“I Was Combining Every Movement in My Body”: Janet Peterson and the Development of Working-Class Feminism in the 1970s

In 1975, the National Congress of Neighborhood Women proclaimed itself the voice of a “new women’s movement.”  From its home office in Brooklyn, this group of women from working-class backgrounds set out to address the unmet and previously unarticulated needs of poor, working-class and “neighborhood” women.  Within two years, the NCNW had established the first battered women’s shelter in New York City, begun a neighborhood-based college program aimed at working-class women and featuring classes in family and labor history and community organizing, and received a $2.6 million dollar federal grant to place unemployed poor women in jobs at feminist non-profits. Using organizational records and oral history interviews, this paper will place the NCNW within the context of the long civil rights movement through an examination of the role of Janet Peterson, a charismatic outside organizer and the founder and long-term leader of the NCNW. Peterson began her activist career in the Congress of Racial Equality in Harlem in the mid-1960s, and she brought the techniques of the civil rights movement, including consciousness-raising, group education, and non-violent direct action, to her organizing work in Brooklyn. 

In addition to her activism with CORE, Peterson worked at Mobilization for Youth, an early War on Poverty project, and participated in and drew inspiration from the women’s liberation and white ethnic movements.  In many ways, Peterson’s work with the NCNW was a culmination of her experiences in multiple social movements in the 1960s.  The NCNW’s success in creating a progressive interracial program and achieving meaningful expansions of citizenship for poor and working class women in the 1970s suggests a reconsideration of politics in that decade, highlighting the ways in which progressive ideals and War on Poverty-funded social service programs dispersed and gained new footholds.