Bra burning, The Feminine Mystique, Gloria Steinem, man-hating lesbians: legacies of 1970s feminism that have become hegemonic, characterizing US feminism as white and middle-class and erasing the unruliness of feminist activism. At a moment when scholars countering the force of this hegemony have increasingly emphasized the local and the quotidian, Victoria Hesford takes us back to the national scale and focusses on publications that circulated widely. Describing her analytical practice as “reading along the grain” (6), Hesford immerses herself in mainstream representations of women's liberation to “track the conditions of possibility through which ideas of the movement and its political imaginary were shaped” (7). If discourse has a generative effect on politics and identity, then close readings of texts allow Hesford to excavate the rhetorical devices that, through their repetition across space and time, created a consensus that made feminism intelligible in the 1970s and frames our memories of it now. Repetition, importantly, has produced an “affective economy in which particular objects … and figures circulated in the press coverage and worked to shape certain emotional responses to the movement” (32). Therefore, disrupting dominant narratives must involve challenging that which structures our feelings and beliefs.

Feeling Women's Liberation is organized textually and chronologically. We begin in 1970, during a “moment of indeterminacy” (41) in the representation of women's liberation, which Hesford deftly demonstrates through the ambivalent portrayals of feminism in mainstream media. The following three chapters turn to feminist publications, such as SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanis, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” by Anne Koedt, “The Woman Identified Woman” by the Radicalesbians, and Flying by Kate Millett, to explore how the figure of the lesbian organized feminists’ self-representation. Concluding, Hesford takes us to the more recent past. Supracultural texts – the films Miss Congeniality and If These Walls Could Talk 2, both released in the year 2000 – and academic essays published in the 1980s by Adrienne Rich and Teresa deLauretis reveal how women's liberation is collectively remembered.

At times an apparition hovering around the edges of feminism and at times synonymous with “feminist,” the lesbian is a figure that has shaped our memories and representations of women's liberation politically, discursively, and affectively. Lesbians were “threats to the social fabric of American society” (74), “a shorthand notation for the movement's political aspirations” (117), a “sign of the possibilities” (248), tropes that served as a rhetorical scaffold through and against which feminism became meaningful, regarding sexuality as well as race and class. By looking carefully at language and rhetoric, Hesford defamiliarizes “lesbian” and “feminism.” She reminds us that feminist-as-lesbian was not an inevitable construction and that the politics and values expressed by feminists were hardly monolithic and homogeneous.

While Hesford's analysis reveals the multiplicity, irruptions, and paradoxes of the women's liberation movement, she focusses primarily on how responses to the movement – mainstream coverage of events and reviews of feminist texts – tend to “flatten out the contradictions and incoherencies of its emergence” (151). Feminists in the 1970s were attempting to make the world anew, to create new identities, social narratives, traditions. But, as Hesford shows, they were bound by existing language and conventions. For example, instead of reading Flying as the invention of a life that does not fit easily into existing categories of femininity, reviewers are unable to grapple with its defiance of autobiographical tropes and social norms: it “fails as a feminist memoir” because it is too indulgent, too personal (170), and it “signals a failure of autobiographical writing” (171).

Writing a national-scale history of US feminism runs the risk of reifying the centrality of certain points of origin (e.g. 1970, New York City) and certain figures (e.g. Kate Millet, Betty Friedan). As a result, it could be useful to read this book along with local studies of feminist activism. And though it is not Hesford's project, her book brings up the question how feminists in different locales made meaning of and use these iconic texts. Hesford, however, keeps her argument from becoming ahistorical by consistently remaining connected to the larger social and political context, which additionally reminds readers of feminism's “entanglement with, and involvement in, mainstream media and other countercultural movements (214). Feeling Women's Liberation tells a story of US feminism that looks at the movement's centers as well as the echoes, at the most visible figures and the ghosts that shape and haunt the significance of these figures. Hesford's close, kaleidoscopic readings of these icons and mass-produced texts thus allow us to see women's liberation differently.