My contribution to this Critical Dialogue underscores how three streams of Progressive-Era feminists refounded democracy from the bottom up. First, the intersectional activism referenced in the title reattaches intersectionality to its social movement roots. The social democratic feminists were bridgers between movements. Julia Anna Cooper appealed to African American men to embrace the woman question and to white women to dismantle the racial caste system. Rose Schneiderman urged Jewish immigrant working-class men to interconnect the class struggle and women’s suffrage. Embracing a “both/and” stance, Cooper and Schneiderman produced new synthetic thinking. I call my method of revealing how their intersectional activism generated new theorizing a theory-activist dynamic. To show the power of this dynamic to advance a refounding of US democracy from the bottom up, I analyze how they actualized it in the shaping of new experimental participatory spaces and through democratic conversations.
Second, based on feminist critiques of deliberative democratic theory and reflections from social democratic feminists, I develop an ideal type of an intersectional conversation to explore what happens when bridgers acknowledge the power differentials within their coalitions to pursue shared goals. They speak and listen from different intersectional social locations. Some become aware of their class and/or race privileges through the acquisition of relational knowledge. Together, bridgers generate new intersectional analyses and visions. I combine and extend the documented exchanges and parallel conversations within the three streams of Progressive-Era feminists. This approach foregrounds the essential contributions of the two less powerful streams of African American and Jewish social democratic feminists. By using the ideal type of an intersectional conversation to bring the bridgers into relationship, I recover and give shape to their deeply diverse, complex conversations about how to interconnect the engendering and socializing of democracy. In effect, I produce what could be considered notes from a Constitutional Convention that refounds the US polity from the bottom up.
Finally, I induct the social democratic feminists into the Refounders Hall of Fame not to celebrate an ideal theory of feminist social democracy but to provide conceptual and organizing tools for a bottom-up social democratic refounding today. As they defended social policies, the bridgers provoked processes of collective self-reflection in which Americans could debate “who we are” and “what we stand for.” Their new beginning for American democracy laid the groundwork for a welfare state and imbedded it in a new transnational humanitarianism. Embracing multileveled social citizenship, they learned how to synthesize levels, from daily life to transnational civil society and the League of Nations. Through their egalitarian suffragism, they advanced a political revolution in the constitution marked by the incorporation of diverse women as full members of the sovereign power. In short, by exercising women’s political and economic agency, they created a new American tradition of social democracy and social citizenship. Validating this tradition is essential for acknowledging their refounding project. In a dire moment in US history, adapting their methods of activism and coalitional politics can provide intersectional activists today with the strength and courage required to save our democracy from the bottom up.
