Feminist Frictions:
Radical Feminist History
Digital Archive:
Radical Feminist History
Accompanying Breanne Fahs’s Feminist Frictions essay,
“The Urgent Need for Radical Feminism Today“
Other Digital Archive Pages:
Radical Feminism and Trans Rights
General Overviews and Histories
Women’s Pentagon Action
Reading the “Unity Statement”
Event: Women’s Pentagon Action, Pentagon
Washington, D.C.
November 16-17, 1980
Prints D 1030 – D 1042
6.5″ x 9.5″
Event: Women’s Pentagon Action, Pentagon
Washington, D.C.
November 16-17, 1980
Prints D 1030 – D 1042
6.5″ x 9.5″
Boston Women’s Pentagon Action (Cambridge, Mass.) collection, M143. Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
Boston Women’s Pentagon Action was a local chapter of the Woman’s Pentagon Action, a decentralized, national feminist organization focused on anti-military, environmental, and social activism. The Women’s Pentagon Action was born out of a 1980 meeting of activist women in the Northeastern United States. Concerned with the threat of nuclear proliferation, the Women’s Pentagon Action was formed to organize and lead protests advocating human rights and non-violence. In November of 1980, the first Women’s Pentagon Action march was held at the Pentagon and included experimental use of protest actions such as theatre, puppetry, and weaving demonstration. A similar march was held at the Pentagon in 1981. The structure of the Women’s Pentagon Action allowed for autonomous regional chapters, which organized joint projects with local organizations. In addition to participating in national rallies, the Boston Women’s Pentagon Action, part of the Women’s Educational Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, partnered with local organizations to host protests, discussions, artistic events, and civil disobedience training sessions. In support of the 1983 anti-military Seneca Peace Encampment in New York, the Boston Women’s Pentagon Action mobilized local activists to participate in the summer-long protest camp. In 1984, the Boston chapter took part in the national Women’s Pentagon Action “Not in Our Name” protest on Wall Street. The rally was organized in an effort to expand the focus of the Women’s Pentagon Action by targeting economic inequality. In 1986, the Boston Women’s Pentagon Action disbanded and its assets were transferred to the Boston Women’s Fund.
International Women’s Day Protests:
News Articles:
Faludi, Susan. “Shulamith Firestone’s Radical Feminism.” The New Yorker. April 8, 2013.
Aronowitz, Nona Willis. “Radical Lesbians and Active Desire: On Rita Mae Brown and the Lesbian Political Movement.” Literary Hub. August 6, 2022.
Aronowitz, Nona Willis. “I Still Believe in the Power of Sexual Freedom.” The New York Times. August 16, 2022.
Frank, Priscilla. “T8 Radical, Feminist Artists From The 1970s Who Shattered The Male Gaze.” HuffPost. October 24, 2016.
Jones, Marian. “This Feminist Group Put Hexes on Wall Street and Richard Nixon.” Teen Vogue. October 28, 2021.
Mackay, Finn. “Don’t Write off Radical Feminism – It’s Always Been Ahead of Its Time.” The Guardian. October 17, 2021.
Press, Joy. “How the First Abortion Speak-Out Revolutionized Activism.” Vanity Fair. October 19, 2022.
Schuessler, Jennifer. “How Do You Tell the Story of Roe v. Wade?” The New York Times. November 2, 2022.
Chertoff, Emily. “Eulogy for a Sex Radical: Shulamith Firestone’s Forgotten Feminism.” The Atlantic. August 31, 2012.
Dinsdale, Emily. “Judy Chicago on Her Radical Feminist Art Project, Womanhouse.” Dazed. May 5, 2022.
“Protesting Miss America.” Equality Archive. September 22, 2015.
Gay, Roxane. “Fifty years ago, protesters took on the Miss America Pageant and electrified the feminist movement.” Smithsonian Magazine. January 2018.
Gilbert, Sophie. “How Should Feminists Have Sex Now?” The Atlantic. August 14, 2022.
Dean, Jonathan. “Radical Feminism: What It Is and Why We’re Afraid of It.” The Guardian. February 9, 2011.
Shulman, Alix Kates. “Remembering Ann Snitow, the Feminist Activist Who Embraced Uncertainty.” The Nation. August 13, 2019.
