Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. Vintage, 1980.

== Summary ==
Sara Evans’
classic study, Personal Politics, looks
at the roots of the modern feminist movement in the civil rights movement and
the New Left. The radical feminists that would emerge by the end of the 1960s
and revolutionize housework, child care, family decision-making, and sexuality
drew on a particular set of experiences in the south civil rights movement and
parts of the New Left. These movement experiences “catalyzed a new feminist
consciousness” and created an environment where these young radicals “found the
inner strength and self-respect to explore the meaning of equality” as well as
an ideology that encouraged them to do so. They also discovered the same contradictory
treatment most American women experienced (thrust into subservient roles as
secretary, sex object, housekeeper and ‘dumb chick’) and thus from it spun a
movement of their own. Thus, Evans argues: “The women’s liberation movement was
initiated by women in the civil rights movement and the new left who dare to
test the old assumptions and myths about female nature against their own
experience and discovered that something was drastically wrong.” (212) The personal became political: Participating
in these movements, these activists experienced an “egalitarian ideology, which
stressed the personal nature of political action, the importance of community
and cooperation, and the necessity to struggle for freedom for the oppressed.”
(213) Their tactic became known as “consciousness raising” (journals, small
group discussions, protests) reflecting their personalized approach to
politics.