Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism by Tamar W. Carroll (review)

Someday, because of historians like Tamar Carroll, the history of postwar radical feminism will be understood as the rich cross-class, multiracial movement that it was. Made up of neighborhoods full of immigrants and people of color who spearheaded civil rights, antiwar, and labor activisms, New York has a long history of direct-action politics. These grassroots movements were often made up of women who were drawn to feminism because of prior commitments to neighborhood-based social justice.

New York’s activists of color increasingly inspired white feminists to understand the links between gender oppression, racism, poverty, reproductive rights, and, ultimately, AIDS. Carroll’s study of four direct-action organizations—Mobilization for Youth (MFY), the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW), the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and the Women’s Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!)—takes us from working-class Brooklyn to the Lower East Side, from feminists who organized mothers for neighborhood justice to those who escorted pregnant women past antiabortion protesters.

Mobilizing New York is an unusually exciting book to read in part because of the bridges it builds: between neighborhoods, between grassroots organizations, and between historiographies. Carroll’s research shows how the civil rights movement, antipoverty mobilizations, labor organizing, women’s liberation, and LGBT liberation spoke to and built on each other in New York; she draws on a rich reservoir of activists steeped in left-wing politics. Feminism was in the air that women on the left breathed, even when they did not know yet that they were breathing it, and it is the thread that ties these six compelling chapters together.

At the center of it all is New York City, a universally recognizable urban landscape with a national reputation that made any political cause taking to its streets hypervisible. A global crossroads, New York is “simultaneously distinctive and representative of America,” Carroll writes (5). Policy initiatives like the War on Poverty, youth employment, gender equity, and health care had a particular appeal in a city with a rich community-organizing tradition based in neighborhood activism, cross-class alliances, and social justice traditions handed down from parents to children. “Many [activists] viewed their childhoods and upbringings as crucial to their political consciousness,” Carroll notes, documenting activists’ memories mined from twenty-five archival collections and over fifty of her own interviews, which she has now deposited at the Sophia Smith Collection in Northampton, Massachusetts (xi).

New York City gave activism a stage. This global and national media capital, with built-in audiences of workers, shoppers, and tourists, linked well-choreographed actions to iconic spaces. The Statue of Liberty, the United Nations, Times Square, and other landmarks also embedded local feminist activism in larger conversations about human rights. Because of this, Mobilizing New York provides a platform for thinking beyond the scope of the book to even more recent activisms informed by feminism, such as #BlackLivesMatter. As Carroll writes, local issues become national conversations in New York streetscapes where activists’ “attention-grabbing graphics, words, and performances transform the city’s spaces into forums for critical and creative expression” (3).

As Carroll’s opening chapter on MFY underlines, the New Left, often seen as an environment where women’s negative experiences led them to feminism, also created a contemplative space for the women’s movement to germinate. It is in MFY that Carroll finds Rosalyn Baxandall, by 1967 one of the founding members of New York Radical Women (NYRW), as well as organizer and scholar Stanley Aronowitz, later married to Baxandall’s NYRW comrade Ellen Willis.

It is easy to see that MFY, a comprehensive social service organization funded by the Kennedy administration and designed by social scientists Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward, promoted a repertoire that feminists would draw on as they began to understand the parallels between racial and gender inequality. Indirectly, Carroll raises the possibility that consciousness-raising, the...