What was it like to participate in the Women’s Liberation Movement? What made millions of women step forward from the 1960s onwards and join it in different ways? Many of the fifty women in this book were there. They describe how they have contributed in multitudinous ways across politics, the arts, health, education, environmentalism, economics and science and created wonderfully subversive activism. And how they continue this activism today with determined grittiness. Here are women – all over 70 years of age – still railing against the patriarchal systemic oppression of women, still fighting back. “Don’t Call Me Sweetie”, “Never Waste a Good Crisis” and “Still Here, Still Clear and Still Lesbian” are what they want us to know.
The contributors to Not Dead Yet have created new analyses with new language and new kinds of organisations always aware of the ways in which the system is stacked against them, particularly against radical lesbian feminists. But they persist. They share the revolutionary zest they have carried with them over many decades. There is history, there is subversion and there are many extraordinary acts of courage. The language is full of irony and wit – as well as deadly serious.
The Women’s Liberation Movement had a profound effect on the lives of millions of women and in turn those women have changed the world. Young women in particular might enjoy reading the inspirational tales by their foremothers in Not Dead Yet and let their wisdom guide their own paths.
