About the Event
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Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Book Festival and The Harmony Bar & Grill welcome you to a book launch celebration for the new essay collection, Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories. Hear from the contributors and enjoy complimentary pizza and appetizers!
A Room of One's Own bookstore will be on hand with copies of Radical Family for purchase and signing.
Edited by Margaret Mooney, Radical Family honors the history-making struggles and triumphs of lesbian families in Madison, Wisconsin, who raised children in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s—a time when lesbian motherhood was widely considered extreme and unnatural. In a collection of nine profoundly personal essays, the contributors recount their diverse paths to parenthood, as well as the hopes and challenges each family experienced. While the stories in Radical Family are unique, they all share a common thread: the mothers’ resilience and the risks they took, both small and sweeping, to defend their family’s right to exist. Overcoming legal and social prejudice, these moms created informal networks in their local communities where they could share survival strategies and find acceptance among other families that looked like theirs. And with no rule book to guide them, and few laws to protect them, lesbian mothers created a new—some might even say radical—standard for what it means to be a family.
Joining editor Margaret Mooney at the event will be contributors Meg Gaines, Shelley Gaylord, Alix Olson, Leslie Bernstein, MC Reisdorf, Denise Matyka, Margaret McMurray, Janet Wright, and Kathy Borkowski.
