Women's responses to rape have taken many forms over the past three decades, from guerrilla actions targeting individual assailants to the founding of rape crisis centers. This timely book illuminates the movement's importance to the broader women's movement and discusses the public policy implications of this activism.
Maria Bevacqua locates the roots of rape consciousness, traces the evolution of an anti-rape ideology on the feminist agenda, describes how the rape issue moved to the wider public agenda, and investigates the various manifestations and strategies of anti-rape politics. She examines how feminists first articulated the rape experience as a women's issue, traces the evolution of anti-rape ideology over a thirty-year period, and considers recent tensions in the movement, including allegations of a feminist date rape "hype" in the media and in the academy.
The author untangles the public and legislative responses to the rape issue, analyzing both the political context that made policymakers receptive to anti-rape goals and the effect of the anti-rape movement on American political and social life.

Much of the scholarship on second-wave feminism has focused on divisions within the women's movement and its narrow conception of race and class, but the contributors to this volume remind readers that feminists in the 1960s and 1970s also formed many strong partnerships, often allying themselves with a diverse range of social justice efforts on a local grassroots level. These essays focus on coalitions and alliances in which feminists and other activists joined forces to address crucial social justice issues such as reproductive rights, the peace movement, women's health, Christianity and other religions, and neighborhood activism, as well as alliances crossing boundaries of race, class, political views, and sexual identity. The contributors bring fresh perspectives to feminist history by calling attention to how women struggled to include and represent diverse women without minimizing the difficulties of conceptualizing a singular feminism.

Contributors are Maria Bevacqua, Tamar Carroll, Marisa Chappell, Andrea Estepa, Sara M. Evans, Amy Farrell, Stephanie Gilmore, Cynthia Harrison, Elizabeth Kaminski, Wendy Kline, Premilla Nadasen, Caryn Neumann, Anne M. Valk, and Emily Zuckerman.

As we enter the twenty-first century, scholars, activists and others concerned with social change increasingly realize that in order to transform society effective coalitions among different groups working for social justice need to be created and maintained. However, most of the research and writing about coalitions provide rather limited approaches to the study and understanding of radical alliances; i.e.: coalitions whose goals are to fundamentally change interpersonal relations and social structure in order to achieve equality and true social justice. This anthology challenges dominant approaches of explaining social movements and coalition building. Based on numerous case studies of alliances created between disparate peoples and among a variety of groups, the authors show that both resource mobilization theories and identity politics frameworks for the most part are inadequate for conceptualizing how alliances have been and can be created across boundaries of gender, race/ethnicity, class, nationality, ideology, sexual orientation, and age. The theoretical approach we propose suggests that coalitions are fluid sites of collective behavior where the blending of multiple identities with political activism interact with structural conditions to influence the development of commitments, strategies and specific actions. This analogy makes a contribution to a body of knowledge that aims to understand and explain how radical coalitions work in order to enable the development of visions and plans for change that advance and sustain political and social activity.

As we enter the twenty-first century, scholars, activists and others concerned with social change increasingly realize that in order to transform society effective coalitions among different groups working for social justice need to be created and maintained. However, most of the research and writing about coalitions provide rather limited approaches to the study and understanding of radical alliances; i.e.: coalitions whose goals are to fundamentally change interpersonal relations and social structure in order to achieve equality and true social justice. This anthology challenges dominant approaches of explaining social movements and coalition building. Based on numerous case studies of alliances created between disparate peoples and among a variety of groups, the authors show that both resource mobilization theories and identity politics frameworks for the most part are inadequate for conceptualizing how alliances have been and can be created across boundaries of gender, race/ethnicity, class, nationality, ideology, sexual orientation, and age. The theoretical approach we propose suggests that coalitions are fluid sites of collective behavior where the blending of multiple identities with political activism interact with structural conditions to influence the development of commitments, strategies and specific actions. This analogy makes a contribution to a body of knowledge that aims to understand and explain how radical coalitions work in order to enable the development of visions and plans for change that advance and sustain political and social activity.