Liberation in Print - (Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America) by Agatha Beins (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This is the first analysis of periodicals' key role in U.S. feminism's formation as a collective identity and set of political practices in the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973, more than five hundred different feminist newsletters and newspapers were published in the United States. Agatha Beins shows that the repetition of certain ideas in these periodicals--ideas about gender, race, solidarity, and politics--solidified their centrality to feminism.

Beins focuses on five periodicals of that era, comprising almost three hundred different issues: Distaff (New Orleans, Louisiana); Valley Women's Center Newsletter (Northampton, Massachusetts); Female Liberation Newsletter (Cambridge, Massachusetts); Ain't I a Woman? (Iowa City, Iowa); and L.A. Women's Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister (Los Angeles, California). Together they represent a wide geographic range, including some understudied sites of feminism. Beins examines the discourse of sisterhood, images of women of color, feminist publishing practices, and the production of feminist spaces to demonstrate how repetition shaped dominant themes of feminism's collective identity. Beins also illustrates how local context affected the manifestation of ideas or political values, revealing the complexity and diversity within feminism.

With much to say about the study of social movements in general, Liberation in Print shows feminism to be a dynamic and constantly emerging identity that has grown, in part, out of a tension between ideological coherence and diversity. Beins's investigation of repetition offers an innovative approach to analyzing collective identity formation, and her book points to the significance of print culture in activist organizing.

Review Quotes

Liberation in Print is an important work of feminist scholarship. Like several other recent titles in feminist history, it focuses on just a few years from the late 1960s to early 1970s when women nationwide and globally came together to demand rights they had historically been denied. Beins' book successfully captures why this specific era was critical to the feminist movement, but it also provides an outstanding publishing history that demonstrates the critical role that publishing so often plays in social transformation.--Kate Eichhorn "SHARP News"

Reveals the far-reaching capacity of feminist periodicals at the time, and emphasizes how multifaceted print culture networks provided the foundations for the women's movement.--Olivia Wright "Journal of American Studies"

These analyses point to patterns that we miss when focusing solely on the text of these periodicals and suggest new points of entry for thinking about white women's engagement with histories of activism by women of color, as well as the deployment of images of non-US women as a way of claiming a revolutionary mantle.--Meredith Benjamin "American Periodicals"

About the Author

AGATHA BEINS is an associate professor of multicultural women's and gender studies at Texas Woman's University.