Customer Reviews

The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America

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Rosen, a historian, professor, activist and journalist brings the wisdoms of her personal and professional experiences to bear upon the modern Women's Movement. The result is a refreshing, candid, almost conversational accounting and chronicle, as well as an astute and careful analysis of the many impacts and consequences of the movement for American life. The numerous interviews with both known and unknown leaders of the movement are captured with such precision that at times you feel you are there. When Rosen then moves toward grounding these voices in the larger social-cultural-political contexts of the times, we begin to really experience the extent and depth of the Movement not only for American life but for life as we know it.

This is a must read for anyone wanting to better understand not only the modern Women's Movement, but themselves. As a psychotherapist, educator and social worker at the University of Michigan, I work daily with those struggling with their roles and identities. I think this is an excellent resource for helping women (and men) understand their personal struggles in context, which as Rosen's title so aptly puts it, makes "The World Split Open", and thus the personal truly political.

Finally, we have a book to make the women's movement make sense for those too young, too unaware, or too biased to appreciate its enormous impact on America. Rosen's style is approachable without losing its analytical rigor. Her research brilliantly documents the movement's factions, "leaders," victories, failures,and issues. While _Split Open_ is a tour-de-force through the 1970s, I found its treatment of the anti-feminist backlash too superficial - although, unlike one reviewer here, I would not chracterize this as bias, so much as a decision to remain focused on the movement rather than its detractors.

The myth is that the American women's movement was the domain of upper-echelon white women who wanted it all--exciting sex, prestigious careers, brilliant children they didn't have to take care of--and that working women, especially those of color, rejected it as irrelelvant to their lives. In fact, as Ruth Rosen's excellent book shows, women from many walks of life took part in a multi-faceted movement that has brought remarkable changes and helped all women.

This book about women also describes the sweep of US social movements, including civil rights, over the past 50 years. I found the chapters tracing the rise and fall of the New Left in the 1960s fascinating. It's well known that women who went south to help with voter-registration drives were put down by their male co-workers. Less known is the influence on them of black women activists they met there. Seeing "the remarkable clout black women wielded in their churches and civic organizations," white women later used them as role models for grassroots organizing in northern cities. In Students for a Democratic Society, men wrote theoretical papers on how to revamp society and women mimeographed them--and ran the offices, gaining administrative skills. By 1969, says Rosen, the New Left "was in tatters" while the women's movement took off in the 1970s--and is still going strong.

"The World Split Open" gives a comprehensive view of the women's movement, filling in important events that the media ignored in favor of the sensational. For people in other countries, it also provides a well-researched, readable account of American movements for social justice over the past half-century, centered around the experiences of women. This is a book to read now, and keep on your referrence shelf.

I lived through this era, but I was a young man and had no idea of the amazing changes the women's movement caused. Now I understand the women in my life much better. I recommend this book to all men who want to understand how the world has changed and how they fit into it.

This book explores the history of the women's movement in the 20th century. Although many books have been written on the first wave of feminism, this book deals with the second wave--written by a real pioneer in the field of women's history. The World Split Open shows how rights possessed by women today were almost non-existent less than fifty years ago. Although women gained the right to vote in the early part of the twentieth century, this book shows how far women still had (and still do have) to go. Ruth Rosen is an amazing person (I was a student in her women's history course at UC Davis last year), and I highly recomend this book to those interested in the study of not only women, but the American family as a whole. Further, I challenge anyone who sees "feminists" in a negative light to read this book and thus have their assumptions proven false.

This is a labor of love, a work so beautifully written, balanced, careful, yet passioante. It is a stunning contribution to the literature on the women's movemnet. Everyone, young and old, should read this to remember where we've been, and to reconsider where we might go.

This was a very enjoyable and interesting read. Although I was an adolescent in the 1960's, it gave me tremendous insight into many of the privileges these courageous women fought for that many of us now take for granted. It was a fascinating eye- opener for me.

This book is a lively historical account of possibly the most important human revolution/evolution in a while. By giving us the full sweep of the roots of the second wave of the women's movement from the 50's onward to the current moment,the author provides a comprehensive retelling of the excitement -- and the mistakes and miscalculations of strategies -- of this on-going event. For those of us who lived through the last three decades it is well to remember the intense elation about profound changes in our thinking and our lives-- and the deepest disappointment about the resistance and the ultimate backlash from a culture pushed too fast and too hard to change the ways of several thousand years. This book is a joy to read. It's also extremely easy to read. Rosen has an incredibly fluid style that carries the reader along through paragraphs and pages. Ordinarily, I feel that most books could easily be shortened and make the same points. But with this one, I kept wanting for each chapter to go on for a few more dozen pages. And when you look at the notes section, one sees how much scholarly work has been compressed and translated into this fascinating account of what we thought we knew, and all the events we knew not of. I learned a great deal about the continuity of liberal activism of the 30's and 40's and how that experience gave the movement a jump start in the 60's. And I learned too how many of the characterizations of the movement as a white women's affair are simply not true. The diversity of the movement from the start has only proliferated now, not only in the US but across the world. In 30 years a movement of people with little money but a powerful idea has begun to transform cultures everywhere. Here's a book to treasure and pass along to next generations as precious reality and future inspiration.

I never took courses in Women's History or Feminism at college, as I felt very put off the narcissism these subjects tended to inspire in my female friends in the classes. Born in 1972, I grew up taking much for granted, and was raised to not necessarily dislike overt feminists, but to definitely question their motivations. I never considered myself a feminist (now there's an overused phrase!) but I always knew that my life was just as valid as any man's on this planet, and as an adult I strive to actively live my life rather than let it happen to me and be a victim.

The good news about this book is that it questions the motivations of feminists as well, be they suffragists, leftists, women of color (finally, a feminist book about the movement that makes it clear that the Civil Rights Movement is important background education in the modern Women's Movement!), laborers, disenfranchised women kept in poverty by welfare, intellectuals, lesbians, all of the above and then some. The author makes no bones about the fact that all of these women have contributed something when they felt a part of the movement, and that all of them have axes to grind though some would prefer you didn't know about it.

I could never have gained this kind of insight and sheer scope of history and knowledge with a mere Women's Studies course in college, though I might have had a chance to read many of the feminists cited in this book. This book should be used as a textbook in Women's Studies courses at the highschool and undergraduate level.

The Women's Movement has by no means ended, we are all participants in it, and it is clear that those of us born after the primary thinkers of the 1950s and onward have a lot to do if we are to ensure equality across the board for our childen yet to come.

As an American woman, I believe this is a must read book for all men and women. Rosen has written a book that is easy to read. This book also helps the reader to better understand the struggle of women in America. If you are a woman in America, this is the story of your past. If you are a man in America, this will offer you an understanding of the world that is the reality of the women in your life.