Mar 182010
 

Here are the first few paragraphs from the introduction of ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’ by Robin Morgan (1970) Vintage Books

Introduction: A Woman’s Revolution

This book is an action.  It was conceived, written, edited, copy-edited, proofread, designed, and illustrated by women… During the year that it took to collectively create this anthology, we women involved had to face specific and very concrete examples of our oppression, with regard to the book itself, that simply would not have occurred in putting together any other kind of collection.  Because of the growing consciousness of women’s liberation, and, in some cases, because of articles that women wrote for the book, there were not a few “reprisals”: five personal relationships were severed, two couples were divorced and one separated, one woman was forced to withdraw her article, by the man she lived with: another’s husband kept rewriting the piece until it was unrecognizable as her own; many of the articles were late, and the deadline kept being pushed further ahead, because the authors had so many other pressures on them–from housework to child care to jobs.  More than one woman had trouble finishing her piece because it was so personally painful to commit her gut feelings to paper.  We were also delayed by occurrences that would not have been of even peripheral importance to an anthology written by men: three pregnancies, one miscarriage, and one birth–plus one abortion and one hysterectomy.  Speaking from my own experience, which is what we learn to be unashamed of doing in women’s liberation, during the past year I twice survived the almost-dissolution of my marriage, was fired from my job (for trying to organise a union and for being in women’s liberation), gave birth to a child, worked on a women’s newspaper, marched and picketed, breast-fed the baby, was arrested on a militant women’s liberation action, spent some time in jail, stopped wearing makeup and shaving my legs, started learning Karate, and changed my politics completely.  That is, I became, somewhere along the way, a “feminist” committed to a Women’s Revolution”.