degree of nationalism in the New Left group they were embedded in: Asian American women had an
easier time promoting gender concerns because the Asian American New Left was not particularly
nationalist. Anti-feminist attacks were also virulent among whites, however, usually on the similar ground
that the women were playing “identity politics” and thereby fragmenting progressive unity.
Feminism and the New Left
In the early 1970s, almost all the younger participants in the women’s liberation movement had previously
participated in other parts of the New Left. Most writers have narrowed their understanding of the “New
Left” by referring exclusively to the white student-intellectual movement that coalesced around campus
and anti-war activism in the 1960s, then broke up into sectarian fragments from 1968 to 1970. A closer
look shows the New Left as a developing, interlocked chain of social movements that began in the 1950s
with civil rights, extended through campus protests, the anti–Vietnam War campaign, the women’s
liberation and then gay liberation movements, taking in also the environmentalism that continued
throughout. These movements shared anti-authoritarian impulses, a recognition of the need for new
analyses of injustice and exploitation, strategic orientation toward defiance, tactical reliance on direct
action and civil disobedience, rejection of conformist culture, and creativity in pioneering new cultural
and communitarian forms and innovative tactics. Recognizing this “long New Left” is vital for
understanding the women’s liberation movement.
From the constricted, predominantly white, male and heterosexual misconception of the New Left
flowed another misconception: that feminism arose by “breaking off” from the New Left. True, women
had been criticizing their treatment in the labor, civil rights, peace, and environmental movements for
decades, but that criticism did not usually mean divorce, any more than does criticism of family or
friends. In fact, women’s liberation grew from and remained an integral part of the New Left.
Participation in earlier movements sharpened feminists’ analyses of injustice and their confidence that
collective action could create change.
The single greatest influence on women’s liberation was civil rights, and many early feminists were
veterans of that movement. Elizabeth Martínez’s life’s work shows it clearly. From her childhood
experiences of racism through her writing and editing work in New York, she was gripped by the southern
civil rights movement, despite not being an African American. Though she wasn’t typical—not many
people will quit their jobs to join a dangerous struggle in alien territory at age forty—her integration of
feminism with civil rights and other progressive causes was typical. Pam Allen, the first codifier of
consciousness raising, also came from civil rights. She went to Mississippi in 1964 a devout Christian,
convinced that God would protect her, but that was before the killings of three of her fellow civil rights
workers; twenty-five years later she found a letter her father wrote to his congressman saying, “Get her
the hell out of there,” and she was grateful that the letter did not succeed.^26 As Catherine Stimpson, noted
scholar and founder of the feminist journal Signs, wrote, the civil rights movement “scoured the rust off
the national conscience.”^27 By exposing the mechanisms of white domination and proving that a social
movement could defeat some of those centuries-old mechanisms, it shaped and invigorated feminism. In
one way the civil rights influence was too great, because feminists compared women’s oppression to
African Americans’—an extremely limited and misleading analogy. True, both race and sex inequality are
profitable for others: employers who could pay low wages and husbands and boyfriends who received
domestic services. (If husbands had to pay for domestic services, not to mention the labor of child raising,
the great majority of them would not have been able to live on their wages.) But the differences between