With Daring to Be Bad, Alice Echols is the first historian to chart the rapid rise and fall of radical feminism in twentieth-century America.^[1] Radical feminism, birthed in 1967, was eclipsed by cultural feminism by 1975.^[2] Writing in 1989, Echols sought to demystify radical feminism for readers.^[3] This required a significant exploration of the tendency that succeeded it: “A study of this sort seems to me especially important because radical feminism is so poorly understood and so frequently conflated with cultural feminism. This conceptual confusion arises in part because radical feminism was not monolithic and aspects of radical feminism did indeed anticipate cultural feminism.”^[4] The latter evolved from the former, plus “cultural feminists almost always identified themselves as radical feminists and insisted that they were deepening rather than jettisoning” radicalism, creating fertile ground for disorientation.^[5] Echols’ work is an intriguing history of these theories. Let us review the major distinctions between them.

Radical and cultural feminists have important points of intellectual departure. Radical feminism sought revolutionary changes in power structures, along Marxist lines, to bring about gender equality; cultural feminism was a turn inward, attention drifting away from the State and toward women’s culture, with the establishment of women’s businesses and other supports (stores, health clinics, credit unions, festivals) that to critics represented “an evasion of patriarchy rather than a full-throated struggle against it.”^[6] The former was an anticapitalist movement for political transformation, the latter a self-sufficiency, self-improvement counterculture that rejected class struggle.^[7] The radicals stressed the personal was political — a new system was needed to rectify oppression in the home, the bedroom, and so on.^[8] Culture-minded reformers viewed matters from the other direction: the personal was the “foremost site of change,” from which a new world could be built.^[9] Each movement had some form of opposition to male political supremacy and the construction of a new women’s culture, but each poured most of their energies into one arena. Echols offers a helpful parallel by pointing to the civil rights movement, which saw black nationalist offshoots that were “more involved in promoting black culture than in confronting the racist policies of the state.”^[10] Of course, there were many other ideological differences among feminists. For instance, would women’s liberation be best served by minimizing male-female differences (the tack of the radicals) or placing more value on a unique female nature dismissed by the patriarchal society (the tack of the culturalists)?^[11] Should you eradicate gender or celebrate it?^[12]

Both tendencies left important legacies. The women in the earlier movement for social transformation demonstrated the power ordinary women have to enact political change. “They fought for safe, effective, accessible contraception; the repeal of all abortion laws; the creation of high-quality, community-controlled child-care centers; and an end to the media’s objectification of women.”^[13] Unjust rape and domestic violence policies were challenged, as was exclusion from workplaces and universities.^[14] Radical feminists engaged in direct action and civil disobedience, disrupting Miss America pageants and Senate hearings, hosting rallies, marches, and sit-ins.^[15] Their organizing pushed the United States in a new direction. The Fourteenth Amendment was applied to women in Reed v. Reed (1971), the Equal Rights Amendment sailed through Congress (1972), the right to an abortion was guaranteed (1973), and more. With the ascendance of cultural feminism, political successes, expectedly, trailed off.^[16] However, the later movement for personal transformation turned away from the talk of capitalism’s overthrow and other tenants of radicalism, broadening the tent. After the 1970s, far more women of color joined the movement, for instance.^[17] In the same way, during the heyday of the radical feminists, “liberal feminism was…in some cases morediverse” than the radical feminist movement.^[18] Though cultural feminism cannot be applauded for shifting focus away from political struggle, and much merit can be found in radical feminist beliefs, it is difficult to deny that more women might be attracted to a more tempered movement further divorced from the Marxist niche. This went beyond anticapitalism, as well, to other aspects of radical thinking. One of the defining texts of cultural feminism was Jane Alpert’s 1973 “Mother Right” piece, which “reaffirmed rather than challenged dominant cultural assumptions about women” by refusing to erase male-female differences, instead celebrating the “biological difference between the sexes… The unique consciousness or sensibility of women…”^[19] Cultural feminism was better adapted to mainstream American ideologies, and could therefore attract a wider, more diverse following.

