The World Split Open (86 page)

Classic works of the first years that were widely read and debated include Germaine Greer,
The Female Eunuch
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Jill Johnston,
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution
(New York: Bantam, 1973); Kate Millett,
Sexual Politics
(New York: Doubleday, 1971); Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
(New York: Bantam, 1970); Adrienne Rich,
Of Woman Born
(New York: Norton, 1976); Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975); Caroline Bird,
Born Female
(New York: Bantam Books, 1969); Jessie Bernard,
The Future of Marriage
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968); Eva Figes,
Patriarchal Attitudes
(London: Faber, 1970); and Ti-Grace Atkinson,
Amazon Odyssey
(New York: Link, 1974). Celestine Ware's
Woman Power
(New York: Tower, 1970) was the earliest book to challenge the new feminist movement to address racism. Norman Mailer's
Prisoner of Sex
(New York: Primus, reprinted from 1971 edition) was probably the most important intellectual assault on the women's movement. Some of the most important early novels were Alix Kates Shulman,
Burning Questions
(New York: Bantam, 1978);
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
(New York: Knopf, 1972); Sara Davidson,
Loose Change
(New York: Doubleday, 1977); and Erica Jong,
Fear of Flying
(New York: Signet, 1973). For other literature, see Lisa Maria Hogeland,
Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1998).

Important memoirs by women activists offer an insider's view of the movement. See Betty Friedan,
It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement
(New York: Random House, 1976); Betty Friedan,
Life So Far
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Daisy Bates,
The Long Shadow of Little Rock, A Memoir
(New York: McKay, 1962); Phyllis Chesler,
Letter to a Young Feminist
(New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1997); Elaine Brown,
A Taste of Power
(New York: Pantheon, 1992); Anne Moody,
Coming of Age in Mississippi
(New York: Dial Press, 1968); Robin Morgan,
Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
(New York: Vintage, 1978); Angela Davis,
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
(New York: Random House, 1974); Assata Shakur,
Assata
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill
Books, 1987); Erica Jong,
Fear of Fifty
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Audre Lorde,
The Cancer Journals
(San Francisco: Spinsters, Ink, 1980); Gloria Steinem,
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983); and
Revolution from Within
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1992); Shirley Chisholm,
Unbought and Unbossed
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1970).

For valuable literature on women's experiences during World War II, see Susan M. Hartman,
The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940's
(Boston: Twayne, 1982); Leila Rupp,
Mobilizing Women for War
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); D'Ann Campbell,
Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Karen Anderson,
Wartime Women
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Maureen Honey,
Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender and Propaganda During World War II
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Ruth Milkman,
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); John Costello,
Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); Jack Goodman,
While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the U.S.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946); Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith,
Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Homefront
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard Lingeman,
Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Homefront 1941–1946
(New York: Putnam, 1970); Doris Weatherford,
American Women and World War II
(New York: Facts on File, Oxford, 1990).

For general overviews of the fifties, see David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York: Villard Press, 1993); Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak,
The Fifties: The Way We Really Were
(New York: Doubleday, 1977); Kenneth Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
(New York: Oxford, 1985); Eugenia Kaledin,
Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s
(Boston: Twayne, 1984). Valuable works on adult women during the fifties include Elaine Tyler May,
Homeward Bound
(New York: Basic Books, 1988); Andrew Cherlin,
Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Benita Eisler,
Private Lives: Men and Women of the Fifties
(New York: Franklin Watts, 1986); Brett Harvey,
The Fifties: A Women's Oral History
(New York: Harper, 1994); Albert Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(New York: Pocket Books, 1953); Ferdinand Lundberg and Marya Farnham,
The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947); and Stephanie Coontz,
The Way We Never Were
(New York: Basic Books, 1992). Betty Friedan's image of
The Feminine Mystique
(New York: Norton, 1963) is challenged by essays in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed.,
Not
June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). Useful works on McCarthyism are David Caute,
The Great Fear
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), and Ellen Schrecker,
Many Are the Crimes
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). For women's political engagement, see Leila Rupp,
Surviving in the Doldrums
(New York: Oxford, 1987); Amy Swerdlow,
Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and her pathbreaking essay, “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in Linda Kerber, Kathryn Sklar, and Alice Kessler-Harris, eds.,
U.S. History As Women's History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The contributions of the Old Left to the women's movement of the 1960s can be found in Kate Weigand,
Vanguard of Women's Liberation
, dissertation, Ohio State University, 1995; in Daniel Horowitz,
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); and in Judith Adler Hennessee,
Betty Friedan: Her Life
(New York: Random House, 1999).

