Barbara Tischler’s Don’t Call Us Girls Women’s Activism, Protest, and Actions in the Vietnam War, is a lucid, engaging and expansive study. I was delighted to learn so much about a period that I thought I already knew well. I think I am most impressed by the scope of this book. Tischler recounts the story of how women of different classes and ethnicities participated in the Vietnam War, and supported their sons, husbands and brothers whilst other women were central to the success of the anti-war movement. She takes her reader into the detail of the era, but at the same time Tischler’s analysis uses the Vietnam War as a pivot, a vantage point, a fulcrum of activity that enables us to understand interlocking and overlapping aspects of feminism and protest in this momentous period and beyond it. She expertly details the interconnections between Second Wave feminism, the Civil Rights movement, 1968 and student protests in the U.S. and Europe, Gay Rights activism and, reaching into the 21st Century, the Black Lives Matter movement. She attends to the gradual success of feminist activism in arenas such as women’s sports and U.S. college admissions practices and tracks the steady, conservative backlash of legislation like the Equal Rights Amendment and the antecedents of the current conservatism exemplified by Trump and his MAGA base. This is the way to tell history! Tischler is the consummate historian: she has an eye for detail and an ability to bring any context alive on the page. She tells this story with pathos, insight and wit. This is a book I will use in my university literature classes when I teach, for instance, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Sula by Toni Morrison, Top Girls by Caryl Churchill and Girl, Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo. Don’t Call Us Girls is relevant to feminist thought in the 19th, 20th and 21st century and will help students and all interested readers to understand the long arc of feminist struggle not just in the U.S. but further afield.

Nicole King

Comprehensive analysis of women’s role in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the struggle for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, leading to “A Movement of One’s Own” to achieve inclusion in society as full citizens. Presenting a diverse range of experiences and perspectives, building on the heroic heritage of women from years past, and introducing us to reformers and innovators whose names may not be well known, but whose activism and actions affected the world in which we live today. Told with a historian’s clear gaze, the transformational changes achieved by this generation are compared to retrenchment in our own time, from liberal progress back to radical conservatism.

David A Fullard, PhD