No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

by Ellen Willis

Overview

With characteristic intelligence, wit, and feminist insight, Ellen Willis addresses democracy as she sees it: “a commitment to individual freedom and egalitarian self-government in every area of social, economic, and cultural life.” Moving between scholarly and down-to-earth activist writing styles, Willis confronts the conservative backlash that has slowly eroded democratic ideals and advances of the 1960s as well as the internal debates that have frequently splintered the left.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452934297
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	07/05/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	282
File size:	793 KB

About the Author

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) was the first pop music critic for the New Yorker and an editor and columnist at the Village Voice. A groundbreaking radical leftist author and thinker, she has contributed to numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Nation, and was the founder of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Her work is published in three other books of essays: Out of the Vinyl Deeps, No More Nice Girls, and Don’t Think, Smile!

Editorial Reviews

This anthology collects the book reviews, feminist political essays and fiction that Willis, formerly a Village Voice columnist and now a New York University associate professor of journalism, published during the Reagan-Bush years. The book opens with several works from the early '80s that tediously address psychosexual issues within the feminist movement. Beyond these exercises in anti-misogynist rhetoric, however, lie many outstanding works. In ``Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,'' Willis chronicles the internal struggles, strategies and consequent splintering of the women's movement, while in ``Escape From New York'' she writes nostalgically of her fellow aging radicals and their compromises. In more recent pieces Willis eloquently argues her pro-choice position on abortion and offers a balanced perspective on the racial division within the women's movement. Essays on the issues of parental responsibility in an age of reproductive choice and on the war on drugs demonstrate her ability to communicate strong, rational arguments for emotionally charged liberal philosophies. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this first collection of essays since her Beginning To See the Light ( LJ 6/1/81), feminist / journalist Willis documents the struggle toward transforming society in the conservative 1980s. Moving between academic and earthy, activist writing styles, she explores changes in feminism, race relations, and cultural politics. Critiquing a culture that has backed away from the promises and idealism of the Sixties, Willis reimagines a world committed to a democracy that values individual happiness and self-development. She concentrates specifically on feminism, drawing on her earlier personal experiences with the radical feminist movement, to explore both the movement's internal failures and the well-orchestrated external attacks against it that have come from the right. Recommended for communications and women's studies collections.-- Judy Solberg, Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park

Library Journal

At a time when feminism is too often equated with New Age mysticism or the search for self-esteem, the old-fashioned, in-your-face radical feminism of "Village Voice" columnist Willis is refreshing. Willis' new collection of essays--her previous collection was 1982's "Beginning to See the Light"--spans the long dry spell of the Reagan-Bush era. A Redstocking feminist who considers sexual repression and familialism just as significant as sexism in producing oppressive conditions for women, Willis takes on current events like the "Achille Lauro" hijacking, the "Challenger" disaster, the Jonathan Pollard spy case, and the drug war; cultural icons from Picasso and Warhol to De Beauvoir and Rushdie; and the myriad tendencies within the left and the women's movemen (s) over the past quarter-century. Twenty of the collection's 26 pieces are from the "Voice" or its literary supplement; the remainder come from sources as diverse as "Dissent" and "Mirabella". Whether she's on a long 1980 bus trip, surveying the state of the nation in "Escape from New York," or reconsidering the impact of race, class, and culture on the feminist critique, Willis offers serious readers the fruits of her wide-ranging curiosity, thoughtful analysis, penetrating insights, and utterly unapologetic commitment to freedom and pleasure as liberating, radical ideas.

Mary Carroll