How the Strike for Equality Relaunched the Struggle for Women’s Liberation in the US
In August 1970, campaigners for women’s liberation mounted a huge demonstration that recharged feminism in the US. Ruthann Miller, the protest coordinator, was a socialist activist. She talks to Jacobin about the march, and the need to combine feminist and socialist politics.
The Strike for Equality put forward three main demands: free abortion on demand — no forced sterilization; free, community-controlled 24-hour childcare centers; and equal opportunities in jobs and education. (Eugene Gordon / The New York Historical Society / Getty Images)
The Women’s Strike for Equality in August 1970 was a landmark in the development of second-wave feminism. On August 26, fifty thousand women marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue, defying the efforts of the police to confine them to the sidewalk as they mounted the largest feminist demonstration that the United States had seen.
The protest in New York was flanked by actions in ninety US cities, coming fifty years to the day after women had won the right to vote. This time, the Strike for Equality put forward three main demands: free abortion on demand — no forced sterilization; free, community-controlled twenty-four-hour childcare centers; and equal opportunities in jobs and education.
Ruthann Miller, a young socialist activist, was the coordinator of the New York march, but her role in the Strike for Equality has never received the attention it deserves. Now, telling her story for the first time, Miller describes the events leading up to the historic demonstration and on the day itself.
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