Sopinka, Heidi. “How the Radical Feminist Artists of the 1970s Can Help Us Navigate Our Monstrous Times.” The Globe and Mail. October 6, 2022.
Spicer, André. “‘Self-Care’: How a Radical Feminist Idea Was Stripped of Politics for the Mass Market.” The Guardian. August 21, 2019, sec. Opinion.
Tax, Meredith. “Where Is the Women’s Movement?” The Nation. April 5, 2022.
Seltzer, Sarah. “Second Wave Feminism Comes Crashing Back.” Lilith Magazine. September 24, 2019.
Signs Articles
Breines, Wini. 2002. “What’s Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, and Feminism in the Movement Years.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (4): 1095–1133.
Echols, Alice. 2016. “Retrospective: Tangled Up in Pleasure and Danger.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (1): 11–22.
Eschle, Catherine. 2005. “‘Skeleton Women’: Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (3): 1741–69.
Grant, Judith. 2006. “Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A Retrospective.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (4): 967–93.
Grover, Kate. 2021. “Rocking the Revolution: The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and the Politics of Feminist Rock and Roll.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46 (2): 489–512.
Halley, Janet. 2016. “The Move to Affirmative Consent.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (1): 257–79.
Heath, Melanie, Jessica Braimoh, and Julie Gouweloos. 2016. “Judging Women’s Sexual Agency: Contemporary Sex Wars in the Legal Terrain of Prostitution and Polygamy.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (1): 199–225.
Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher, and Naomi Scheman. 1994. “Separatism Re-Viewed: Introduction.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (2): 435–36.
Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher, and Naomi Scheman. 1994. “Separatism Re-Viewed: Introduction.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (2): 435–36.
Keating, James. 2022. “‘Woman as Wife, Mother, and Home-Maker’: Equal Rights International and Australian Feminists’ Interwar Advocacy for Mothers’ Economic Rights.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47 (4): 957–85.
O’Donnell, Kelly Suzanne. 2017. “Reproducing Jane: Abortion Stories and Women’s Political Histories.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (1): 77–96.
Polatnick, M. Rivka. 1996. “Diversity in Women’s Liberation Ideology: How a Black and a White Group of the 1960s Viewed Motherhood.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (3): 679–706.
Stewart, Abigail J., Jayati Lal, and Kristin McGuire.“Expanding the archives of global feminisms: Narratives of feminism and activism.” Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 4 (2011): 889-914.
Books
Morgan, Robin. Going too far: The personal chronicle of a feminist. Random House, 2018
Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon. Dear sisters: Dispatches from the women’s liberation movement. Basic Books, 2000.
Brownmiller, Susan. In our time: Memoir of a revolution. Delta, 2000.
Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry. Feminism unfinished: A short, surprising history of American women’s movements. WW Norton & Company, 2014.
Dworkin, Andrea. Letters from a war zone: writings, 1976-1989. Dutton Adult, 1989.
Dworkin, Andrea. Last days at hot slit: The radical feminism of Andrea Dworkin. MIT Press, 2019.
Echols, Alice. Daring to be bad: Radical feminism in America, 1967-1975. U of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Evans, Sara M.,Maria Bevacqua, Tamar Carroll, Marisa Chappell, Andrea Estepa, Amy Farrell, Cynthia Harrison et al. Feminist coalitions: Historical perspectives on second-wave feminism in the United States. Vol. 159. University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Hoagland, Sarah Lucia, and Julia Penelope, eds. For lesbians only: A separatist anthology. Onlywomen Press, 1988.
Lederer, Laura, ed. Take back the night: Women on pornography. Bantam Books, 1980.
Mackay, Finn. Radical feminism: Feminist activism in movement. Springer, 2015.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, ed. How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.
Crow, Barbara A., ed. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. NYU Press, 2000.
Samer, Rox. Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. Duke University Press, 2022.
Fahs, Breanne. Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore. University of Washington Press, 2018.
Penelope, Julia, and Susan J. Wolfe, eds. Lesbian Culture: An Anthology: the Lives, Work, Ideas, Art and Visions of Lesbians Past and Present. Crossing Press, 1993.
Eichhorn, Kate. The archival turn in feminism: Outrage in order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.
Mairead Sullivan, Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Articles:
Kreydatus, Beth. “Confronting the” bra-burners:” teaching radical feminism with a case study.” The History Teacher 41, no. 4 (2008): 489-504.
