Quote:With the resurgence of the women’s rights movement in the middle 1960’s the question of female separatism quickly came to the fore. The critical issue was the demand for groups both of and for women.

Of course, there had been groups of women long before this: in the political spectrum these ranged from Women’s Strike for Peace on the left to the League of Women Voters in the middle to the Daughters of the American Revolution on the right. In addition, there were myriad non-political women’s organizations — ladies’ auxilliaries, women’s clubs, women’s colleges, the YWCA, etc. The exclusively female composition of these groups alarmed no one because their goals, no matter how much they differed from group to group, were the same in the one crucial respect of not addressing the question of women’s rights.