer