Notes from the Aftermath
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Description
From what stance can one comment critically on memoir? Our position as political-intellectual daughters of the feminist movement—heirs to all that is good, bad, and undecidable in this legacy—seems at once overdetermined and difficult to name. The pieces in this volume seem to us to represent much of the full spectrum of our inheritance. There is much here we’ve found inspiring; even more, humbling. And a fair amount that makes us cringe, as perhaps only true daughters can—those who are both indubitably of this heritage and yet/still outside of it. For each of us, a defining feature of our entry into feminism was that it occurred ex post facto. We weren’t there. We studied feminism-as-critiqued. The “third wave”—marked chiefly by the decentering of the unmarked (hence, white and middle-class) Woman—was well underway by the time we reached college in 1986, as was the conservative “backlash.” Many of the contributors here are in conversation with this panoply of critics. Much of the prose exudes varying degrees of longing to correct the record, but the critiques themselves are here too: perhaps this is feminism’s most enduring strength and its bane, a relentless self-criticality. For us, this volume offers us an account of our debts; it complicates that “straw woman,” the seventies feminist, and it challenges us to find an adequate measure of our own places in this history.
Source Publication
The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation
Source Editors/Authors
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ann Barr Snitow
Publication Date
1998
Edition
1
Recommended Citation
Rosga, AnnJanette and Satterthwaite, Margaret L., "Notes from the Aftermath" (1998). Faculty Chapters. 1806.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1806
