Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End » (Reprint)

Sara M. Evans is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she has taught women's history since 1976. The author of Born for Liberty and Personal Politics and the coauthor of Free Spaces and Wage Justice, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

As recently as 1960 few women worked outside the home, married women could not borrow money in their own names, schools imposed strict quotas on female applicants, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. In Tidal Wave, Sara M. Evans, one of our foremost historians of women in America, draws on an extraordinary range of interviews, archives, and published sources to tell for the first time the incredible story of the past forty years in women's history.

Encompassing the so-called Second Wave of feminism (1960s and 1970s) and the Third Wave (1980s and 1990s), Evans challenges traditional interpretations of women's history at every turn. Covering politics, economics, popular culture, marriage, and family, and including the perspectives of women ranging from leaders of NOW to little-known women who simply wanted more out of their lives, Tidal Wave paints a vast canvas of a society in upheaval. The movement's shocking success is evinced, Evans notes, by the simple fact that we now live in a country in which all women are feminists, in practice if not in name.

The Washington Post

Evans's most striking revelations are about the animated interchanges among different political camps of women. She does an excellent job of integrating, for the first time, the stories of black and white activists, dispelling the tired stereotype of feminism as a white women's movement. Although she doesn't make the point explicitly, her narrative shows how productively blacks and whites, radicals and liberals, local protesters and Washington insiders worked with one another. The collaborations were often inadvertent and loaded with suspicion -- black women always distanced themselves from the rubric of "feminism," for example, while liberal members of NOW always took care to distinguish themselves from the hell-raisers in "women's lib." But her depictions of a broad spectrum of activity in the 1970s and '80s — countercultural music festivals, Emily's List, campaigns against forced sterilization, feminist-inspired labor organizing — vivify, as no generalizations could, the extraordinary creative reach of the movement. — Christine Stansell