While on assignment for the Village Voice at the end of the 1960s, the writer Vivian Gornick found herself drawn into the gyre of the New York Radical Women, a second-wave feminist protest group formed as a response to the male domination of US civil-rights organisations. In that moment, Gornick’s personal experience – she’d grown up in a socialist household in the Bronx – locked in with a nascent political movement, giving her a sense of harmony.