by Nancy Rosenstock
Haymarket Books
8/30/22, paperback
SKU: 9781642597042
A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today's women's liberation movement.
Activist members of the radical feminist organization Boston Female Liberation provide an inside account of the group's history, strategy, and legacy in this compelling contribution to the historiography of Second Wave feminism.
Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against sexism.
The book also includes ten radical feminist documents crucial to contextualizing the activity and thinking of the organization and its members.
Reviews:
“An invaluable contribution to the canon of works on the history of the feminist movement in the United States. Nancy Rosenstock has written an absorbing account of what it felt like to be a woman in the America of the 50s and 60s, the awakening of so many of us to the systematic discrimination we faced, and how we fought and overcame it.” —Dr. Barbara Roberts, co-founder of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition
“Not only is this book a full-throttled challenge to overly simplistic and whitewashed portraits of second wave feminism, but it also honors the scrappy, homegrown, grassroots radical feminist histories of Boston’s Cell 16. Nancy Rosenstock provides a beautiful window into the nuances of starting a movement, from grunt work, growing armpit hair, and marching in the streets to lesbian separatism, Tae Kwon Do classes, and radical abortion rights activism. This account is both historic and fresh, showing us once again that history is alive, written and rewritten by each subsequent cohort of rabble-rousing feminists looking to smash norms and change the world.” —Breanne Fahs, editor of Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution
About the Author:
Nancy Rosenstock, feminist and socialist activist for five decades, was a member of Boston Female Liberation and served on the national staff of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition in 1971. She continues to fight for abortion to be safe, legal, and accessible.