Barbara Berg,
The Crisis of the Working Mother, Resolving the Conflict between Family and Work
(New York: Summit, 1986), is a study of this generation's attitudes toward domesticity, and Landon Y. Jones,
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation
(New York: Ballantine, 1980), provides an overview of the baby boom and its influence on American society. For works on the specific experiences of young women, see Wini Breines,
Young and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Susan Douglas,
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media
(New York: Random House, 1994); and Joyce Johnson,
Minor Characters
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). On the influence of Simone de Beauvoir, see
The Second Sex
(New York: Harmondsworth, 1953); Judith Okeley,
Simone de Beauvoir
(New York: Pantheon, 1986); Alice Schwarzer,
After the Second Sex: Conversations with Simone de Beauvoir
(New York: Pantheon, 1984); and Deirdre Bair's
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
(New York: Summit, 1990). A film titled
Daughters of de Beauvoir
, directed by Imogen Sutton, explores her influence on the women's movement. An essay by Mary Felstiner early assessed feminism's second-wave relationship to de Beauvoir: “Seeing the Second Sex through the Second Wave,”
Feminist Studies 6
(Winter 1986): 247–76.

On the roots of young people's rebellion, see Richard Flacks, “The Liberated Generation: An Explanation of the Roots of Student Protest,” in Richard Flacks, ed.,
Conformity, Resistance and Self-Determination
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), and Kenneth Keniston,
Young Radicals: Notes on
Committed Youth
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), especially the appendix. Robyn Rowland,
Women Who Do and Women Who Don't Join the Women's Movement
(London: Routledge, 1984), is one study of the differences between those who joined the women's movement and those who did not.

For the creation of a singles culture, see Helen Gurley Brown,
Sex and the Single Girl
(New York: Pocket Books, 1962), and Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs,
Remaking Love
(New York: Doubleday, 1986), which argues that it is women who made the sexual revolution during the twentieth century.

The two best accounts of the women's movement and U.S. liberal politics during this period are Cynthia Harrison,
On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues 1945–1968
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Ethel Klein,
Gender Politics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Also see the U.S. President's Commission on the Status of Women,
American Women
(Washington, D.C., 1963); Gerda Lerner, “Midwestern Leaders of the Modern Women's Movement: An Oral History Project,”
Wisconsin Academy Review
(Winter 1994–95): 11–15; Nancy Gabin,
Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1925–1975
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Susan Lynn,
Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace and Feminism, 1945–1960's
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Most of the articles collected for
Not June Cleaver
also point to the continuities between radical movements of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s feminism.

For valuable sources on the history of the New Left, see George Vickers,
The Formation of the New Left
(Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975); Maurice Isserman,
If I Had a Hammer . . . The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left
(New York: Basic Books, 1987); Paul Buhle,
History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Todd Gitlin,
The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), and
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(New York: Bantam, 1986); Jim Miller,
Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Harvard Sitkoff,
The Struggle for Black Equality
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); Richard Flacks,
Making History: The American Left and the American Mind
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan,
Who Spoke Up? American Protest against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975); David
Caute,
The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988); David Farber,
Chicago 68
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Ronald Fraser et al.,
1968: Student Generation in Revolt
(New York: Pantheon, 1988); Dick Flacks, “What Happened to the New Left?”
Socialist Review
(January 1989): 91–110; and Wini Breines,
Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–68
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982).

The best sources on women in SNCC are Sara Evans,
Personal Politics
(New York: Knopf, 1979) and Belinda Robnett's critique of the emphasis on white women in
How Long? How Long? African-American Women and the Struggle for Freedom and Justice
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Different perspectives are offered by Mary Rothschild,
A Case of Black and White: Northern Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964–1965
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); Cynthia Washington, “We Started from Different Ends of the Spectrum,”
Southern Exposure
4:4 (1977): 14; Michael Honey, “The Legacy of SNCC,” in
OAH (Organization of American Historians) Newsletter
(February 1989), and Joanne Grant, “Sexual Politics and Civil Rights,”
New Directions for Women
(January/February 1989): 4. For further reading on SNCC, see Clayborne Carson,
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960's
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Mary King,
Freedom Song
(New York: Morrow, 1987); Doug McAdam,
Freedom Summer
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); David J. Garrow, ed.,
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds.,
Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965
(New York: Carlson, 1990); Cheryl Greenberg,
A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNNC
(New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1998); and
Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement
, Constance Curry, Joan Browning, et al. (Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia Press, 2000). See especially Anne Standly's essay in this collection, “The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” 183–203; Daisy Bates,
The Long Shadow of Little Rock
(New York: David McKay, 1962); Anne Moody,
Coming of Age in Mississippi
(New York: Dial Press, 1968); Bernice Reagan, who credited her confidence to the civil rights movement, in Dick Cluster, ed.,
They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee
(Boston: South End Press, 1979), 22–23, 29; Casey Hayden, “Women's Consciousness and the Nonviolent Movement Against Segregation, 1960–1965: A Personal History,” 1989, APA; and “A Nurturing Movement: Nonviolence, SNCC, and Feminism,”
Southern Exposure
, Summer 1988, p. 51.