In the fall of 1967, a small group of mostly white, mostly educated women in their twenties started meeting in the evenings in narrow, tenement-style apartments on the Lower East Side in New York City, the kind that still had bathtubs in the kitchens. They wore fitted paisley minidresses and tidy updos; long hair and jeans; billowy white linens and gingham clamdiggers. They’d sit on chairs or windowsills or cross-legged on the floor, chattering and taking notes. Later, when the meetings got crowded, they’d stand on the edges, craning their necks and moving their bags from one shoulder to the other.

Restless revolutionary energy was all around them. Some of these women had been active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, but many of them had caught a distinct sense of dismissal, even contempt, from the male activists for whom they’d been stuffing envelopes. They often struggled to gain political clout on the Left, especially if they declined to trade sexual favors—feminist Francine Silbar wrote that women were treated like “sexual garbage cans” by activist men.

The group was called New York Radical Women. Their idea was to talk about their daily lives and put them in the context of society. Though many of them had yet to consider how racism and sexism overlap and collaborate, they did draw inspiration from the civil rights movement. A couple of group members recalled their time in Mississippi working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they’d witnessed mass meetings at which Black people would stand up and “testify” about their own personal experiences with racism. A radical civil rights worker from Iowa, Carol Hanisch, connected the concept to Mao Tse-tung’s slogan “Speak pain to recall pain.”