New York Radical Feminists

Not to be confused with an earlier radical feminist group also co-founded by Shulamith Firestone, New York Radical Women.

New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) was a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1969, after they had left Redstockings and The Feminists, respectively.[1] Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Vivian Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs". The end of this essay announced the formation of the group and included a contact address and phone number, raising considerable national interest from prospective members.[2][3]

Central to NYRF's philosophy was the idea that men consciously maintained power over women in order to strengthen their egos, but also held that women internalized their subordination by diminishing their egos.[4][5] This analysis represented a rejection of the two other prevailing theories of women's subordination current at the time – Redstockings' "Pro-Woman Line", which emphasized men's subordination of women and women's often deliberate adaptations to that reality, and The Feminists' theory that emphasized women's subordination as being rooted in the unconscious playing out of internalized sex roles.[6][7]

Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt left NYRF in 1970 over disagreements about organization and leadership with other factions of NYRF.[8] Nonetheless, the group continued to be active through the mid-1970s.[8] Its activities during that time included holding a monthly consciousness raising meeting, publishing a regular newsletter, and maintaining a speaker's bureau.[9] NYRF also organized a number of public conferences and speakouts through the early to mid-1970s on topics such as rape, sexual abuse, prostitution, marriage, lesbianism, motherhood, illegitimacy, class, and work.[10] In 1982, NYRF was listed among the signatories to a leaflet produced by the "Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism", an ad-hoc coalition put together by Women Against Pornography to protest the Barnard Conference.[11]

References

  1. ^ Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p 186.
  2. ^ Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p 187.
  3. ^ Gornick, Vivian. (1969). "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs". Village Voice, November 27, 1969. (Reprinted in: V Gornick. (1978). Essays in Feminism. Harper and Row. ISBN 0060116277.)
  4. ^ Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p 187–189.
  5. ^ New York Radical Feminists. (1969). "Politics of the Ego: A Manifesto". In: S Firestone, A Koedt (eds). (1970). Notes from the Second Year. Radical Feminists. (Reprinted in: D Keetley, J Pettegrew (eds). (2005). Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0742522369.)
  6. ^ Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p 188–189.
  7. ^ Willis, Ellen. (1984). "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" In: S Sayres (ed). The Sixties Without Apology. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816613370. (Reprinted in: E Willis. (1992). No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6284-X.) 1992 edition, p 133–134.
  8. ^ a b Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p 191–195.
  9. ^ "New York Radical Feminists" (pamphlet), March 1976; p 5–6.
  10. ^ "New York Radical Feminists" (pamphlet), March 1976; p 2.
  11. ^ Abelove H, et al. (1983). "The Barnard Conference". Feminist Studies 9(1):177–182.

Further reading

External links