Borrowing from Our Foremothers: Reexamining the Women's Movement through Material Culture, 1848-2017 by Amy Helene Forss (review)

Reviewed by: Borrowing from Our Foremothers: Reexamining the Women's Movement through Material Culture, 1848-2017 by Amy Helene Forss Nora Ellen Carleson Borrowing from Our Foremothers: Reexamining the Women's Movement through Material Culture, 1848–2017 By Amy Helene Forss (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Illustrations, appendix, index. Clothbound 60. 00; e-book 60. 00. ) How can centering objects in our discussion of the long history of the women's movement in the United States from 1848–2017 provide additional insight into well-trod historical studies of feminism and its female critics? Dr. Amy Helen Forss seeks to answer this question in Borrowing from Our Foremothers: Reexamining the Women's Movement through Material Culture, 1848–2017. In just over 160 pages of text and 124 pages of appendix and bibliographic materials, the author analyzes thirty objects that she claims "generally reside in the endnotes, not the narrative" of popular and undergraduate American women's history. She explores the way the movement's "foremothers" utilized material objects as part of a transgenerational strategy. Gathering what she labels "unifying artifacts, " Forss highlights the continuity in women's production, display, and gifting of objects in the context of the movement during 169 years of United States history. Forss excels in her breadth of study, balancing both the movement itself as well as women and groups who actively fought against suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment. She embraces an intersectional approach that includes LGBTQ, Black, and Asian members of the women's movement. Including these voices and stories provides insight into the complexities of not just the ability to vote or equal rights, but the additional hurdles people of color and members of the LGBTQ community faced. As a scholar of African American history, Forss provides particularly well-researched and insightful chapters featuring Black foremothers. The other strength of the author's work—oral histories—is simultaneously one of its greatest missed End Page 79 opportunities. The author conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with nearly one hundred women, but the insights feel almost hidden within the pages. Only through limited mentions of a conversation with one of her subjects or a pointed flip to the notes does the reader grasp the impressive and extensive body of firsthand accounts backing her selection of objects and their stories within the text. Forss's extensive citations and ability concisely to recount histories of her actors shine in the volume's historiography and historical narrative. However, her use of both material culture evidence and theory is muddled and frequently ineffective. Forss adeptly assesses the 1917 "Jailed for Freedom" pin and "Lavender Menace" t-shirts; however, she does not treat the material objects as texts. Regrettably, the author's use of traditional historical methods overpowers her use of material artifacts and theory, likely diminishing the work's value to the field of material culture studies. Objects act as touch points or totems instead of as the driving force of the text, and the editorial choices compound this problem. Each chapter is comprised of an introduction, a conclusion, and, in between, a small section on each object. Every object is designated by a heading that denotes the artifact's numerical placement in the book and its name. This disrupts connections the author actively attempts to make among the objects themselves. Additionally, the puzzling lack of figure numbers for reference further decenters material culture. In place of figures, one finds thirty-one images in the center of the book, completely de-contextualized. Despite the difficulties in considering her monograph as a material culture text, Forss does succinctly recount an intersectional history of 169 years of the women's movement in the United States. Ultimately, this alone makes the text appealing to undergraduate readers and the general public. The incorporation of material culture, though clunky, can serve as an introduction to the field for these readers, and the book leaves room for other scholars to continue to incorporate its methods and theory in the histories of the women's movement in the United States. End Page 80 Nora Ellen Carleson Historic New England Copyright © 2024 Trustees of Indiana University