Califia Women

Ventures into entirely new territory [and] engages the larger political landscape as no prior work on feminist activism has done. A. Finn Enke, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism

This book is a substantial and original piece of scholarship that addresses critical issues in women’s history and post-1945 history of social movements. Pomerleau’s study of Califia is important for a number of reasons. Previously there were no major studies of alternative educational institutions of Second Wave feminism despite their importance in the overall network of alternative institutions—bookstores, restaurants, record companies, health centers—created by feminists of the 1970s and 1980s. Califia Women argues that radical feminism and cultural feminism operated together, blending the political radicalism of the former and the ‘women’s culture’ of the latter. The book establishes that this type of radical movement extended well into the 1980s, a time that is often characterized as marked by a decline in radicalism, with a shift toward mainstream liberal politics such as the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment. Finally, Califia Women offers a nuanced study of the tensions within feminism around race and class. Most important, Pomerleau succeeds in doing something few scholars have done: he makes radical lesbian feminism accessible to both scholars and students alike. Susan Cahn, Professor of History, SUNY Buffalo, and author of Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age