Page 8 RAIN January 1982 Moving the Mountain: Women Workingfor Social Change by Ellen Cantarow, Susan Gushee O'Mally and Sharon Hartman Strom, 1980,166 pp., $4.75 from: The Feminist Press Box 334 Old Westbury, NY 11568 Moving the Mountain is an unusual, useful, and powerful book. It is at once an introduction and a contribution to recent American history (and, especially, herstory); it brings us as close to its subjects—three women active in the social struggles of this century— as any good novel does to its main characters; it illustrates how to use interviews, or “oral history," so that events and movements come to life and can be understood from the perspective of those who engaged in them. The book draws most of its power from the lives and voices of its three women: Florence Luscomb, now in her nineties, who has worked in feminist, labor and peace movements for over seventy years; Ella Jo Baker, a civil rights organizer who developed cooperatives in black communities during the Depression and helped form SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), a key organization in the 1960s struggle of black Americans for political equality; and Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, the first woman organizer for the United Farm Workers, who has recently joined with other Mexican-American ex-migrant workers to purchase land and operate a successful cooperative farm. Taped in hours of sensitive interviews, Luscomb, Baker, and De La Cruz reflect on the movements they helped form and still influence, on their personal and political development, on the strains and satisfaction of lives committed to social change, often at the cost of other concerns, such as those of family life. All three emerge as real and many-sided—independent, perceptive, strong-willed, humorous. We learn not only what they did and when and why, but how they felt and feel about those long years of dedicated, and often lonely and frustrating, activity. This by itself makes the book a rare one, for studies of activists too frequently turn them into historical monuments—distant, one-dimensional, preachy. Moving the Mountain, on the contrary, reads like a collection of fresh and life-filled letters. The authors have edited their interviews around key questions and provided background information and occasional analysis, but they wisely refrain from tidying everything up. The result is a labor of care and love; filled with starts and stops, thoughts and afterthoughts and with the vibrant coherence of whole human beings who have preserved their integrity over decades of struggle. Thus, Florence Luscomb not only takes us through the Woman's Suffrage and Labor movements in the first third of this century, but tells us why she never chose to marry and why she feels men will be "very great gainers" from the feminist changes still to come. Ella Baker conveys the "deep sense of. . . being part of humanity," ac-
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