Wendy Sarvasy’s Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism is a book with a clear mission. Rejecting doomy forecasts of an impending twenty-first-century civil war, Sarvasy chooses instead to see America’s divided present as evidence that the country is undergoing a productive reexamination of its core ideals and institutions. She hopes to nudge Americans toward a vital democratic refounding and proposes looking to an earlier era for inspiration, guidance, and some caution as well. She comes well-equipped for this mission. For nearly four decades, across numerous articles, chapters, and book reviews, Sarvasy has worked to understand different facets of women’s full political and economic equality. All along, she has been highly attentive to the intersections of history and political theory—to the way past thinkers have imagined the relationships among individual, family, and state and to how we in the twenty-first century might continue to reimagine those connections in more egalitarian ways.
In bringing together a number of Sarvasy’s long-standing commitments, Refounding Democracy represents a kind of feminist summa for the Lecturer Emerita (at California State University, East Bay). Here she lays out, with methodical precision, her ideal theory of a fully “engender[ed] and socializ[ed]” democracy (p. 16). The book’s introduction makes clear that it is written not merely for a scholarly audience but specifically for a political theory one. Less specialized readers may be tempted to put the book down before they even get to the four main body chapters or the concluding fifth one. They shouldn’t. What awaits them is a challenging but bracing argument for a democracy that is at once intersectional, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan.
The notion of “refounding” is an intriguing one. Scholars of Reconstruction have emphasized that moment, with its cluster of constitutional amendments (the first in over six decades), as a “second founding.” Sarvasy develops this concept, drawing on Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Hannah Arendt, and examines how a generation of “social democratic feminists” provided the intellectual and activist roots of a third founding. As she notes, hers is the first attempt to consider women (let alone feminists) as meaningful and significant “founders” of the evolving project of American democracy. Through close, imaginative readings of her Progressive era feminists, Sarvasy builds on this earlier generation’s efforts to rethink the relationship between the household and the state; to achieve meaningful economic autonomy for women; to practice an electoral politics of presence; and to replace militarized and imperial nationalism with a transnational social democratic politics.
Though many of Sarvasy’s figures are familiar to historians, they are likely less well-known to political theorists. Certainly, only a few would be considered household names. The figure who garners the most attention here by far is Jane Addams. She is joined by other native-born, middle-class, white Protestants, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, and Emily Balch. That “stream” of social democratic feminists shares space with two others: middle- and working-class African American women (including Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Addie Waites Hunton, and Mary Church Terrell) and immigrant Jewish middle- and working-class women (including Theresa Serber Malkiel, Lillian Wald, Rose Schneiderman, and Pauline Newman). These three streams represent an astoundingly wide-ranging group of what Sarvasy terms “theorist–activists.” Collectively, they played a role in nearly every reform movement of their day, from labor legislation and anti-lynching campaigns to women’s suffrage to pacifism. This flurry of activity and their extensive commentary on it provide bountiful grist for Sarvasy’s theoretical mill.
At the heart of the social democratic feminist refounding is a newly cast relationship between the household and the state—fusing the social and the political. Jane Addams’ social settlement Hull House—as an exemplary democratic, participatory space—sits at the center of the first chapter and indeed of the whole social democratic feminist project. Sarvasy builds on a generation of scholarship (e.g., Louise Knight’s 2005 book, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy) that treats Jane Addams as a major democratic theorist, not simply a reformer or a sidekick to her neighbor and frequent collaborator, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The women of Hull House engaged in a range of democratic conversations and cross-class and cross-ethnic experiments, all of which Sarvasy brings to life here. Various efforts at cooperative housekeeping combined with Florence Kelley’s “participatory” enforcement of the pioneering Illinois legislation that limited the hours that women could work and shielded young children from sweatshops altogether. Though short-lived (before being gutted by the courts), this legislation protected the “human labor” of the household from a rapacious market and thereby modeled the kind of feminist social politics that Sarvasy seeks to excavate.
