Book Recently Acquired

Book Recently Acquired


Cooke, Joanne, Charlotte Bunch-Weeks, and Robin Morgan, eds. The New Women: An Anthology of Women's Liberation. 1970. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1971.


I picked this up used from the free book table at school. I love old anthologies like this (especially from the various liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s) because of their value as historical texts. I like to see what people were thinking, who was thinking it, how many of the thinkers are still relevant (or, at least, have kept publishing their thoughts [a crasser way of putting this is "who have I heard of, and what are the reasons I haven't heard of the others?"]) today? I have only heard of a few of the authors--Cynthia Ozick, Diane Di Prima, Rita Mae Brown, and Robin Morgan--but the questions listed on the back cover that the anthology addresses are still relevant today: "Why are we intimidated by the fashion and beauty industries? Why do we have to get married? Why do we have to have children? Why are we paid lower wages for doing the same work as men?" and so on. It is always nice to be reminded of the concrete issues and demands raised by second-wave feminism every once in a while even though I am more of a third-wave thinker.


There is also an essay by W.I.T.C.H (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). I love the old collectives from those days and wish more activists/writers would adopt the model. I am a sucker for manifestos, and collectives are usually the best sources of them. I especially appreciate the effort to come up with an organizational name that results in a meaningful acronym.