Pragmatism, Feminism, Gender, and Identities

Miras Boronat addresses the work of progressive-era feminists who have been incorporated into the history of pragmatism and are now regarded as feminist pragmatists. She argues that some of those figures already had the resources to deal in important ways with two issues still relevant today: the distinction between sex and gender, and intersectionality. Decades before de Beauvoir or Stoller addressed the sex/gender distinction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jessie Taftwas were applying it to the so-called woman question. Gilman’s critique of androcentrism relied on a distinction between the biological and the cultural, while Taft approached the matter from the point of view of social behaviorism and understood gender in terms of social roles and expectations. On the subject of intersectionality, Miras Boronat describes the work of Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about the “double invisibility” of Black women at the beginning of the progressive era, and she adresses recent work inspired by Cooper that is aimed at developing an analytical approach to intersectionality.