Liberation in Print

Agatha Beins

Between 1968 and 1973, more than five hundred different feminist newsletters and newspapers were published in the United States. Agatha Beins shows that the repetition of certain ideas in these periodicals--ideas about gender, race, solidarity, and politics--solidified their centrality to feminism. She focuses on five periodicals: Distaff (New Orleans, Louisiana); Valley Women's Center Newsletter (Northampton, Massachusetts); Female Liberation Newsletter (Cambridge, Massachusetts); Ain't I a Woman? (Iowa City, Iowa); and L.A. Women's Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister (Los Angeles, California). Beins examines the discourse of sisterhood, images of women of color, feminist publishing practices, and the production of feminist spaces to demonstrate how repetition shaped dominant themes of feminism's collective identity. She also illustrates how local context affected the...