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Title details for Outside Voices by Joan Gelfand - Wait list

Outside Voices

A Memoir of the Berkeley Revolution

by Joan Gelfand
Sandy Rustin
Audiobook
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Berkeley, 1972: a hotbed of creativity where painters, filmmakers, musicians, and writers inspire a young poet.
Second-wave feminism, inspired by Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan is swelling into a tsunami. Women are joining together to change power dynamics in politics, the home, and the workplace.
On election day, Joan Gelfand casts her vote for George McGovern and boards a plane from New York to California. With one introduction to a woman musician, Joan's journey to become a writer is born. Embraced by a thriving women's community of artists, filmmakers, musicians, poets, and writers, Joan is encouraged to find her voice.
Mentored by paradigm-changing writers, Joan finds the courage to face her darkest fears through poetry and art, mining the trauma she experienced after losing her father and questioning her Jewish identity. Reminiscent of Paris in the twenties, Greenwich Village in the sixties, and Berlin in the eighties, Berkeley in the seventies was the "it" city of America.
Outside Voices reports the ups and downs of finding one's way as an artist, living with a women's band, forging an independent Jewish identity, founding a women's restaurant, and becoming a published writer and songwriter while exploring the limits of sexuality and spirituality. The story includes road trips to music festivals in the woods, beaches in Mexico, concerts in Southern California, and a retreat in the Pacific Northwest.
A triumphant story of determination and will, Outside Voices is a backstage look at the women's movement that sets the stage for decades of change. This book is a firsthand look at how the power of community emboldened innovation, social change, and self-discovery.
"Joan Gelfand has written a compelling book about coming of age in Berkeley in the second wave of feminism circa 1970s. Her depth of discovering herself and her world is intense and reveals all the passion and confusion of a sensitive soul grasping at life through politics, sex, and the long road to becoming a writer."—Geri Spieler, author of Housewife Assassin: The Woman Who Tried to Kill Gerald Ford

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 26, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798892730440
      • File size: 225104 KB
      • Duration: 07:48:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 23, 2023
      Poet and activist Gelfand (Extreme) delivers an engrossing recollection of the protest scene in 1970s Berkeley, Calif. Arriving in the city from New York in 1972, when she was 18, Gelfand sought direction and healing while struggling with her father’s sudden death. Almost immediately, she was introduced to a network of women artists who welcomed her with open arms and encouraged her to pursue writing. Coming from a family that held fast to traditional gender roles, Gelfand was thrilled by the women’s intellectual and sexual freedom. She recalls with wide-eyed wonder her experiences dining for the first time in a women-run restaurant, attending a writers’ retreat in the “great Northwest,” touring with her friends’ protest band, and participating in political rallies that the rest of the country was watching on television. Along the way, Gelfand processed the trauma of her father’s death, found her authorial voice, and eventually grew tired of the Berkeley scene’s productive chaos. She decided to leave in 1975—while she was in the middle of an acid trip—so she could “bring the war home” and “be own person.” Though nostalgia creeps in, Gelfand mostly conjures the period with clear eyes, giving flesh and blood to a scene so well-covered it can feel mummified. This stirring account from the front lines of the feminist movement enchants.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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