This session is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017), which charts the unabashedly feminist project of generating new forms of knowledge, transforming institutions, supporting public-facing scholarship, and building vital connections among women. By stressing the need to “bring feminist theory home,” Ahmed rearticulates earlier exhortations that the personal is political. Panelists will explore these themes through an intergenerational conversation with Judith R. Walkowitz, Professor Emerita of History at Johns Hopkins University, with reference to key moments in her career. We consider how feminist politics, pedagogy, and scholarship can shape one’s trajectory in the historical profession, open up new areas of research, and provide opportunities for dialogue with activists. This is not a festschrift, however. Instead, biography will lead us to broader questions about the public presentation of history, and the “dynamism of connections” with students, scholars, activists, and friends.

We begin in the 1970s, in the founding years of women’s history. Martha Howell describes this moment of institutional transformation: building a women’s studies program at Rutgers University, the founding of the journal Feminist Studies, and other collaborative efforts to shape historical scholarship and knowledge production. Sonja Dolinsek, a PhD candidate from Germany, will contextualize Walkowitz’s scholarship on prostitution, starting with her groundbreaking Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980), which insisted that poor women “made their own history, albeit under very restrictive conditions.” Dolinsek will explain the significance of giving sex workers a history at a time when prostitutes’ rights groups clamored for recognition.

Two former students, Lara Kriegel (PhD 2000) and Ren Pepitone (PhD 2015), provide reflections on feminist mentorship while probing the historical and historiographic context. How did the British Marxist tradition, the denunciation of capitalist patriarchy, the debate on housework and other forms of intimate labor, and women’s calls for bodily autonomy offer Walkowitz and others a blueprint for change in the 1970s and 1980s? How did intersectionality, the cultural turn, and the increasingly imperiled state of the humanities, both trouble and reinvigorate feminist strategies?

The writers and activists Kate Marquez and Tracy Quan consider the thorny question of collaboration with scholars. Both contributed to a recent issue of Radical History Review coedited by Walkowitz; in this and other venues, they have presented invaluable insights into the sex worker rights movement in Europe and the United States. For those of us grappling with the detrimental effects of public policy on prostitution—the intensified policing of vulnerable individuals, along with laws that make sex work less lucrative and less safe—partnerships between activists and scholars could lead to fruitful solutions. How do we build those bridges in a spirit of mutual respect?

Each snapshot confirms that the feminist life championed by Ahmed is experienced in community, created anew in its historical context. Walkowitz’s response will be forward-looking as much as retrospective: How do we continue to transform institutions and strengthen these bonds in the twenty-first century?