The Feminists and New York City’s Radical Challenge to Marriage and Sex Roles

Before it became known as The Feminists, the New York City group called itself the October 17th Movement, taking its name from the date of its founding in 1968. The organization formed when members of the city chapter of the National Organization for Women concluded that NOW did not go far enough in challenging women’s inequality. The new group positioned itself as a radical feminist alternative and adopted the longer name “Feminists—A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles.”

The organization’s history is closely tied to debates over how gender roles were created and maintained. Its members challenged institutions and expectations that they viewed as reinforcing unequal relationships between women and men. Marriage was one of the clearest targets of that critique.

In September 1969, members demonstrated outside New York City’s Marriage License Bureau. They picketed the office and handed out pamphlets opposing the marriage contract, arguing that discriminatory treatment of women was connected to marriage as an institution. The action placed a familiar city site—the office where marriage licenses were issued—at the center of a broader argument about law, social status and gender.

Ti-Grace Atkinson was the group’s central figure and informal leader until she departed in 1971. Other prominent members included Anne Koedt, Sheila Michaels, Barbara Mehrhof, Pamela Kearon and Sheila Cronan. Koedt left in 1969 and went on to co-found New York Radical Feminists, another organization that emerged from the period’s feminist organizing.

The Feminists remained active in New York City from 1968 through 1973. Its relatively short history nevertheless illustrates an important feature of the city’s second-wave feminist movement: activists were not united around a single strategy or level of reform. Some members believed existing organizations were too moderate, while others formed new groups as disagreements continued.

For New Yorkers today, the group’s campaign against marriage offers a historical example of how activists used public demonstrations to question institutions that many people regarded as ordinary or private. The Marriage License Bureau protest also shows how feminist organizing connected personal arrangements to larger systems of power. Rather than treating marriage only as an individual choice, The Feminists presented it as a political structure open to public criticism.

The group dissolved in 1973, but its New York City record remains part of the history of radical feminist organizing and of movements that challenged officially recognized sex roles.

Source and reuse information This automatically generated backgrounder adapts text from “The Feminists” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminists The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. The source article’s linked references are provided below where available. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://web.archive.org/web/20051125081629/http://womens-studies.osu.edu/araw/chrono1.htm Image rights Photograph description: Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective on roof of Westbeth in NYC 1971 with Sally Ordway, Susan Yankowitz, Christina (Chryse) Maile, Gwen Gunn, and Patricia Horan Creator: Lucille Rhodes, photographer. License: CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWestbeth_Playwrights_Feminist_Collective_on_roof_of_Westbeth_in_NYC_1971.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.