Impossible to Hold

Avital H. Bloch is research professor at the Center for Social Research, University of Colima, Mexico. and author of Politics, Political Thought, and Historiography in the Contemporary United States.Lauri Umansky is Professor of History at Suffolk University and is the author of The New Disability History: American Perspectives and ""Bad Mother: The Politics of Blame in the Twentieth Century America.

• Introduction Part I Break1 The "Astronautrix" and the "Magni?cent Male": Jerrie Cobb's Quest to Be the First Woman in America's Manned Space Program Margaret A. Weitekamp2 Building Utopia: Mary Otis Stevens and the Lincoln, Massachusetts, House Susana Torre3 Life on the Cusp: Lynda Huey and Billie Jean King James Pipkin4 Balancing Act: Ursula Kroeber Le Guin Zina PetersenPart II Bridge5 Ambassadors with Hips: Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and the Allure of Africa in the Black Arts Movement Julia L. Foulkes6 Take Everyone to Heaven with Us: Anne Waldman's Poetry Cultures Roxanne Power Hamilton7 Joan Baez: A Singer and Activist Avital H. Bloch

"For too long, cultural historians of the Sixties have marginalized women, and womens historians of that period have privileged the political over the cultural. At last, Lauri Umansky and Avital Bloch have had the good sense to bring together womens history and cultural history in order to advance a gendered understanding of the cultural revolution of the Sixties. Through the lives of women as varied as folksinger Joan Baez, poet Sonia Sanchez, and artist Judy Chicago, Impossible to Hold reveals the centrality of women to the culture of the Sixties, and the significance of the cultural to women.:" - Alice Echols,Professor of English, USC, and author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Jop "Too often we think that the women's movement burst onto the sixties scene late in the decade. Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky have assembled a wonderful and varied set of essays to revise that notion. Here are women from throughout the era, staking their claims to central roles in American culture and, by their words and actions, demonstrating the centrality of the female experience to that culture. The array of subjects includes many names we have knownJoan Baez, Billie Jean King, Diana Ross, Yoko Ono, Jane Fondaas well as many we will know now, because of this important and compelling collection." - Alexander Bloom,author of Takin' It to the Streets and Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now "A superb accomplishment that assembles lively, spirited writing about women, some well-known and others less so, who made a difference in the way we live our lives today." (The Journal of American History) "One of the strongest aspects of this book is that it ignores the usual female suspects in discussions of the sixties. It also focuses on women and the culture of the sixties instead of feminism during the sixties. Almost none of the women profiled in the text self-identified as feminists, yet their cultural contributions helped make a huge impact for women of future generations." (Altar Magazine) "By emphasizing community, inclusivity, and the political dimensions of cultural change, the women in this volume forged and fostered an important set of alternatives to the dominant culture . . . As a result, these artists helped shift the mixed-gender & mainstream by shaping countercultural trends and visions. They may have been 'impossible' to restrain, but the contributions they made to American culture and life were lasting and concrete.:" (H-Net)