Overview

On January 21, 2017, massive demonstrations in Washington DC and sister marches held in over 600 American cities drew crowds of over four million people. Popularly called 'The Women's March,' it became the largest single-day protest in American history. The feminism that shaped the consciousness of millions in 2017 had distinct roots in the 1990s. In They Didn't See Us Coming, historian Lisa Levenstein argues we have missed much of the past quarter century of the women's movement because the conventional wisdom is that the '90s was the moment when the movement splintered into competing factions. But by showcasing voices and stories long overlooked by popular culture and scholars, They Didn't See Us Coming shows that this decade was actually a time of intense and international coalition building. This activism centered around the growing influence of women of color, women with disabilities, women from the global South, and people of ranging gender expressions and identities. Together, they built a movement from the margins. Exclusion sparked action. Moments like the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference, whose major players included Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug and where Hillary Clinton famously declared, 'Women's rights are human rights,' were also stages for less-remembered but no less important calls to action. Wheelchair riders staged a 'crawl in' protest when a panel on disabilities was held on the third floor of a building with no elevator-a consciousness-raising moment that informed much of the work around disabilities for the remainder of the decade. Meanwhile, new tools like e-mail, listservs, and discussion boards brought people with common purpose into instant contact; activists working on campuses and in culture, like Riot Grrls and Guerilla Girls, organized in ad hoc and less visible ways, without figureheads but with clarity of purpose. All this work reveals a thriving (but changing) women's movement. A necessary and fresh understanding of a transformative period in the history of American and international feminism, They Didn't See Us Coming also offers an urgent road map for thinking about organizing today and continuing to build on the work of these extraordinary activists.

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A Bitch Most Anticipated Book 2020

A Bitch Most Anticipated Book 2020 An authoritative account of how the feminist movement evolved during the 1990s and beyond... sharp... Levenstein successfully combines well-documented research with personal observations and interviews to create an accessible and informative narrative. Required reading for classes in women's studies. --Kirkus Reviews In this sweeping and beautifully written account of a feminist movement that too many of us assumed had simply faded away, Lisa Levenstein reckons with the truly powerful mark that US women of color and activists from the Global South made together in the 1990s. In moving and intimate detail, Levenstein helps us all to appreciate not only that the ways in which it was a new multiracial and global coalition of women that kept the feminist movement vibrant and alive, but also that it was these women who made it possible for us still to imagine a more just and equitable future today. --Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water

Author Information

Lisa Levenstein is the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History at UNC Greensboro. Her first book, A Movement Without Marches, won the Kenneth Jackson Book Award. She lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

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