Author Description

A housewife and mother on three daughters in San Luis Obispo in the 1960s, Carol McPhee Norton felt left out of the national countercultural movements. San Luis Obispo was small-around 25,000 people-the county rural. News of the civil rights, farm workers' rights, and women's rights movements arrived through the national media, rather than through the actions of local citizens. But in the early 1970s, inspired by the idealism of the egalitarian feminist movement, Carol began to look for local women roused by what was going on in the rest of the country. A Small Town Women's Movement describes her search and, eventually, her reluctant decision that the best way to bring women into the movement was to try to combine feminist idealism with political activism. Together with Mary Gail Black, an elderly local political activist, she gathered women from throughout the county to create a successful political campaign to form a local Commission on the Status of Women.