KH I agree you about sterilisations, I can’ t believe she dismisses that out of hand. I’m not particularly fond of that review though. I agree with some ofthe points, in the review - but the way she personally attacks Susan Brownmiller, and unnamed amporphous people who agree with Susan Brownmiller, really bothers me . I don’t think writing a bad book is a sign that you are unworthy person.

Amp - thanks for finding that I don’t know how I missed it. I must have been tired - I called Bernadine Dohrn ‘Bernadette’ (but oddly enough still remembered how to spell her surname) - oh the shame.

http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/oct_01/oct_01_19.html

Socialist feminism has long since been eclipsed as a current within US feminism, but similar divisions within the movement along class, racial, national & other lines are still very much with us.

Aside: Forced sterilization wasn’t a bizarre or sectarian concern during that period. The last forced sterilzation in the continental US was in 1981, & the US government conducted mass sterilization under troubling circumstances in Puerto Rico. Although the members of the political class who had continued to advocate negative eugenics after 1945 had for the most point had stopped advocating it by the late 1960s, they still occupied elite positions in state & society. Major magazines & newspapers gave extensive, positive coverage to proposals for sterilization of lower class blacks promulgated by William Shockley & others.

All this may seem as distant as the 14th century to people born later, but it was a lingering part of mainstream political discourse as late as the 1960s.

I can’t recommend Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s Rebel Woman enough (although it doesn’t seem to be on Amazon)

It might be under a different title in the US — might this book be the one you mean?