[Weather Underground] Women’s Liberation and Imperialism

[San Francisco]: Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 1977. In newsprint wraps. 30 pp.

A rare publication from the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee shortly after the fracture of the Weather Underground, focused on the intersection of feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle.

The Weather Underground, which grew out of Students for a Democratic Society, took a decidedly more militant turn and by the mid-70s much of its membership was underground or in hiding; in 1974, members of the WU published Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism, a call to organize. Debates in the group surrounding the efficacy of an above ground mass movement grew and the Underground eventually fractured in 1977, with Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, forming the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. The group took an explicitly feminist tact, with the belief that the success of imperialism relied on the oppression of women. Prairie Fire is notable for the creation of childcare teams which collectivized the labor of raising children within the organization.

An important critique of the misogyny of 1960s New Left organizing and a document of militant left organizing in the mid-1970s.

Seven copies located on OCLC as of October 2022.