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outcolder's review against another edition
5.0
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this. I love the story of SNCC so much, no matter how often I read a retelling I am immediately riveted. There are more recent collections of women's POV of SNCC, but Evans has a strong narrative voice and keeps the pace up as she references various memoirs and personal interviews she'd done practically in the heat of the moment. Especially the SDS material had not had time to cool off when she wrote this and the incandescent rage throughout the second half of the book makes for exciting reading.
"Personal Politics" is cited often in more recent books about SNCC and SDS, and those mentions tend to be: "it wasn't quite like that." But now that I've read it, it doesn't seem to contradict the picture I'd already formed. SNCC was a place where women experienced more power than they had in their everyday lives, but as things got more and more black power-ish, women began to question their own oppression more. SDS was a nightmare, run by white-boy know-it-alls who somehow thought that words speak louder than actions, and that women are "girls" who should concentrate on making lunch and being available for "free love." If you hate "boomers," this will really feed your fire.
I think readers involved in the feminist conversation in the 2020s will find this work interesting for how it can inform the discussion around what they call "white feminism." Women of color are of course front and center in SNCC but more or less invisible in this book after that, the women in the Black Panthers and other radical groups beyond SDS in the late 60s are not included. Considering what a page turner this is, though, might as well take a few days to plow through it. You're certainly going to see it cited in whatever you read about the history of Second Wave Feminism.
"Personal Politics" is cited often in more recent books about SNCC and SDS, and those mentions tend to be: "it wasn't quite like that." But now that I've read it, it doesn't seem to contradict the picture I'd already formed. SNCC was a place where women experienced more power than they had in their everyday lives, but as things got more and more black power-ish, women began to question their own oppression more. SDS was a nightmare, run by white-boy know-it-alls who somehow thought that words speak louder than actions, and that women are "girls" who should concentrate on making lunch and being available for "free love." If you hate "boomers," this will really feed your fire.
I think readers involved in the feminist conversation in the 2020s will find this work interesting for how it can inform the discussion around what they call "white feminism." Women of color are of course front and center in SNCC but more or less invisible in this book after that, the women in the Black Panthers and other radical groups beyond SDS in the late 60s are not included. Considering what a page turner this is, though, might as well take a few days to plow through it. You're certainly going to see it cited in whatever you read about the history of Second Wave Feminism.
almartin's review against another edition
4.0
crucial. succeeds at everything you would imagine from the subtitle, but also just a really nice summary of the linkages that brought the left from SNCC to SDS and the anti-war movement. curiously quiet on LGBTQ questions, which is more than a touch ironic when you consider that a big part of the thesis here is about the invisibility of female actors in the histories of 60's political movements...
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
1.0
A borderline racist narrative about white women fixing the lives of African Americans in the South and then moving on to improving their own lives. Don't read this.
codexmendoza's review against another edition
3.0
A lot about this book really bothers me, but that's probably because it's based on oral history interviews. Really interesting look at how the women's rights movement got started and why its demographics (upper/middle class white) ended up the way they did.
Edit: what I implied way back when I wrote this review was that they were racists, all of them, and it came out through the interviews.
Edit: what I implied way back when I wrote this review was that they were racists, all of them, and it came out through the interviews.
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