chapter 11: Women's Liberation

Feminism movement during the 1960s and 1970s had a huge impact on history of women. It helped to reshape the ideals of equality and marked a significant growth in women’s decision to be a part of movement in order to improve their own lives.
Ellen Willis, through Letter to the Left (1969) criticized the leaders of the Left and made a comparison between Black Power and Women’s Liberation. Who was the Left, you may ask; the Left as being referred to the New Left was group of people who tried to reform on issues such as gay rights, abortion, gender roles and drugs (Wikipedia). It seems that the New Left was doing a good deed for women; however readers could sense a frustration through the Letter to the Left as she implied that they ignored to take active in gender issues and sexism. “Except for a hip vanguard movement, men have tended to dismiss the women’s movement as ‘just chicks with personal hang-ups,’ to insist that men and women are equally oppressed, though maybe in different ways, or to minimize the extent and significance of male chauvinism (‘just a failure of communication’).  All around me I see men who consider themselves dedicated revolutionaries yet exploit their wives and girlfriends shamefully without ever noticing a contradiction” (Ellen Willis, Letter to the Left, 1969, Through the Women’s Eyes, pg. 723). From my own perspective, men could argue that they've treated women equally but as Ellen Willis mentioned in the Letter to the Left, in family system, we are oppressed as Women, and the misconception of being a woman in family as less powerful and as a property of man would never fade.
Similarly, in Outreach Leaflet in 1970 by Bread and Roses, they were unfulfilled with the reformation “DO WE WANT EQUALITY IN THE MAN’S WORLD, OR DO WE WANT TO MAKE IT IN A NEW WORLD?” (pg.726, through women’s eyes). It seems like Bread and Roses could not hold it anymore, the frustration, inequality, and “unrealistic” of their lives. “Sisters, we are living in a world that is not ours- it’s a man’s world”,(pg.725) so what world do Bread and Roses want to live in? This is how I see that world: a world that women could participate and voice their opinion, a world in which woman and men could share their jobs; a world where women can be themselves without having to wake up “angry” and “shocked” and can be true to their real desires.
Mirta Vidal’s Women: New Voice of La Raza exposed how Chicana feminists were beheld from within their culture. They were considered traitors whom against their own culture. Mirta Vidal unveiled the suffrage and oppression that Chicana had to face, not only as a woman but also as worker and the journey of their struggles to fight for the equality on the job to their role in the home.
Radicalesbians have expanded the definition of lesbian in The Woman Identified Woman (1970). “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” (pg. 729). In this document, Lesbianism is not just a sexual preference or an identity, it becomes a way of representing every woman’s resentment, and their path towards liberation. And other messages were: A woman can be anything they desire to be and still be a woman; indeed, lesbian could break free from "feminine" since she is not a part of description of womanhood.