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From W be easy Chicago this is Nurdette I'm Greta Johnson and today we are

going to explore some not so distant feminist history the 90s.

You might remember or you may have learned since then that 1992 was actually called

the Year of the Woman and that's because the number of women elected to Congress

here in the United States jumped up by two-thirds it was the biggest increase in

US history but just six years later, Time magazine actually accused the younger

generation of being politically inactive and the cover of the magazine asked if feminism was dead. So how important were the 90s in

feminist history and how did they shape the place we're in today? Well today

we're going to speak with Lisa Levenstein to find out.

Now I had always been really suspicious of this narrative about feminism being dead and when I started going

to the archives and conducting oral histories and looking at the forms of activism that weren't getting the attention of the reporters from Time magazine, I found that in fact this wasn't just a dead decade.

This was actually one of the most pivotal decades,

I believe, for feminist history.

Lisa is the director of the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies program at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and she is also the author of a new book called

They Didn't See Us Coming The Hidden History of Feminism in the 90s. Lisa, hey,

thanks for having me. So right off the bat I want to be clear

this is not just a book about white feminism of 30 years ago. This is an

intersectional look at what was going on in the 90s.

And the 90s are really interesting for me in particular

...