Winner of the 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Prize

Do you think I can be a feminist mother? Did I make you and your kisses up in my mind? Will you join our military protest at the gate? Will you feed the kids when I'm in prison? Are you able to forgive me for breaking off this correspondence because you are a man?

During the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s, feminists in the United States and Britain reinvented the image of the woman letter writer. Symbolically tearing up the love letter to an absent man, they wrote passionate letters to one another,...