Fri., Nov. 20 2009 @ 9:50AM
In the fall of 2006, shortly after the death of her mother, the feminist writer and critic
Ellen Willis, Nona Willis Aronowitz met up with her friend Emma Bee Bernstein for brunch.
"I'd been bombarded with my mom's colleagues, friends and students, people who had been influenced by her," Aronowitz remembers. "I had feminism on my mind. Emma had wanderlust. Both of us were stuck in this New York bubble. We wanted to find out what issues were important to women all across the country."
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| courtesy Nona Willis Aronowitz |
| Bernstein (left) and Aronowitz in Austin. |
That day, the two women resolved to take a massive road trip and find out what feminism meant to young women outside New York. Unlike most people who make such grand resolutions, particularly over bloody Marys, they followed through and chronicled their trip, which mostly took place in the fall of 2007, in the new book
Girldrive. Aronowitz, a journalist, wrote most of the text and Bernstein, a photographer, took most of the pictures.
Over the course of their journey, which took them from New York to California with stops at many points in between, they interviewed nearly 200 women, not all of whom identified as feminists.