I was quite surprised by the reality of the book. It hit me hard. I then realized that women were desperately oppressed in earlier days. I thought we had it bad now... Oh boy was I wrong. I will pass this on to my daughter-if I ever decide to have one... :)

If you are already a convert, you'll love this stuff. But if you're a curious scholar, like me, you're going to find this tough sledding at times. I don't like the way the book is organized. But I think most thinking people will find it a useful roadmap into the minds of feminists and it's a good place for men to begin if they want to get a handle on this important movement. Like it or not, the feminists are here to stay.

Feminists of each generation, I think, have to do a lot of reinventing of the wheel. We don't know our own history, and although in 2001 we take for granted the ideas that women can be professional athletes or CEOs, that families are not all alike, that equal pay for equal work is fair and right...these ideas were once radical, and not that long ago. Likewise, in the 1970s universal suffrage was taken for granted...and the struggles of women activists in the 1920s were forgotten. This is a valuable collection of writings which gives us some of that history back. It covers important feminist thought from 1949 to 1993. This book holds important lessons for all of us, on religion, rape, health, pornography, family, race, sexual orientation...all manner of relevant and fascinating work.

Miriam Schneir's book, "Feminism in Our Time..." is an EXCELLENT text full of wonderful bits of powerful moments in American women's history. Her text features the work (in the form of essays, excerpts from books, speeches, or manifestos) of such authors as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet, Anne Koedt, Adrienne Rich, and Anita Hill. In addition, at the beginning of each chapter and before each piece from these and other authors, Schneir provides crucial historical information. The experience of reading the works within this text will undoubtedly move any reader who has a passion for women's history (and for those who don't yet have the passion, this text will spark it) and inspire you to read more!!

I'll pay Walter and Miriam Schneir a compliment and assume they were sincere when they wrote this book. It's one of the few compliments I can pay them.

The Schneirs wanted to believe that the Rosenbergs were innocent, framed by the U.S. Govt. They wrote a book that 'proved' their case -- if you didn't know enough about the Rosenberg affair to make an independent judgement, and didn't think well enough to see through their predjudices and pre-conceptions.

The Schneirs basic method is twofold: One: when presented with a complex case, select only the evidence that supports the story you're pushing; Two: when nothing to help you is available, make it up. Examples: an exchange that goes on for several pages in the trial transcript, involving the judge, two lawyers, and a witness, that ends with the judge ruling against the defense but saying that the defense lawyers can bring up the subject again tomorrow, when they have the transcript of that day's proceedings [something the defense chose not to do], is reduced to ONE sentence, designed to show a prejudice by the judge that isn't there; when trying to explain how the investigation of the Rosenbergs started, they claim, on no evidence, that Hoover believed in Soviet atomic espionage because he thought the Russians were too stupid to build the bomb on their own (actually, it was because decrypted messages proved the former USSR [oh! how I love to type "former USSR"!] had spies in the Manhattan Project, but those messages were the U.S. Govt.'s biggest 'secret', known only to the FBI, NSA, and KGB).

In the seventies, the FBI released its files on the Rosenbergs, allowing anyone with the will to see that they'd been guilty. The Schneirs refused to see. In the Nineties, the National Security Agency declassified the Venona files . The Schneirs finally threw in the towel and admitted what had been obvious for decades: Julius Rosenberg spied for the Soviet Union.

If you are writing the history of a controversial subject, I recommend this book as an example of how to go wrong. If you're interested in what really happened in the Rosenberg Case, get THE ROSENBERG FILE by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, in print and available.

Walter and Miriam Schneir's book "Invitation to an Inquest" remains the best book on the Rosenberg case. The authors have researched the topic exhaustively, and they acknowledge that the Rosenberg case is incredibly complex. At the same time, this is not a "Charlie Brown" fence- straddling study. The authors ultimately argue, convincingly, that the Rosenberg's were likely innocent of the charges. A must-read that sheds light on the most important trial of the postwar era.