It’s impossible to look back on the sixties without thinking, What a time that was! Politics and culture intermingled in a heady mix, the personal was political and the political personal; every act—whether demonstrating against the Vietnam War, smoking dope, having sex, or listening to rock and roll—had meaning beyond itself. The civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s liberation movement, and the counterculture were all demanding changes that would alter the social landscape forever. Peace, freedom, equality, justice were the watchwords of the time. Yet, even among the young male revolutionaries of the New Left, equality didn’t mean the women with whom they worked, studied, and slept.

Indeed, men’s contempt for women, their refusal to take their female comrades-in-arms seriously, was legendary. Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the civil rights struggle replied to a question about the position of women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)...

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