I keep in mind Rabbi Tarfon’s ancient wisdom that “you are not required to complete the task, but neither are you free to abandon it.” Let this be my… - Alix Kates Shulman

each generation can do no more than add its bit to the endless river of consciousness and change, and that's about as good as it gets.

“Looks were an advantage for getting a husband, and getting a husband was everything,” Shulman explains. “You couldn’t even go to upscale restaurants in the evening if you were a woman alone or even two women. You had to have a man with you. It’s very hard for people to understand what it was like then.

By the early 1980s the explosive phase of the movement was over, at least for the time being-explosive and quiescent phases having alternated for several hundred years. Yet throughout that decade and the following, the ideas advanced by the movement were so warmly embraced by the mainstream that their very success sparked an organized, sometimes virulent backlash (including widespread bombings of abortion clinics and torture of gays), producing what became known as the culture wars.