ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

REVIEWS

"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

"Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism takes readers on a genealogical exploration of the Progressive Era in the United States. The book lays a strong theoretical foundation for recasting the activism and theory building of Progressive Era, social democratic feminists as a moment of democratic refounding…. Sarvasy is at her most convincing when we recognize how much we scholars have missed about the social-democratic potential of these feminists."—Mobilization

“Sarvasy see[s] America’s divided present as evidence that the country is undergoing a productive reexamination of its core ideals and institutions.... Refounding Democracy represents a kind of feminist summa.... [A] challenging but bracing argument for a democracy that is at once intersectional, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan.... There is tremendous value—intellectual, political, and pragmatic—in Sarvasy’s effort to systematize the theory of her social democracy feminists and place them in coherent conversation.”—Perspectives on Politics

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Contemporary Context as a Period of Collective Self-Reflection

1. The Feminist Settlement House and Socializing Democracy

2. Women’s Economic Independence and the Creation of a Feminist Welfare State

3. Egalitarian Suffragism and Electoral Politics of Presence

4. The Transnational: Surrounding and Completing the National

5. Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism: Conceptual and Organizing Tools for Today

Notes

References

Index

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