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.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction: The Feminism of Uncertainty: I  1Part I. Continuing a Gender Diary1. A Gender Diary  212. Critiquing a Gender Diary  59Part II. Mothers/Lovers3. Introduction to Mothers/Lovers  714. Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing  805. From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923–1992)  936. Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963–1990  977. The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus Transformation  1238. The Poet of Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940–1992)  1399. Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts from an Interview with Angela Carter, 1988  14810. The Beast Within: Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett  153Part III. The Feminist Picaresque11. Introduction to The Feminist Picaresque  15912. Occupying Greenham Common  16313. Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc  19114. Feminism Travels: Cautionary Tales  20415. Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka)  21616. “Should I Marry Him?” Questions from Students  22817. The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Professor Spends One Day in a Small City in Albania  23818. Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in Prison  241Part IV. Refugees from Utopia19. Introduction to Refugees from Utopia  27320. Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project  27521. The Politics of Passion: Ellen Willis (1941–2006)  29322. Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex  297Part V. The Feminism of Uncertainty23. Introduction to The Feminism of Uncertainty  30724. Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle  31025. Doubt’s Visionary: Doris Lessing  31626. Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago  32827. The Feminism of Uncertainty: II  330Appendix: Publication History  335Bibliography  339Index  355

“Snitow’s work has always been very readable. Her prose has that luminous fluency that comes only after a writer has been steeped in decades of rigorous reading, writing and activism. These essays repeatedly emphasise how important her students are to her. … For third- and fourth-wave feminist readers, The Feminism of Uncertainty will be both an introduction to Snitow’s philosophy and a valuable reminder not to reinvent the feminist wheel.” - Emma Rees (Times Higher Education) "Ann Snitow is a hero of late twentieth-century radicalism, in its many guises. . . . [A] valuable resource for the ambitious future scholar/activist digging into feminism’s past. . . . The Feminism of Uncertainty shines brightest when Snitow’s uncertainty politics clash with the realities of action (and for Snitow, thinking, reading, and speaking are all actions)."- Paula Rabinowitz (Women's Review of Books) "At a time when the field is cleaved with irreconcilable differences between earlier epistemologies of feminisms and emergent perspectives, this book fills a major gap as it cuts across divides and speaks across eras and ideologies." - Basuli Deb (Socialism and Democracy)