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.10From Right arguments that America lost its way in the late 1960s to theLeft perception that 1960s revolutionary aspirations came to a deadend, the story of 1960s radicalism has served as a kind of cautionary taleacross the political spectrum.11 In general, for the last three decades of thetwentieth century, national conceptions regarding the pleasures anddangers of American progress were given shape by the most commonplace 24 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYreading of the politics of the 1960s, which in turn has been structured bythe logic of time and totalization I have been describing.12As I will suggest, the moral of this story has usually been understoodto be this: the revolutionary impulse both cannot and should notanimate American politics.Because this interpretation rests on deeply heldideas of how political time operates, it often seems an inarguable, indelibleone.While the meaning of this realization is certainly dire for the Left, ithas crucial effects on the Right s imagination of political change as well,as Fukuyama s ambivalent description of history s end implies.Whilethe defeat of 1960s radicalism is, from an economic perspective, not thedeterminant cause of this sense of stasis, my point is that it has served as anexplanation of and an alibi for certain perceptions in American culture ameans of describing why large-scale attempts at instituting politicalprogress will and even should fail.13 In this sense, the inexorable logicof time and totalization that shapes the narrative of the 1960s servesas a means of registering the seemingly inexorable demise of positiveAmerican futurity in ways that greatly undermine the conviction thatsomething might be done about that demise.In general, this book arguesthat the understanding of static time inscribed in these narratives of1960s radicalism becomes configured and reconfigured through popularfeminist discourse, which then functions as a key means of attemptingto retrieve access to positive political transformation.In order to uncover these relationships, I analyze the way in which thelogic of static time has undergirded what historians have referred to asthe declension narrative of American 1960s radicalism, which influencedmost historical scholarship on the decade through the end of the twen-tieth century.14 In historian Van Gosse s words, In this scenario, the Six-ties failed in their millenarian purpose and now Americans have steppedoutside their own history, lost their groove, and forgotten what ToddGitlin called their common dreams. 15 Put more generally, this narrativefalls into a basic three-act structure: the good (or at least less bad) middleyears of the 1960s, symbolized by the civil rights movement and the earlyStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS), come to be supplanted by thebad Black Power movement and the bad late SDS, and this transforma-tion then leads to the futility, despair, and stasis with which our story ends.While there are many stories one could tell about the 1960s from manyperspectives, the story of American 1960s radicalism was most frequentlyorganized and judged according to this particular narrative structurethrough the end of the 1990s.16 For example, in 1989 Maurice Issermannoted that what one might have expected to be the Dark and Bloodyground of the historiography on the 1960s remains thus far remarkablyuncontested terrain, resulting in near unanimity among histories THE PROBLEM OF STATIC TIME 25of 1960s radicalism.17 Not only did historians often present a verysimilar negative trajectory for 1960s radicalism but also this narrativemirrored popular readings of the decade that began to circulate almostimmediately upon its conclusion: as Kevin Boyle has argued, mosthistories of the decade reflect the same powerful narrative sketched outin the Time-Life volume on the 1960s published in 1970
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