Impossible to Hold Women and Culture in the 1960s [Hardcover]

With Jackie in a pill-box hat and Marilyn crooning to the president, the 1960s opened with women hovering at the fringes of the public imagination—and ended with a feminist movement that outpaced anything NASA could concoct. A compelling story, but did it really happen that way?
Unlike many accounts of the era,Impossible to Holdrevels in the complexities of female identity and American culture. The collection's sixteen original essays move beyond conventional discussions of hippie chicks and Weatherwomen to examine the diverse lives of women who helped to shape religion, sports, literature, and music, among other aspects of the cultural hodgepodge known as the sixties.
From familiar names like Yoko Ono, Carole King, and Joan Baez to lesser-known figures like Anita Caspary and Barbara Deming, the women revealed inImpossible to Holdrepresent a variety of points on the celebrity and feminist spectrums. The book traces women who sought to break into “male” fields, women whose personae and work link the radical sixties to earlier cultural traditions, and those who consciously confronted power structures and demanded change. Separately and together, their cultural work informed the sixties and their biographies offer a lucid and complex picture of that proverbial “long decade.”

Too often we think that the womens movement burst onto the sixties scene late in the decade. Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky have assembled a wonderful and varied set of essays to revise that notion. Here are women from throughout the era, staking their claims to central roles in American culture and, by their words and actions, demonstrating the centrality of the female experience to that culture. The array of subjects includes many names we have knownJoan Baez, Billie Jean King, Diana Ross, Yoko Ono, Jane Fondaas well as many we will know now, because of this important and compelling collection. By emphasizing community, inclusivity, and ló)