Read In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution for Free Online

urged the new groups to leaflet women factory workers on Vietnam and women’s low wages, to form consumer co-ops and child-care centers, to wage antiwar guerrilla theater in shopping malls, to canvass door-to-door and talk “to the wives of working-class men about the war, racism, and the presidential election.” These actions, they said, would assuredly be liberating.
    Not everyone agreed.Naomi Weisstein wanted tostorm singles’ bars to talk about sex roles,but on the night of her proposed action, Shulie Firestone’s sister Laya was the only other West Sider who showed up. Vivian Rothstein, who had traveled to Hanoi in 1967 with Tom Hayden and a select delegation of SDS-ers, made sketches for a radical women’s costume, a tunic, simple and cheap to make, that “would not be co-opted by the fashion industry.” The idea didn’t fly. Increasingly at odds with the male identified leftist faction, Jo Freeman continued to type mailing labels and cut stencils for the Voice of Women’s Liberation . “The women in that early group,” Freeman says, “were not only New Left, they were mostly the wives and girlfriends of New Left leaders. They weren’t ready to break with men.”
    New York, however, continued to up the ante. In February, Anne Koedt, unaccustomed to speaking in public, summoned her nerve to challenge a citywide meeting of women on the left. The large room at the Free University on West Fourteenth Street was packed with ideologically warring “heavies” from various SDS factions whose rage had turned against the capitalist system. “It is not enough,” Koedt said with quiet clarity, her eyes glued to her written speech, “to speak in terms of ‘the System.’ We must expose and eliminate the causes of our oppression.”
    Women’s oppression was primary, Koedt insisted. It went deeper than economics and reached wider than the self-doubt and subordination they were experiencing in the male revolutionary movements. “We’ve never confronted men,” she said. “We’ve never demanded that unless they give up their domination over us, we will not fight for their revolution. We’ve never fought the primary cause.”
    “What about Jackie Kennedy?” the leftists catcalled. “Is Jackie Kennedy oppressed?”
    The following month Shulie Firestone addressed a small rally in support of the peripatetic abortion crusader Bill Baird, a messiah of birth control whose confrontations with the law were getting him arrested up and down the East Coast. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” she taunted the crowd. “It’s not a distant aunt who faced this problem. We do, ourselves. And if by some accident any of you women have avoidedit, you can count yourselves lucky or bless the Pill. Let’s face it. Woman is scared shitless. She’s been told to shut up and stop talking a million times. If she dares to have an opinion, she is called shrewish and opinionated. Even I—after months of work in Women’s Liberation—had my fears about speaking openly for free abortion today. God, what would my father think? ”
    But the days of fear and cowardice were over, Shulie predicted. “Women are angry at last. So angry, Bill Baird, that we no longer need you to fight our fight.”
    Prodded by Firestone, New York Radical Women spent the spring of 1968 putting together its first collection of writings. Mimeographed and stapled, it bore the ambitious but accurate title Notes from the First Year . Nearly half of Notes , which sold for fifty cents to women and one dollar to men, consisted of transcribed material from consciousness-raising sessions and speeches. Shulie contributed an analysis of the nineteenth-century suffrage movement, its successes and failures, that ended with her exhortation “Put your own interests first, then proceed to make alliances with other oppressed groups.”
    Anne Koedt provided the dynamite and the fuse for Notes in an essay that took up one single-spaced page. She called her paper “The Myth of the