How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don’t have a “big bang” theory for the “second wave” of the women’s movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when …
In early September 1968, American feminism announced its arrival to the nation, when a hundred women demonstrators from New York traveled down to Atlantic City to disrupt the Miss America pageant. The protest on the boardwalk was more or less …
It’s impossible to look back on the sixties without thinking, What a time that was! Politics and culture intermingled in a heady mix, the personal was political and the political personal; every act—whether demonstrating against the Vietnam War, smoking dope, …
At an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group “the Diggers” burst into the middle of Tom Hayden’s keynote speech, screaming that the people …
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Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive.
I will begin with a general comment, then discuss the specific points raised by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern. There is a great deal of public anxiety about the dramatic family changes of the past several decades, and …
Megan Seely promises fearlessness. At twenty-eight, she was the youngest woman to have been leader of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women. Before that, she was the organization’s youth coordinator, a position specifically created for her. Now …
Over the last century, the link between sex and reproduction has weakened. Feminist activism, aided by technological advances, has given middle-class women in the United States widespread access to effective contraception and safe, legal abortion. Although far too many exceptions …
Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum An icon of American art, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party is the focus of the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The …
Doug Anglin isn’t likely to flash across the radar screen at an Ivy League admissions office. A seventeen-year-old senior at Milton High School, a suburb outside Boston, Anglin has a B-minus average and plays soccer and baseball. But he’s done …
The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Simon & Schuster, 2006, 208 pp., $16.99 This lightweight book is being reviewed everywhere because of the following intensely engaging facts: Its author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was …
The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge by Nic Dunlop and Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld, translated by Linda Coverdale
Marriage entered presidential politics for the first time as farce: Dan Quayle’s June 1992 attack on the television character “Murphy Brown” for having a child while unmarried. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, the then-vice president addressed the …
There are ominous signs that new versions of biological determinism have returned, with the claim that women are not meant, by nature or by psyche, for achievement. Myths about gender difference now “prove” that women should be confined to jobs …
