No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0345450531
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“On the situations of women around the world today, this one book provides more illumination and insight than a dozen others combined. . . . Freedman’s survey is a triumph of global scope and informed precision.”
–NANCY F. COTT
Professor of History, Harvard University
Repeatedly declared dead by the media, the women’s movement has never been as vibrant as it is today. Indeed as Stanford professor and award-winning author Estelle B. Freedman argues in her compelling book, feminism has reached a critical momentum from which there is no turning back. Freedman examines the historical forces that have fueled the feminist movement over the past two hundred years–and explores how women today are looking to feminism for new approaches to issues of work, family, sexuality, and creativity.
Drawing examples from a variety of countries and cultures, from the past and the present, this inspiring narrative will be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the role women play in the world. Searching in its analysis and global in its perspective, No Turning Back will stand as a defining text in one of the most important social movements of all time.
protested the underrepresentation of women artists, New York’s Whitney Museum had increased the proportion of women’s art to only one-third of those exhibited. That was not good enough for activists like the Guerrilla Girls, who have kept up the pressure to do better since the 1980s. This anonymous group of women dressed in gorilla suits exposes “sexism and racism in the art world and the culture at large.” In performance art and posters they proclaim “When Sexism & Racism Are No Longer
BCE) shaped the patriarchal Chinese family system, especially for elite women. As the foundation of the larger state, the family provided a model and training ground for a world in which women provided an “inner space” to balance men’s public lives. These ideals encouraged gender segregation and female subordination. In elite households, women ideally remained in an inner area that only male family members could enter. Confucian ideology also required obedience of children to elders and wives to
Statement,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism, Zillah Eisenstein, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 366. 29. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 59. 30. Cherríe Moraga, “Preface,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981; repr., New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), xv. 31. Smith, “Racism and
“Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in Human Rights Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 61–67. 14. Quoted in Barry Schlachter, “International News,” Associated Press, Nairobi, Kenya, July 15, 1985. 15. NGO Forum ’80 newsletter (Copenhagen), quoted in Charlotte Bunch, Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 299. 16. Charlotte Bunch, “U.N. World Conference in Nairobi: A View from the West,” Ms. 13:12 (1985),
paths, linking gender to the environment or the economics of globalization. At the same time, I have hated being the messenger whose lectures evoke in students a sad recognition of the personal costs of persistent injustice. It disturbs me deeply to learn each year how many young women still struggle to find their voice, to accept their bodies, and to recover from sexual assault. I try to give all of these students the analytical tools to help them make sense of gender in their lives and in the