UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism

Book Jacket: "Betty Friedan and the Making of 'The Feminine Mystique,'" by D. Horowitz

Daniel Horowitz

Finalist, Biography, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Winner, Northeast Popular Culture Association's Annual Book Award

A highly praised, controversial reevaluation of a major feminist leader

"Horowitz's engaging, well-told story is a landmark contribution to our understanding of both Betty Friedan and the origins of the modern women's movement."

Times Literary Supplement (London)
"To his great credit, Daniel Horowitz, who has labored long in the archives, has produced a fascinating, even riveting, account of how the legacy of one generation of women of the American left ended up influencing and shaping a generation of New Left women. It is a vital story, and a story well told."

Dissent
"Horowitz carefully delineates the links between the Popular Front feminism of the Old Left and the New Left feminism of the 1960s, thereby casting doubt on the claims of novelty that many have made about social movements of the 1960s. In the process, he illuminates important details of Friedan's early life by mining everything from her papers while a student at Smith College to her articles for the labor press."

Wilson Quarterly
"An important book. The connections between the Left of the 1940s and the feminist movement of the late 1960s have been established for women in labor unions and groups such as the Congress of American Women. Horowitz advances that historiography with deft and evocative descriptions of women's experience of left-wing politics and culture in the 1940s and 1950s and by limning Friedan's place within that context."

Journal of American History
"Horowitz places the young Friedan squarely within the great national tragedy of McCarthyism—which not only hurt individual men and women, but also deflected the course of feminism and distorted the development of women's history as a subject of study."

Chronicle of Higher Education
"A fascinating and important new book."

Newsweek
"An engaging and often arresting narrative, highly effective in portraying the evolution of Friedan's thinking. This book will certainly change common assumptions about the origins of The Feminine Mystique."

Nancy F. Cott, Yale University
"A book that will be read, enjoyed, pondered, and debated. It is literate, broadly grounded in the intellectual and political currents of the era, reflects meticulous and imaginative sleuthing in archival sources, and is written in graceful and accessible prose."

Dorothy Sue Cobble, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
"A compelling story. The melding of genres—biography, exposé, historical monograph—should make the book useful in classrooms and also enhance its readership outside the university. . . . The book will make a big splash in and out of the historical profession."

Joanne Meyerowitz, editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and
Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
"Horowitz's careful reconstruction of Friedan's radical past exposes unexpected continuities between generations of radical thinkers and activists, and forces a reconsideration of the oft-noted class and racial limitations of Friedan's book. His argument—judiciously framed yet bold in its implications—is built upon a meticulous piecing together of sometimes fragmentary evidence, and insures that we will never again see Friedan and the movement she came to stand for in quite the same ways."

Lois Palken Rudnick, author of Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge
Luhan House and the American Counterculture

Daniel Horowitz is Mary Higgins Gamble Professor of American Studies and director of the American studies program at Smith College. He is author of Vance Packard and American Social Criticism.

American Studies / Women's Studies
384 pp., 33 illus.

$29.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-168-6
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-276-3
2000
To order the paperback edition online, click on "ADD TO CART"
To order either edition by mail or fax, click here for an order form

A volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War

about placing orders on our secure server
ADD TO CART | VIEW CART | CHECKOUT