It was an honor to be asked to write the foreword to the newly released anthology Times They Were A-Changing, edited by Linda Joy Myers, Amber Lea Starfire, and Kate Farrell, whose selection of forty-eight powerful stories and poems by women about life changing experiences in the ’60s and ’70s vividly re-creates those two decades of American history. In writing the foreword, I felt compelled to remember my own life during the 60’s. I re-experienced my connection to the strength women displayed in redefining  and challenging traditional gender roles, even when suffering hurtful consequences. Many months after I submitted the foreword, I read online advice to those writing forewords. My favorite was that a foreword should help the reader make an emotional connection with the book. The writers in this book had certainly created an emotional connection for me. I’m glad that I got to share what that emotional connection meant to me.

During the 60s and 70s, in every part of our country, women were waking up to their power, intelligence, right to succeed in life and opportunities to contribute their gifts without inhibition. The road ahead was not a smooth one. It was fraught with conflict between parents and their offspring, between bureaucratic power and individuals, between students and teachers, between traditionally civic-minded people and those questioning the status quo, and between the persons individual women were raised and trained to believe they would be and who they really wanted to be.

As a college student from 1966 to 1970 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was involved in antiwar demonstrations that got students beaten and arrested, that called into question the attitudes of the police and state (and are now commemorated with bronze plaques around the campus). As a mother of two children born in 1973 and 1975, I was part of the Lamaze movement and the idea that women could be seen in public, of all things, nursing their babies (how uncomfortable people were when we began doing this, even with our baggy sweaters for privacy). In the tide of energy that followed the events of the anti-war movement in the sixties, women turned toward liberating themselves from second-class citizenship and by then institutions had to listen. Universities that were formerly all male with separate women’s colleges united their campuses into one institution, girls who were led to believe a college education was only for their brothers, insisted on attending schools, and they studied for jobs that were outside of their parents’ comfort zone (women had most usually been encouraged to become teachers or nurses since those was jobs to “fall back on” if one didn’t find a husband or something happened to him). The birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960 and eventually led to higher numbers of women graduating from college (though even today since birth control medication and devices require prescriptions, access is still limited). We read and shared the beloved book Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1971, and started women’s clinics as we learned to love and understand our bodies. Ms. Magazine began publishing in 1972, making headlines with its story that included the names of women who spoke of having abortions when they were still illegal in this country. A year later, the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion, the same year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, articulating an image for women much different than the one many had grown up with in the 50’s. Daughters raised in the 50s and 60’s formed consciousness raising groups, women introduced women’s studies and feminist literature into university curricula, helped their mothers stand up for their rights as individuals inside marriages and in the work force and raised their own daughters and sons to respect women’s rights.

We are now well beyond the years the UN dubbed the Decade for Women. We are working at jobs that have clout nationally and internationally, whether that is as heads of high tech companies or US Cabinet members. We are doctors and lawyers and newscasters. We win literary prizes and hold professorships in greater numbers than in the past. We are awarded grants to continue our research. We have flown in space. I believe there is no going back to the time when women accepted a double standard and lived under the ceiling men lowered on them. Even so, state governments are currently passing laws to abolish women’s rights to choose and the US Congress accuses the Supreme Court of ruling the country when it is its role to try cases to determine the constitutionality of new laws.

There are powers that be that will fight woman before they’ll finally accept the changes that women gained traction for in the 60s and 70s. And so it is important to read what women lived with, lived through, felt and did when they began this rise to today’s more powerful standing. It is important that this part of our history not be forgotten or be understated or be ignored. Anthologies such as Times They Were A-Changing are good reading; they are also reading of the utmost importance. For a woman to know herself, she must know whose shoulders she stands upon.

I thank the editors and the authors in Times They Were A-Changing for sharing so much with us, so honestly, and for bringing these two important decades of their lives to the page so readers can experience (and in so many cases re-experience) those years, not always lived with clarity but fully lived, decades that are crucial to our times now. I thank the writers’ and editors’ for keeping in our national memory women’s engagement in celebrating a more open, accepting and complex world.

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The assignment to write a foreword helped me focus experience in a way I might not have done without the assignment. It helped me honor information from my own life as well as information from the lives of others. As writers, try the assignment to create a foreword to a book for which you are an advocate, whether or not it already has a foreword. Be bold in your chose of book–a contemporary novel, a book of poems, a classic in literature, a travel book, even the Bible. See what happens when you connect your life experience with the book’s content, what happens when you find yourself building a case for others to connect with the material.