Finding feminism when the word isn't there

Today I turned to work I started last spring and shared at the fabulous Women’s History in the Digital World. I’d hoped to expand the analysis I did using two periodicals, Off Our Backs and Chrysalis with several more periodicals from JSTOR. However I found a corruption in the files which means I’m waiting to hear back from JSTOR about the usability of the 3600+ files they kindly sent me.

I turned therefore to a corpus I’d be dying ot get at Conditions, which is in Reveal Digital's Independent Voices collection but only as JPG. I tried scraping with wget but couldn’t. I asked for help on Twitter, and ultimately Micki Kaufman not only figured out how to, she did it for me.

Question for the day:

“Echols demonstrates in her Daring to Be Bad, radical feminism dissipated into a more general, shorthand "feminism" [Jacqueline Rhodes]

This is exactly the sort of thing that corpus linguistics can help us to understand. However, I first worked the JSTOR beta search function to get some sense of diachronic change since I don't have that corpus to use. Specifically I looked in periodicals classified as women/feminist studies, research articles 1967 to the present. This is related to what Echols is discussing, but tilted more heavily towards academic feminist writing rather than activist (list of periodicals under this category).

Echols' book covers the years 1967-1975

"radical feminism" Peaked in 1976, 1980, 1994 and 2000.

My argument is that the crucial shifts in feminism came later, post 1978.

Thus I’ve been working with periodicals from the period of about 1978-1981 which coincided with some major shift in feminist theory.

What the above graphs don't tell us is anything about how the term radical feminism is used.  Our brains are fairly decent at picking out aboutness in a text, but not so good at keeping track of how words are used in combination with other words, or compared to other words.   Here CL shines. For example, CL allows us to look beyond raw frequency to measure usage of one word relative to the word count in the text. 

Using three periodicals (Off Our Backs generally defined as a radical feminist periodical, Chrysalis, which carried tag line "magazine of women's culture" and Conditions, which at times carried tag line a magazine of writing by women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians) I started exploring feminism.

There is no statistically significant difference in occurrence of feminism in OOB and Chrysalis (P=3.76 LL). However using the messy files from Conditions  there is a significant difference ) LL 13.52 b/n Chrysalis and LL 27.15 OOB).  This raises really interesting issues about use of term “feminism” in the only publication with focus on “black feminism.”

Corpus Linguistics can also look at clusters (words that appear together in a body of texts)

Top clusters for feminism 

                       

OOB                1. Radical feminism

                        2. Of feminism

Chrysalis        1. of feminism

                        2. radical feminism

Conditions      1. black feminism

                        2. American feminism

And yet, even this doesn't get us to how the above actually appear IN the texts.  For that we need to look at the concordance views.

concordance view occurrences of radical feminism in Chrysalis all issues 1978-1981

Almost half the uses of "radical feminism" in Chrysalis are in the title of Mary Daly's book Gyn/Ecology The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (in comparison only 4 of the 86 occurrences in OOB relate to book titles) This points to a fascinating conundrum, which is that while authors like Daly have been labeled as NOT radical feminists, she clearly considers her work to be part of radical feminism. 

OOB 1978-1981 occurrences relating to efforts to define "radical feminism"

Defining radical feminism accounts for a third of the occurrences in OOB [ variants of "define," are declarative statements "RADICAL FEMINISM IS," or attempt to differentiate "radical feminism" from other types of "feminisms." (Another sizable cluster of uses pertains to strategies for making radical feminism more effective) Most crucially, these statements occur in just 10  of over 1000 articles. 
I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions yet because the corpus of Conditions is both messy and so small in comparison to the other two corpora.

Today's take away lesson is that  the interpretation of Echols that hinges on uses of “radical feminism” being flattened out into “feminism” is not reflected in that language in primary sources of the era that I examined either in JSTOR or in the three periodicals I zoomed in on.   These appear as terms retroactively applied by historians and other scholars seeking to characterize nuances within the women’s movement. 

Next up I'll start exploring ways to get at the idea of shifting feminisms without using ideological labels. 

Echols wanted to distinguish radical feminism from "cultural feminism, a strand that grew out of radical feminism” but that is a frustrating difficult definition to operationalize.  Words she uses to elaborate this definition are countercultural, femininity and religion.  I'll look for those words, but also body, nature, goddess, mother/hood   which I identify via keyness a comparison of words in one corpus to the words in another corpus (in this case Chrysalis and OOB).

Other authors see cultural feminism as celebrating “female values” which again get hard to nail down, but perhaps nurture and values?   There are those who highlight cultural feminism as oppositional to male so CL quite helpful here looking at collocates and clusters of female and male in the corpora.

huge thanks to Heather Froehlich, who took time away from her own dis work to talk me through this!  Of course, all  errors are my own and not down to her in any way.