No Permanent Waves

NANCY A. HEWITT is a professor of history and women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her books include Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872; Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880–1920s; and A Companion to American Women's History.

• IntroductionPart I: Reframing Narratives/Reclaiming HistoriesChapter 1. From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Chapter 2. Multiracial FeminismChapter 3. Black Feminisms and Human Agency“We Have a Long, Beautiful History”Chapter 5. Unsettling “Third Wave Feminism”Part II: Coming Together/Pulling ApartChapter 6. Overthrowing the “Monopoly of the Pulpit”Chapter 7. Labor Feminists and President Kennedy’s Commission on WomenChapter 8. Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s MovementChapter 9. Rethinking Global SisterhoodChapter 10. Living a Feminist LifestyleChapter 11. Strange BedfellowsChapter 12. From Sisterhood to Girlie CulturePart III: Rethinking Agendas/Relocating ActivismChapter 13. Staking Claims to IndependenceChapter 14. “I Had Not Seen Women Like That Before”Chapter 15. The Hidden History of Affirmative ActionChapter 16. U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style!Chapter 17. “Under Construction”

"From Seneca Falls to hip-hop, this striking collection pushes us to rethink the who, what, when, where, and why of U.S. feminist history. The wide-ranging essays toss out the overly tidy generational model and replace it with complex, rich, and inclusive accounts of our feminist past. Highly recommended." - Joanne Meyerowitz (author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States) "An important contribution to the ongoing dialogue on the meaning of feminism and its application not just within the academy, but also to a larger and more general political, social, and intellectual forum. Recommended." (Choice) "As an intellectual enterprise the book successfully established the overlapping and intertwined configurations of feminist movements from the 1840s to the present. Hewitt's book is a compelling guide to contemporary interpretations of American feminisms. Its thought-provoking essays will be especially useful in classroom distussions about historical practice."(Journal of American History) "No Permanent Waves offers not only crucial information on the histories of feminism but also evidence for new historiographical claims about how feminism relates to itself across time, positionality, race, region, class, sexuality, occupation, and especially generation. Featuring a range of essays on manifestations of feminism and their relationships to time and generation, No Permanent Waves demonstrated the strength of attending to difference."(Signs)