“Looks were an advantage for getting a husband, and getting a husband was everything,” Shulman explains. “You couldn’t even go to upscale restaurants… - Alix Kates Shulman

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.

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 advice to young writers, too. Keep writing and never give up.

My inspiration for the novel came from my participation in the first national demonstration of the women’s liberation movement: the 1968 protest against the Miss America Pageant, in Atlantic City, that symbol of traditional white beauty standards. That protest brought women’s liberation to national attention for the first time.