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. - from publishers

This book is a great collection of feminist writing but of course it's also much more than that; it's also an attempt to reclaim and to some extent rehabilitate second wave feminism from charges about how white and disconnected from working class women the "movement" was. (Movement in quote marks to delineate the idea of a single movement.) I would say it's a compelling argument, and definitely raises some questions about how we mark off movements of feminism, though I'm not sure it's necessarily always useful to take these different concerns and mark them all as "second wave."

My primary Big Beef is the way the text draws a line between "academic feminism" and "regular" feminism, as if many of the pieces in the book--including the writings of Audre Lorde--were not produced for academic conferences. The lines between academic and non-academic are not as neatly drawn as this book might suggest, and I'm not sure who they were intending to exclude--Judith Butler? Joan Scott? (neither of whom I would say were second wave necessarily, and in fact responding to some of the claims that "regular" second wave feminists were making.)

A smaller beef is with some of the explanatory text--which overall I did deeply appreciate, but occasionally important terms like "Third World Woman" were badly contextualized (in that case, stripping the term of any anti-colonial commitments.)

Overall though, my personal nitpicking aside, I think this collection is actually very useful and does make a compelling argument for reexamining our assumptions about what constitutes the "second wave." I think especially for teaching, this collection is really really helpful, and I am glad I read it (and have already used it greatly for finding things for high school students and others to read!) ( )

Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can is a wonderful collection of writings from second wave feminism. There is such a wealth of ideas here that speak to our contemporary society as powerfully as it did then.

Depending on your background, many if not all of these writers and works (excerpts, essays, etc) may well be familiar to you. If so, this offers you a chance to remember some key points you may have forgotten. I found myself reading some of these almost as if I had never seen them before. So much has been written and so much has happened over the past sixty years or so that some things fade. Shulan and Moore made some phenomenal choices to include and made a point in the introduction of reaching back to The Second Sex, a work that sits outside the time frame of this collection but is definitely a part of it in spirit.

For any readers new to feminist thought, this is an excellent primary document source. There are some very good histories available to help create more of a narrative, within which these works played key roles. As they also mention in the introduction, some people over simplify the past, giving the impression that every conflict or debate had only two sides, the popular "cat fight" narrative. If anyone is interested in getting a broader view of the so-called sex wars during this period, one that disputes the sex-positive/sex-negative dichotomy, I would recommend the forthcoming Why We Lost the Sex Wars by Lorna N Bracewell. I believe it is being published next month, March, from University of Minnesota Press.

We must continuously look back so we don't forget in order to make the change we need to make. This volume serves that function for both those of us who remember these works and those for whom these are new. Highly recommended for both reading and reference.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )