Books By and Featuring the VFA
Some recent publications from our members and friends
Fran Abrams
I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir
November 2022
I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir is an autobiographical story told in poetry through the eyes of a woman whose life paralleled the second wave of feminism, a movement that began in the 1960’s and focused on equal opportunities and equal pay for women.
The second wave changed the expectations of women from the homemakers of the 1950’s to career women. The author was a freshman in college in 1962 determined to enter the workforce in a professional position. After completing her graduate degree in 1969, she was rebuffed in job interviews by men who assumed she would leave her job soon after she married and had children. She accepted a job in an office where she was the only professional woman. She married in 1970, had her first child in 1976 and her second in 1984. She worked for 41 years, retiring in 2010.
Placing her story in the context of women’s marches and feminist goals, the author tells how she grew up in a world that expected women to become homemakers and how she combined her desire for a professional career with marriage and motherhood at a time when mothers with careers were just starting to be accepted in our culture.
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Dahlia Lithwick
Lady Justice: Women, The Law and the Battle to Save America
September 2022
Heroic feminist attorneys are saluted in this highly readable new book. Its engrossing stories feature trailblazing lawyers such as Anita Hill, Stacey Abrams and Nina Perales. Hill has commented that the author “deftly weaves together the narratives of women lawyers who are holding our legal system accountable for safeguarding an inclusive democracy.”
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Mary Ziegler
Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment
June 2022
The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big business—two things so closely identified with the contemporary GOP that we hardly notice the strangeness of the pairing. Legal historian Mary Ziegler traces how the anti-abortion movement helped to forge and later upend this alliance. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, right‑to‑lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending—and the First Amendment—work. The anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in U.S. politics and persuaded conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOP’s embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics—and explains how it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending.
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Barbara J. Love
There At The Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist
May 2021
Barbara Love, feminist writer, lesbian activist, editor of Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975, and co-author with Sidney Abbott of Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, shares her personal experiences of being present at the birth of feminism in the 60s and 70s. We learn the stories of the women’s movement and lesbian and gay liberation movement from her first-hand accounts of her front-line troublemaking, risk-taking, and activism. Her brand of inclusive lesbian feminism is irresistible.
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Zeyn Joukhadar
The Thirty Names of Night
November 2020
Joukhadar uses the genre of magical realism to tell us the multi-cultural and multi-generational tale of a closeted Syrian American trans boy, an artist who has not been able to paint since the death of his mother five years before. The only time he feels free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. The Thirty Names of Night is an imaginative and intimate exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.
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David M. Hamlin
Killer Cocktail
January 2021
Meet Emily Winter. Feminist. Wife. Friend. Trailblazer. Breaker of a glass ceiling as one of the first female broadcast reporters in 1970s Chicago. She’s tough as nails and always manages to be, out of necessity, a step ahead of her male colleagues. She is determined to uncover the next big story in the Windy City and she does. The books in the Emily Winter Mystery Series (authored by David Hamlin) include Winter in Chicago, Winter Gets Hot and the newly released Killer Cocktail.
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Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore, co-editors
The new Library of America anthology:
Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings Which Inspired a Revolution & Still Can
February 2021
Its 600 pages contain 90 entries, from 1963 (Friedan) to 1991 (Faludi), with 22 pages of photos, including a portrait of Friedan. Naturally, the book (and our Introduction) begins with The Feminine Mystique—the entire opening chapter! And Betty is a presence throughout the book, as her influence on many of the writers therein is mentioned in our headnotes.
The book was released on Feb 16, 2021 and it has received a splendid review from Publishers Weekly:
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Paula G. Cullison
Downloadable Free at PaulaCullison.com
Paula: A Girl from Brooklyn
February 2021
Half the book is focused on Paula’s feminist activities and social activism, which began in the early 70s.
Marilyn Heins, MD
A Traveler’s Guide to Geriatrica
November 2020
How come a retired pediatrician wrote a book on aging? This retired pediatrician became a nonagenarian! Who is this book for? All us Medicare kids, those already dwelling in Geriatrica, new immigrants, children of aging parents, caretakers of the elderly, and any curious young adults who figure they will be old one day.
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Unstoppable: The Nine Lives of Roxanne Barton Conlin
June 2020
Unstoppable is the first in-depth biography of Roxanne Barton Conlin, who rose from a difficult childhood where she faced an abusive father, to become a leading Iowa attorney, feminist, political candidate, and community leader dedicated to fighting for the underdog.
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Lois Kathryn Herr
Women, Power, and AT&T: Winning Rights in the Workplace
March 2020
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) successfully challenged AT&T’s employment practices. This book documents a little-known but important stage in the fight for equal employment opportunity for women and does so with the author’s unique insight gained as a player in the action.
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Riane Eisler
Brilliant Riane Eisler, author of the iconic, The Chalice and the Blade.
Contributor to:
Women of wisdom Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women
March, 2017
Women of Wisdom is an inspiring book of spiritual, academic and artistic contributions from professionals and lay people who share their experience of being women and celebrate the power of the feminine spirit.
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Amazon Books
Powell’s Books
Shelah Leader and Patricia Hyatt
American Woman on the Move, The Inside Story of the National Women’s Conference, 1977
Published in 2016, this is the only book specifically written about this historic conference.
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Amazon Books
Janet Allured
Remapping Second Wave Feminism – The Long Women’s Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950-1997
For those who are interested in the Louisiana Movement, Janet Allured, a professor at McNeese in Lake Charles, Louisiana, has published a history of the Second Wave.
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Amazon Books
Lois Kathryn Herr
Dear Woman of My Dreams
May, 2016
Publisher, Xlibris
Dear Woman of My Dreams is Kathryn’s 1923 diary, covering her nineteenth year. This coming-of-age story is told in her own words as she goes about her daily life at college with her friends and with her mother and grandmother at home. She writes to the woman that she sees as herself in later years, and the book closes with a brief chapter based on letters and the diary Kathryn wrote when she was one hundred years old. All this has been creatively edited by her daughter to include enough material for the reader to follow both the cross-country train trip that Kathryn and her grandmother took in the summer of 1923 and the various details of time and place that one would not necessarily find in a diary. Illustrations and references link four generations of strong women, and the work is based on an extensive family archive. This is the first in a series of stories based on the women of this family.
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Amazon Books
Powell’s Books
Linda Stein
Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture
May 12, 2016
Old City Publishing
Replete with extraordinary full-color images, Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein, includes a foreword by Gloria Steinem, essays by notable scholars and intimates, as well as the artist, and was published by Old City Publishing. A page-turner, this book tells the story of Stein’s traveling exhibition and educational initiatives, celebrating ten female heroes during the time of the Holocaust. It inspires readers to re-imagine their own roles as Brave Upstanders protecting the well-being of others against bullies and bigots.
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Amazon Books
View Recommended Books 1999 – 2016
Click on button to the right to see a list of VFA recommended books and author pages.