Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights for todayWhen 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.
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.
"Both a comprehensive introduction to the movement and a persuasive defense of its revolutionary nature." —
Publishers Weekly
“It’s hard to remember, especially if you weren’t yet born, about the rights women have not always enjoyed, the laws that undervalued women, or the cultural mores that subordinated us. I was born, grew up, and came of age in the tumultuous times this anthology covers (1960s-1990s) and these writings became foundational for me and millions of other women: Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, Audre Lorde, Susan Brownmiller, Maxine Hong Kingston, bell hooks, (to name a few) and their texts about abortion, pornography, birth control, sexuality, identity, family, sexual harassment, the erotic, sisterhood, date rape, race, and a constellation of social justice issues precipitated a future more appealing than our past. It was here, within these ninety(ish) pieces, women began to subvert their position as Other through writing, meaning other than the default: men. Shulman and Moore have also been activists and participants in the feminist movement from the start, and created feminist literature themselves. Ordered chronologically, these pieces smartly convey the movement’s development; it’s important to know from whence feminism came in order to know where we are going, and this anthology sculpts a path for that to happen.”
—Kerri Arsenault, LitHub
