New York Radical Feminists

New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) was a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1969, after they had left and The Feminists, respectively. Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Vivian Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs". The end of this essay announced the formation of the group and included a contact address and phone number, raising considerable national interest from prospective members. NYRF was organized into small cells or "brigades" named after notable feminists of the past; Koedt and Firestone led the Stanton-Anthony Brigade.

Central to NYRF's philosophy was the idea that men consciously maintained power over women in order to strengthen their egos, and that women internalized their subordination by diminishing their egos. This analysis represented a rejection of the two other prevailing theories of women's subordination current at the time – Redstockings' "Pro-Woman Line", which emphasized men's subordination of women and women's often deliberate adaptations to that reality, and The Feminists' theory that emphasized women's subordination as being rooted in the unconscious playing out of internalized sex roles.

Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt left NYRF in 1970 over disagreements about organization and leadership with other factions of NYRF. Nonetheless, the group continued to be active through the mid-1970s. Its activities during that time included holding a monthly consciousness raising meeting, publishing a regular newsletter, and maintaining a speaker's bureau. NYRF also organized a number of public conferences and speakouts through the early to mid-1970s on topics such as rape, sexual abuse, prostitution, marriage, lesbianism, motherhood, illegitimacy, class, and work. In 1982, NYRF was listed among the signatories to a leaflet produced by the "Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism", an ad hoc coalition put together by Women Against Pornography to protest the Barnard Conference.

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