Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can

Edited By Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore

Published by  the Library of America, 2021, 560 pgs.

Reviewed By Jill Norgren

I have always been grateful that the classic document of the first women’s rights movement, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of the Rights and Sentiments, delineates grievances and demands with specificity. The multi-point inventory has made it easy to establish what was ultimately won, and what remains to be addressed: Suffrage is ours. If married, we are no longer dead in the eyes of civil law. Women now control their property and wages. Divorce and child custody laws have changed; education and access to the professions have as well. Relations with many church hierarchies remain to be sorted out as, in some communities, does the question of obedience to one’s husband and differing codes of morality.  

In their newly published compendium, Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can editors Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have selected ninety important text written from 1963 through 1991 that educate us on the range of feminist thinking in the 20th century – what it meant to be a woman in the United States and the changes that these authors wanted, often demanded.  And like the Seneca Falls Declaration, once read these writings provide a similar opportunity to explore which feminist goals have been achieved and where the movement is still reaching.

Shulman and Moore have selected the ninety entries for this volume after reviewing thousands. It was clearly a massive task and surely a frustrating one as page limitations required leaving out many pieces that they had wished to include.  In their Introduction Shulman writes that as coeditor of the volume she saw “the opportunity to correct – stereotypes and misconceptions” such as “how frequently the second wave has been mischaracterized as a monolithic white women’s movement – merely reformist or even [an] elitist one.” The collection of writings found in Women’s Liberation!  reveals the second wave’s great diversity of race, class, and ethnicity but also the “diversity of politics, emphases, styles, interests, sexual practice, aesthetics, and vision.”

The unquestioned success of the project rests squarely upon having fulfilled this mission.  Shulman and Moore have reached into archives, attics, and dusty cartons to gather up the well-known texts of Betty Friedan, Flo Kennedy, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,  Alice Walker, and Susan Faludi as well as the hard to find and the out of print.  The volume begins with the opening chapter, titled “The Problem That Has No Name,” of Friedan’s classic, The Feminine Mystique.  The chapter remains a powerful, revealing, and contentious essay which concludes “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.” Five hundred pages later, in the book’s last entry, there is the Introduction, “Blame It on Feminism,” to Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash, a volume the columnist Ellen Goodman called “spine-stiffening.” 

The range of the remaining eighty-eight essays is exactly what drew Shulman to the project. They reveal a diversity of politics – debates, for example, among and within racial groups:  Mary Ann Weathers arguing that women’s liberation should be used to unite “the entire revolutionary movement consisting of women, men, and children”; Frances M. Beals insisting “white feminist groups must become anti-imperialist and anti-racist”;  Doris Wright insisting that feminism does not detract from the Black freedom struggle and that nothing justifies men attempting to dominate women; Mitsuye Yamada unfolding an argument for the rejection of “shikataganai,” or resigned acceptance, and demanding visibility;  Cherrie Moraga using the perspective of a lesbian to explore how victims can oppress one another. (Illustration: Seneca Falls Convention, sos.oregon.gov)

Women’s Liberation! contains iconic essays that remain compelling.  Pauli Murray and Mary O. Eastwood’s “Jane Crow and the Law” makes the argument that adding “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would protect women from discrimination in their right  to employment. Their work greatly influenced lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” put in writing what many women knew. “Why I Want a Wife,” Judy Syfers’ analysis of women’s domestic duties concludes, “My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?  And after publication in 1970 Carol Hanisch’s phrase “the personal is political” became, according to Shulman and Moore, “an international byword.”

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