A Life in Motion
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A sharp and compelling memoir” of a feminist icon who forged positive change for herself, for women everywhere, and for the world (Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association).
Florence Howe has led an audacious life: she created a freedom school during the civil rights movement, refused to bow to academic heavyweights who were opposed to sharing power with women, established women’s studies programs across the country during the early years of the second wave of the feminist movement, and founded a feminist publishing house at a time when books for and about women were a rarity.
Sustained by her relationships with iconic writers like Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Marilyn French, Howe traveled the world as an emissary for women’s empowerment, never ceasing in her personal struggle for parity and absolute freedom for all women.
Howe’s “long-awaited memoir” spans her ninety years of personal struggle and professional triumphs in “a tale told with startling honesty by one of the founding figures of the US feminist movement, giving us the treasures of a history that might otherwise have been lost” (Meena Alexander, author of Fault Lines).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The founder of the Feminist Press offers a bifurcated account of her accomplished life. There's her personal life: growing up in a working-class family in Brooklyn in the 1930s, her marriages; her thwarted desire for children and laborious building of a family of close friends, adopted teenage black daughter, and stepsons. Then there's her professional life: teaching, civil rights and antiwar activism, development of women's studies, and her most important project, the Feminist Press, started 40 years ago. Her private and professional lives sometimes intersect, especially in her chapter "Becoming a Feminist," but usually she deals with these parts of her life separately. Howe is most enlightening in describing her childhood, with a mother who doted on her son but often treated Howe harshly (perhaps to teach her how hard a woman's life is). Yet after her mother's death, Howe finds that her mother had kept every piece of paper reflecting Howe's achievements. Howe is most comfortable writing about her work with the Feminist Press, how she met the women who became the editors of Women Writing India and Women Writing Africa, as well as her travels to international conferences. Too often, however, the emotional heart of her story is buried underneath the details.
