Revolutionary Feminists
The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle
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- £18.99
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- £18.99
Publisher Description
Revolutionary Feminists tells the story of the radical women’s liberation movement in Seattle in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of a founding member, Barbara Winslow. Drawing on her collection of letters, pamphlets, and photographs as well as newspaper accounts, autobiographies, and interviews, Winslow emphasizes the vital role that Black women played in the women’s liberation movement to create meaningful intersectional coalitions in an overwhelmingly White city. Winslow brings the voices and visions of those she calls the movement’s “ecstatic utopians” to life. She charts their short-term successes and lasting achievements, from organizing women at work and campaigning for subsidized childcare to creating women-centered rape crisis centers, health clinics, and self-defense programs. The Seattle movement was essential to winning the first popular vote in the United States to liberalize abortion laws. Despite these achievements, Winslow critiques the failure of the movement’s White members to listen to Black, Latina, Indigenous, and Asian American and Pacific Islander feminist activists. Reflecting on the Seattle movement’s accomplishments and shortcomings, Winslow offers a model for contemporary feminist activism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winslow (Shirley Chisholm), a professor emerita of women's and gender studies at Brooklyn College, delivers a granular history of the radical women's liberation movement in Seattle from 1965 to 1975. Forcefully pushing back against criticism that the organizations behind the movement, including her own Radical Women, advanced a white, middle-class agenda and ignored the needs of women of color, Winslow highlights their anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspectives and focus on issues of childcare, and notes the involvement of Black feminist luminaries including Nina Harding. Though many feminist victories are recounted, particularly the 1970 public referendum that liberalized the state's abortion laws, Winslow also details how the movement was impeded by differences of opinion about strategy and the influence of male-led socialist and progressive organizations. Ultimately, the radical women's groups in Seattle were subsumed by regional branches of more mainstream national feminist organizations. Winslow crams an impressive amount of play-by-play detail into her account, but the book's takeaways are partially obscured by its tone of defensiveness. The result is a worthwhile but somewhat tedious snapshot of radical feminism.
