The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late l960s. These 32 writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in our time. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation. What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their rebellion? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such an unwomanly struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. These stories tell how the world we live in changed. With The Feminist Memoir Project, these activists contribute to yet another movement project, the political work of memory.

The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation

Snitow, Ann

Duplessis, Rachel

History

Three Rivers Press

The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.  

Biographies & Memoirs

Duke University Press Books

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.

This provocative anthology brings together a diverse group of well-known feminist and gay writers, historians, and activists. They are concerned not only with current sexual issues-abortion, pornography, reproductive and gay rights-but they also raise a host of new issues and questions: How, and in what ways, is sexuality political? Is the struggle for sexual freedom a complement to other struggles for liberation, or will it detract from them? Has the sexual revolution diminished or enriched the lives of women?

Powers of Desire (New Feminist Library)

Literature & Fiction

Stansell, Christine

Sharon Thompson

History & Criticism

Monthly Review+press

Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe

Review\n"This is an inspired piece of personal journalism that takes us to Eastern Europe where we follow the social and political adventures, over a period of twenty five years, of one of the great feminists of the Second Wave. As Ann Snitow discovers the historic antagonism to women’s rights that marks the region, she also experiences the remarkably courageous women who are spending their lives fighting it. Richly informed, emotionally centered, beautiful written, Visitors is a book to be read by all who crave a deeper understanding of the times in which we live." -- Vivian Gornick\n"Ann Snitow’s extraordinary gifts for friendship and organizing spill off the pages of this illuminating memoir, which lights up a formerly obscure but important aspect of our history. The lucky reader gets to follow Ann and her new friends as they create a broad, potent network of feminist activists practically from scratch in the ruins of Soviet communism." -- Alix Shulman\nA feminist organizer in East Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall reveals the struggles of women fighting for their rights during the rise of the Right in Europe\nVisitors tells the story of Ann Snitow’s adventures as a Western feminist helping to build a new, post-communist feminist movement in Eastern Central Europe. Snitow stumbles onto this fast-changing, chaotic scene by chance, but falls in love with the passionate feminists she meets in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. What kinds of feminism should they hope for?\nVisitors is a book about forging enduring relationships and creating formerly unimaginable institutions―a feminist school, the Network of East-West Women, women’s centers, gender studies programs. It is about unity amid fractiousness and perseverance through uncertainty, Snitow’s flickering lodestar. Visitors moves gracefully between vivid anecdote, political analysis, and unsparing introspection. It is richly peopled with “brilliant” comrades and vexing detractors alike, all described with respect and humor. Every sentence is imbued with the experience and insight of this sui generis feminist activist, writer, and pedagogue of 50 years. Most of all, Visitors is the story of friendship, the heart and sinew of the leaderless feminist movement.\nReading like the best historical novel, it is intimate and worldly, resolutely unsentimental yet finally, even as the political skies darken, optimistic in the conviction that feminism can make life meaningful, fascinating, fun, pleasurable―and better for everyone, even as better is redefined again and again.

Historical

New Village Press

A feminist organizer in East Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall reveals the struggles of women fighting for their rights during the rise of the Right in Europe Visitors tells the story of Ann Snitow's adventures as a Western feminist helping to build a new, post-communist feminist movement in Eastern Central Europe. Snitow stumbles onto this fast-changing, chaotic scene by chance, but falls in love with the passionate feminists she meets in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. What kinds of feminism should they hope for? Visitors is a book about forging enduring relationships and creating formerly unimaginable institutions--a feminist school, the Network of East-West Women, women's centers, gender studies programs. It is about unity amid fractiousness and perseverance through uncertainty, Snitow's flickering lodestar. Visitors moves gracefully between vivid anecdote, political analysis, and unsparing introspection. It is richly peopled with "brilliant" comrades and vexing detractors alike, all described with respect and humor. Every sentence is imbued with the experience and insight of this sui generis feminist activist, writer, and pedagogue of 50 years. Most of all, Visitors is the story of friendship, the heart and sinew of the leaderless feminist movement. Reading like the best historical novel, it is intimate and worldly, resolutely unsentimental yet finally, even as the political skies darken, optimistic in the conviction that feminism can make life meaningful, fascinating, fun, pleasurable--and better for everyone, even as better is redefined again and again.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Snitow, Ann. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Snitow, Ann

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Snitow, Ann. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation

The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary

The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary

Powers of Desire (New Feminist Library)

Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe

Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe