Sisters Against the System - Chicago Reader

Jenny Knauss’s awakening came when she taught at Mundelein College in the late 1960s. Because she was close to the age of her students–and most of the other teachers were nuns–she found herself being approached by often desperate young women in need of advice. “The number of people who asked me to help them find out how to get abortions or to get information about family planning was overwhelming,” she says.

“People brought up ideas and we tried them,” she says. “We structured it by work group. If anybody had an idea, we’d start a work group.” “We sort of had our fingers in everything,” says Horowitz. But she doesn’t see that kind of broad collective activism today: “There doesn’t seem to be linkage and connection between various projects. The women’s union attempted to link the projects and see them as part of the struggle for women’s equality and social justice.

Leaner, who’s African-American, was one of the few minority women involved in the CWLU. Membership was almost entirely white and college educated. “There weren’t many working-class women either,” she says. “There were many discussions about that. It was primarily a no-possibility kind of conversation. African-American women were disinclined to participate. The same was true for Hispanic women.

Sexuality, of course, was a hot-button issue. “You got ridiculed as a bra burner or a dyke if you took any position that was prowoman or pro-choice,” says Leaner. But, members say, there was never a division between gay and straight members of the CWLU. Davenport, who also edited the group’s monthly newspaper, Womankind, says, “As an organization we maintained gay-straight unity. That was very important in writing the newspaper.

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