Review by Booklist Review
Astronauts and senators, CEOs and surgeons: the roles for women in society today are impressive and, perhaps in certain quarters, taken for granted. Evans is here to remind us that things were not always this way. After the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century obtained for women the right to vote, the impetus to achieve other forms of equality languished until the 1960s, when a combination of circumstances and attitudes coalesced to accelerate the women's movement into what Evans terms the "second wave." Like a tidal wave in nature, the feminist movement in the late twentieth century started out as a groundswell, a powerful grassroots effort to raise the collective and individual consciousness of a nation. Evans, with an intimate "behind-the-scenes" approach, analyzes how and why disparate and diverse factions operated independently and simultaneously toward divergent, but ultimately corresponding, goals. Meticulously researched and with an unequivocal respect for detail and balance, Evans offers a comprehensive and compelling historical overview of the status and role of women in contemporary society. Carol Haggas
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Evans, who has taught women's history at the University of Minnesota since 1976 and written several books on feminism, including Born for Liberty and Personal Politics, has attempted here the nearly impossible: to write a nonpartisan, totally inclusive account of modern (i.e., 1960-2002) feminism in America. A movement with slogans like "the personal is political"; which demanded, at times, self-criticism and anti-elitist nonleaders; and generally rejected party-line politics is necessarily a difficult one to document, much less to summarize. But Evans is determined to write down as much of this history as possible, "to affirm for future generations that they do indeed have a history, by turns glorious and distressing, on which they can build." She sees feminism as a rising tide in the late 1960s and '70s, engendering an undertow pulling women back in the '80s, resulting in a resurgence of women in the '90s. Evans views the women's movement as a "tidal wave" destined to prevail (even if the steady in-and-out of tides might also suggest the power of the status quo). She lays out her chapters chronologically, with a wealth of detail on people, ideas, organizations and acronyms, all carefully identified. Personal accounts of the movement, like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Outlaw Woman, are more engaging than this condensed, encyclopedic overview; still, it will be a useful textbook for women's studies classes. (Mar. 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Evans continues exploring the history of second-wave feminism, begun with Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. Again viewing events as a participant and a historical observer, Evans argues that the intensity associated with the feminist epiphany that the personal is political led to both great energy and great change but also to painful implosions within the women's movement over personal and philosophical differences. Like other movement memoirists, Evans emphasizes the desire of feminists to include women of all races and economic backgrounds, although a unified movement remained elusive. But, she contends, the proliferation of movement groups also provided space to women with extraordinarily diverse agendas. Ending on a positive note, she points out a resurgence sparked by renewed concern about sexual harassment, the threat to abortion rights, and the globalization of women's issues. Evans's accessible style makes this work suitable for most academic and large public libraries.-Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Has feminism been a failure, as some of its critics have charged? Did it die in the 1980s? Certainly not, writes historian Evans in this fine overview of its many achievements. Consider, she urges, the early '60s, when a woman could not take out a loan without her husband's signature, when graduate schools openly imposed quotas restricting women to ten percent of the student body, when "it was perfectly legal to pay women and men differently for exactly the same job and to advertise jobs separately." In just two decades, a committed body of women from many economic, ethnic, and political backgrounds (including a Republican activist who fondly recalled a 1977 caucus in Houston as something about which far-flung attendees now reminisce "in the same way war veterans, strangers on sight, quickly become close as they talk about Normandy, Inchon, or Hue") joined forces to challenge separate-and-unequal policies and programs throughout society. At first, writes Evans (Born for Liberty, 1989, etc.; History/Univ. of Minnesota), these early feminists met with opposition on the part of most politicians and the media, which proved to be "condescending if not hostile," yet they managed to hold a united front and eventually to achieve some signal victories while sustaining a few failures, such as the still-troubling defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. By the '80s, she observes, even against Reaganite and Christian Coalition hostility, the women's movement had changed enough minds that "the simple appearance of a woman in a position of authority no longer provoked disbelief." Challenges remain today, she concludes, not least of them contending with the tensions inherent in trying to balance demands for decentralized action with the need to use government "as an instrument of social policy"-female activists, Evans adds, tend far more than their male peers to view government as a positive, necessary force. A well-written, critical overview of feminism's real contributions, useful and timely in an age of backlash and antifederalist sentiment.
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Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
