At the time, abortion was illegal and women were dying in back alleys at the hands of butcher abortionists. Birth control was difficult to obtain. Women were earning fifty-nine cents for every dollar a man made for similar work. Access to higher education was somewhat limited, meaning that we could not always pursue fields of interest like science or medicine. We were generally expected to become mothers, secretaries, nurses, or teachers. In some states, unmarried women couldn’t get credit cards or own property. We were also concerned with things like constant unwanted sexual attention and harassment, and being forced to conform to the gender norms and fashions of the era, like having to wear skirts and nylons, and being expected to have long hair.

The Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970, which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of women winning the right to vote, was a turning point in second-wave feminism because it was such a tremendous outpouring of women expressing their aspirations and demands. That action had three demands: free abortion on demand (and no forced sterilization); free, community-controlled twenty-four-hour childcare centers; and equal opportunities in jobs and education. The strike in 1970 was a massive success: fifty thousand people marched in New York City and there were marches in ninety other cities. We made national headlines. It brought our demands to the mainstream and brought many more people into the movement.

Boston Female Liberation worked in a coalition for the rally in Boston on August 26, 1970. Our group was the leading activist wing of a coalition that was open to all who agreed on the demands of the action. A successful demonstration of over five thousand people took place. In New York City, all types of women participated: radicals and more conservative women, suburban women, lawyers, and students. It wasn’t hard to agree on the main demands, though there were differences in strategy and perspective.

After the success of the demonstration, people had different ideas of how to move forward. Even though we came together powerfully for August 26, the fragile coalition began to fall apart. A lesson for today is that the only way to move forward is to unite with as many other forces as possible around issues that we agree on, leaving aside our differences on other issues.

Today, with wave after wave of attacks on our rights, we can unite around the fight to maintain abortion as safe, legal, and accessible. We can build broad coalitions and action committees with those who share these demands. One of the strengths of Boston Female Liberation was that we were uncompromising in defense of feminism; we didn’t subordinate our struggle to Democratic or Republican politicians. We relied on our own power as a movement.

While it’s difficult to extract direct lessons from fifty years ago, I think some general points can be made. One takeaway from the movement against the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement, was the idea of how you make change. Does it happen primarily at the ballot box, by relying on individual politicians, or through mobilization in the streets?

The majority of people today support legalized abortion, so how do we mobilize that majority? We need to be in the streets. But during the fight for women’s liberation, we did a lot more: we had meetings, demonstrations, speak-outs, testimonials, and all kinds of other activities. One of the challenges we face right now is that the Supreme Court has forced us into a state-by-state fight around abortion access as opposed to a federal one, so the fights are all local, though they need to be coordinated.

Prior to the rise of the second wave, women were forced into a certain role in society. We were primarily expected to be a wife and a mother, and we weren’t treated equally, so to get together and talk about that served a real purpose at the time. We sat around in a circle and just talked about things that we thought we had been alone in experiencing, things that we never talked about before. Through this process, we came to an understanding that our “personal” problems were rooted in women’s second-class status in society. And we realized that we could do something about it — we could take action. It didn’t have to be that way. If we came together collectively, we could begin to change things. We could fight to have more opportunities and control over our bodies, to get rid of curfews in the dorms, to have access to birth control as well as many other things.

In a short period of time, there have been huge changes in social and gender norms and advancements in opportunities for many women, which I attribute to the second wave of feminism. It’s a little bit different now in terms of consciousness-raising, though it still can be a useful tool to collectivize and politicize our experiences.

It became widely known that starting in the 1950s, Puerto Rican women were coerced into sterilization and used as test subjects in developing the modern birth control pill, which resulted in one-third of all Puerto Rican women having been surgically sterilized. Black women and other women of color were also sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent.

It felt completely natural to link the fight for abortion rights with the fight against forced sterilization, as both involved the need to control our own bodies. The fact that we raised this demand also answers one of the misconceptions about second-wave feminism — that it was supposedly a movement only of white, middle-class women. But it was much more diverse, and it was not monolithic. It included those who had the least control over their lives, and the demands reflected the needs of those who were most oppressed.

The FBI was infiltrating and seeking to undermine all the social movements of the time, seeing them as a threat. One example of this was when we were part of building a demonstration in November 1971 spearheaded by the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition (WONAAC). At one point, what we’ve called “poison pen letters” were received by some of the people who we had invited to speak, claiming to have been written by a disgruntled member of the group stating that we were a “communist front.” As a result, some of the speakers pulled out. At the time, we thought, could this really be the FBI? And later it came out that it was. They had a lot of informers. I think at one point they might have had about ten informers inside the women’s movement in the Boston area. They watched everyone; they really tried to intimidate us.

There was also red-baiting in the movement, sometimes those of us who were socialists were politically attacked from some of the women in the liberal wing of the movement. And we had to take that head-on politically and defend our radical and socialist positions.

Some of the advances that we gained as a result of the women’s liberation movement are now in retreat, especially abortion rights, so maybe it’s harder for people to recognize all the gains that were won, or how those changes happened. A backlash against second-wave feminism has definitely occurred and this has spurred on the growing right-wing movement, emboldened by the government.

Perhaps all the attacks on abortion access and losing Roe has been disorienting for some people, but it’s also had the effect of galvanizing others. We know what we’re fighting for, and we have to focus on what we can win. We build movements based on victories. Free abortion on demand may not be something we’re able to win right now, but we can take a step along that road, advance the struggle by winning smaller victories, and in the process gain self-confidence and a feeling of empowerment.

Another experience that was formative for us at the time was what we used to call “sisterhood.” Our slogan was: “Sisterhood is powerful!” What I went through with these women in the movement is something I haven’t gone through with other people in the same way, even though I’ve been involved in a lot of political activity. It was a different experience, a bond that developed, as we shared experiences fighting side by side for our liberation.

First of all, I think it’s important to have a long view of history when examining any movement for social change. In terms of women’s liberation, not one of our demands from 1970 has been fully achieved. We don’t have legalized abortion nationwide or control of our bodies; we don’t have free childcare; and women are still paid less than men. But with a big enough movement, anything is possible. We actually came close to winning free childcare with the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, which would have created a national network of federally funded day care centers — if President [Richard] Nixon hadn’t vetoed it. That such a radical demand came close to winning, even under a conservative administration, should give us some hope. We also won Roe under the Nixon administration.

We live in a very divided and polarized society. The rising right wing has a lot of money and power. With the cost-of-living crisis and everyone just trying to get by, we can become discouraged and divided, which of course is the aim of the rulers. Winning our demands can become harder, and we need to mobilize even more people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of massive demonstrations and explosions of protest; people were protesting all the time. We need to have that sustained level of protest again.

Feminism absolutely still has revolutionary potential. But today we’re paying the price for fifty years of the liberal pro-capitalist wing of the feminist movement winning out over the radical wing. We’ve too often ceded the streets to the right-wing opponents of women’s rights. The strategy that ties our fight to a particular politician or one of the established political parties has failed. In fact, I believe that because of the inaction of the government and ultimately its abdication of responsibility, the door has been left open for right-wing forces. They are emboldened. Because feminism has revolutionary potential and challenges every institution in this society, reactionary forces backed by the government have every interest in keeping us in our “place.”

Along the road of a total transformation of society we can build a movement, one victory at a time. We need to regain the grassroots ability to build and sustain protests in the streets. As Williamson says, “Until women are free, the human race will wear chains.”