The Word Of A Woman
Feminist Dispatches 1969–1992
Two decades of “feminist dispatches”—essays as a personal window into the birth, truths, and changes of modern feminism.
W.W. Norton & Company, 1992
“No writer in America has traveled the entire distance of modern feminism with writings as provocative or with greater range or talent.” —CONGRESSWOMAN ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON
“Robin Morgan’s ideas don’t date and don’t pall. She is devoted, disciplined, poetic, tough on her sisters as well as her brothers . . . I’m not a fool, and I’m much older than she is—yet she has taught me most of what I know, and all of what I feel, about feminism.” —NED ROREM
“This global journey of a courageous woman at the cutting edge of the feminist movement will inspire, provoke, anger, and educate you . . . destined to be a feminist classic from which we can all learn.” —ELEANOR SMEAL
“With Morgan’s passion and honesty, this book of selected short prose pieces may be the only source that combines the history of the recent Women’s Movement with a vision of the future. It leaves a trail of light.” —GLORIA STEINEM
From the first Miss America Pageant Protest in 1968 (which Morgan organized) to the “divorce” from the New Left, from the first fights for abortion rights to the burgeoning of a global feminist consciousness, Robin Morgan raised, embraced, and recorded issues from housewives’ rage to racism, through women’s love for women to global peace, neocolonialism, and the environment. Essays that are alternately journalistic, humorous, personal, meditative, theoretical, and analytical, but always with an obsession for freedom and for the power of language.
This Second Edition (Norton paperback) contains five additional essays, including “Isolated Incidents” (on the systemic rape of Bosnian Muslim women in Serbian brothel camps during war in former Yugoslavia), “Every Mother’s Son” (on raising a male child in the patriarchy), and “The Deeper Reality: Notes on the Politics of Language” (on a murder in South Africa).