Item #39851 Notes From The Second Year: Women’s Liberation. Major Writings of the Radical Feminists. Shulamith FEMINISM. FIRESTONE, Anne KOEDT.
Notes From The Second Year: Women’s Liberation. Major Writings of the Radical Feminists.

46.

Notes From The Second Year: Women’s Liberation. Major Writings of the Radical Feminists.

NY: Notes (From the Second Year): Radical Feminism, 1970. 4to. Wrps., staple bound. 126pp. Photo-illustrated.

The sequel to “Notes from the First Year”, the first theoretical journal of the modern Women’s Liberation Movement, published by Shulamith Firestone in June 1968.

The anthology is organised into three sections: Women’s Experience; Theories of Radical Feminism; and Founding a Radical Feminist Movement, which itself is split into four sections: The Left Debate; Consciousness-Raising; Organizing; and Manifestoes. The latter section includes Kate Millett’s essay “Sexual Politics: A Manifesto for Revolution”, which became the basis for her first book, “Sexual Politics”, and the manifesto of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis in New York City in 1969.

Other notable contributions include the first appearance of Anne Koedt’s essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”; “Radical Feminism” by Ti-Grace Atkinson (Atkinson founded the October 17th Movement, a group which later became THE FEMINISTS); “Power as a Function of the Group” by Pamela Kearon (also a member of THE FEMINISTS); and “The Personal is Political” by Carol Hanisch, an essay that marked the first use of the phrase (though it doesn’t appear in the text and Hanisch later credited the journal’s editors for the essay’s title).

Hanisch also contributes “A Critique of the Miss America Pageant”, based on her protest at the 1968 Miss America contest during which she and three other women disrupted the proceedings by hanging a women’s liberation banner over the balcony. In the essay she describes the protest as “a zap action”, defined by her as “using our presence as a group and/or the media to make women’s oppression into social issues” (‘Zaps’ had recently been popularised in the US as “political theater for educating the gay masses” by the Gay Activists Alliance).

Newsprint pages and edges of wrappers slightly age-toned; occasional vertical ink lines to the margins and unobtrusive, infrequent underlining by Michelene Wandor (1pp. incomplete typescript with holograph amendments by her laid in); o/w Very Good plus.

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