Sarvasy’s second chapter shows how social democratic feminists challenged two key elements of economic relations at the turn of the century. First, they contested laissez-faire liberalism by urging the state to play a role in protecting (particularly female and child) workers. Second, they exposed the ways that a purportedly gender-neutral liberal ideology harmed women, whose additional caring tasks at home differentiated them from the presumed default male worker. Facilitating women’s economic independence thus formed a crucial element of the larger effort to “socialize” and “engender” democracy. Here, Sarvasy makes an important departure from previous scholarly interpretations of “maternalist” politics. Rather than understanding her subjects as operating within a “framework of the male family wage,” Sarvasy argues that they “used their struggles for economic independence to extract the emancipatory potential of care from its traditionally subordinate status” (p. 66).
Two more body chapters elaborate on this social democratic feminist theory. Nearly all of this first generation of college-educated women remained, before the Nineteenth Amendment, nonvoting “outsiders” in the body politic. According to Sarvasy, this status helped them weave together understandings of national and transnational citizenship from the very beginning. A striking feature of Refounding Democracy is its insistence that, for these feminists, participation in the political sphere and an “electoral presence” were not merely means to an end, but an integral feature of their conception of “multileveled social citizenship” (p. 56). If women’s full inclusion in the democratic polity necessitated a radical reimagining of it, their vision of transnational citizenship similarly required a new set of institutions (such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). The “bridging” work this required—for example, to outlaw lynching, to build support for women’s suffrage among male working-class and socialist allies, and to work for peace—modeled the very intersectional activism on which their social democratic feminism flourished.
“Intersectionality,” which appears in the book’s title, is key to Sarvasy’s analysis and features across all the chapters. Although they would not have used this word to describe their efforts, the Progressive-era feminists did seek to bridge divides of race, ethnicity, education, class, religion, gender, and generation in multiple ways. Addams and Mary Kenney, an Irish Catholic organizer for the American Federation of Labor, gradually overcame skepticism and mistrust to form a productive partnership between Hull House and the nascent women’s labor movement. Such efforts, unsurprisingly, were not always successful. As Sarvasy recounts in a footnote, Addams’ well-meaning assurance to an eastern European Jewish neighbor that a wedding dinner would be serving kosher chicken failed to recognize that the butter and cream accompanying that chicken rendered the meal nonkosher. More seriously, some working women resented labor legislation as middle-class meddling, and white women (including Addams) continued to prioritize other political goals over the fight for racial equality.
The difficulty of this intersectional work is laid bare by the fact that Sarvasy has to invent or “construct” dialogues that never actually occurred. In the interest of building her theory, she puts the voices of her white Protestant, African American, and Jewish feminists into a series of “intersectional conversations” around childcare, paid maternity leave, and the racialized sexual double standard. While richly and compellingly imagined, these invented conversations remind readers that Sarvasy’s political theory is more normative than empirical. And if her democratic refounders stumbled on this front, what does that reveal about how challenging intersectionality can be as a practical basis for an emancipatory politics? 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. Yet, at times, the “smoothing” process necessary to achieve this unity and coherence made me long for more jagged edges. Grappling with the jagged edges of history seems an important step toward acknowledging and understanding the friction that any ideal theory would encounter in the present.
Sarvasy is quite good on what twenty-first century democracy would require to become an intersectional, cosmopolitan, and egalitarian project. The concluding chapter offers a series of conceptual and organizing tools meant to achieve this. However, it is perhaps less satisfying when it comes to explaining how, in our current era of social media algorithms, we might persuade a majority of voters to agree with this vision. That is, the democratic ideals are far better articulated than the democratic means to those ideals. How can the social democratic feminist goals of engendered and socialized democracy and multileveled social citizenship be made appealing to the nonactivist, nonfeminist voters on whom it depends for success? Writing in mid-November of 2024, this seems a daunting task indeed.
