Reflecting on her experiences in the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies, Ann Snitow, who died last week at seventy-six, wondered, “Have we written enough about how erotic those new freedoms sometimes felt? Most of us were young of course, but that can’t fully explain the general atmosphere of passion set free, the literal embodiment of the name the movement had then: ‘Women’s Liberation.’”

Snitow was at the heart of that movement, cofounding important groups like New York Radical Feminists and No More Nice Girls. Throughout her many years as an activist, writer, and teacher, Snitow documented and worked through the meaning of that period and that early sense of liberation and freedom while never getting stuck in nostalgia or allowing the significance of those years to temper her engagement with new conditions and possibilities.

Feminists of Snitow’s generation saw writing and activism as mutually reinforcing in part because their intellectual work was collective; perhaps no one embodied this more than she did. Appropriately, among Snitow’s most influential works were several anthologies. Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, the volume she coedited in 1983, featured new historical scholarship on sexuality and queerness along with personal reflections and poetry. In containing both a piece like Atina Grossman’s “The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimer Germany” and Joan Nestle’s “My Mother Liked to Fuck,” the volume recaptured the vitality the feminist press had created during the movement’s peak.