Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. Vintage, 1980.

Summary
Sara Evans’ classic study, Personal Politics, looks at the roots of the modern feminist movement in the civil rights movement and the New Left. The radical feminists that would emerge by the end of the 1960s and revolutionize housework, child care, family decision-making, and sexuality drew on a particular set of experiences in the south civil rights movement and parts of the New Left. These movement experiences “catalyzed a new feminist consciousness” and created an environment where these young radicals “found the inner strength and self-respect to explore the meaning of equality” as well as an ideology that encouraged them to do so. They also discovered the same contradictory treatment most American women experienced (thrust into subservient roles as secretary, sex object, housekeeper and ‘dumb chick’) and thus from it spun a movement of their own. Thus, Evans argues: “The women’s liberation movement was initiated by women in the civil rights movement and the new left who dare to test the old assumptions and myths about female nature against their own experience and discovered that something was drastically wrong.” (212) The personal became political: Participating in these movements, these activists experienced an “egalitarian ideology, which stressed the personal nature of political action, the importance of community and cooperation, and the necessity to struggle for freedom for the oppressed.” (213) Their tactic became known as “consciousness raising” (journals, small group discussions, protests) reflecting their personalized approach to politics.