In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller

of thegroup was relieved when Roxanne left Boston in December 1969 to pursue her radical vision in New Orleans. Dunbar’s role as a catalytic feminist founder and thinker had run its course. The rest of Cell 16 fought a takeover attempt by the Socialist Workers Party and stayed together until 1973, when the sixth and final issue of No More Fun and Games was published.

    New York had the reputation of a sea of barracudas to movement women in the rest of the country. Although New York represented the roiling center of pure feminist theory (in opposition to Chicago and Washington’s socialist/feminist/anti-imperialist vision), inside the city the divisions between the leftist “politicos” and the pure feminists ran deep.
    New York Radical Women had grown so large and unwieldy thateach time a newcomer walked in the door, the interminable debate, “Is the enemy man or capitalism?” cranked up anew. The January 1969 Counter-Inaugural fiasco in Washington had been the last straw for Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis. They announced they were forming a new group whose key principles would be “feminist” and “action.” Firestone came up with the name.
    “You know how women intellectuals used to be called Bluestockings?” Shulie said one evening to the group at Irene Peslikis’s loft. “We’re radical women intellectuals, so we should call ourselvesRedstockings.”
    The appealing name would resonate in movement history, not always, alas, for comfortable reasons. Redstockings acquired instant cachet when, for their first action, the women disrupted a New York State hearing on abortion law reform. Five weeks later their public speak-out, “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is,” would mark a turning point in the national campaign to legalize abortion.
    After that powerful beginning,fights over equality began to sap the group’s cohesion. As Barbara Mehrhof saw it, Kathie Amatniek, Shulie Firestone, and Ellen Willis functioned as a leadership clique, and everyone else’s ideas were disregarded. Sheila Cronan proposed that Redstockings hang a banner from the Statue of Liberty, and she and Barbara spent many nights sewing the words. “Free Abortion on Demand” on a huge cotton sheet at Irene Peslikis’s loft. They were hurt and bewildered when the leaders scuttled Sheila’s plan. As a result the outsiders started meeting separately on another night of the week. Calling themselves theClass Workshop, they began to explore their family histories.
    “We got together out of a feeling that no one was paying any attention to us,” says Cronan, “and we came up with the idea that it was because of our working-class backgrounds. A lot of the Jewish women had grown up in radical families and had gone to expensive colleges where they’d been involved with radical groups. They were used to speaking out and being listened to, at least to some extent. We didn’t have that confidence. We felt that the Jewish women thought the Catholic women were intellectually inferior or kind of stupid because we didn’t speak their political language.”
    For a while Redstockings rented a storefront on Avenue A and East Eleventh Street where new women were processed through monthly orientation sessions.
    “Kathie was very nervous about the new people,” says Irene Peslikis. “She kept saying, ‘Who are they? How can they call themselves Redstockings? We don’t know their level of consciousness.’ ”
    “Shulie would never work on ordinary stuff,” says Mehrhof. “She said she could only work on creative things.”
    After covering Woodstock, the rock concert of the century, for The New Yorker ,Ellen Willis took off for Colorado with the man she lived with to organize for the antiwar G.I. Coffee House movement. Irene Peslikis felt betrayed.
    “Sending literature through the mail became our big contribution,” she sighs. “I was the only one with a car, so I went to the far reaches of Queens and Brooklyn carrying bulk literature and