A Note in the New York Radical Feminists
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 Feministsand the rise and fall of radical feminism more generallyI highly recommend Alice Echolss Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, a detailed and vivid account of the movements history. Echols also wrote an elegant essay in the Village Voice Literary Supplement on the occasion of the reissue of Firestones Dialectic of Sex, in 1993. The essay, Like A Hurricane: Shulamith Firestones Wild Ride, was reprinted in Echolss 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 Womens Liberation Movement Archives for Action, which Sarachild graciously allowed me to use while I was researching the story. National Womens 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