Personal politics : the roots of women's liberation in the civil rights movement and the new left

Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness. This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.The women most crucial to the feminist movement that emerged in the 1960's arrived at their commitment and consciousness in response to the unexpected and often shattering experience of having their work minimized, even disregarded, by the men they considered to be their colleagues and fellow crusaders in the civil rights and radical New Left movements. On the basis of years of research, interviews with dozens of the central figures, and her own personal experience, Evans explores how the political stance of these women was catalyzed and shaped by their sharp disillusionment at a time when their skills as political activists were newly and highly developed, enabling them to join forces to support their own cause.

In A Memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood — a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.

She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide — bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her — into depression and dependency.

We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet — the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons — Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink,pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually -and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self.

Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place — or to a dream — can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

In ''The Road From Coorain,'' one fire starts another. The author's predicament as a woman in Australia becomes a measure of Australia's predicament in the British Empire....''The Road From Coorain'' is the work of a writer who relentlessly tugs at the cultural fences around her until they collapse, leaving her solitary under an immense Australian sky, enlarged to herself at last. What emerges most clearly from this book is the depth of Jill Ker Conway's feeling for ''the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level''. -- New York Times

From Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Faludi, from the ERA to Anita Hill — a historically informed sourcebook that defines the intellectual and political underpinnings of contemporary feminism.

In this important volume, the respected feminist historian Miriam Schneir completes the work she began in her bestselling Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, presenting contemporary writings that define the women's movement today add reveal how radically transformative a force it is throughout the world.

Ranging from intensely personal statements to ringing manifestos, from diagnosis to outright rebellion, and incorporating both public records and works addressing such specific issues as religion, rape, women's health, pornography, and the concerns of lesbians and women of color, Feminism in Our Time is the most thorough record to date of women's ongoing struggle to control their own destinies and provide alternative visions of the just society and a true human equality.

Publishers Weekly

A sampler of feminist writings that focuses on the 1960s and '70s, this volume begins with a selection from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and then jumps rather abruptly to 1962 and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook . Incorporating a diverse range of contributors, from poets (Anne Sexton) to polemicists (Shulamith Firestone), Schneir's selection is lively, inspiring and inclusive--there are excerpts from legal documents , such as the ERA and Justice Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v. . Wade , and from political statements from activist groups. Schneir's introductions, providing historical context and relevant biographical data, take pains to be diplomatic but also acknowledge disputes. Of antipornography crusader and censorship advocate Andrea Dworkin she writes, ``Her blunt, hard-hitting prose is anything but temperate or judicious.'' There is no sex-positive voice like Susie Bright or Betty Dodson to counterbalance Dworkin, but in anthologizing a heterogeneous movement, omissions are perhaps inevitable. Schneir has assembled not just a political sampler but an anthology of some of this country's best essayists. Her sequel to Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings will undoubtedly find a home on women's studies syllabuses, but it deserves a much broader readership. (July)

