De schaamte voorbij

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Betty Friedan

First published in 1976, "It Changed My Life" is a collection of reports from the front, back in the days less than a generation ago when women were routinely shut out of the professions and higher education, underpaid, condescended to, and harassed without consequences to the harassers. The book describes the political campaigns for equal pay and job opportunities, for the outlawing of sex discrimination, for the Equal Rights Amendment, and for legalized abortion, the creation of NOW, NARAL, and the National Women's Political Caucus, and analyzes the antifaminist backlashes. Encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Indira Gandhi are juxtaposed with moving and vivid personal struggles of many ordinary women. Among those women was Friedan herself, who frankly recorded her astonishment, gratification, and anger as the movement she helped create grew beyond all her hopes, and then raced beyond her control into a sexual politics she found disturbing.

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Caroline Lazo

Recounts the life of the feminist leader, her impact on the women's movement, and the founding of Ms. magazine and the Ms. Foundation.

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz became a founding member of the early women's liberation movement. Along with a small group of dedicated women, she produced the seminal journal series, *No More Fun and Games*. Her group, Cell 16 occupied the radical fringe of the growing movement, considered too outspoken and too outrageous by mainstream advocates for women's rights. Dunbar-Ortiz was also a dedicated anti-war activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During the war years she was a fiery, indefatigable public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical and underground politics, including the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union, and the African National Congress. But unlike the majority of those in the New Left—young white men from solidly middle-class suburban families—Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part-Indian in rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women's movement. Dunbar-Ortiz's odyssey from dust-bowl poverty to the urban radical fringes of the New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement which forever changed American society.

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Lynn Sherr

Susan Brownell Anthony's birthdate has its 175th anniversary in 1995, which is also the 75th year since passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. There couldn't be a better time to remember the inspirational words of the woman who, more than any other individual, is responsible for the crusade for women's equality. Anthony's life was her work, a life of action to inspire change. Raised a Quaker, she developed a strong sense of social responsibility that drew her both to the abolitionist movement and to the suffragist cause. A tireless campaigner into her eighties (although she did not live long enough to see women get the vote), she not only helped change laws but changed attitudes and introduced the entire realm of equal rights for women to a very reluctant nation. At first ridiculed, she was ultimately welcomed into the White House and cheered in Congress. Anthony's legacy goes far beyond the vote. Eloquent, visionary, and armed with a trenchant wit, she addressed many crucial issues - equal opportunity, political representation, domestic violence, and financial autonomy - that remain at the forefront of feminism. In researching the women's movement, writes Lynn Sherr, "I learned that Anthony and her colleagues had not only gotten there first, and said it better, but that they had carefully, wittily, and sometimes painfully laid the groundwork for virtually every right we were either demanding or already took for granted."