Contemporary feminists are used to juggling many different identities at once, balancing affiliations based on race, nation, class, and sexuality. First-wave feminists also negotiated—or failed to negotiate—similar tensions in their international organizing. Using primary documents dating from the abolitionist movement to the Second World War, Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell investigate the tensions inherent in organizing early transnational feminist movements.
Documenting First Wave Feminisms: Volume 1 provides a historical framework to bring together voices of women both canonical and less well known, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mabel Dove, who were active in feminist movements in all corners of the world. Suffrage, imperialism, citizenship, sexuality, and moral reform are shown to be key issues in a variety of exchanges across North America, Europe, the global south, and the Pan-Pacific region. This source book is as nuanced as first-wave feminism itself and will prove a valuable resource for studying women's rights in an increasingly globalized world.

Maureen Moynagh is Associate Professor in the English Department at St. Francis Xavier University where she teaches postcolonial literature and does research in the areas of modernism and empire, nationalism/transnationalism, and the literature of the African Diaspora.

Maureen Moynagh's profile page

Nancy M. Forestell is an associate professor in the Department of History at St Francis Xavier University.

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‘This impressive anthology is a welcome and needed addition to the field of feminist studies ... In one handy volume it provides an exceptional resource.’

Histories sociale/Social History