Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project
More than her own failings, perhaps there are times when new nations are just not ready to be called into being.
Although Phillis Wheatley (Peters) is widely known as the first African woman to publish a book of poetry in English, her biography—her forced Middle Passage journey to Boston, her enslavement by the Wheatley family, her rise to poetic celebrity and eventual fall into obscurity—often looms larger than the poems themselves.
But what would it mean to consider Phillis not as a “slave,” but as a poet, writer and critic who was enslaved?
Slavery was not an innate identity. It was a system imposed upon the enslaved. And when we return to Phillis’ work with that understanding, we encounter a writer of formidable imagination—one who envisioned interior worlds of freedom even while living within bondage.
Phillis’ personification of Imagination becomes, in this sense, a founding feminist figure—an “imperial queen” who invites us to leave the rolling universe behind and imagine new worlds. That work of imagination remains unfinished. It is the ongoing labor of love that Black feminist traditions continue to carry forward today.
(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)
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Founding Feminists: 250 Years of an Unfinished Revolution (With Janell Hobson)
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men declared that “all men are created equal,” casting a vision of liberty that has shaped the American imagination ever since. But even as they debated freedom in Philadelphia, women were writing, organizing, governing, resisting and insisting on their place within the nation taking form.
As Ms. launches a new series on our country’s Founding Feminists this month, Dr. Michele Goodwin is joined by the series’ editor, Professor Janell Hobson, to discuss what America’s 250th anniversary means for women and the feminist agenda.
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Cover Reveal and Spring 2026 Issue Sneak Peek: ICE Is ‘the Army of the Patriarchy’
In early February, while the nation was still reeling from the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, Loretta Ross and Jackson Katz—two feminist academics with decidedly different backgrounds and identities—discussed how U.S. federal agents became the enforcement arm of the nation’s racism and misogyny.
You’ll find this, and more, in the Spring 2026 issue of Ms.
‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America
Centuries before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women crossed oceans and deserts to build communities whose legacies still shape the United States.
As anti-Latino sentiment coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must remember that long before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women inhabited territory that would become the United States.
Like their English Protestant counterparts in New England, Spanish-speaking women were founding mothers of our nation. Their legacies live on through their descendants and the many other Latinas who immigrated to the U.S. over the past 250 years. Faced with the widespread detention of Spanish-speaking women, it is crucial to remember that it has long been their country too.
(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)
