The idea is to change first of our own volition and according to our own inner promptings before they impose completely arbitrary changes over us.

Beat poet Jane Bowles

What has been trickling up through the years--the voices of the women--emerges now in a collected form in Brenda Knight's enlightening new book, Women of the Beat Generation. Through their journal notes, letters, poems and napkin scrawls, this outstanding collection expertly and intimately portrays 40 of these women who had their fingers on the pulse of the times. They were setting a beat of their own--not mere echoes of their male counterparts, but counterpoint whispers and screams--the private ravings of a deeper dissent. 

The '50s was an era epitomized by transition. The U.S. had dropped the bomb. Atomic power, the space race and the baby boom were in full tilt. Birth control became available and for the first time women were gaining choices. With the advent of commercialism, television, new household gadgets for the happy homemaker and the push for the nuclear family, women were becoming increasingly isolated in nice suburban neighborhoods. Those who had worked in the factories for the war effort were sent back home to make babies; alternatives were not easy. Women who challenged traditional roles threatened the security of the nation in a new way. Dissatisfied, outspoken women of intensity were having breakdowns, turning to drugs and alcohol, becoming casualties. Their voices were not usually heard beyond their circle of friends and their writings remain obscure. During a panel discussion in honor of Allen Ginsberg, someone asked where the women of the Beat Generation were and why they were not represented. Stephen Scobie replied, "There were women; they were there. I knew them. Their families put them in institutions. They were given electric shock. In the '50s, if you were male, you could rebel. But if you were female, your families had you locked up. 

Women of the Beat Generation turns up the volume on influential women like Madeline Gleason, Denise Levertov, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger and Mendocino County's ruth weiss and Mary Norbert Körte. These and many others were compelled, as Poet Priestess Diane di Prima said of herself, "to look for trouble in all directions." Lenore Kandel writes of the trouble she'd seen as her friends turned to heroin in "A Small Prayer for Falling Angels": . . . Kali-ma, their blood sings death to them. Remind them of life that they be born once more, that they slide through the gates of yes, that they relax their hands not try to stop the movement of the flowing now . . . We also read about Elise Cowen, the shy and tragic "twin" and lover of Allen Ginsberg who, once refusing to leave her typing job at ABC without being given a verbal explanation, was hauled away by police. Her work includes titles like "Trust yourself--but not too far" and " Death I'm Coming." She died of suicide in 1962. 

But the times were not all just trouble and tragedy. So much was happening beyond the linoleum that pulled on the revolutionary spirit. We see examples of this in the political and environmental themes of Denise Levertov and the writings of her friend and longtime activist Mary Norbert Körte. Her life as a nun was transformed at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. Her poem "Eddie May the Cook Dreamed Sister Mary Ran Off with Allen Ginsberg" recalls those turbulent times just before leaving the convent with"all freedoms looming ahead." Meanwhile, ruth weiss was revolutionizing the poetic form through her innovation of reading poetry to jazz. Poet Jack Hirschman claimed, "No American poet has remained so faithful to jazz in the construction of her poetry . . . ruth weiss writes jazz in words." 

Inspired by Zen Buddhism, many turned from their Judeo-Christian roots. These women set an example of self-liberation long before the term "feminism" was coined. With her husband in jail on drug charges, Brenda Frazer, engaging in "writing therapy" made this breakthrough: "There is no mentor of male muse to be a live-in example for me. I have more faith in my creativity now. Creativity is in the middle, at the turning point of gender, either, neither, nor." In touch with the thread of imagination, "the lilting dream which grows upon itself" she applied her creativity to agriculture and devised a method of combining compost and manure to make the methane gas which ran the Ginsberg farm. 

Women of the Beat Generation expresses the struggle of women wanting to rise up and speak in an era when women were best kept silent. It is an important tribute to a movement that may still be underground, but has not lost count.