Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore Map Genealogies
of Feminist Activism
February 19, 2021
During the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, feminist activism richly diverse both in the women involved and in its aims, tone, and strategies exploded in the United States and around the world, forever changing society by expanding the rights, opportunities, and identities available to women. And at the center of everything that the women’s liberation movement achieved was the writing that both forged and propelled it, writing that continues to inspire, challenge, educate, and even offend.
Yet, by the mid-1980s, despite occasional victories, the feminist movement had become so distorted and vilified that the tag “feminist” was rejected by many women who had welcomed the changes in their lives the movement produced. At the end of World War II and even as recently as 1970, as detailed by Gene Boyer in her essay, excerpted in this volume, “Are Woman Equal Under the Law?” a husband’s forcing