The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America

Abstract

Ruth Rosen has written a deeply researched and engaging, but also highly selective, history of second-wave feminism. Because the ideas and experiences of young, white, educated, left-leaning women—such as Rosen, herself an activist in the Berkeley area—drive the narrative, a more instructive subtitle would be “How a Critical Element of the Women's Movement Helped Change America.” Rosen paints a picture of the 1950s even bleaker than Betty Friedan's. “A virulent strain of antifeminism saturated the culture,” she writes, creating bitterness, depression, and a “private nightmare” for more than a few women, at least according to their daughters, themselves experiencing “quiet desperation.” Although she follows the standard narrative explaining the origins of two feminist streams in the mid-1960s, Rosen offers important revisions. She delineates differences between women involved in the National Organization for Women (now) and those in the local women's liberation groups, while also demonstrating that they do not neatly fit the categories of liberal versus radical or integrationist versus transformative. moreover, she documents the working-class origins and race-conscious perspective of many activists in both wings and notes that NOW “targeted the problems of ordinary working women, not those of professional women.”