2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The metaphor of 'waves' of feminism, surging across history like freak high tides at certain periods and then receding, leaving perhaps a certain amount of flotsam and jetsam on the beaches of history, is one that has rather outworn its usefulness. This panel examines the influence of feminism and the persistence of feminist analysis in liminal times supposedly 'between the waves', in three different national contexts, during times when the question of feminism and the struggle for women’s rights have been assumed to be no longer a significant cause. These three papers discuss women in China, the UK and the USA who were undertaking the work of feminism at periods when the very idea was greeted with hostility along a spectrum from outright suppression to mockery and disdain. In these different contexts, all the women discussed were in some respect situated on margins and peripheries, from which they found standpoints for addressing and contesting hegemonic constructions of womanhood and the question of women’s relationship to the state and to civic life. Far from being jetsam beached by the receding tide, feminism was a, possibly flickering, flame, being sheltered and kept burning, as women continued to develop feminist critiques of society and its institutions in times and places which seemed far from propitious to such an endeavour.