MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

During the 60s and 70s, feminist writings such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, played a significant role in the personal and collective formation of baby boomers. Importantly, works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde provided an “ah-ha” moment for many individuals born between 1946-1964 about the everyday heterosexism that permeated their world. These baby boomers viewed feminist texts as both a mirror and a hammer, reflecting, shaping and intertwining with their increasingly politically charged world marked by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement— two important collective frameworks in which the aforementioned writings were read and discussed. Drawing on qualitative research, including interviews and online analyses of selected goodreads.com posts, this paper examines the social motivations, uses and lasting effects that underlie the reading of seminal second-wave feminist works by everyday readers who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s. Autobiographical reflections by baby boomers in this study provide many vivid examples of the ways in which feminist texts became “equipment for living,” to use a term by literary theorist Kenneth Burke. More specifically, this paper argues that second-wave feminist writings, which intersected with television, film, music and classic feminist texts, were used by baby boomers as 1) life markers, 2) social signifiers 3) alternative targets for identification and, occasionally, 4) action triggers.