Praise for The Girl I Left Behind
“An important book. I know of no book like it.”
--Jill Ker Conway,
Author Road from Coorain and A Woman’s Educaiion
“Bolstered by contemporary statistics and an excellent memory, Nies details the life changes she experienced alongside countless other women during a decade of secrecy, boys’ club politics and outright lies…The book’s narrative style—blunt, unflinching, honest—serves the story well…educational and entertaining, with a wry, ironic wit evident throughout.”
--Kirkus Review,
“Nies combines personal memoir with period history...a highly valuable first-person record.”
--Publishers Weekly
Refreshingly candid…Nies’ personal take on the ripple effects of the women’s movement – both on those involved directly and those who followed – is honest and engaging.”
-Booklist
“A dense and energetic public and private history [for our] ambitious daughters who have no idea how recent ancient history can be.
-- Boston Globe
“Nies combines personal memoir with period history...a highly valuable first-person record.”
--Publishers Weekly
The life experiences she relates so freshly (including political parallels to this era’s war) make this book captivating for students of the political and cultural history of the Sixties. Highly recommended…”
--Library Journal
Publishers Weekly
"Nies's combination period history and memoir is a highly valuable first-person
record"
The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties
Judith Nies. Harper, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-117601-2
Future chroniclers of the period may well place the drug and hippie scene as, historically
mere decorative fringe to "the women's movement that came out of the 1960s," which
was, according to Nies, "the most successful and transformative social movement of the
twentieth century." Historian and biographer Nies (Nine Women: Portraits from the
American Radical Tradition) combines her memoir of the girl she was with an account of
the world in which she grew up to become a "pioneer feminist." She delineates a milieu
of limitations of women's lives unimaginable today a time when "women were
supposed to marry well, dress well, and entertain well," and when men's clubs had
"Ladies' Entrances" and Congress a "Ladies'Gallery." Nies combines personal memoir
(her family history, student days, her travels, her marriage, her jobs from summer
waitress to being "one of only a handful of professional women on Capitol Hill") with
period history (the Cuban missile crisis, the Women's Strike for Peace campaign against
nuclear testing, the formation of NOW) and well-known people with whom she crosses
paths (Madeleine Albright, Paul Wolfowitz, Dorothy Day and Gloria Steinem, to name a
few). While the book lags at times, Nies's combination period history and memoir is a
highly valuable first-person record of a woman who finds herself, and the movement she
grew with. (June)
