Jennifer Baumgardner
Jennifer Baumgardner is the editor of LIBER. She is the former executive director at the Feminist Press, the publisher of Dottir Press, and the Lakes Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
TALK Nona Willis Aronowitz NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ is the author, most recently, of Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution (Plume, 2022), a memoir about the end of the author’s marriage, as well as a work of social history that examines the enduring barriers to true sexual freedom. She
TALK In 1972, when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines, award-winning feminist dissident and writer Ninotchka Rosca was a young radical journalist and chair of the Women’s Bureau. She was soon swept up and imprisoned for disseminating news that didn’t adhere to the government’s propaganda machine. She served
Me and Curtis Sittenfeld. Photo by Matt Carlson. I loved playing with Barbies when I was a kid. Because it was the seventies and my mom subscribed to Ms., I was as familiar with the feminist critique of beauty standards, “girls” toys, and mandatory high heels as I was with
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FALL 2023
OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi,
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 1
SPRING 2023
In Sync I worked a bunch of minimum wage jobs in college, hard-selling suede bomber jackets at Wilson’s Leather, guzzling Frangelico-flavored coffee while reading Backlash at a failing coffee shop, and nude modeling for figure drawing classes. That last one paid twice the hourly wage of the others, but the
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SUMMER 2023
Almost sixty years ago, a girl at the University of Chicago was pregnant and suicidal. Her brother begged another student (a member of CORE and SDS) to find an abortion provider. The student “hadn’t thought about the issue before” but approached this as a good deed and found a doctor.
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WINTER 2022
Anne Heche, who died suddenly in August, was seventeen in 1987, when she began playing the twins Marley and Vicky on Another World, my favorite soap. Marley was a kindly drip in mauve Ann Taylor suits and a pained smile. Vicky, the conniver, had bouncy hair and dressed like Olivia
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FALL 2022
Some people find the analogy of mothers and daughters to describe intrafeminist generational tension annoying and inaccurate, but not me. Chapter six of Manifesta, my book with Amy Richards (2000), is titled “Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother” and ends with an open letter to “older feminists,” the theme of
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JULY/AUGUST 2022
Magazines used to be valuable—an important medium to read, to write for, in which to be covered. This past week, I counted how many magazines I was sent despite not being a subscriber—Time, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, People, Wired, and National Geographic—all of which, pathetically, wind up in the recycling
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MAY/JUNE 2022
A quick (yet somehow exhaustive) memory inventory of where I glimpsed feminism while growing up in Fargo in the 1970s and 1980s: My purple, clothbound Free to Be . . . You and Me book and accompanying record My Judy Blume books, especially Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
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MARCH/APRIL 2022