Faces of feminism

by Sheila Tobias

"As one of the main players in the second wave of feminism, Sheila Tobias returns to Kate Millet's central tenet, "sexual politics," and argues that it can still unite progressive men and women around a common set of goals. Providing a map of a complex terrain, Tobias details "generations" of issues, each more radical and therefore harder to tackle than the ones before. She sets the story in two contexts: feminism's own evolving strategies and America's political landscape. Even though her passion for feminism remains, she is not unwilling to critique the sisterhood and herself for failing to see, for example, that not every woman would be a feminist nor every man an enemy. In the heady first years, feminists forgot that deeper even than gender is the liberal/conservative divide in American politics. From the origins of the movement through feminist theory and new scholarship on women, Tobias traces the political history of the second wave and its comeuppance at the hands of Phyllis Sc