With Jackie in a pill-box hat and Marilyn crooning to the president, the
1960s opened with women hovering at the fringes of the public
imagination--and ended with a feminist movement that outpaced anything
NASA could concoct. A compelling story, but did it really happen that
way?
Unlike many accounts of the era, Impossible to Hold revels in the
complexities of female identity and American culture. The collection's
sixteen original essays move beyond conventional discussions of hippie
chicks and Weatherwomen to examine the diverse lives of women who helped
to shape religion, sports, literature, and music, among other aspects of
the cultural hodgepodge known as the sixties.
From familiar names like Yoko Ono, Carole King, and Joan Baez to
lesser-known figures like Anita Caspary and Barbara Deming, the women
revealed in Impossible to Hold represent a variety of points on the
celebrity and feminist spectrums. The book traces women who sought to
break into "male" fields, women whose personae and work link the radical
sixties to earlier cultural traditions, and those who consciously
confronted power structures and demanded change. Separately and
together, their cultural work informed the sixties and their biographies
offer a lucid and complex picture of that proverbial "long decade."