Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights, bold ideas that in some ways went underground, but are ready to inspire a new generation When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, it exploded into women's consciousnesses like an atom bomb. Soon the women's rights movement, which had largely been focused on labor concerns since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, found new expression in a women's liberation movement, and the consciousness raising groups that began to meet in the 1960s grew into a mutli-racial movement that took on birth control, orgasms, intersectionality, housework, self-defense, childcare, rape, identity, healthcare, abortion, sexual harassment, pornography, prostitution, women's art, and more. Here are the essential visionary and radical writings that made the movement and spurred it onward, in more than 90 selections by over 100 different writers and collectives: from Pauli Murray to bell hooks, the Miss America Pageant protest to the battle over pornography, JANE and abortions in Chicago to the Boston Women's Health Collective, Toni Morrison and Florynce Kennedy to the Combahee River Collective, Susan Griffin to Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem to Susan Faludi, and many more. Focusing especially on writings that captured that electric moment when women exposed for one another the full dimensions of patriarchy in America and created a movement, each piece is expertly introduced with headnotes by writers and activists Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore who experienced the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s and 70s firsthand.
Synopsis
Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights for today When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women's consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women's civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This was the women's liberation movement, and writing--powerful, personal, and prophetic--was its beating heart.
Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works--many long out-of-print and hard to find--that catalyzed and propelled the women's liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan's Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi's Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life--changes too often taken for granted today--but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.