Think women’s lives are no less important than men’s? Become a Dues-Paying Feminist!

By Alexandra Leader, Candi Churchill and Andrea Costello

National Women’s Liberation recently made a commitment to make fundraising for sustained full-time movement workers our top priority.

We hope to raise at least $75,000 for two workers and an office.  All NWL lead organizers have increased our own dues and donations.  We ask you to join us.

“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow” was a slogan from the British militant suffragist movement.  Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement adds: “Those who would be free must not only strike the blow, but finance the blow.” Redstockings challenges women to fund the women’s liberation movement by becoming “dues-paying feminists.”1 If we want freedom and equality, we women are going to have to come up with the money to wield the right tools. Paid workers with benefits and plenty of time to plot, plan, coordinate and evaluate our work are first on our list. Radical movements, especially feminists, cannot depend on corporate or government-funded money. Nor can we depend on a benevolent millionaire to come to our rescue. Organizations that do so find their mission subverted by the interests of the powerful and their movements co-opted.  It will have to be ordinary women, and our male allies, who fund National Women’s Liberation to help us make the kind of changes we want.

The first full-time women’s liberation organizer of the rebirth years of the late 1960’s arrived in Gainesville in 1969.  New York Radical Women founding member and civil rights activist Carol Hanisch started the “Freedom for Women Project,” whose purpose was to organize southern women into the Women’s Liberation Movement. The project was funded by the Southern Conference Education Fund, a national radical organization for freedom, justice and racial integration. Through consciousness-raising and women’s collective analysis and debate, and through the time this stint as a paid radical feminist organizer provided, Hanisch wrote the classic paper “The Personal is Political”  – a theory (though unattributed and misused today) that still packs a powerful punch.

In 1991, when Gainesville Women’s Liberation’s co-founder, Judith Benninger Brown, passed away from breast cancer, GWL established the Judith Brown Endowment and Scholarship Fund to continue her work.  Kathie Sarachild was the endowment’s first grantee, to carry out full-time work theory for the Redstockings Women’s Liberation think tank.

By 1995, Gainesville Women’s Liberation organizer Jenny Brown had spent three years working in book publishing for $16,000 a year, saving part of her income so that she could then work full-time for the movement.  Gainesville Women’s Liberation realized the need to put more work into fundraising so that we could keep Jenny Brown on board full-time with the group past what her own subsistence savings could provide. And we wanted her to live on more than minimum wage, so we asked supporters to sign up to make regular quarterly contributions to plan ahead for a reliable income source for Jenny, as well as help with health insurance costs.

Jenny’s full-time work allowed for the thought, research and writing which resulted in the publication co-edited with Redstockings Kathie Sarachild and Amy Coenen, Women’s Liberation & National Health Care: Confronting the Myth of America (2001).

That was the beginning of Gainesville Women’s Liberation quarterly donor program and our systematic fundraising efforts in general.  Some of you reading this newsletter have been reliable supporters since then. We thank you for many years of support which has paid off in a stronger feminist fighting force. Others of you are new donors, or are National Women’s Liberation members, activists, or allies who may be considering making a new or increased contribution.

Concentrated, sustained full-time or part-time radical feminist work is possible by funding staff. When the movement has a share of dedicated workers, we can make key advances. We know this from the history of social justice organizing—for example, full-time workers for suffrage, like Susan B. Anthony or Alice Paul were able to spearhead the strategy for the vote. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee struggled to fund an army of young freedom fighters willing to organize in the dangerous Deep South—the belly of the beast. They fought racism, re-won the right to vote for southern African-Americans and ended apartheid-like segregation in the South.

The concentrated thought that comes from the uninterrupted time of paid workers means leaps forward in movement wins. This is a lesson we have learned from Redstockings’ commitment to saving and fundraising for full-time staff in order to produce important, high-quality theory.

Full-time workers for National Women’s Liberation from 2003 – 2005 concentrating on the battle to push the Morning-After Pill over-the-counter allowed us to come up with ideas, arguments and organizing strategies. And in 2006, our efforts helped to end the prescription requirement for women 18 years and older; and later in 2009, lowering the age limit from 18 to 17 years old. We are still battling for complete over-the-counter access with no age restrictions through the federal lawsuit Tummino v. Hamburg, where Annie Tummino and other NWL leaders are named plaintiffs and NWL leader Andrea Costello our attorney.   More brainpower on how to organize women in this battle will bring us closer to a win in this key area of self-determination for women.

Women squeezing out time for radical feminist work in-between paid jobs, childrearing and relationships are critically valuable to the movement. Unpaid organizers will always be the strength and people power base of our movement. Sometimes, unpaid members give large bulks of time when in-between jobs, on vacation, in school or retired. Sometimes we take time from our paid jobs. Movement staff are able to unite this work.

We need both types of workers—paid and unpaid—to be powerful. To win.

Funding from ordinary women and men ensures that our organization is accountable to everyday people, not corporations or a few individuals who are better off financially.

What you can do:

Right now we have one part-time organizer, Meredith Kite, and an office. NWL’s aim is to have two full-time workers and keep our office.  Our current goal is to raise $75,000.

Here’s how you can make this drive successful:

• Women: Join National Women’s Liberation. Get involved.
• Men: become a donor. Give this newsletter to a woman in your life.
• Please increase your contributions if you already give.
• Support the work of Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement–the source for many of National Women’s Liberation’s ideas.  www.redstockings.org
• Contribute other material support—your skills and time, gas money, postage, photocopies, food for an event, even hosting an event at your office or house or providing storage or workspace