Feminist Bestsellers: A Digital History of 1970s Feminism

Abstract

Feminism of the 1970s remains among the most influential social movements within the United States. Bestselling texts played a crucial role in spreading feminism beyond early activists into the mainstream of American society. Contemporary scholars of feminism continue to rely on these works as pivotal historical sources. This paper utilizes quantitative methods to compare six feminist bestsellers from 1970. Our data consists of three subcorpora of digitized books published in 1970 found in the Hathi Trust: six feminist bestsellers, a sample of non-fiction, and a sample of writing about women. Computational textual analysis identifies each bestselling title's salient features and the contributions each text made at this key moment in the development of feminist thought. These results led us to propose a historiographical intervention that credits one bestseller, The Black Woman, with a more prominent role in the development of 1970s feminism.