Sara M. Evans is a feminist and Women's And Gender Studies scholar. She is the author of multiple books including, The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left, Born for Liberty, and How Women Changed America at Century's End.
Sara M. Evans was born in 1943. She grew up in South Carolina with parents that were among the few whites who opposed segregation. She has stated that these beliefs made her family stand out amongst whites in the community...even in her own family.
She attended Duke University for her undergraduate studies and received her doctorate from UNC Chapel Hill .
Evans has stated that her "radicalization occurred in [her] undergrad."
She spent a year in Africa beginning in the summer of 1964. Of this time, she has stated "It transformed my world view because I saw the United States from the outside." After seeing the British flag go down and the Malawi one rise, she was inspired to go into African Studies.
When she returned to the United States, the Vietnam War was just starting up. Her first instance of activism was protesting the war in front of a Durham, North Carolina Post Office. The first march she was involved in was the Montgomery one, at which point she feels she truly became an activist. She also met her husband, a big Civil Rights activist at this march.
Although originally enthusiastic about Black Power movements, she became politically confused. Despite her degree in African studies, she found it difficult, as a white female, to find a place where she would fit into the movement.
So in the fall of 1967, she went to Chicago where "the only skill anyone was interested in was how fast you could type." So she became a secretary. It was here that she "fell into [the first consciousness raising group] in the nation." The group was composed of new left activists who had gone to Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
In the beginning, the Chicago group wasn't sure if it was just a caucus, or the birth of a new movement. In the end, the group decided that what they were doing was in fact a "women's liberation movement." Information, awareness, and camaraderie occurred as women began to just tell each other stories, worries, hope, fear, and thoughts. Many people within the group were trying to figure out how to be organizers, "but at that time, it didn't take much to get people to organize--you basically just had to show up."
Evans decided it was time to go back to school because she felt that "you can't make history if you don't know your history, so that's why [she] went back to graduate school." But shortly before she started school, she had a child in the summer of 1969. On having a child she has stated that she was
Very afraid that having a child...that I would turn into my mother. I had immense admiration for my mother, but I felt like she was angry, and I was right--she felt trapped... but I didn’t want to be trapped in maternity.
She did wind up going back to school, and it was at this point that she became interested in working class white women in the South. This interest translated into helping textile workers in the early 1970s.
She credits Charlotte Perkins Gilmore from the 19th century with the original idea of there being a lot of waste in households. She believes that there is a two part reason to problems with domestic work. The first deal with Gilmore's idea in that each household has a person that take cares of the same thing. Meaning, for example, each house on a street would have one person to do the cleaning and cooking. This means that for every street, there is one person for each household doing those chores instead of something else. Her solution would be to have people come together and have a few people do that work so that others can be diversified.
This waste leads to the second issue, we don't dignify and respect the accomplishments from housework that have traditionally been assigned to women. Her solution is that we honor the wishes of people. Some people are interested in business, while others might have a passion for taking care of children.
The best way to summarize her views on domestic work and childbearing is that many new opportunities have been provided to demographics that at one point did not have access, but society has not re-calibrated the work outside of the home to allow for the domestic duties that make daily life possible.
