This chapter discusses how contemporary poets are influenced and inspired by the rise of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, which unleashed a broad surge of poetry by women who began to write openly about their lives and to use their work to directly critique sexism and patriarchy. The chapter examines debates and tensions within women’s poetry of the period, including fraught questions about how poetry might best address female experience, gender roles, race and intersectionality, the relation between poetry and politics, and the tension between more mainstream lyric approaches and more avant-garde experimental feminist poetry. The chapter focuses on a range of representative poets, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, and Kathleen Fraser.

McCaskill examines three different groundbreaking texts of the second half of the twentieth century: Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970), Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), and Patricia Bell-Scott et al.’s Double Stitch (1991). Working backwards and forwards from these three texts, McCaskill’s chapter analyzes ways that Black women turned the tables on previous representations of themselves by Black men and hegemonic others as subordinate citizens, matriarchs, and ciphers.