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Seven women raise a child together while redefining their place in society at the beginning of the Women’s Movement in Denmark in the 1970s On New Year’s Eve in Copenhagen in 1972, seven women had a child together: one gave birth and six others attended. They had met a year earlier at a feminist women’s camp on a small island and now, with about twenty other women’s liberationists, they occupied three dilapidated apartment buildings in the center of Copenhagen. One became the country’s first Women’s House, the nerve center of the Women’s Movement in Denmark, and the other two were women-only communal living spaces that were Pernille Ipsen’s first home. In this intimate portrait of life during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the globe, she tells the stories of these seven women, her seven mothers.
Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Ipsen captures the individuality of each of her mothers as well as the common experiences that drew them together. As she deftly reflects the practical and emotional realities of her mothers’ women-centered life, Ipsen presents an engrossing picture of intersecting lives that, half a century ago, raised questions we still grapple with today: What is a family? Who is a woman? And who gets to decide?
A chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived,
My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of the challenges and possibilities connected with liberation and radical social change during the 1970s. In this time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, it reminds us that new worlds are always possible.
List of contents
Contents
Prologue: An Open Moment
Part I. Liberation
1. An Island of Women
2. Liberation in Community
3. Chaos in the Beginning
4. A Seal of Approval
5. All the Things That Women Can Do
6. A Lesbian Chronology
7. The Miracle
Part II. We Create Our Own Life
8. The Women’s House
9. The Harsh Winter
10. Our Own Building
11. What Do I Do Now?
12. A Controversial Manifesto
13. A New Life
14. Lesbians in Every Land
Part III. No Liberation without Community
15. A Real Family
16. Now We’re Often Scared of Losing
17. Not Something for Me
18. We Were Cut in Half
19. When the Moment Closed
20. A Shared Story
Epilogue: We Have Come Here to Stay
Acknowledgments
References
About the author
Pernille Ipsen was professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for fifteen years and is now a full-time writer. The Danish-language version of this book,
Et åbent øjeblik (An open moment), was published in 2020 and was awarded the Montana Prize for literature, one of Denmark’s top literary prizes.
Tiina Nunnally is the award-winning translator of more than seventy books from the Scandinavian languages, including Sigrid Undset’s epic tetralogy
Olav Audunssøn, also published by the University of Minnesota Press. She was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her contributions to Norwegian literature in the United States.
