Textual Feminist Recognitions

This article proposes that the feminist scientist and scholar Ursula Martius Franklin (1921–2016) practiced a particular type of reading that I call textual feminist recognitions. These recognitions are a material practice through which Franklin acknowledged the work and impact of other scholars on her own thinking, and the active role that reading played in her everyday life. Franklin’s reading as an act of textual recognition was collaborative, multiple, committed, and reciprocal. Academically trained as a physicist, the reading habits that Franklin practiced beyond her own discipline reflect her understanding of feminism, which she detailed in her published works. She practiced the ideas presented in her publications and lectures in smaller, private textual moments and traces that are preserved in her archive and personal book collection. Franklin amassed a body of work that centres the acknowledgement of intellectual debt and inspiration, and of interpersonal relationships. With this reading evidence, carefully selected and arranged in her archive and library, Franklin made and continues to make her thinking visible. Using understudied contexts and evidence, this conceptualization and archival case study of historical reading practices aim to encourage further research that connects book history to other scholarly fields, and that continues to expand our understanding of reading.