Women's Liberation Unions

WOMEN’S LIBERATION UNIONS. Between 1969 and 1975 upwards of twenty women’s unions were founded across the country to express a radical vision of women’s liberation. As the term gained currency in the early 1970s, most of these women’s unions became explicitly “socialist-feminist” organizations and constituted one of the major institutional vehicles for socialist-feminist politics during the decade.

Unlike many Left organizations, the women’s unions were not located only on the East and West Coasts; midwestern and industrial heartland cities had them as well. Although the membership was concentrated among women in their twenties, it included working women as well as students. The first wave of founders frequently came out of organizing experience in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, community organizing, and Students for a Democratic Society. Within a few years, however, membership expanded beyond this base, drawing in women for whom the women’s union and women’s liberation was their first political experience. A substantial portion of women’s union members were lesbian or bisexual, and the women’s unions prided themselves on good relations between lesbian and straight members.

The organizational structure of the women’s unions varied. The San Francisco Women’s Union adopted perhaps the most democratic-centralist structure; the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union typified the umbrella structure of most of the unions, with project work-groups, a steering committee, and membership meetings. True to their roots in the women’s movement, the women’s unions took issues of process and internal democracy very seriously. Many of them produced newsletters, which are available in the Special Collections at Northwestern University Library.

Most women’s unions tried to select projects that expressed their vision of socialist-feminist politics, which meant an emphasis on anti–Vietnam War agitation; working and working-class women;sexuality/abortion/women’s health; prisoner support work; women’s culture through art, music, and sports; and coalition work with Third World solidarity groups or people of color. Many sponsored successful International Women’s Day celebrations. Some unions, notably the Berkeley-Oakland Women’s Union, took the development of socialist-feminist theory as a serious task; others such as the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union were more project-oriented. The women’s unions, in collaboration with the New American Movement, organized a national conference on socialist feminism held in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the summer of 1975 attended by more than sixteen hundred women.

The women’s unions could not sustain themselves following the collapse of the New Left in the mid-1970s. The national conference, which appeared to mark the takeoff point for socialist feminism, actually revealed the cleavages within it. The women’s unions’ actual base was almost exclusively white and heavily middle-class, despite calls for outreach to women of color and working-class women. Some unions collapsed under the pressure from long-term members and from Maoist groups to suspend what they perceived as mindless activity in favor of study and the development of theory.These critics did not see in socialist-feminist theory an adequate strategy for socialist revolution. Other members, now more rooted in their workplaces and communities, wanted to become more involved in mainstream political activity. They believed the call for more study to be a drain in the direction of more mindless theorizing. Almost all of the women’s unions had dissolved by 1977.

As concrete achievements, the women’s unions provided a generation of women activists with organizing and speaking skills that many have gone on to put to other uses—personal, professional, and political. Former women’s union members are found in significant numbers in trade unions, the women’s health movement, local and state government, community organization; and educational institutions. As autonomous but not separatist women’s organizations, they made visible the politics of women’s liberation and forced the Left to take those politics seriously.

Hansen, Karen. “The Women’s Unions and the Search for a Political Identity.” Socialist Review 86 (March–April 1986).

Enke, Anne. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2007.

Red Apple Collective. “Socialist-Feminist Women’s Unions, Past and Present.” Socialist Review 38 (March–April 1978).

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry [film]. Directed by Mary Dore. 2014.

Strobel, Margaret. “Consciousness and Action: Historical Agency in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.” In Provoking Agents: Theorizing Gender and Agency, edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Strobel, Margaret. “Organizational Learning in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.” In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.