Grassroots feminism: Direct action organizing and coalition building in New York City, 1955--1995.

Abstract

This study charts the development of grassroots feminism among black, Latina, white ethnic, and gay and lesbian New Yorkers, and the coalitions formed between these grassroots activists and middle-class professionals, in the post-World War II period. Composed of three case studies that move chronologically, my dissertation uses organizational and archival records, newspapers, photographs, films, and oral histories to set these activist coalitions in the context of political and social changes in New York City and the nation from the 1950s to the 1990s. I first chronicle the role of black and Latina mothers in the Lower East Side in the early 1960s in transforming the social agency Mobilization for Youth from an expert intervention aimed at juvenile delinquency into a champion of low-income women's political participation in rent strikes and the welfare rights movement. My second case study, on the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, charts the political coalition forged by working-class white ethnic women and African American and Latina women public housing residents in the mid-1970s in Williamsburg/Greenpoint, Brooklyn and East Harlem. I show how NCNW members, drawn into political organizing by urban renewal and disinvestment policies that threatened to destroy their neighborhoods, at a time when racial tensions in the urban North were at their height, formed an organic, cross-racial, needs-based women's movement. My final case study chronicles the history of Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), a direct action feminist group that partnered with gay men in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the late 1980s and early 1990s to promote the rights to sexual privacy and universal access to health care. For all three of these organizations, identity-based organizing provided a political voice and a basis for making claims on the state. Rather than viewing identity-based politics as inherently fragmenting, I argue, it is precisely the recognition of difference among groups that allows for broad-based coalitions for social change. This study reveals the critical role of the state in enabling or hindering grassroots organizing. I conclude that state policies which encourage cross-race and cross-class partnerships offer the best hope for empowering low-income Americans.