In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents'thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a'man's job'of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide—bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into depression and dependency.We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons—Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self.Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free. Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthooda journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slidebereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled herinto depression and dependency. We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planetthe suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessonsJill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to placeor to a dreamcan at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free. This ... Revolutionary Book Began As An Exceptional Woman's Attempt To Find Out Who And What She Was. It Ended Up Shocking, Infuriating, And Galvanizing Millions Of Readers And Dramatically Revising The Way Women Talk And Think About Themselves. Drawing Extensive Interviews With Women Of Every Age And Station Of Life, Masterfully Synthesizing Research About Women's Bodies And Psyches As Well As Their Historic And Economic Roles, [this Book] Is An Encyclopedic And ... Argued Document Of Inequality And Enforced Otherness.--p. [4] Of Cover. Destiny. Data Of Biology -- Psychoanalytic Point Of View -- Point Of View Of Historical Materialism -- History. Nomads -- Early Tillers Of The Soil -- Patriarchal Times And Classical Antiquity -- Through The Middle Ages To Eighteenth-century France -- Since The French Revolution: The Job And The Vote -- Myths. Dreams, Fears, Idols -- Myth Of Woman In Five Authors -- Myth And Reality -- Formative Years. Childhood -- Young Girl -- Sexual Initiation -- Lesbian -- Situation. Married Woman -- Mother -- Social Life -- Prostitutes And Hetairas -- From Maturity To Old Age -- Woman's Situation And Character -- Justifications. Narcissist -- Woman In Love -- Mystic -- Toward Liberation. Independent Woman. Simone De Beauvoir ; Translated And Edited By H.m. Parshley ; Introduction To The Vintage Edition By Deirdre Bair. Reprint Of The 1953 Ed. Published By Knopf, New York. Translation Of Le Deuxième Sexe. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. A landmark collection of writings that define the intellectual and political underpinnings of contemporary feminism, from Simone de Beauvoir to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In this important volume, the respected feminist historian Miriam Schneir completes the work she began in her bestselling The Essential Historical Writings , presenting contemporary writings that define the women's movement todayand revealing how radically transformative a force it is throughout the world. Here are the words of Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Anita Hill, and many other important feminist figures. Ranging from intensely personal statements to ringing manifestos, from diagnosis to outright rebellion, and incorporating both public records and works addressing such specific issues as religion, rape, women's health, pornography, and the concerns of lesbians and women of color, Feminism in Our Time is a thorough record of women's ongoing struggle to control their own destinies and provide alternative visions of a just society and true human equality. Presents The Life Of Martha Ballard, A Midwife In Maine During The Eighteenth Century, By Drawing On The Detailed Diary She Kept For Twenty-seven Years Of Her Life. A Great Sea A Going -- August 1787: Exceeding Dangerously Ill -- September 1788: Warpt A Piece -- October 1789: Mrs. Foster Has Sworn A Rape On A Number Of Men -- November 1792: Matrimonial Writes -- December 1793: Birth 50. Birth 51 -- January 1796: Find My House Up In Arms -- February 1801: A Desection Performed -- March 1804: What A Scean Had I To Go At Evening -- April 1806: Polly Purington Here -- May 1809: Workt In My Gardin. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Originally Published: New York : Knopf, 1990. Reprint. New York : Knopf, 1990. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 366-411) And Index. The women most crucial to the feminist movement that emerged in the 1960's arrived at their commitment and consciousness in response to the unexpected and often shattering experience of having their work minimized, even disregarded, by the men they considered to be their colleagues and fellow crusaders in the civil rights and radical New Left movements. On the basis of years of research, interviews with dozens of the central figures, and her own personal experience, Evans explores how the political stance of these women was catalyzed and shaped by their sharp disillusionment at a time when their skills as political activists were newly and highly developed, enabling them to join forces to support their own cause. From the Trade Paperback edition PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine,'A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own'(The New York Times Book Review).Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale. PULITZER PRIZE WINNERDrawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine,"A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" ( The New York Times Book Review). Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale. **The Second Sex** (French: *Le Deuxième Sexe*) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. She published the work in two volumes: *Facts and Myths* (*Les faits et les mythes*), and *Lived Experience* (*L’expérience vécue*). Some chapters first appeared in the journal *Les Temps modernes*. One of Beauvoir’s best-known books, *The Second Sex* is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy, and as the starting inspiration point of second-wave feminism. This triumphant and genuinely revolutionary book began as an exceptional woman's attempt to find out who and what she was. It ended up shocking, infuriating, and galvanizing millions of readers and dramatically revising the way women talk and think about themselves. Drawing extensive interviews with women of every age and station of life, masterfully synthesizing research about women's bodies and psyches as well as their historic and economic roles, [this book] is an encyclopedic and brilliantly argued document of inequality and enforced "otherness."--Page 4 of cover Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoirs masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of woman, and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness. This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoirs pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was back then, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come. This beautifully written narrative of Conway's journey from a girlhood on an isolated sheep - farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the presidency of Smith College) is both new and universal. If few of us have known an eight-year drought in New South Wales, many of us have felt the despair of an ambitious young woman facing a edstrained female destiny. This book, an extraordinarily gripping and inspiring work, will take its place as one of the few heroic stories of childhood A work of anthropology and sociology, of biology and psychoanalysis, which stands - almost five decades after its first appearance - as the first landmark in the modern feminist upsurge that has transformed perceptions of the social relationship of man and womankind in our time. Prologue: Cracks in the Mold Southern White Women in a Southern Black Movement Going South Black Power -- Catalyst for Feminism A Reassertion of the Personal Let the People Decide The Failure of Success -- Women in the Movement The Dam Breaks Personal Politics A woman of intellect and ambition describes growing up on an Australian ranch, coping with her father's death and her mother's depression, her intellectual awakening at the university, and her path to becoming Smith College's first woman president Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier The memoirs of Jill Conway and her journey into adulthood from a 30,000 acre sheep ranch in Coorain, Australia, to America where she became the first woman president of Smith College Gathers a selection of modern feminist writings by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Andrea Dworkin Explores the psychological, sexual and social roles of woman, and her historical and contemporary situation in Western culture at the middle of the twentieth century Argues that the women most crucial to the liberation movement in the 1960s were responding to their treatment in the civil rights and New Left movements. Soon after 1920, when woman suffrage was won in the United States, the movement that had brought it about faltered, then came to a standstill.