The Journey of the Most Liberated Woman in America


Book Description

One of the Sexual Revolution pioneers, Barbara Williamson, shares her story for the first time ever as cofounder of the highly successful and controversial Sandstone Retreat in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sandstone Retreat quickly became outrageously popular with membership reaching five hundred, and numerous newspapers, magazines, books, movies, and television shows clamoring for interviews. It became known as the hub of the sexual revolution. Barbara's life partner John was branded as "The Messiah of Sex" and Barbara herself as "The Most Liberated Woman in America." University professors nationwide rushed to visit this new kind of unstructured free love community to view and study members joyously living an alternative lifestyle. The dress code was optional but most everyone preferred nudity. The goal at Sandstone was understanding society and setting it free. They believed in the sexual self as being at the core of organized social behavior. When sexuality is distorted, it leads to a distortion of the basic self.




Liberated


Book Description

There are parts of the Bible that I have struggled with, and bits that seemed far removed from my life as a twenty-first-century woman. I have wrestled with them, but as I read, I came to know that God offers more liberation, more freedom, and more fulfilment than I could dare to imagine. Equality for all people is a foundational principle in our culture and embedded in our law. The consensus is clear: all people are equally valuable. However, religion is seen as a stronghold that promotes inequality. There is a widespread belief that the Bible is sexist. Women fear that God does not want their good and instead, he wants to box them in and clip their wings. Our culture believes that they need to forget religion to achieve equality. This, however, is not the case. The principle of equality is established in the first pages of the Bible, and its message exalts and dignifies both men and women. Bible teacher, conference speaker and author Karen Soole shares what she has discovered as she has read the Bible and grappled with it over many years. She takes us through the Bible story from Genesis to Revelation and challenges the reader to decide whether God is offering life and liberation, or suffocation and oppression. It is an invitation to meet and know the God of the Bible, and to view his Word through the lens of his character. Chapter titles include Thirsty Made in God's Image: Genesis 1 Made for Relationship: Genesis 2 Messing up the Design: Genesis 3 The Fallout How the Story Unfolds From Bad to Worse Worrying Laws Wisdom for All The Broken Bride The Wife Liberation Although this book is about women, it is not 'only for women'. These things matter to everyone. This book was written for men and women, although it addresses concerns that women face in particular. These concerns are relevant to everyone.




A Year of Biblical Womanhood


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller. With just the right mixture of humor and insight, compassion and incredulity, A Year of Biblical Womanhood is an exercise in scriptural exploration and spiritual contemplation. What does God truly expect of women, and is there really a prescription for biblical womanhood? Come along with Evans as she looks for answers in the rich heritage of biblical heroines, models of grace, and all-around women of valor. What is "biblical womanhood" . . . really? Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn't sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment--a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as possible for a year. Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a "gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period. See what happens when a thoroughly modern woman starts referring to her husband as "master" and "praises him at the city gate" with a homemade sign. Learn the insights she receives from an ongoing correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman, and find out what she discovers from her exchanges with a polygamist wife. Join her as she wrestles with difficult passages of scripture that portray misogyny and violence against women.







Feeling Women's Liberation


Book Description

The term women's liberation remains charged and divisive decades after it first entered political and cultural discourse around 1970. In Feeling Women's Liberation, Victoria Hesford mines the archive of that highly contested era to reassess how it has been represented and remembered. Hesford refocuses debates about the movement’s history and influence. Rather than interpreting women's liberation in terms of success or failure, she approaches the movement as a range of rhetorical strategies that were used to persuade and enact a new political constituency and, ultimately, to bring a new world into being. Hesford focuses on rhetoric, tracking the production and deployment of particular phrases and figures in both the mainstream press and movement writings, including the work of Kate Millett. She charts the emergence of the feminist-as-lesbian as a persistent "image-memory" of women's liberation, and she demonstrates how the trope has obscured the complexity of the women's movement and its lasting impact on feminism.




Dangerous Ideas


Book Description

This collection of essays focuses on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement and Women's Studies, in Australia and around the world.




Liberated Threads


Book Description

From the civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s through antiapartheid activism in the 1980s and beyond, black women have used their clothing, hair, and style not simply as a fashion statement but as a powerful tool of resistance. Whether using stiletto heels as weapons to protect against police attacks or incorporating African-themed designs into everyday wear, these fashion-forward women celebrated their identities and pushed for equality. In this thought-provoking book, Tanisha C. Ford explores how and why black women in places as far-flung as New York City, Atlanta, London, and Johannesburg incorporated style and beauty culture into their activism. Focusing on the emergence of the "soul style" movement—represented in clothing, jewelry, hairstyles, and more—Liberated Threads shows that black women's fashion choices became galvanizing symbols of gender and political liberation. Drawing from an eclectic archive, Ford offers a new way of studying how black style and Soul Power moved beyond national boundaries, sparking a global fashion phenomenon. Following celebrities, models, college students, and everyday women as they moved through fashion boutiques, beauty salons, and record stores, Ford narrates the fascinating intertwining histories of Black Freedom and fashion.




The Liberated Female


Book Description

This book examines the Hungarian experiment to liberate women from servitude. It provides details on the problems of Hungarian women in employment, in the household, and in the sexual relations and outlines the social policies of the government and the patriarchal culture values in society.




Hard to Get


Book Description

Hard to Get is a powerful and intimate examination of the sex and love lives of the most liberated women in history—twenty-something American women who have had more opportunities, more positive role models, and more information than any previous generation. Drawing from her years of experience as a researcher and a psychotherapist, Leslie C. Bell takes us directly into the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure, and to make sense of their historically unique but contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges. In candid interviews, Bell’s subjects reveal that, despite having more choices than ever, they face great uncertainty about desire, sexuality, and relationships. Ground-breaking and highly readable, Hard to Get offers fascinating insights into the many ways that sex, love, and satisfying relationships prove surprisingly elusive to these young women as they navigate the new emotional landscape of the 21st century.




Watching Women's Liberation, 1970


Book Description

In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC--the “Big Three” of the pre-cable television era--discovered the feminist movement. From the famed sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal to multi-part feature stories on the movement's ideas and leaders, nightly news broadcasts covered feminism more than in any year before or since, bringing women's liberation into American homes. In Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News, Bonnie J. Dow uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks’ eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists’ efforts to use national media for their own purposes. Dow chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement. Groundbreaking and packed with detail, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970 shows how feminism went mainstream--and what it gained and lost on the way.