Women’s Liberation Class in NYC, Fall 2014

 Places filled up quickly for the 10-session community class organized by Redstockings and National Women’s Liberation this fall in New York City.  Called “Building Women’s Liberation Now: Gems from the 1960s & Beyond for Radical Feminist Theory & Action Today,” registration closed even before an announcement of the class could get up on this blog.

Under its original title “Women’s Liberation: Where Do I fit In?” the class was first presented in 1991 by Gainesville Women’s Liberation in Florida and designed by Carol Giardina, who co-founded GWL in 1968.  GWL is now part of National Women’s Liberation, which worked with Redstockings on developing and organizing the new “Building Women’s Liberation Now” class this autumn. From its beginning, the class — geared to a grass roots, community base — has drawn much of its material from the Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action and Redstockings’ program of combining the study of women’s freedom movement history with consciousness-raising for organizing and mobilizing today. To see the call for the 10-session class in NYC this fall, click here.

For a more comprehensive history and context of the class, see Carol Giardina’s talk, entitled ”The 1960s Speak to the 1990s, 2000s, and Beyond: the Gainesville, Florida Women’s Liberation Class,” from the recent Boston University conference (see earlier blog posts). Click here for a summary of her talk, or for a video of the entire panel, click here.

Redstockings and National Women’s Liberation will undoubtedly be giving the class again in the future.  A weekend workshop version is even available for women who want to bring this ongoing women’s freedom school to their communities for a trial run. If you’re interested in this weekend workshop version of the class, contact Redstockings by clicking here.

Reporting on the ‘Revolutionary Moment’ Conference at Boston University, March 2014

Spanning three days near the end of Women’s History Month this March, the conference “A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s,” organized by the Women’s Sudies et al. program at Boston University, attracted over 600 participants from the US and abroad to discuss the herstory and tactics of the Women’s Liberation Movement and debate the direction of feminist theory and practice.

Laced through the many panels at the Conference were representatives from a wide swath of the early radical wing of today’s movement. These pioneers covered a range of political positions “back in the day,” from “feminist” (later called “radical feminist”) to “politico” (later called “socialist feminist”).  Of the few 1960s radical women’s liberation groups continuing today, attending the conference were veterans and fresh troops from the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective of the  book Our Bodies Ourselves,  Gainesville Florida Women’s Liberation, and Redstockings of New York City. BU conference organizers have recently posted the full panoply of videos of the Conference sessions, plenaries, and most of the panels – including questions, comments and debates (see below for links).

Participants in the 2013 Shulamith Firestone Memorial Conference organized two panels in Boston that continued to pursue discussion of the burning questions which gave birth to the Shulamith Conference and to this blog: what happened to halt the momentum of the earlier moment and movement, and what is needed to bring about ANOTHER revolutionary moment for Women’s Liberation? These panels were:  “How to Defang a Movement: Replacing the Political with the Personal” and “Tools of Radical Feminist Analyzing, Organizing and Mobilizing: ‘Consciousness-Raising’ and ‘History for Activist Use.'”

For the latter panel, those of us active with Redstockings and National Women’s Liberation – two groups with roots in an exciting collaboration from the 1960s – shared ideas on what is to be done now with accounts of  what we’ve actually been doing, why we’ve been doing it, and what we think should continue or change going forward. This included a retelling of how the 1969 radical principles of Redstockings (like “women are the real experts on women”) led National Women’s Liberation, against the opposition of two US Presidents, to a significant women’s liberation advance, in a country lagging behind many others, of making the morning after pill available over-the-counter in pharmacies and accessible to women and girls of all ages. (The battle continues, of course, with a big one the cost of the pills!)

Huge thanks and congratulations go to Professor Deborah Belle of Boston University for the courage to organize a conference that restored to academic herstory the radical 1960s origins and revolutionary impetus of today’s feminist movement.  Professor of History Linda Gordon of New York University, herself a veteran 1960s women’s liberation organizer, was a main aider and abetter of Professor Belle’s efforts, along with a wonderful team of young Boston University cadres who helped with the huge workload of making such a conference happen. Click on the photo to watch a WGBH interview with Deborah Belle and Linda Gordon discussing the conference.

To find your way to more information about the Conference, its many panels and panelists, and videos of most of the Conference sessions, as well as the written text of many of the talks, visit the homepage of the Conference by clicking here: http://www.bu.edu/wgs/conference2014/

For more details on and specific links to the Conference panels organized by various Redstockings, old and new, as well as National Women’s Liberation, click here: http://www.redstockings.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=99

For some other voices on the Boston Conference, click here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kathleen-b-jones/reflections-of-revolutionary-moment

And here: http://kenwachsberger.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/womens-liberation-conference-celebrates-2nd-wave-revs-up-3rd-wave/