cover image Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975

Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. City Lights Books, $17.95 (411pp) ISBN 978-0-87286-390-3

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a California State University women's studies professor, was a political activist and a founder of the women's liberation movement during the Vietnam War era. In this second volume of her memoirs, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975, she remembers this period as being full of intra-left battles over tactics and theory, overlaid and intercut by FBI counter-insurgency efforts. The left didn't win in the '60s, Dunbar-Ortiz concedes, but ""a truly revolutionary moment"" did occur, challenging patriarchy and imperialism in new and important ways. Dunbar-Ortiz rarely dwells on the intimate, but her detailed reportage will be useful for those interested in leftist politics of the Vietnam era. (May)