Overall, Daring to Be Bad offers history students and lay readers many ideas and phenomena to consider. It spotlights the bitter infighting leftwing movements typically experience. It prompts one to ask whether members of an oppressed group should focus on their commonalities or fully embrace their differences (an intersectional, but potentially paralyzing or divisive, approach). And will, as Alpert wrote, “economic and political changes…follow rather than precede sweeping changes in human consciousness”?^[20] Or is it best to change social structures first, as the radicals insisted, freeing human thought, letting ideology catch up? Echols has produced both a fine history of a Leftist movement and a potential guide for future struggles.

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^[1] Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), xvi.

^[2] Ibid., 5.

^[3] Ibid., xvi.

^[4] Ibid., 6.

^[5] Ibid., 7.

^[6] Ibid., viii-ix, xviii-xix.

^[7] Ibid., 6-7.

^[8] Ibid., ix, 3.

^[9] Ibid., xix-xx.

^[10] Ibid., 7.

^[11] Ibid., xviii.

^[12] Ibid., 6, 9.

^[13] Ibid., 4.

^[14] Ibid., vii-viii.

^[15] Ibid., ix-x.

^[16] Ibid., 293.

^[17] Ibid., 291.

^[18] Ibid., xxii.

^[19] Ibid., 250, 252.

^[20] Ibid., 251.

Troy R. Saxby, casual academic at the University of Newcastle, offers an intimate, engaging look at an increasingly recognized twentieth-century human rights advocate in Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life. Pauli Murray’s personal life was as turbulent and winding as her political life was significant to American justice movements. She experienced great personal loss, poverty, discrimination, health problems, and struggles with sexuality and gender identity from the 1910s to the mid-1980s.^[1] Saxby’s biography seeks to “connect Murray’s inner life with her incredibly active public life,” which included civil rights activism (first pushing for the integration of the University of North Carolina), helping found the National Organization for Women to work for gender equality, becoming an influential lawyer, professor, and author, and later being the first black woman to serve as an Episcopal priest.^[2] Her writings and legal arguments influenced Brown v. Board of Education (and other NAACP battles) and Reed v. Reed (the 1971 case that first applied the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to sex), broadening rights for blacks, women, and, after her death, LGBTQ Americans.^[3] Considering Murray’s private struggles, Saxby argues, “is essential to understanding Murray,” with her early experiences, her most intimate feelings and thoughts, “shaping her…aspirations.”^[4] This of course is a mere truism. All people are molded by prior experience, circumstances, and so on. Still, the impact Murray’s private life had on her public service is a fascinating history, and was lacking in the historiography.^[5] Let us consider what motivated Pauli Murray.

One intriguing aspect of Murray’s life was her early refusal to cooperate with unjust systems. As a child in 1910s America, racial oppression led Murray to “hate George Washington, mumble allegiance to the flag, resist standing for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” and more.^[6] She “boycotted segregated facilities — instead of taking public transport, she rode her bike.”^[7] Not only does this foreshadow Murray’s important work for civil rights, it suggests that her central motivations were already operating, or at least in development, at seven years old, typically an age of conformity. Thus, an exploration of what drove Murray should start there.

From Saxby’s text, it could be argued that early feelings of alienation played a role — this is more of a subconscious motivation, but important nonetheless. Segregation and sexism of course “othered” the young Murray, but there is much else. She was separated from her father and many siblings at age three, after her mother’s death; she fought feelings of abandonment; caretakers like Aunt Pauline and her grandfather were not affectionate; Murray’s darker complexion stood out in her new family, and she felt like an outsider; her complexion was lighter than most of her classmates, however, drawing mockery; the family’s middle-class values kept her at a distance from neighborhood kids; “Pauli also felt different from her classmates because she did not have visible parents”; she was even left-handed, unlike most students and adults.^[8] At every turn, Saxby writes, “Pauli Murray stands apart, somehow ‘other.’”^[9] A complex, constant sense of difference helped mold Murray into a child who could rebel against nationalism and segregation, among other things: “Pauli’s rebellious streak, a hallmark of her adult life, emerged at school — such was her ability to turn a classroom to chaos that one of her primary school teachers would take Pauli with her whenever she was called away from the classroom.”^[10] The field of psychology has shown that children lacking a sense of belonging often act out (and struggle with poor mental health).^[11] Whereas other children without her experiences might go along with hands over hearts and direction toward the back of a public bus, Murray’s history of alienation led to resistance.

