Women's Rights to Women's Liberation

• Jo Freeman
• Shulasmith Firestone
• Ti-Grace Atkinson
• Women's Liberation

  • The Women's Rights Movement in the early and mid 1960's sought equal rights and opportunities in work
  • Late 1960's saw the development of the Women's Liberation Movement which put a new emphasis upon publicising and opposing sexist oppression and cultural practices that objectify women- the movements overlapped
• Jo Freeman

  • Served on the FSM committee at Berkeley and was one of the 800 arrested in December 1964 and she worked on voter registration for the SCLC in Alabama, Mississippi
• Freeman and Firestone attended a National Conference of New Politics in Chicago


  1967
• Conference director William Pepper said that their resolution on gender equality didn't merit floor discussion
• This inspired Freeman to produce a newsletter 'Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement' which encouraged the formation of Women's Liberation Groups nationwide
• Support for 'Women's Lib' was generated through Freeman's newsletter and through 'consciousness-raising' meeting in colleges and in the community
• They sought to raise awareness of gender inequality and to encourage activism to combat it
• Awareness increased - 1960 ¼ of women polled they felt discriminated against but after consciousness-raising it had reached ⅔ by 1974
• Firestone and Atkinson's opposition to male domination went too far for some member of NOW and the experience at the national conference of new politics inspired Firestone to establish a Women's Liberation Group in NYC called the New York Radical Feminists
• The New York Radical Feminists held consciousness-raising meeting focused upon the issue of male subordination of female
• In her book 'The Dialectic of Sex' 1970, Firestone suggested solutions such as in vitro fertilisation to free women from their biologically determined position in society
• Atkinson was an early member of NOW but left in 1968 because she considered it insufficiently radical
• Atkinson setup a group called The Feminists of New York City
• Atkinson argued that the sexual revolution had benefited men more than women's as it gave them easier access to women's bodies and she was critical of marriage and pornography