[In the following review, Trouard states that In Our Time is informative regarding the history of the women's liberation movement, but criticizes the volume for its inconsistent methodology.]

At least one of the things women, or perhaps feminists, want is a history of our history. Such a work might spare yet another generation the conundrum of why, if there has always been a women's movement, no one seems to know it. In Our Time, by Susan Brownmiller—activist-author of the 1975 Against Our Will, a landmark study of rape—is an account of the women's liberation movement from its combustible and transformative origins in the 1960s to the present vitiated moment. As one woman channeling for the collective, Brownmiller reports that she wrote with “a sense of urgency” since much of the movement's story has “already been lost or distorted.” As a “partisan participant-observer,” she recalls the not-so-long ago when employers were entitled to ask a woman for the date of her last period. She also recalls the times when a consciousness-raising session could lead to the discovery that the woman with two horrendous “illegal operations” in her past was sharing revelations with survivors of four abortions or even five.

Rich in anecdotes, Brownmiller helps readers recall (or see for the first time) the sweat equity and the fragility of women's liberation in all of its mimeo machines, broadsides hastily stapled and distributed, resolutions, shifting coalitions, and the small but vital loans from working women to keep the revolution going. She also retells the movement's totemic tales: of the 1968 Miss America Pageant, the braburning media chimera, The Feminine Mystique, Roe v. Wade. More valuable in many ways, however, are the lesser-known tales. For example, Nina Harding gets credit for designing the wire hanger that became the symbol for Legalize Abortion. In 1962, Sherri Finklestein, mother of four, scuttled her career as “Romper Room” host in Arizona by making a “public odyssey” out of her need to terminate a pregnancy compromised by the drug thalidomide. Brave personal sacrifices are juxtaposed with quirky moments: For instance, Shulamith Firestone finds destiny in her astrological connection to Simone de Beauvoir, a sister Capricorn. There is an utterly trippy account of the events surrounding the Ladies' Home Journal Sit-In Steering Committee's successful, temporary takeover of the magazine in 1970. Like a Martha Stewart gone feminista, Brownmiller recreates the occupation dramedy, from the demonstrators marching the wrong way down the publication's halls to the question of what to wear for the revolution. (Brownmiller chose “her best dress, a sleeveless gray wool.”)

The movement's celebrities and those in the shadows (not always by choice) emerge from the welter of sit-ins, ogle-ins, marches and provocative acronyms: oob (off our backs), WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), D.O.B. (Daughters of Bilitis) and SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men). It's impossible not to learn from this account, which is guaranteed to incite an irresistible nostalgia among those who believed. Even cynics, I suspect, will be a little daunted by the sheer outlay of energy and commitment from the legion of women who made it happen. This is not to say that Brownmiller has written a sanguine portrait of sisters locking arms in struggle. There are hurt feelings and whining galore. As in other recent feminist accounts, pretty Gloria Steinem's media domination of the women's movement haunts Brownmiller even now. Still, Brownmiller claims in a press release for the book that she was not after a “balanced history,” and that “ideological clashes” and “difficult, complex personalities” would not be “papered over” or “airbrushed.”

The book's happenstance methodology, redeemed somewhat by a top-notch index, tempers the achievement. In her acknowledgements, Brownmiller reports the generosity of the women warriors who made the history and shared with her their private archives. She builds the story from taped interviews with 200 leading activists. It's not always possible to tell how the author developed her evidence, and from time to time it is even hard to tell within a paragraph if the assumed voice is still Brownmiller's or that of the person whose story is in progress.

The darkest currents running through the book are mostly about rivalry, betrayal and the need for recognition. Brownmiller rightly if somewhat self-servingly reports the ruptures, the harangues, the disputes among the women about “trashing,” elitism, and the sin of “personal publicity.” She earns the right to her indignation by some candid accounts of her own moments of disappointment and devastation. For instance, she recreates her mortification on the Phil Donahue show when Eldridge Cleaver baited and outmaneuvered her and the audience taunted her about her putative expertise on rape. She also shares a moment when her “blood [was] on the floor” following the East Coast Feminist Conference on Pornography in 1979, where she lost her temper with a heckler and made a ruinous anti-lesbian retort. With poignant candor, she testifies that “nothing in our women's movement was ever accomplished without severe emotional depletion and fractured personal relations.”

Elsewhere, Brownmiller has claimed that Against Our Will was her contribution and that it should be enough. Though In Our Time hardly packs that kind of wallop, it's a worthy reminder of the fight.