Organizing Feminism: Towards Centering the CWLU in Feminist Political Imagination

Abstract: This essay argues that contemporary feminist political imagination is constrained by the dominance of the “New York circle” in narratives of late 1960s and early ’70s radical feminism. This focus has marginalized other feminist groups and reinforced a “progress narrative” that dismisses all early radical feminism as irredeemably white, anti-lesbian, and anti-trans. In response, the essay recovers the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) as a model of intersectional, grassroots feminist activism. Through archival analysis, it reconstructs CWLU’s political theory and practices to offer an alternative feminist inheritance—one better suited to organizing beyond the state and surviving today’s political backlash.