Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
(City Lights Press)
Here is a marvelous evocation of the Sixties in the memoirs of one of the USA’s major feminist antiwar activists. It is also a moving story of a woman’s expanding personal and political consciousness – from housewife to militant, from history student to history maker.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ memoirs mirror the growing political and cultural turmoil in the USA from 1960 onwards: the Kennedy assassinations, Civil Rights marches, the escalation of the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, the counterculture, LSD, increasing militance (verging at times on amateurish guerrilla violence) and the rise and fall of leftwinger’s personal Prince of Darkness, President Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon.
Beyond these movements, lesser known (and one might ask why) but perhaps more significant in the long run, was the feminist movement. The book is loaded with detail, yet its interest never flags.