Fighting for Recovery: foremothers and feminism in the 1970s

This article argues that the feminist recovery of a history of our own' during the 1970s proved difficult in ways not fully addressed in generalising narratives (celebratory or regretful) of feminist historical work. The recovery of a nineteenth-century pioneer woman', Mary Hallock Foote, demonstrates the competing interests in playfeminist and anti-feminist, popular and scholarly, public and familial, national and localas well as the problematic positions of that these cross-cutting debates. The question of recovery, use and even ownership, of Foote and her history retains its ability to spark argument almost fifty years later.