Women's Liberation Issue February 1970

In Feburary of 1970, Radical America published its first issue devoted to women's liberation.  

In 1970 Radical America published its first special issue dedicated to women liberation.  

The editor, Edith Hoshino Altbach, explained that the issue "does not presume to be the definitive statement on women's liberation."  She pointed to the lack of a unified "line" or ideology among women's liberationists as indicative of the character of a movement that rejected prior "groundwork."    

The articles in this special issue appear in a sequence that mirrors the arguments for an autonomous women's liberation movement offered by participants in the late 1960s.  

The first piece, by Selma James, dismisses the idea of sex as the foundation for a movement and instead focuses on working-class women, a common argument against women's liberation from the Left.  Gail Paradise Kelly argues that the reason women in the old left had no consciousness of their oppression as a sex is that they ignored the personal in favor of the institutional. This seed of the "personal is political" continues in Mari Jo Buhle's article that positions notable Socialiist Women like Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn into the foremothers of “women’s liberation activists of today.”  Finally Marlene Dixon connected the contemporaly women's libeartion movement to its origins in the New Left.