Muriel Fox

“When we started NOW, we knew the world needed a civil rights organization, some of us called it an NAACP for women, to work for women’s rights. And that’s one reason it exploded so powerfully—because it was long overdue, in some ways it was centuries overdue.” Read Bio

Ellen Willis

“In the 1960’s we were all subjected to a double message: that first of all sex was okay now, but if we were pregnant it was our problem. Abortion of course was totally illegal and very hard to get. The HORROR—the fear of pregnancy—loomed over anything one did.” Read Bio

Jo Freeman

“I was with SCLC—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—in the South. Many of us who started this new movement had come out of civil rights, and absorbed its ideas, so that it shaped the women’s movement. In some ways, the women’s liberation movement was the bastard child of the civil rights movement.” Read Bio

Jacqui Ceballos

“The first NOW meeting I went to was in November 1967. We were dying to get things done, I cannot tell you the passion we had. Stop with all this talk, we wanted to do something!” Read Bio

Alice Wolfson

“In Washington we were like, ‘have demonstration will travel.’ We demonstrated in the halls of Congress, we demonstrated outside of Congress. We said, ‘we are not asking men for our rights, we are taking them.’” Read Bio

Fran Beal

“I was in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. You’re talking about liberation and freedom half the night on the racial side, and then all of a sudden men are going to turn around and start talking about putting you in your place. So in 1968 we founded the SNCC Black Women’s Liberation Committee to take up some of these issues.”  Read Bio

Marilyn Webb

“We were very conscious of race and class, because of Washington being a multi-racial city. Lots of working-class women were there in hospitals and government—just for the taking. We went and talked to them all! And all of these women responded so incredibly! It was like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Come talk to us!!’ It was a bonanza of organizing.” Read Bio

Heather Booth

“A friend mentioned his sister was pregnant, nearly suicidal, and needed an abortion, so I helped find her a doctor. A few weeks later, someone else called…the word had spread. I was living in a dormitory, so I told people to call and ask for Jane. In those days, three people discussing an abortion was a conspiracy to commit a felony murder.” Read Bio

Judith Arcana

“In JANE, the underground abortion service in Chicago, all of us were always aware that what we were doing was illegal, that we could go to jail. We worked to keep a lot of what we did secret, literally underground. We knew these women are desperate, and they are going to hurt themselves and do awful things if they cannot find people to help them.” Read Bio

Alix Kates Shulman

“It’s really hard to imagine how shameful sex was. You had to put on a wedding ring and pretend you were married to get birth control. So suddenly being in a room full of women who were eagerly speaking of sex—not for the titillation, but in order to be able to change this double standard—was a very great thrill.” Read Bio

Ruth Rosen

“We began to realize that we knew nothing about ourselves. I was in the history department at Berkeley and I knew zip, nada, zero about women’s history. We realized we didn’t know very much about women as a social group, or women’s literature, or women’s art.” Read Bio

Chude Pamela Allen

“It was thrilling, absolutely thrilling, and hard. You have to take yourself seriously, and nothing in this culture encourages you to take yourself seriously. In the beginning of the women’s movement, women as well as men told me I was wrong. Over and over again. ‘You are wrong, women are not oppressed.’” Read Bio

Karla Jay

“I told no one I went to college with that I was a lesbian, I never told anyone. I think that was what the 60’s were like for many of us—we grew up in silence and isolation, and that’s why consciousness-raising in Redstockings was so appealing, because so much of our lives we could not speak of.”  Read Bio

Our Bodies, Ourselves Collective

“We came together with a passion for a project. We would do a course on women and their bodies, and if women were excited about the material, they would take it into their communities, their neighborhoods and just pass on the information.”—Miriam Hawley. Read Bio

Our Bodies, Ourselves Collective

“People who had post partum depressions worked on the post partum chapter. People who had abortions worked on the abortion chapter. We always said the personal is political, the political is personal and there it was.”—Vilunya Diskin. Read Bio

Carol Giardina

“At the Miss America protest, people outside had all kind of signs. I liked mine best, ‘Can makeup cover the wounds of our oppression?’ But the best part came when they were about to crown Miss America. Women who’d snuck up into the balcony unfurled this huge banner that said Women’s Liberation, and it was a beautiful moment.” Read Bio

Denise Oliver

“I was in the Young Lords, and one of the points in the original program was ‘Revolutionary Machismo’. Machismo is reactionary, so you can’t have revolutionary machismo. We women weren’t having it. So we made a very different kind of statement. ‘We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male chauvinism.’” Read Bio

Rita Mae Brown

“I joined NOW, and I was the youngest person there and I think I was the only southerner. I called them on the carpet about class, and I called them on the carpet about race, and then I called them on the carpet about lesbianism, I said, ‘You are treating women the way men treat you. And those women are lesbians.’” Read Bio

Ellen Shumsky

“We took seats all around the conference, and when the lights went back on—like Superman, we removed our blouses and stood up wearing our Lavender Menace t-shirts. We started saying that we were taking over the meeting and the women’s movement had to address the issue of lesbianism.” Read Bio

Susan Brownmiller

“Those of us who planned the Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in understood that there was something essentially hilarious about 200 women sitting in at a women’s magazine and claiming it didn’t reflect the interests of women.” Read Bio

Marlene Sanders

“I may have looked very proper and buttoned up as a reporter, but I was very sympathetic to what was going on. Now it isn’t my taste to do some of the demonstrations and things some of them did. But I was always sort of gleeful about it underneath and I thought, you know, ‘Go for it!’” Read Bio

Nona Willis Aronowitz

“Though my mother was an early pro-sex feminist, I didn’t really know what feminism meant to me, to our generation. When I wrote Girldrive with my friend Emma Bee Bernstein, we definitely found a lot of young kick-ass feminists out there. They’re blogging. They’re out in the streets. They’re organizing.” Read Bio

Mary Jean Collins

“Chicago was a hotbed of feminist organizing. The women power that went into this was amazing, it’s what can be done if people put their energy into something. You can’t convince me you can’t change the world, because I saw it happen.” Read Bio