This panel, “(Re)Writing the New Woman,” seeks to highlight the transoceanic and transcontinental women’s rights movements that undergirded and also resisted the development of a white, bourgeois, feminist ideal—the “New Woman”—that emerged in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. This panel will hold in productive tension the various, interlocking and antithetical conceptions of feminism that were on offer in and around fin-de-siècle America. Resisting the historical impulse to define turn-of-the-century American ‘feminism’ as a theoretically and geopolitically invariable entity, something many critics of the long nineteenth century in American literature continue to do, each of the papers to be presented will highlight the international currents of discourses on gender equality—many of which vehemently resisted the limiting language of ‘feminism’ or ‘feminist’—from which the socioeconomically and racially exclusive, Euro-American ideal of the “New Woman” precariously distanced itself. We hope that this panel will spark further debate, not only around historical, ‘feminist’ movements, but also about how these historical trajectories inform the ‘feminism(s)’ many have come to mobilize across the United States today.

This panel will consist of three speakers, and each will be allotted fifteen minutes to present her paper. The first speaker, Jesse Cordes Selbin, an assistant professor of English at Gettysburg College, will present a companion essay to her forthcoming PMLA article entitled “The Global New Woman and the Invention of Modern Feminism.” Selbin’s essay, “Feminism is for Everybody: The Influence of Pandita Ramabai on American New Womanhood,” will trace the influence of Ramabai’s The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), penned in Karnataka, on early conceptions of American feminism. Ramabai’s work heavily influenced the work of Frances Willard, Dr. Rachel Bodley, and Mary Greenleaf Leavitt, contemporaneous advocates of women’s rights in the United States. Selbin will underscore the various ways Ramabai’s exchanges with American proponents of early feminist ideals benefited from the privileges and preconceptions of class, race, and caste, structural relationships that influenced the evolution of intersectional feminism in the United States.

The next speaker, Caroline Martin, a PhD student in American Literature at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, will present a portion of her dissertation entitled Textual Subjects: Performing the New Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction. Martin’s paper, “Creolizing the New Woman: The Subversion of Feminist Archetypes in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Early Short Fiction,” will trace the transatlantic and Caribbean influences on Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction collection Violets and Other Tales (1895). Ultimately arguing that Dunbar-Nelson’s conceptualizations of race and class cannot be overlooked, or unlinked, Martin calls attention to Dunbar-Nelson’s extensive and simultaneous subversions of the frenetic, white, middle-class trope of the “New Woman.”

The last speaker, Andy Bainbridge, a PhD student in English at Tufts University, will present her paper entitled “‘A Witch Is a Cunjuh Man’: Defining Conjuring, Witchcraft, and the New Woman in Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and Toni Morrison's Beloved.” Carrying us slightly forward in time, Bainbridge will zoom in on the affective and archival links between late nineteenth-century American literature’s conceptions of Black womanhood and the twentieth-century American novel’s. Using the lens of Black conjure magic, Bainbridge will argue that Black women characters practice conjure as a means of asserting control over racist and sexist administrations of justice in Reconstruction America. The links between Black conjuring and early conceptions of womanism in America, Bainbridge asserts, cannot be overlooked.

“Feminism must be relentlessly truth-telling, not least about itself,” Amia Srinivasan asserts in The Right to Sex (2021; xiv). This panel strives to take up that call, to look both backward and forward in time as well as also across steady notions of geopolitical space. Some of the central questions it will ask are the following: What can hearkening back to the troubled pasts of ‘American feminism,’ specifically the rise of the New Woman ideal, teach us about where so-called ‘American feminism(s)’ are headed today? How might this practice of looking across time and space allow us to peer at the exclusionary, authoritarian formations that parade beneath the headline of ‘fourth-wave’ feminism? In returning to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in American literature, we demand, scholars of feminism and American literature must trace the racist, classist, and imperial phantasms that inform the movements of today’s exclusionary, feminist rhetoric.