How did the women s movement -which fought for equal opportunity for women in education and the workplace - and the sexual revolution - which reduced women to ambitious sex objects - become so united in the popular mind today? In the early days, the women s movement and the sexual revolution were radically different social phenomena, quite at odds with each other. How did these two once-separate revolutions get blended into one?
In Subverted, Sue Ellen Browder reveals for the first time how it all happened. As a former staff writer for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1970, Browder confesses that many of the half truths and lies she told were meant to soft-sell unmarried sex, contraception, and abortion to single women as their path to freedom. Trained at the University of Missouri School of Journalism to be an investigative journalist ( the propagandist s natural enemy ), she betrayed her true calling and became a propagandist herself.
Yet unknown to her, several much more cunning propagandists, under a pretext of love for the poor, were plotting their own deceptions. Soon Sue and her family were swept up in a propaganda-laced story so subtle and clever that it would subvert the women s movement, change the course of their lives, and even go on to deceive the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court and shatter the unity of a nation.
To her surprise, in the end, Browder finds hope, forgiveness, and true freedom in the place she least expected to find them. Yet today millions of women, children, and men continue to suffer from the fallout of the unholy union between the women's movement and the sexual revolution.
Error divides. Truth unites. In Browder s words, We cannot free ourselves from the sea of propaganda in which we all swim until we free ourselves from the errors of the past.
Subverted discloses not only how Americans fell into those divisive errors but also points to the ground of hope on which we can stand to rise above our differences and reject the empty words that have so long harmed women and children and have disunited our nation."
