On the center shelf, over the filing cabinets, sits the dictionary, the thesaurus, the copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible: in other words, the essential equipment of the workaday writer. But at one end is a paperback, pale ocher with age. It's the copy of "Sisterhood Is Powerful" I bought right after I graduated from high school. White cover, red female power symbol, an artifact. Much of it is rad arcana, although there's a dispiritingly contemporary quality to parts of the chapters on birth control, the Roman Catholic Church and the politics of housework. And some of it is a total galvanizing hoot—the guerrilla theater at the bridal fair, the nude-in at Grinnell to protest the politics of Playboy. Who would have thought, when feminists famously disrupted the Miss America Pageant in 1968, that it was the pageant that would eventually collapse beneath the weight of irrelevancy, relegated to a cable channel, while many of the goals of the women's movement would become cultural norms?
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