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“No More Nice Girls: Women’s Liberation, Cosmopolitan Jews, and Expanding the Boundaries of American Intellectual Life”

In the 1970s, feminist writers challenged the axiom that the intellectual vocation was inherently masculine, along with its corollary—that a woman needed to write like a man to be taken seriously. Many of these women, like the New York intellectuals before them, were secular Jews. Jewish women were so prominent in second-wave feminism that the eminent intellectual historian David Hollinger has wondered, “In what sense was Women’s Liberation… a Jewish story?” This talk, part of a new project in its early stages, takes up Hollinger’s question by focusing on the prominence of Jewish women as writers and critics. It homes in on a group of them who were active in the earliest Women’s Liberation groups in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s and who wrote about the movement for The Village Voice, including Vivian Gornick and Ellen Willis.

About the speaker:

Ronnie Grinberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and Coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History. She is the author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press, 2024; paperback 2026), which was longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award, was a finalist in two categories for the National Jewish Book Award, and received honorable mention for the Saul Viener Book Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society Academic Council. The book also received wide critical acclaim in venues including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is currently co-editing a volume on the subject of an American Jewish intellectual tradition(s), to be published by Rutgers University Press, and is working on a new project examining the intersection of secular Jewishness and second-wave feminism.

Sponsored by Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, George L. Mosse Program in History, and Department of History