Women’s and gender history particularly represent the 1970s as a vital decade, and no wonder. While second-wave feminism saw its origins in the 1960s, it reached its fullest voice in the 1970s. Bonnie J. Dow’s Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News shows how the media was vital to this process as the “Big Three” networks “discovered” feminism, helping to give women’s issues widespread appeal and attention.
A number of recent syntheses of women’s post-World War II history and the recent history of feminism see the 1970s as a central decade on which second-wave feminism hinged. Among these important works are Estelle Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women; Nancy MacLean, The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents (especially well suited to classroom use); editor Stephanie Gilmore’s Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States (which includes a preface by Sara Evans); editors Myra Marx Ferree and Beth Hess, Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement across Three Decades of Change; and the revised and updated edition of Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. Providing immediacy in the voices of both scholars and women who were part of this emerging sea change (and there is considerable overlap between these two categories) is the edited collection of Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Providing the most significant history of perhaps the most important organization to emerge from postwar feminism is Maryann Barakso’s Governing NOW: Grassroots Activism in the National Organization for Women.
Not all feminisms were alike. Indeed, sisterhood occasionally foundered on the shores of race and ethnicity, while at other times the double binds of race/ethnicity and gender helped to forge a particularly strong kind of sisterhood, issues best explored in Benita Roth’s Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave and Kimberly Springer’s Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980. Similarly exploring not only the struggles for but also those within feminist movements is Deborah Siegel’s Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Girls Gone Wild.
In Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism, Anne Enke reveals how radical feminists in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis/St. Paul utilized public spaces and enlisted the support of lesbians and gays to shape feminism(s). (Indeed, almost all of the aforementioned books address not only gender but also sexuality, to varying degrees of success.)
Perhaps not surprising, then, is that the explosion of significant work on feminism and gender has also arisen concomitant with a similarly vital wave of gay, lesbian, and transgender history. Although the Stonewall uprising of 1969 hardly represented the beginning of calls for recognition, dignity, and rights on the part of LGBT Americans, it certainly provided the most potent entry into the public consciousness, taking place as it did within the larger backdrop of the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As with the histories of sex, gender, and feminism, many important books place the 1970s as a central decade within a larger historical time span. Among the most significant such works are Eric Marcus, Making Gay History: The Half Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights; Mark Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement; and Craig Rimmerman, The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation?
In Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, Amy Stone shows how activists used politics to fight for equality beginning in the 1970s. Similarly, Tina Fetner, in How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism, traces the emergence of conflicts between the religious Right and advocates of LGBT rights to the 1970s. In light of the way in which these political questions have become central to current political dialogues, all of these books are especially timely.
How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism by 
