Editor's Introduction

This volume’s publication coincides with the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which Meridians readers likely know was the culmination of nearly a century of women’s organizing for political and civil rights. However, as our cover art “Layers” by Preetika Rajgariah alludes, the “long fetch”¹ of this “first wave” of U.S. feminist history is often hidden in plain sight, and the racism within suffragist organizing and in “the waves rubric” deployed by white feminists periodizing the history of their activism “remains hidden from view” (Lipsitz 2007: viii; Hewitt 2010). Yet “historical knowledge reveals that events that we perceive as immediate and proximate have causes and consequences that span great distances” (Lipsitz 2007: viii). Likewise, world-systems analysis reminds us that just as tides rise and recede, “progress is . . . possible, but so is regression” (Wallerstein 2009...