“Those women left their husbands,” Esther marveled to me, noting with wonder that “social movements have the potential to radically change us, not just radically change the world.” What she was pointing out was that this contemporary wave of women’s rage in the early twenty-first century—over sexual assault and harassment and workplace discrimination and political power imbalances—also entailed a wholesale reevaluation of women’s pasts, a remaking of their perspectives, on themselves and on gendered power and its abuses.
