![]() Woman’s bizarre background.” -New York Magazine The fact that a polyamory enthusiast created her partly as a tribute to the reproductive-rights pioneer Margaret Sanger is, somehow, only the fourth or fifth most interesting thing in Ms. “Even non-comix nerds (or those too young to remember Lynda Carter) will marvel at Jill Lepore’s deep dive into the real-world origins of the Amazonian superhero with the golden lasso. Her discipline is worthy of a first-class detective….Lepore convinces us that we should know more about early feminists whose work Wonder Woman drew on and carried forward….A key spotter of connections, Lepore retrieves a remarkably recognizable feminist through-line, showing us 1920s debates about work-life balance, for example, that sound like something from The Atlantic in the past decade.” -New York Review of Books The result can look both familiar and disturbing, like our era’s arguments flipped in a funhouse mirror….Besides archives and comics Lepore relies on journalism, notebooks, letters, and traces of memoir left by the principals, as well as interviews with surviving colleagues, children, and extended family. She lays out for our modern sensibility how some event or social problem was fought over by interest groups, reformers, opportunists, and “thought leaders” of the day. “Lepore specializes in excavating old flashpoints-forgotten or badly misremembered collisions between politics and cultural debates in America’s past. In her hands, the Wonder Woman story unpacks not only a new cultural history of feminism, but a theory of history as well.” - New York Times Book Review “Lepore’s brilliance lies in knowing what to do with the material she has. Her superb narrative brings that history vividly into the present, weaving individual lives into the sweeping changes of the century.” -The Wall Street Journal ![]() 'The tragedy of feminism in the twentieth century is the way its history seemed to be forever disappearing,' Ms. Like many illuminating histories, this one shows how issues we debate today were under contention just as vigorously decades ago, including birth control, sex education, the ways in which women can combine work and family, and the effects of 'violent entertainment' on children. The author, a professor of history at Harvard, places Wonder Woman squarely in the story of women’s rights in America-a cycle of rights won, lost and endlessly fought for again. Lepore’s lively, surprising and occasionally salacious history is far more than the story of a comic strip. ![]() A New York Times and National Bestseller and Winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |