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The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties | 
 enlarge | Author: Judith Nies
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 143303
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.5
ISBN: 006117601X
Dewey Decimal Number: 975.304092
EAN: 9780061176012
ASIN: 006117601X
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
At the height of the Vietnam War protests, twenty-eight-year-old Judith Nies and her husband lived a seemingly idyllic life. Both were building their respective careers in Washington—Nies as the speechwriter and chief staffer to a core group of antiwar congressmen, her husband as a Treasury department economist. They lived in the carriage house of the famed Marjorie Merriweather Post estate. But when her husband brought home a list of questions from an FBI file with Judith's name on the front, Nies soon realized that her life was about to take a radical turn. Shocked to find herself the focus of an FBI investigation into her political activities, Nies began to reevaluate her role as grateful employee and dutiful wife. In The Girl I Left Behind, she chronicles the experiences of those women who, like herself, reinvented their lives in the midst of a wildly shifting social and political landscape. In a fresh, candid look at the 1960s, Nies pairs illuminating descriptions of feminist leaders, women's liberation protests, and other pivotal social developments with the story of her own transformation into a staunch activist and writer. From exposing institutionalized sexism on Capitol Hill in her first published article to orchestrating the removal of a separate "Ladies Gallery" on the House floor to taking leadership of the Women in Fellowships Committee, Nies discusses her own efforts to enlarge women's choices and to change the workplace—and how the repercussions of those efforts in the sixties can still be felt today. A heartfelt memoir and piercing social commentary, The Girl I Left Behind recounts one woman's courageous journey toward independence and equality. It also evaluates the consequences of the feminist movement on the same women who made it happen—and on the daughters born in their wake.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 This book was almost a personal history from another Judith November 17, 2008
Judith L. Coloma (Silverdale,WA)
I am a middle baby boomer who came of age during the 1970's. I loved the book and finished it within 6 hours.
In 1971, at 16 years old I worked in Woolworth's. We salesgirls made less money than the stock workers even though we pretty much did the same work. We were told that they work for "men's wages".
Upon starting my career as a graduate nurse, I remember standing in the presence of physicians (usually white males) and required to remember how they took their coffee. No one suggested otherwise, that was just how things were.
I also remember needing my father's signature for a car loan at the age of 19, my male cousin, the same age as me, did not need a co signer for the similar loan at the same bank.
I do not wax nostalgia for the good old days but cherish all that we as women have accomplished in my nursing career and in the world.
However, we cannot take our rights lightly and musted remind the newer generation of how the world was.
 Rare fascinating personal and political history September 11, 2008
Clare Crawford-Mason
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Judith Nies has written a rare and delightful memoir--gripping, personal and historic. The story of the girl she left behind dramatically illustrates the rapid, personal and complex social change of the sixties. Her lively account even illuminates usually dull Washington politics. It is a book for every age: those who lived parallel lives as well as young men and women who want to understand their roots and today's culture.
Clare Crawford-Mason, author: The Nun and the Bureaucrat: How They Found an Unlikely Cure for America's Sick Hospitals; Quality or Else, the Revolution in World Business and Thinking About Quality: Progress, Wisdom and the Deming Philosophy
Intersecting Lives September 8, 2008
S. Hirst (Flagstaff, AZ USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I shared some of the years and experiences in Italy and Washington Judy Nies details so incisively in this must-read book about the Sixties. When I first met her, Judy's intellect intimidated me so much that I assumed she stemmed from the connected, prep-school background as the people she was running such a swath through.
Imagine my surprise to learn here she suffered the same disconnect at Johns Hopkins that I did. My wife and I were trying to fit two years of Peace Corps service face to face with life and death in its rawest forms into theoretical frameworks at Johns Hopkins that didn't seem to take these in. Who would have known that Judy was facing a similar dissonance? Nothing seemed to faze her. She was Holly Golightly on speed.
Instead of stemming from the privileged background of her classmates at Johns Hopkins, we discover in The Girl I Left Behind that Judy was a scholarship student--not from a sophisticated upbringing but from blue-collar, factory people. All of us who ever experienced a gilded world from the outside will relate deeply to her narrative of trying to find her way through the thickets of an upper-class, prep-school world.
I am ultimately grateful that she left the old-boy network of Washington position and power that came her way afterward. It might have diverted her from the harder but finally more splendid curve her life took. Would she have written the books she did or promoted the causes she writes about here?
I wonder still whether women like my wife who went into the Peace Corps emerged as different women--women like Judy--because they needed to cope with profoundly life-testing challenges far from support or whether (as my wife thinks) those were the kind of women who went into the Peace Corps in the first place.
However that may be, the Sixties made a watershed for our society that I nearly believed the subsequent backlash had quashed. The Girl I Left Behind assures us the ideals of the Sixties still flourish, and for that we owe Judy Nies a debt of gratitude.
just in time for this season's assault on feminism September 4, 2008
C. Donaher (MA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I just finished this book and am dazzled by the author's ability to recall and reconstruct her life and the(to the less integrative eye) disparate up-ending events of the 1960's. So much was totally familiar to me(I'm that cohort) and at the same time I had no roadmap for making any sense of it until she generously produced this extraordinary work. It must have been a tumultuous emotional journey for her to revisit all those relationships, encounters and powerful feelings-- she did(we all did --and still do) absorb a lot of disrespect and indignities--but I do think that we can also take some credit for the substantial progress that's been made by women over the past 30 years. There's so much more to say-- her writing is lucid- --- a pleasure to read; she certainly has a strong identifiable voice - --
Where did we lose the feminist movement? August 30, 2008
Carol Grosser (San Antonio, TX United States)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
I just learned about this book from C-SPAN2 presentation and I have ordered the book. So I am writing a request for this author or other feminist authors to answer my question--where and how and when did we lose the feminist movement and here is my evidence that it was lost.
I am 63 and I worked for the anti-Vietnam War movement in San Antonio for the American Friends Service Committe as the typist and mimeographer.
I was in the early consciousness raising groups of the feminist movement. I left that group because my husband wanted to come to be "liberated" and then took up with one of the other women leaving me in the dust!! Additionally, one of the most amazing facts dropped by one of the "leaders" of our consciousness raising group was that many major corporations were financing the women's movement. I began to think the feminist movement must be going awry if that were true.
I still very much hold to feminist ideals and beliefs in spite of that.
However, I remember the naysayers during the early feminist movement saying that we just wanted to be "men!" But now I see a vanished feminist movement turning out to make the naysayers true.
How do you explain the heavily-made up, pretty, young, mostly dyed blond hair females on the networks in stocks, weather, and news loudly proclaiming what male spectator sports to attend or applaud? How do you explain Jane Mayer's book where one of the most evil of Bush's torturers was female?
We lost the female persona of nurturing and care and just added the male persona of the biggest cojones are the best. We have the highest rate of female violence that is mentioned occasionally as if it is of little import. Yes, things may well have changed, but we do not have much feminism and more aggrandising corporate machoism in our culture at its cruelest and most vicious.
On the only female-oriented television networks (Lifetime and LMN), females are still touted to be well made up and non-wrinklely in its advertising. These networks specialize in their programming content with occasionally important feminist issues and lack of self-esteem of our young women. However, make-up, hair care, and skin emollient producers are the only advertisers who have any interest in "chick" television. "Chick" television at least covers important feminist issues, i.e., male violence against women, lack of laws covering video peeping, lack of laws protecting victims of spousal abuse, lack of acknowledgment of verbal abuse directed toward women from spouses and others, as examples.
So with brainwashing women to "get a career," the corps doubled their work force lowering their labor expense and threatened men that if they didn't fall in line for corporate needs there were plenty of desperate single women ready to fill their shoes at half the price. And the movement created lots of single women as women got self esteem and learned that they should have a little dignity in a marriage where the male indicated his was the only important consideration. Everybody lost by women getting a career (such as they were and are). Women rushed to low-wage jobs, filled their children's bellies with fast foods, left their children's care to indifferent and sometimes brutal day care providers, and so began the "health" care industry, now trying to get us all in line with "required" health insurance to take care of the cancers and other ailments the result of terrible food, lack of adequate rest, and polluted air from trucking in 1500-mile food.
Recently, Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver have brought to mind the actual cause of our poor health is not lack of health care, but rather lack of well-grown foods in healthy soils. And I would add lack of well-cooked food from foods grown in healthy soils grown locally.
How do we influence society to return to true feminist values, i.e., care and nurturing, care of the earth and care of the children. And, most importantly, building plowshares instead of guns and bombs. I hope to see a generation of women who are not spending their days with fashion and make-up, but learning yoga, vegetable gardening, or self-defense. You cannot do both things. I urge a return to women being allowed 4 hours a day or even 8 hours protected financially if they choose to remain in the last used-to-be cottage industry of child care, garden care, and food preparation. Apparently, we cannot afford to pay women to raise their children (i.e. welfare queens), but we can afford to pay divisions of men to fight for corporate interests, misnamed as US interests.
I did not grow up well-heeled in an urban city, but ironically from what I learned in Ms. Nies' presentation on CSPAN, our histories are weirdly convergent. She fighting the women's balcony in Washington and I with the Quakers telling my boss that the Friends could not afford to pay for "secretaries" to attend national priority-setting conferences. I am ordering the book, The Girl I Left Behind, via Amazon's Kindle and look forward to seeing what other congruencies are in our respective past lives.
I grew up on one of the last peasant (sustainable) farmsteads in this area due to the aged state of my parents. I began being a believer in women's rights at an early age because after a long day clearing shrub for more pastureland, my parents returned for meals with my father taking a nap and my mother doing meals and parenting.
We really never had a feminist movement that worked as today's "culture" so vividly shows. We have a movement freeing women to be just like their dads! The problem was and still is, dear old dad--ruler of the roost and the agenda setter.
We need an intelligent writer such as Ms. Nies or someone else to analyze what happened to the feminist movement and how we can revive a true feminist movement and it is not a movement where we all take on male values and male lifestyles. It is a book where we get men to want to be women, i.e., nurturers and open thinkers, not Bible thumping war mongerers as we have now for most of the male population who just can't get enough of drilling into the earth and wherever else it can be done. I look forward very much to such a book and it is long overdue.
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