The Women’s Liberation Movement in America

The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s changed the lives of a vast majority of women, especially young women, in America. This introduction to the movement provides not only a narrative overview, but a also wealth of ready-reference materials, including 13 lengthy biographical profiles of key figures, a broad selection of 15 primary source documents, a glossary of terms, and a useful annotated bibliography. The women’s liberation movement was an outgrowth of earlier waves of feminism, including the women’s suffrage movement that gained women the right to vote in 1920. In a succession of chronologically organized chapters, Berkeley tells the tumultuous story of the movement from its historical roots through the present.

Berkeley examines the background of the modern movement in the early 20th century, by detailing the stirrings and development of the movement in the 1960s, analyzing the key issues that defined the feminist agenda in the 1970s, and chronicling the growing backlash against feminism that reached its peak in the 1980s. An epilogue offers an assessment of the impact of the movement on American society and the direction feminism may take in the 21st century. This narrative history and ready-reference guide to the movement will aid students in understanding this important movement in American life.

KATHLEEN C. BERKELEY is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is the author of Like a Plague of Locusts: From an Antebellum Town to a New South City, Memphis, Tennessee, 1850-1880 (1991) and numerous articles including the 1986 History of Education Society’s prize-winning selection The Ladies Want to Bring About Reform in the Public Schools: Public Education and Women’s Rights in the Post-Civil War South. She is currently working on a biography of Charlotts Hawkins Brown, an African-American educator and race leader from North Carolina.