A Further Gaze into the Strengths and Weaknesses Exhibited in Sara Evans's Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left

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A Further Gaze into the Strengths and Weaknesses Exhibited in Sara Evans's Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left

Sara Evans's Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left recounts the struggles and hardships that women of the 1960's and 1970's faced fighting for equal rights during the Second Wave Feminism. It is largely based on interviews that Evans conducted with women active in the early stages of the civil rights movement, as well as the New Left, namely in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Student's for a Democratic Society (SDS), but also utilizes activist groups' publications. Personal Politics describes the actions of brave women who risked their lives involving themselves in movements and protests to further African American rights despite sexism within the organizations, and those women, borrowing from the ideological style of the black civil rights movement, were able to create a stronger front for the women's fight for equality among men.

As more and more women opened themselves up to career possibilities outside of the home, they felt the ever stronger suppression of the "straitjacket of domestic ideology" (p. 11). The pressure for wives and mothers to stay home and take care of their families and households led many younger women to rebel against these "housewife" assumptions. Several young women, met with extreme disapproval from their parents, left home to take part in something bigger, the civil rights movement. These women were often forced to choose between family and the movement, hoping their parents would later understand. This feeling of a loss of those closest is, according to Evans, the issue that led to the forming of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), an organization promoting equality in...