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Women's Liberation: Seeing the Revolution Clearly
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2015
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Women EmpowermentWomen's RightSocial ChangeMass Feminist MovementFeminist DebateSocial SciencesBlack Feminist ThoughtGender IdentityFeminist ResearchGender StudiesAfrican American StudiesClass WomenBlack Feminist StudiesWomen StudiesFeminist ScholarshipIntersectionalityFeminist PerspectiveBlack PowerFeminist Political TheoryBlack RadicalismFeminist TheorySocial MovementsWomanist EthicsFeminist PhilosophyRevolution ClearlySociologyBlack FeminismSecond WavePolitical MovementsFeminist Method
Women's Liberation was a radical, multiracial feminist movement that grew directly out of the New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and related freedom movements of the 1960s. Its insight that "the personal is political," its intentionally decentralized structure, and its consciousness raising method allowed it to grow so fast and with such intensity that it swept up liberal feminist organizations in a wildfire of change. Though women's liberation was fundamental to the emergence of a mass feminist movement, the persistent stereotypes of this feminist upsurge as white, middle-class, anti-motherhood, and anti-sex have obscured the creative radicalism of this early period and erased the presence of women of color and working class women. In a period of extreme racial polarization, feminist efforts to articulate the intersections of gender with race, class, and sexuality were often deeply flawed, but they began a conversation on which later generations could build. As scholars unearth the complex history of this dynamic and revolutionary moment they complicate narratives of the so-called "second wave."