To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Erica Jong’s autobiographical novel Fear of Flying, just released in a new Penguin edition, we’ve put together a shortlist of firsthand accounts from the front line of the second wave. The heady heyday of the feminist movement, from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, saw the passage of transformative legislation and the rousing to action of writers, artists, politicians, and legions of ordinary women through the efforts of their tireless sisters. They launched battles that are still raging today, and the personal cost to these pioneers was often enormous. Their life stories are inspiring, infuriating, and everything in between.

Erica Jong has always drawn heavily on her own life for her prolific literary career, which spans poetry, essays, fiction, and memoir. Her Isadora Wing novels, especially Fear of Flying, may be thinly veiled autobiography, but Jong has also written more directly of her own life, especially in recent years. In 2006’s Seducing the Demon, Jong conveys the profound importance of writing in her life through a series of deceptively chatty, engrossing essays. Romantic disasters pile up (Jong has been married four times) and the author grits her teeth to evade the pull of alcoholism and escape the suicidal pull of her literary foremothers, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. Her sexual frankness continues to provoke conservative readers, and she continues to have great fun at their expense, with no sign of age mellowing her distinctive voice.

Gloria Steinem’s early journalistic career -- especially her stint working undercover as a Playboy bunny -- forged her lifelong awareness of the power of the press and the importance of making a splash. In 1972 she co-founded Ms. magazine, and went on to become a prominent organizer and speaker on women’s rights, a role she continues to this day, tireless at a few months shy of her eightieth birthday. Her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun was a prominent academic feminist who fought for years with her male colleagues in the English department at Columbia University for respect and equality for female students and professors, making her study of Steinem, Education of a Woman, an enlightening meeting of minds.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique sounded the clarion call for what came to be known as feminism’s second wave (in the wake of the first wave of fighters for women’s suffrage). Although it has been criticized for its narrow focus on white, upper-middle-class women, the book sent shockwaves through the lingering 1950s national mindset that thoughtlessly idealized domesticity for women. Friedan’s autobiography, Life So Far, chronicles her progress from her Midwestern childhood, to her education at Smith College (where Steinem would later study), through the transformative publication of The Feminine Mystique and her election as head of NOW, the National Organization for Women. Through the story of the deterioration of Friedan’s marriage into abuse, the book also lays bare the challenges of living feminist principles within intimate relationships.

The relationship between the feminist and Civil Rights movements was an uneasy one. Women fighting for racial equality frequently faced sexist marginalizing from their male peers, while white feminists often did a poor job of including the voices of women of color. Yet many influential Black feminist leaders worked to bridge the divide, and to show the connections between sexist and racist thinking. One of the most prominent of these activists, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has been a Congressional delegate representing her hometown of Washington, D.C., for almost twenty-five years. Norton was a campus activist who went on to become a lawyer and a signatory of the Black Woman’s Manifesto, a foundational document of African American feminism. Her numerous accomplishments include chairing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1977, where she laid the groundwork for laws regulating sexual harassment in the workplace. In her biography of Norton, Fire in My Soul, Joan Steinau Lester -- a friend of Norton’s since they met as undergraduates at Antioch College -- profiles the lifelong advocate for freedom and equality, drawing on extensive interviews with her subject.

A political trailblazer who no doubt served as an inspiration for Eleanor Holmes Norton, Bella Abzug’s career is aptly summed up in the subtitle to Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom’s oral history, Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way. Along with Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan, Shirley Chisholm and others, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, with the goal of encouraging and supporting women seeking political office. In the same year Abzug was elected to Congress as a representative from New York, a political battleground that helped forge her hard-charging style. Assembled from interviews and an incomplete memoir, Levine and Thom’s book bring Abzug’s voice forcefully back to life.