There were of course positive influences as well, more conscious motivations, such as her grandparents’ emphasis on black pride and uplift, and Aunt Pauline’s assurances that Murray was destined for greatness.^[12] The Fitzgeralds in fact had long “avoided any contact with white people if it meant losing dignity…”^[13] America and its segregation had previously been questioned and experienced. There are many factors that push us to do what we do. But Murray’s view that “in some ways, I was alien” dominates the text, especially as she becomes an adult and her feelings toward women and her interest in passing as a man develop.^[14] She was, at the same time, rejected from one college for being a woman and from another for being black.^[15] Murray remained The Other in myriad ways. This fact contributed to her mental health challenges.^[16] That it also pushed her toward activism seems a sensible supposition: Otherness impacted her behavior as a child (so it might do the same in adulthood), and it could only be rectified through policy change. Murray’s sense of difference that contributed to behavioral nonconformity against unjust systems as a child persisted, rose to a more conscious place, and manifested anew in work in the black struggle and the feminist movement — as an adult, Murray could work to create a society with greater inclusion for herself and others. She never felt like she belonged, so she built a world with more belonging.

Overall, Pauli Murray conjures many musings on the nature of history and biography, which undergraduate and graduate students may find interesting. For instance, environment and prior experiences motivating an individual is a given, as stated, but it is also open to interpretation. What factors were at play, and how influential each was, can be argued at length, based on historical sources. Other historians may see the Fitzgeralds’ rebellion against segregation as a much more significant factor on Murray’s activist path than her sense of being an outsider. One may instead emphasize the constant tragedies of her life and consider potential connections to social oppression, such as her father being killed by a white man in an insane asylum when she was ten.^[17] As we have seen, conscious and subconscious drivers can be theorized and posited, their strengths speculatively compared. The forces that molded historical actors are as powerful as they are elusive.

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^[1] Troy R. Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), xiv-xv.

^[2] Ibid., xiii, xvii, 68-76.

^[3] Ibid, 145-146, 212-213, 249-251.

^[4] Ibid., xiv, xvi.

^[5] Ibid., xv-xvi.

^[6] Ibid., 23.

^[7] Ibid., 24.

^[8] Ibid., 6-7, 9-12, 15-16, 20, 23,    

^[9] Ibid., xvii.

^[10] Ibid., 23.

^[11] Kelly-Ann Allen, DeLeon L. Gray, Roy F. Baumeister, and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: A Deep Dive into the Origins, Implications, and Future of a Foundational Construct,” Educational Psychology Review 34 (August 2021): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-021-09633-6.

^[12] Saxby, Pauli Murray, 21-22, 38.

^[13] Ibid., 24.

^[14] Ibid., 24, chapter 2, for instance 45-48.

^[15] Ibid., 39, 70.

^[16] Ibid., 65-68.

^[17] Ibid., 35.

The dominant social construction of womanhood from 1945 to 1960, which became the dominant historical image of women later on, was one of the suburban housewife and mother — white, middle-class, straight, and patriotic, she was content to cook, care for the home, and raise children.^[1] But as Not June Cleaver, edited by historian Joanne Meyerowitz, demonstrates, the postwar era was far more complicated. Women were politicians, workers, union organizers, and strikers; they were Communists, peace activists, and secret abortionists; women were city-dwelling Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, black Americans; they were lesbians with cultural creations, Beatniks who ran away from home, the poor just trying to survive, and tireless organizers pushing for civil rights and gender equality, whose efforts would expand in the 1960s.^[2] Though an anthology with the works of many historians, Meyerowitz’s text argues that women had more agency and more diverse experiences and ideologies than the historiography acknowledged; it “aims…to subvert the persistent stereotype of domestic, quiescent, suburban womanhood.”^[3] She further demonstrates that the postwar literature and “public discourse on women was more complex than portrayed” in works such as Betty Friedan’s famous The Feminine Mystique, which positioned women as well-trapped in the home, thanks to inculcating cultural messaging.^[4] Yet, as we will see, magazines and other media could in fact push back against the gender ideal and show this other side of the age.^[5] Let’s look closely at three papers in the text, each revealing how women broke the mold.

