Closely and Consciously: Reading and the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement

The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good. Yung-Hsing Wu examines the importance of reading--personal, professional, vocational, aesthetic, and always political--and how the act itself brought a host of women, each with their own history with the movement, into relation, and into a belief in that relation. The value given to reading can be seen in the ways feminists pursued media representation; in consciousness-raising (CR) groups including shared reading in their meetings; in women opening bookstores, developing newsletters, establishing journals, and starting presses; and in corporate publishers pursuing feminist fiction.

Closely and Consciously crisscrosses distinct print spheres, including newsletters and periodicals produced by feminist cells and consciousness-raising groups, feminist presses seeking to articulate their visions for women’s writing, the emergence of feminist literary criticism in first-time monographs and newly established journals, personal and editorial correspondence, press records, and the publishing histories of bestsellers that testified to the increasingly broad popularity of women’s writing. Uniting all these disparate activists and media outlets, and providing crucial relationality, was reading. With a mix of close readings and archival research, Wu unpacks and interprets this central act of reading and why it matters during a crucial moment of feminist history.

Yung-Hsing Wu is professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Digital Humanities Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA,  Profession, the Mississippi Quarterly, and the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. She has also contributed to a number of essay collections, including This Book is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics, and The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club.