A Revolution in Ephemera

This chapter uses feminist periodicals to demonstrate the significance of the local, quotidian, and daily scale at which Women's Liberation occurred in the 1970s. Offering local interpretations of grander ideals, shifts in ideas and ideals through time, a variety of different texts and voices, and local specificity, periodicals temper and texture the political images that characterized feminism on a national scale. In their content and in their intertextuality, periodicals highlight how feminist ideals were manifested in different communities and how communities developed distinct practices to reach these ideals. To illustrate the complexity and provisionality of feminism during this time, the chapter focuses on four different facets of periodicals: spatial intertexuality, temporal intertextuality, the significance of location, and the way periodicals make feminism visible at a local, quotidian scale. It examines periodicals published in New Orleans, Louisiana (Distaff), Northampton, Massachusetts (Valley Women's Center Newsletter), Cambridge, Massachusetts (Female Liberation Newsletter), Iowa City, Iowa (Ain't I a Woman?), and Los Angeles, California (L.A. Women's Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister).