Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/ 0009-0005-4548-7005
Date Available
7-18-2026
Year of Publication
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
English
First Advisor
Dr. Shauna M. Morgan
Abstract
Recent critical texts by Jessie Daniels, Mikki Kendall, and more frame the histories of mainstream white feminism in ways that highlight its ongoing complicity with white supremacy and its maintenance of racist structures and systems. In conversation with these current scholarly as well as mainstream cultural conversations about white feminism that have been happening with more frequency since 2016, this project turns to post-suffrage narratives of white womanhood to historicize the modern narratives we tell about feminism’s history. Each chapter of this project considers a 1920s or 1930s literary narrative alongside current literary and cultural narratives as I explore the ongoing legacies of white (supremacist) feminism that post-suffrage American literature by and about white women has left us with. Literary narratives considered here include texts that were popular at the time even if they no longer are (e.g. Edna Ferber’s Show Boat), as well as those that continue to carry cultural capital today (e.g. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind). Cultural narratives considered include films that developed out of these literary narratives, social media narratives of white womanhood, news stories, memoirs, and more. In addition to drawing on and intervening in (1) critical whiteness studies scholarship more broadly, this project closely relies on (2) a body of interdisciplinary scholarship on white feminism that has proliferated in recent years, as well as (3) both British and American scholarship on the nation, imperialism, and Empire given white feminism’s participation in global systems of white supremacy. I argue that the dominant U.S. literary and cultural narratives of mainstream white feminism, from its defining post-suffrage decades to now, have been and continue to be inextricably linked with white supremacy, and this project highlights the ongoing social and cultural production of white (supremacist) feminism at the level of narrative.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.376
Recommended Citation
McConnell Parsons, Jannell C., "WRITING WHITE WOMEN: WHITE (SUPREMACIST) FEMINISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE, POST SUFFRAGE TO POST HILLARY (1920–2020s)" (2024). Theses and Dissertations--English. 176.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/176
Included in
American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons
