ABSTRACT

As one of the main players in the second wave of feminism, Sheila Tobias returns to Kate Millets central tenet, sexual politics, and argues that it can still unite progressive men and women around a common set of goals. Providing a map of a complex terrain, Tobias details generations of issues, each more radical and therefore harder to tackle than the ones before. She sets the story in two contexts: feminisms own evolving strategies and Americas political landscape. Even though her passion for feminism remains, she is not unwilling to critique the sisterhood and herself for failing to see, for example, that not every woman would be a feminist nor every man an enemy. In the heady first years, feminists forgot that deeper even than gender is the liberal/conservative divide in American politics. }As one of the main players in the second wave of feminism, Sheila Tobias returns to Kate Millets central tenet, sexual politics, and argues that it can still unite progressive men and women around a common set of goals. Providing a map of a complex terrain, Tobias details generations of issues, each more radical and therefore harder to tackle than the ones before. She sets the story in two contexts: feminisms own evolving strategies and Americas political landscape. Even though her passion for feminism remains, she is not unwilling to critique the sisterhood and herself for failing to see, for example, that not every woman would be a feminist nor every man an enemy. In the heady first years, feminists forgot that deeper even than gender is the liberal/conservative divide in American politics.From the origins of the movement through feminist theory and new scholarship on women, Tobias traces the political history of the second wave and its comeuppance at the hands of Phyllis Schaflys StopERAcoincidental with the nations careering toward the Right. Somehow, feminism survived the 1980s, but by having to fight brush fires throughout the Reagan-Bush presidencies, the movement lost some of its breadth and much of its taste for the mainstream. Because of her activism and her feeling for the period she chronicles, Tobias is at once inside and outside the issues of sexual preference, pornography, the draft, the Mommy Track, comparable worth, affirmative action, reproductive rights, and the challenges of equality versus difference. }

chapter 1|10 pages

Gender and Politics Redefined

chapter 3|14 pages

Feminism in the Postsuffrage Era

chapter 4|16 pages

Women at Work

chapter 5|13 pages

Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique

chapter 6|22 pages

The Origins of the Second Wave of Feminism

Three Strands and an Accident

chapter 7|18 pages

The Women's Movement Goes to Work

Role Equity Issues

chapter 8|23 pages

Second-Generation Issues

Conflict Over Role Change

chapter 9|21 pages

Antifeminist Women on the Right

The Battle over the ERA

chapter 10|15 pages

Feminism and Sexual Preference

Lesbians and Lesbian Rights

chapter 11|20 pages

Third-Generation Issues

Issues on Which Feminists Do Not Agree

chapter 12|19 pages

New Theory, New Scholarship

chapter 13|17 pages

Fissures into Fractures

chapter 14|18 pages

Surviving the 1980s

chapter 15|16 pages

The End of a Movement