Refugees from Utopia: Remembering, Forgetting and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project

Abstract

Rachel Blau DuPlessis and I, old friends from the Women’s Liberation Movement, discovered in the late eighties a shared indignation — and grief. The books about the sixties were beginning to come out. Histories mostly written by men who had been there, these books skirted the Women’s Liberation Movement with a finesse it was hard to quarrel with. One would stop the story before the movement came on the scene. Another would deal with it as an impressive side show — noises off. At around the same time in histories and general discussions, women’s movements, along with a range of Black radical movements, were being corralled into a closed pen to keep in dangerously limited examples of ‘identity politics.’ The charge was that our movements had been chauvinistic in ways that the original democratic and civil rights movements of the earlier sixties were not.