cover image Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960

Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960

Flora Davis. Simon & Schuster, $27.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-60207-9

Deliberately short on feminist theory and free of rhetoric, this balanced, gripping, inspirational chronicle of the contemporary women's movement in the U.S. should be a standard resource for years to come. Davis, who has taught journalism at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, tells how activists ``virtually reinvented feminism'' in the 1960s, fueled by dozens of small women's groups that had survived since the suffragette ``first wave'' of the early part of the century. She explains how the struggle to ratify the ERA touched off a movement of its own, and how the reproductive rights movement in the '70s brought together NOW, new single-issue groups and older organizations like Planned Parenthood. She investigates media stereotyping and the right-wing backlash bolstered by white males' resentment at the challenges from feminists and from the civil rights movement. Davis suggests that, despite its setbacks, the women's movement of the 1990s is more deeply rooted and more diverse than ever before. (Nov.)