(about writing her 1972 novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) I wanted to show everything that we were talking about, in consciousness-raising - Alix Kates Shulman

Each generation must define the problems anew, from their own observations and experience.

“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.

It was in 1967, in the midst of that decade of emotional upheaval and political dissent, that I heard the first rumblings of the women's liberation movement. News reached me in my Greenwich Village apartment via the radio, while I was washing the dinner dishes. I was in my thirties, raising two small children and beginning to write. On the air, several fervent young women were discussing the injustice of women's situation in words that spoke directly to me. When they invited their listeners to attend an upcoming meeting of the fledgling movement, I put down my sponge and picked up my pen. Jotting down the telephone number and date of the meeting, in that moment I launched myself into one of the great liberation movements of our time, which profoundly transformed the lives of women worldwide, mine included.