Donna Penn’s “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America” examines the lives of lesbian women of the era and the larger society’s changing reactions to their existence. For a time adorned by the stereotype of the heterosexual wife, there was considerable effort — in films, books, articles by social scientists, and so on — expended on vilifying lesbianism in a harsher manner compared to prior decades, for instance by beginning to link gay women to the pre-established categorization of prostitutes as fallen women, sexual deviants in a criminal underworld.^[6] “Many prostitutes,” one expert wrote, “are latent homosexuals insofar as they resort to sexual excesses with many men to convince themselves that they are heterosexual.”^[7] Lesbians were often prostitutes, prostitutes were often lesbians, it was asserted — and prostitutes, as everyone knew, were of the wicked underbelly of society.^[8] This was different from the dominant prewar image of lesbians as refined middle-class women with lifelong female partners, otherwise respectable.^[9] Though some lesbians took assumptions of sexual depravity to heart, struggling with sexual identity under restrictive social norms and pressures, others pushed back against demonization.^[10] Defiant appearances in public, building community at lesbian bars, writing lesbian pulp fiction and articles, and more signaled a right to exist and to live true to the self.^[11] More intimately, a culture of “sexual ceremony and dialogue” developed that gave lesbians a coded language to express interest beyond the repressive gaze of the larger society, and which also subtlety subverted gender norms when butch women, who mirrored the man in heterosexual relationships, made giving pleasure, rather than receiving it, their “foremost objective.”^[12]

In “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls,” Wini Breines shows the extent to which women and girls sought to escape from their dull, prescriptive futures as homemakers. Rather than happy in their place, as the standard image of the postwar era suggests, some dreaded “a life where nothing ever happened. I looked around me and saw women ironing dresses and hanging out clothes and shopping for food and playing mah-jong on hot summer afternoons, and I knew I couldn’t bear to spend my life that way, day after drab day, with nothing ever happening. The world of women seemed to me like a huge, airless prison…”^[13] So, like boys and men, girls and women became or imitated Beats, the free-spirited artists, writers, and musicians of New York City who rebelled against mainstream society, its conservatism, materialism, religiosity, male careerism, and so forth.^[14] Women and teens enjoyed rock and roll, jazz, sex, intellectual discourse, racial integration and black culture, bad boys, drugs, artistic creativity, Buddhism, and other experiences that they described as “Real Life,” an existence “dramatic, unpredictable, possibly dangerous. Therefore real, infinitely more worth having.”^[15] Not only did these exciting countercultural lives undermine the happy housewife trope, they contradicted the hegemonic ideal of girlhood — properly behaved, virginal, neatly dressed and done up, hanging out “around the malt shop” — found in magazines, novels, films, and other cultural outlets.^[16] Rebellious females also contradicted the notion, pushed by social commentators, that problem children of this generation were exclusively boys, who, unlike girls, were expected to make something of themselves, but were failing to do so after falling into delinquency, hipsterism, doping, and the rest.^[17] Although the stories of female Beatniks would not be well-captured until memoirs printed in the 1970s, the 1950s saw films like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, which displayed girls’ interest in troublemakers and bad boys.^[18]

