Published in 2007 (first published 1998)
544 pages
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a professor of English and women’s studies at Temple University and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Ann Snitow is a professor of literature and gender studies at The New School for Social Research and lives in New York City.
What is this book about?
The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women’s Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These 32 writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in our time. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation.
What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their rebellion? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such an unwomanly struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. These stories tell how the world we live in changed.
With The Feminist Memoir Project, these activists contribute to yet another movement project, the political work of memory.
