The Feminism of Uncertainty

Ann Snitow is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender Studies at Lang College, The New School, in New York City. A longtime activist, Snitow has cofounded The Network of East-West Women, No More Nice Girls, and New York Radical Feminists. She has written for The Village Voice, The Nation, The Women’s Review of Books, Dissent, and many other publications, and is coeditor of Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality and The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation.

Collecting almost four decades of writings by feminist activist Ann Snitow, Feminism of Uncertainty includes well-known essays, such as "A Gender Diary," along with pieces appearing here for the first time.

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: The Feminism of Uncertainty: I  1 Part I. Continuing a Gender Diary 1. A Gender Diary  21 2. Critiquing a Gender Diary  59 Part II. Mothers/Lovers 3. Introduction to Mothers/Lovers  71 4. Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing  80 5. From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923–1992)  93 6. Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963–1990  97 7. The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus Transformation  123 8. The Poet of Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940–1992)  139 9. Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts from an Interview with Angela Carter, 1988  148 10. The Beast Within: Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett  153 Part III. The Feminist Picaresque 11. Introduction to The Feminist Picaresque  159 12. Occupying Greenham Common  163 13. Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc  191 14. Feminism Travels: Cautionary Tales  204 15. Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka)  216 16. “Should I Marry Him?” Questions from Students  228 17. The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Professor Spends One Day in a Small City in Albania  238 18. Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in Prison  241 Part IV. Refugees from Utopia 19. Introduction to Refugees from Utopia  273 20. Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project  275 21. The Politics of Passion: Ellen Willis (1941–2006)  293 22. Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex  297 Part V. The Feminism of Uncertainty 23. Introduction to The Feminism of Uncertainty  307 24. Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle  310 25. Doubt’s Visionary: Doris Lessing  316 26. Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago  328 27. The Feminism of Uncertainty: II  330 Appendix: Publication History  335 Bibliography  339 Index  355