Inspired by the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, this special issue seeks to rethink “first wave” feminisms in a heterogeneous and expansive way—by pushing geographic, chronological, and ideological boundaries and by broadening the definition of whom we usually think of as early feminists. Far more than the right to vote, early feminism included anticolonialism and demands for national sovereignty, racial justice, labor rights, peace, immigrants’ rights, attention to and remuneration for reproductive labor and domestic work, and sexual sovereignty. The traditional wave model, while difficult to dislodge, offers an incomplete and distorted view of feminist history.

How does our idea of a global first-wave feminist cultural imagination, emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, change when we view it transnationally and translinguistically? Specifically, what new theoretical approaches to the question of feminist agency can we glean by decentering authors and authorship from literary history? This article looks at the cultural politics of early feminism by focusing on literary translators as often neglected agents of transnational cultural exchange. I focus in particular on the politics of publishing in Fascist Italy to argue that in spite of state censorship and Fascism’s openly misogynist cultural policy, women cultural producers were able to formulate counternarratives to those of Fascism and, to an extent, shape the literary field. Importantly, however, their cultural activities moved from the terrain of authorship to that of what I call “feminist nonauthorship.” To make my argument, I trace the making of two publishing products in translation in Fascist Italy: the seventeenth-century French novel La Princesse de Clèves by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne (better known Madame de La Fayette), translated by the feminist writer Sibilla Aleramo in 1934, and the contemporary African American novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, translated by the anti-Fascist activist Ada Gobetti in 1938. I argue that by closely studying the hardly visible labor of translators as nonauthors, we can move beyond frameworks for the study of women’s literary history that are entrenched in the liberal Western categories of visibility, authenticity, freedom, and progress.

When feminists in the antebellum United States organized to end slavery and demand their rights, they immediately faced critics who ridiculed them as ugly old maids, wrinkled old ladies, and superannuated old ex-slaves. “Old” in this sense was not the same as old age but rather an aesthetic judgment wielded by antifeminist and anti-Black journalists, caricaturists, and politicians to suggest that women speaking in public looked unattractive, ridiculous, or pitiful and should therefore be dismissed without engaging their ideas or political strategies. To gain a public hearing, feminists needed to shift how Americans saw mature women, but the very plasticity of the term “old” did more to divide women from each other than to create a unified age group. Images of female oldness remained keyed to middle-class marriage, racial difference, and chronological age in ways that divided old maids from married matrons, white women from Black women, and middle-aged women from those over sixty. Moving beyond a simplistic analysis of ageism, defined as prejudice by one age group toward another, this article develops an intersectional approach to analyzing the gendered and racialized aesthetics of oldness. By examining Anglo-American visual culture from the 1830s to the 1890s through the analytic of age, I demonstrate how antifeminist and anti-Black representations of female oldness created distortions in public recognition and led some women to internalize negative stereotypes with which abolitionists and feminists had to contend in order to enter politics.

In this essay I first elucidate how white women’s literatures of madness in the early twentieth century, as well as feminist criticism, utilize racialized madness to frame the recovery and liberation of white feminist protagonists. As a counterpoint to these white literatures of madness, I draw upon short stories by Marita Bonner, an early Black feminist author who speaks back to this narrative trend by articulating the structural forces that impact Black women’s mental distress. I argue that Bonner’s corpus deploys what feminist disability scholar Jina B. Kim terms a proto–“crip-of-color critique” through her explorations of pathologizing structures of care and state surveillance, from domestic confinement to institutions, jails, and reformatories. Like psychiatric survivor movements in the present moment, Bonner shows the inefficacy of agitating for psychiatric reform when these protests do not encompass the imprisonment and confinement of Black women in distress. In this way, I show that genealogies of mad activist movements should be traced not just through the work of white, middle-class psychiatric survivors but also through long-standing Black creative expression that critiques structures of confinement and incarceration wholesale. In line with the growing body of feminist disability studies scholars interrogating the racialized dimensions of able-mindedness in contemporary works, I posit that centering Black feminist literary expression in the early twentieth century remaps our feminist genealogies of mad critique.

The women’s movement wing of the Progressive Era—the wave of widespread activism spanning the 1890s to the 1920s—was defined by two important but often conflicting dynamics. The movement was built around coalitions, with women collaborating across organizations to advocate for multiple reforms, including those related to gender, class, immigration, and race. At the same time, there were deep divisions and debates among women from different backgrounds, leading to conflict and mistrust within the movement. This article uses network and text analyses methods to reexamine the intersections of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in first-wave feminist organizations in Chicago during the Progressive Era, from 1860 to 1920. Using intersectionality as a theoretical lens, the article takes a bird’s-eye view of organizational connections and discourse across this movement. By comparing three different identities that intersected with gender—class, ethnicity, and race—I reexamine both collaboration and conflict within Chicago’s first-wave movement by mapping the precise empirical contours of intersectionality within it. I find that class and ethnicity were both an organizational core and a persistent public focus of the movement. While the intersection of race and gender was also an important aspect of this movement, race was never fully integrated into the movement to the extent that class and ethnicity were. In other words, Chicago’s first-wave women’s movement was foundationally intersectional, but not all of its intersections were treated equally in the core of the movement. This analysis lends fresh empirical evidence to historians’ observations of both coalition and conflict within first-wave feminist organizations. As the women’s movement continues to grapple with anti-Black racism, we can reflect on the inequality of intersectionality during the first wave to inform and frame our attention to intersectionality today.

Linda Smart Chubb made history in 1950 when she served as acting mayor of Colón City, Panama. Not only did she become the first woman to hold this position in Colón, but her tenure also marked the first time that a woman of Afro-Caribbean descent had been elected to any political office in Panama. Smart Chubb’s position in the mayoral office also came only four years after women had secured the right to vote. Looking particularly at Smart Chubb’s work with feminist organizations, advocacy groups for Afro-Caribbean migrants, the Black international press, and British consular offices in Panama, this article posits that Smart Chubb’s election rested on her ability, beginning in the 1920s, to hone a Black feminist internationalist praxis. Such a praxis sought to secure the political rights of all women but also acknowledged the specific challenges faced by Black people in a world mired by xenophobia, anti-Blackness, and competing imperial mandates. Through a focused engagement with the life of Linda Smart Chubb, this article adds to recent scholarship on Black women internationalists while centering a vision of Black feminist internationalism rooted in grassroots local activism with attention to imperial and nationalist struggles emanating from Central America and the Caribbean.

The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation in the 1970s, has provoked vital debates about gender, care work, and the problem of accounting for reproductive labor. Yet such discussions typically ignore the campaign’s roots in first-wave feminism. In examining Australian journalist Linda Littlejohn’s tenure as chair of Equal Rights International (ERI; 1934–41), a lobby group often cast as the vanguard of legal equality feminism in interwar Geneva, this article explores its surprising role in spreading Antipodean ideas about the “money value” of “home work” through the League of Nations. In doing so, it first historicizes the contentious forty-year struggle to recognize women’s domestic labor in Australasia. Shifting from Sydney to Switzerland, it traces the international circulations that allowed Littlejohn and her allies in the United Associations of Women to redirect ERI away from its founders’ concern with an equal rights treaty and toward a brand of feminism constructed around the recognition of difference in the home and equality in economic and political life. Reading ERI through the lens of Littlejohn’s years as chair, I contend, not only complicates binaries between equality and difference within international interwar feminism, revealing a messier and less centralized history of feminist ideology, it also enriches our understanding of ongoing struggles to illuminate and compensate reproductive labor.

This article uses the All-Asian Women’s Conference (AAWC), which brought elite feminist activists from six Asian nations together in Lahore in 1931, as a case study to investigate how the League of Nations influenced the first wave of international feminism. The AAWC faced competition from other Asian women’s organizations and from international women’s organizations based in Europe, which claimed to speak for all the world’s women. The attempts of some Western European and US feminists to represent Asian women fueled some of the conference’s anticolonialist rhetoric. The League’s organizational structure, which only let organizations with an “international” designation participate in its formal proceedings, caused some of the competition over who got to speak for Asian women. Seeking an international designation led feminists to establish new organizations like the AAWC. Many of these new feminist networks were ultimately unsustainable—the AAWC only met once—which raises questions about what kind of connection is needed to forge sustainable feminist coalitions across borders. To fully understand the AAWC’s goals and objectives, the conference needs to be studied against the backdrop of the emergent international women’s rights system, which was taking shape at the League of Nations and in which international women’s organizations headquartered in industrialized capitals in Western Europe and the United States had the most power. The activists who gathered in Lahore had the difficult task of presenting Asian womanhood as simultaneously apart from and a part of the international women’s movement.

This roundtable stems from a Zoom event, “New Directions in Feminism and Global Race Studies (a Book Conversation)” with authors Tiffany N. Florvil, Kaiama L. Glover, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Katherine M. Marino, Robin Mitchell, and Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, hosted by Samantha Pinto. These scholars discussed their recently published books, which expand how we think about transnational feminism and global Black feminisms in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. The lightly edited transcript of the conversation explores how putting Black women at the center of histories of global feminisms and race studies transforms these fields and the questions that are usually asked. The authors also discussed navigating research challenges and confronting racism in the sources and in the archives. The conversation underscores the importance of intellectual community, as well as the relevance and urgency of Black feminist scholarship today.