Organizing Feminism: Retrieving the Lost Art of Politics from the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union

In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), US feminists have been forced to confront a grim reality: the state, the courts, and even the university can no longer be counted as allies. The recent antifeminist backlash (reproductive rollbacks, attacks on “gender ideology,” threats to women’s and gender studies programs, and erosion of Title IX protections for trans and nonbinary persons) has revealed the fragility of feminist gains once believed secure. In this moment of shock and disorientation, feminist political imagination feels stalled. Outrage has erupted in powerful but fleeting bursts: the Women’s March, #MeToo, post-Dobbs protests. These moments demonstrated the continuing passion for feminist politics but not the capacity to organize for the longterm. Why, in a time of heightened crisis, has US feminism struggled to sustain itself as a movement? This paper argues that the problem is that US feminists today have not inherited feminism as a tradition of political organizing. The typical feminist imagines feminism as a set of beliefs (e.g., about gender equality and bodily autonomy), but not as a set of political practices for creating change. This project seeks to recover that lost inheritance. In particular, I argue that we should center early radical feminism in Chicago, and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) specifically, in the tradition in which we situate ourselves today. Doing so would position us as inheritors of a vibrant tradition of feminist organizing for political change, and restore to us rich theoretical and practical resources for rethinking feminist activism and surviving today’s political backlash. Drawing on thousands of heretofore unexplored archival documents, I uncover the CWLU’s distinctive feminist organizing theory and practices. In conversation with antiracist, anticapitalist, and gay liberationist activists, together with feminists across the US and in Europe, the CWLU developed a unique approach that can guide and inspire feminist resistance to creeping authoritarianism today. (1) Like other feminists at the time, they rejected the idea that the movement needed spokeswomen, but unlike other contemporaneous groups they embraced hierarchical structure and leadership. (2) They rejected ideological purity and encouraged pluralist political experiments in social change. (3) They engaged with formal government institutions when they felt this was strategically beneficial, but they prioritized generating alternative sites of power by showing that women could successfully organize campaigns within their own counterpublics. (4) They rejected a unidimensional analysis of sexism, and insisted on addressing multiple forms of oppression simultaneously, including racism, capitalism, imperialism, and oppression based on sexuality. What could feminism be today if feminists centered a group like CWLU in our political inheritance from this period? Perhaps feminists today could see themselves as having models like the CWLU to draw on for inspiration about how to organize politically, to build a movement, and to sustain activism that aims at altering the top-down relations of power that have set state and academy at odds with feminism. That’s a feminist inheritance that we have been denied, but one that is there in the archival record for us to rediscover.