In the Preface to Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973 ed.) members of the Boston Women’s Health Collective describe how their desire to learn about their bodies resulted in a game-changing book and worldwide women’s health movement. Audre Lorde reconceptualized the meaning and power of the erotic. Carol Gilligan proposed, based upon interviews, that women conceptualized self and morality “in a different voice,” one that privileged “an ethic of care.” And in a 1970 speech at a conference on employment, the great congresswoman Shirley Chisholm told women that the break with tradition for which they were fighting required educational, economic, and psychological preparation, “in order that we will be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us.” That was two decades before Susan Faludi declared “the backlash.”
Shulman and Moore have rightly selected many text that focus upon issues of esteem and building new identities. They include a number of essays that consider various forms of violence including rape. One of the most moving pieces in this volume is Del Martin’s “A Letter from a Battered Wife.”
As might be expected, the debate over pornography is represented by Andrea Dworkin, described by the editors as “perhaps the leading figure of the feminist anti-pornography movement in the late 1970s and 1980; Susan Jacoby, identifying herself as a “First Amendment junkie,” who argues the difference between expression of ideas, and conduct; and Joan Nestle who, in “My Mother Liked to Fuck,” speaks against what she calls Dworkin’s “litany against the penis.” One of the strengths of Women’s Liberation! centers upon the selection of essays that highlight pointed and contentious differences of vision. Nestle and Dworkin; Steinem and Firestone.
The selections in Women’s Liberation! naturally reflect the concerns of the various authors at the time that they wrote. They also speak to certain issues like movement building including, for example, the Redstockings manifesto and principles, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and domesticity more than education and employment issues or using legislatures and courts as an adjuvant to movement. This imbalance reflects Shulman and Moore’s decision to avoid inclusion of (more readily available) academic writing on discrimination in education and employment.
Don’t mistake this book for a library reference volume, though it is that. The strength, and allure, of Women’s Liberation! is that it invites readers to select one or several entries, read them and then contemplate what cultural and economic conditions were behind their words forty or fifty years ago. And critically, like the Seneca Falls Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the articles and manifestos in Women’s Liberation! encourage readers to consider where second wave feminism succeeded and how its vision connects to, and supports, contemporary movements for rights and justice.
©2021 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
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