Kubala, Julie. “Teaching ‘Bad Feminism’: Mary Daly and the Legacy of ’70s Lesbian-Feminism.” Feminist Formations 32, no. 1 (2020): 117–36. doi:10.1353/ff.2020.0010.
Cameron, Debbie, and Joan Scanlon. “Introduction: Trouble & Strife Magazine, 1983–2002.” In The Trouble & Strife Reader, edited by Deborah Cameron and Joan Scanlon, 1–16. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.
Enke, Finn. “Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s: Toward a Less Plausible History.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2018): 9–29. doi:10.1215/23289252-4291502.
Heaney, Emma. “Women-identified women: Trans women in 1970s lesbian feminist organizing.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1-2 (2016): 137-145.
Ketchum, Alex D. “‘All Are Welcome Here?’: Navigating Race, Class, Gender, Sexual Orientation, Age, and Disability in American Feminist Coffeehouses of the 1970s and 1980s.” Gender, Work, and Organization 28, no. 2 (2021): 594–609. doi:10.1111/gwao.12595.
Stewart, Abigail J., Jayati Lal, and Kristin McGuire. “Expanding the archives of global feminisms: Narratives of feminism and activism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 4 (2011): 889-914.
O’Donnell, Kelly. “The Activist Archive: Feminism, Personal-Political Papers, and Recent Women’s History.” Journal of Women’s History 32, no. 4 (2020): 88-109.
Documentaries And Multimedia:
Dore, Mary. She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry. New York: International Film Circuit, 2014.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-n829QzZ58
Redstockings, Riot Grrls, Three Generations of Feminism in Conversation, March 20, 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfxR1haUDYc Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, lead a dynamic panel of feminists including Alix Kates Shulman, Farai Chideya, and Marisa Meltzer in a discussion of where feminism is today and where it needs to go in the twenty-first century.
The Heretics, directed by Joan Braderman, 2009,https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/5573702
Tracing the influence of the Women’s Movement’s Second Wave on art and life, THE HERETICS is the exhilarating inside story of the New York feminist art collective that produced “Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” (1977-92). In this feature-length documentary, cutting-edge video artist/writer/director Joan Braderman, who joined the group in 1975 as an aspiring filmmaker, charts the collective’s challenges to terms of gender and power and its history as a microcosm of the period’s broader transformations.https://feminismandthemedia.co.uk/stories/fem-fm/
Making a Lesbian Sex Magazine in the Age of Feminist Sex Wars,” panel featuring Lulu Belliveau, Susie Bright, Phyllis Christopher, Morgan Gwenwald, Nan Kinney, Jill Posener, Deborah Sundahl, Jessica Tanzer, moderated by Gayle Rubin, part of the Radical Desire Symposium celebrating Cornell Library’s exhibition “Radical Desire: Making On Our Backs Magazine.”YouTube, May 31, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM0RL8ppDmE
“The Feminist Sex Wars: A Retrospective by Gayle Rubin,” part of the Radical Desire Symposium celebrating Cornell Library’s exhibition “Radical Desire: Making On Our Backs Magazine.”YouTube, May 31, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWjqeAarm2I
FilmArchivesNYC “Women’s Liberation (stock footage / archival footage)” YouTube, March 4, 2013.
“Miss America Up Against The Wall” YouTube, December 9, 2007. (clip of Peggy Dobbins and her Miss America puppet)
Baus, Janet, and Su Friedrich. “Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too.” The Lesbian Avengers, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4o0tZPETAc
Podcasts:
Page, Morgan M. “Camp Trans.” One From The Vaults, August 2022. Accessed December 6, 2022. https://soundcloud.com/onefromthevaultspodcast/oftv-camp-trans-live-at-camp-trans-uk
Emma Austin and Eva Espenshade. Gender Troubles.
“Radical Feminism.” August 20, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/58VZwxTKu508fJ6aBy033w?si=e4add11eb33b4602
“The Sex Wars.” May 29, 2022.https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NSlQ4R0jLdze4I2fvhLkG?si=daf1d6908e4048db
Music:
The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band https://rozsixties.unl.edu/items/show/30
Lavender Jane https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2021-05-21/alix-dobkin-musician-lesbian-activist-lavender-jane-dies
Lesbian Concentrate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I4FxXHoQ28