A Note in the New York Radical Feminists

[ismnotwasm]

In the early to mid-nineteen-seventies, the group took on such issues as sexual assault, molestation, marriage, and motherhood. Most notably, it held a formative conference on rape in the spring of 1971, spearheaded by Susan Brownmiller, who would publish her classic book on the subject, “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” in 1975. Subsequent events were of mixed success: at a conference on prostitution in the winter of 1971, working prostitutes showed up to lambaste their rescuers.

To learn more about the vicissitudes of the New York Radical Feminists—and the rise and fall of radical feminism more generally—I highly recommend Alice Echols’s “Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975,” a detailed and vivid account of the movement’s history. Echols also wrote an elegant essay in the Village Voice Literary Supplement on the occasion of the reissue of Firestone’s “Dialectic of Sex,” in 1993. The essay, “Like A Hurricane: Shulamith Firestone’s Wild Ride,” was reprinted in Echols’s 2002 collection, “Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks.”

A final note: The third group that Firestone co-founded, the Redstockings, which fell apart in 1970, would be resurrected a few years later by several of its former members, including Kathie Sarachild (who coined the phrase “Sisterhood is Powerful”) and Carol Hanisch (who introduced the expression “the personal is political”). Sarachild and others have continued the group as an activist think tank and maintain a historical collection, the Redstockings Women’s Liberation Movement Archives for Action, which Sarachild graciously allowed me to use while I was researching the story. National Women’s Liberation, a spinoff of Redstockings, played a key role in the campaign for an over-the-counter “morning after” emergency-contraception pill, and, as a lead plaintiff, recently won a federal-court ruling to grant women of all ages access to the pill without restrictions or a prescription.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/a-note-on-the-new-york-radical-feminists.html

[whathehell]

1. Yes, I remember at least the latter part of that period well.

The last big conference I remember that featured many of them, including Brownmiller, my idol,

was in 1978. It was interesting, but a big argument broke out between the lesbians

and the straights. .

[ismnotwasm]

2. I'm going to have to read that book

[whathehell]

3. You mean "Against Our Will"?

If so, yes you should, it's loaded with insights, not only about rape

but "rape culture". Quite amazing.

[ismnotwasm]

4. Oh I read that one more than once.

Although It WAS a while back, Might be due for a reread: no I mean the one the one cited in the article "Daring to be Bad" a history of radical feminism.

[whathehell]

5. Oh, yes..That does sound good.

Thanks for the OP and the link.