Finally, there’s Deborah Gerson’s “Is Family Devotion Now Subversive? Familialism Against McCarthyism,” wherein the mainstream construction of American womanhood is shattered by women running their households without their husbands, organizing, and speaking up for Communism and free speech. When the Smith Act of 1940 eventually sent leaders of the Communist Party to prison or into hiding over their political and revolutionary beliefs, their wives formed the Families Committee of Smith Act Victims, which gave “financial, material, and emotional assistance” to each other, their children, and the prisoners.^[19] Fundraising allowed for childcare, trips to visit fathers behind bars, birthday presents, and more.^[20] But the Families Committee also existed to fight anticommunist policies and practices.^[21] It denounced the imprisonment of Reds and the FBI’s continued harassment and surveillance of the wives and children.^[22] In a sense, the Smith Act blew up the postwar ideal, creating single mothers who had to enter the workforce, become heads of households, and return to the world of organizing they had known as young Communist women.^[23] The Families Committee seized the opportunity to publicly turn American ideology on its head, through pamphlets, articles, and letters.^[24] To be a true American, a good mother, a healthy family in the 1950s was to be anticommunist — patriotic, loyal, conformist.^[25] But the U.S. government was, in its persecution of dissenters, attacking families and ignoring stated American values.^[26] “No home is safe, no family life secure, as long as our loved ones are persecuted and imprisoned for exercising their constitutional right to speak out for their political ideas,” the women wrote in one pamphlet.^[27] It was the Communists, in other words, who were fighting for secure, whole families, and the First Amendment. (Language that centered families, one should note, was a new tack for the Communist Party, which long focused on how power impacted workers; and the Committee itself represented a greater leadership role for women in the CP.^[28]) The all-female Families Committee continued its support network and its campaign of familial rhetoric until the late 1950s, when the Supreme Court ruled imprisonment over beliefs, even revolutionary ones as long as no specific plans for violence are made, to be unconstitutional, and Communist leaders were freed or returned from hiding.^[29]

Overall, while Not June Cleaver reveals women’s diverse identities, perspectives, and activities, Meyerowitz of course does not deny the conservatism of the era, nor the domestic ideal.^[30] But the work makes the case that dominant ways of living and meanings of womanhood (there were of course many white, middle-class, suburban housewives) were not as dominant as the historiography suggested. There were rebels and countercultures enough to toss out myths of homogeneity. There was sufficient diversity of postwar literature to question notions of textual ideological hegemony. We mentioned lesbian pulp fiction, blockbuster films with rebellious male and female teens, and articles by and about Communist women in newspapers. Meyerowitz, in her study of nearly 500 magazine articles from Reader’s Digest, Atlantic Monthly, Ebony, Ladies’ Home Journal, and more, found that “domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity.”^[31] “All of the magazines sampled advocated both” housewifery, motherhood, and other stereotypical experiences and women’s advancement beyond them.^[32] Indeed, 99 articles “spotlighted women with unusual talents, jobs, or careers,” such as in politics or journalism.^[33] Another 87 articles “focused on prominent entertainers.”^[34] Compared to magazines of the 1930s and 40s, there was in fact less focus on the domestic sphere.^[35] But glorification persisted of the woman — sometimes the career woman — who was a “good cook” and “never a lazy housewife,” who was beautiful, married, motherly, soft-spoken.^[36] The postwar era, then, was less a regression for women who found new opportunities and independence during World War II (the ranks of working women actually grew after the troops came home^[37]), less a time of a universal gender ideology and a concretized women’s place, and more a clash of recent progress, new ideas, and different experiences against the larger, traditionalist society.

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^[1] Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-3.

^[2] Ibid., 3-11.

^[3] Ibid., 1-2, 4, 11.

^[4] Ibid., 2-3.

^[5] Ibid., 229-252.

^[6] Ibid., 358-372.

^[7] Ibid., 370.

^[8] Ibid, 370-371.

^[9] Ibid., 369.

^[10] Ibid., 372-378.

^[11] Ibid., 375-378.

^[12] Ibid., 374-376.

^[13] Ibid., 389.

^[14] Ibid., 382-402.

^[15] Ibid, 391-392.

^[16] Ibid., 385-386.

^[17] Ibid., 382-383.

^[18] Ibid., 396, 398.

^[19] Ibid., 151.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Ibid., 157, 160.

^[22] Ibid., 152, 157-158, 165.

^[23] Ibid., 162, 155-156.

^[24] Ibid., 164-168.

^[25] Ibid., 152.

^[26] Ibid., 152, 165.

^[27] Ibid., 165.

^[28] Ibid., 166, 170-171.

^[29] Ibid., 165.

^[30] Ibid., 4, 9.

^[31] Ibid., 231-232.

^[32] Ibid., 231.

^[33] Ibid., 232-233.

^[34] Ibid., 232.

^[35] Ibid., 249.

^[36] Ibid., 233.

^[37] Ibid., 4.