A COLLECTIVE RADICAL FEMINIST DECLARATION
The following are excerpts from a history of the Redstockings Manifesto sent in a mass email on the Manifesto's 40th birthday, July 7, 2009.
"After centuries of individual and preliminary political struggle,
women are uniting to achieve their final liberation from
male supremacy.... We call upon all our sisters to unite with us
in struggle.... This time, we are going all the way."
This is the call to action of the Redstockings Manifesto, one of the founding documents of the radical feminist branch of what has come to be called the "second wave" of the United States' Women's Liberation Movement.
The original document was signed simply "Redstockings" dated July 7, 1969 and provided a New York City post office box as a contact address. Now you can find it on the Redstockings website.
In the electrifying rebirth years of feminism, the Manifesto circulated widely in mimeographed form. By 1970, it began showing up in the Women's Liberation anthologies that were pouring out of mainstream publishing houses; two well-known examples are Sisterhood is Powerful... and Voices of Women's Liberation...
RESONATING TODAY
Four decades later, the Manifesto's call to battle continues to resonate with women not even born in 1969, judging by the new generations of feminist activists who are just now launching a mass radical feminist organization in the United States, National Women's Liberation. From their beginning, they have looked to current Redstockings for advice and to the Redstockings track record and tradition – including the Manifesto – for inspiration.
Recent decades have seen not a decline in the number of books reprinting the Manifesto, but an increase. The two-page Redstockings Manifesto is still in print today in freshly minted anthologies of everything from "Feminism" and "Radical Feminism," to "1960s Readers," to "American Political Thought."
See below for recent examples.
UNTOLD BACKGROUND OF THE REDSTOCKINGS MANIFESTO
As mentioned in our recent email blast of June 28, Kathie Sarachild penned a set of Principles for the then-recently organized Redstockings. Ellen Willis, a Redstockings founder, along with other members of the Manifesto working group, transformed those principles and some more that the group had agreed to, into a clarion call to women. Fading memories of early Redstockings and the fact that, unlike the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Manifesto never acquired signers, necessitates further research on the reason the date July 7 was chosen for the Manifesto and other questions regarding its genesis.
There is a 1972 document in the Redstockings Archives signed by five "members and former members of Redstockings who worked on the writing of the Redstockings Manifesto" which establishes at least partial authorship. According to this letter, other authors of the Manifesto, in addition to Willis and Sarachild, included PatriciaMainardi, Irene Peslikas, and Karen Rappaport. These are the only documented authors atpresent, but the wording of the letter suggests there were more. We look forward to getting oral histories from other early Redstockings members who may have participatedin the writing of this founding document.
In ringing tones, the Manifesto proclaimed that “the time for individual skirmishes is past,” that “Redstockings is dedicated to building... unity and winning our freedom." These convictions and a commitment to them are at the heart of what has kept Redstockings in existence nearly continuously for forty years.
THE PROGRAM TODAY
Redstockings is able to send out this and other emails, maintain its website, and continue to make available radical feminist ideas, old and new, because new generations of feminists get involved in consciousness-raising and study groups through our work. They become turned on to the hope and reality of what a collective women's liberation struggle can bring in the same way we were, those of us who were around in the era when the Manifesto was first issued.
In 2009 our main program is to make the Redstockings Women's Liberation Archives for Action a powerful tool for women's liberation analyzing, organizing and mobilizing – but especially for persisting. The Redstockings Women's Liberation Archives is a grassroots effort staffed mainly by volunteers.
As Shirley Chisholm put it, we are "unbought and unbossed." So we need your support.
Maintaining an archive of Women's Liberation Movement insights and analysis – not to mention great graphics – as well as producing new materials, takes storage space and woman hours – both costly. Donations from you, our sisters in struggle, enable us to keep Redstockings Archives growing.
British militant woman suffragists liked to use the slogan of the radical democratic poet Byron: "Who would be free themselves must strike the blow." Redstockings Archives activists would add that those who would be free must not only STRIKE the blow, but FINANCE the blow. We are determined to maintain independence from the leash of corporate foundation-grant and state-grant financing. Help us construct an INDEPENDENT financial base for an INDEPENDENT Movement.
Click here to donate to Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement.
Every dollar, every hour you donate sows the seeds of a women's liberation resurgence.
FOR WOMEN'S LIBERATION, NOTHING LESS!
To see the Manifesto again, click here.
