Making Trouble

Book excerpt: What happens when angry young rebels become wary older women, raging in a leaner, meaner time: a time which exalts only the “new,” when the ruling orthodoxy daily disparages everything associated with the “old”? Delving into her own life and those who left their mark on it, Lynne Segal journeys through time to consider her generation of female dreamers, the experiences that formed them, what they have left to the world, and how they are remembered in a period when pessimism pervades public life. Searching for answers, she studies her family history, sexual awakening, and ethnicity, as well as the peculiarities of the time and place that shaped her political journey, with all its urgency, significance, pleasures and absurdities.