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NEW YORK -- In the 1960s and '70s, a burgeoning movement of young women who called themselves feminists marched in the streets for equal rights.
They drew attention to practical problems, such as the fact that women couldn't get credit in their own names. And they focused on the philosophical ones, too -- women who found their dreams stifled by the realities of a male-dominated world.
A group of these women's rights pioneers, now in their 60s and 70s, gathered here recently and reminisced about the early years of their movement. They say they're still proud to call themselves feminists, even though many young women today avoid the term and, they say, take women's rights for granted.
"It's hard not to feel a little envious sometimes," says Susan Brownmiller, 71, one of the movement's leaders. Her 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, became a classic for its theme of rape as a crime of violence and domination.
"I think, 'Gee, look at all that they can do now that I couldn't do,'" Brownmiller says. "And then I remember that it was my movement that made it possible, whether they know it or not."
Says Muriel Fox, 78, who worked closely with feminist matriarch Betty Friedan in the movement's early days as founders of the National Organization for Women, "We changed the world in a remarkably short time." This month, NOW celebrates its 40th anniversary.
"For thousands of years, women were regarded as appendages of men. We changed all that in just one generation," Fox says.
"Great personalities" such as Friedan, who died in February at age 85, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem provided the glue holding the movement together, says photographer Joan Roth, 63. She says more such strong and unifying leaders are needed now.
"In the earlier days, the idea was for women to gain equality -- not just with jobs and in the home but also in having a say in the world," Roth says. She says such a "sisterhood of women" is missing today.
Part of the problem today, says Alix Kates Shulman, 73, author of the 1972 book Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is that there is no "unified worldview that you can call 'feminism' that's out there widely."
Phyllis Chesler, 65, a psychotherapist and author of the 2005 book The Death of Feminism, believes it is more difficult today to be a feminist.
"I think that to be a feminist in our time, it was very easy. We were all out together -- so strong and so vibrant and we had such hope," she says.
"By the 1980s -- and certainly into the '90s -- it became very not fashionable to be a feminist because it was equated with being a man-hater, a loser, an angry person. They'll say 'I'm not one of those feminists, but I'm for equal rights.' But they won't wear the label. It's not fashionable."
Leora Tanenbaum, 36, says it's time to retire the label "feminist" because the term for many in today's world is a "turnoff."
She is a "Third Wave" feminist, trying to take the women's movement into the future. The First Wave, suffragists, demonstrated for women's right to vote, which was enacted in 1920. Second Wave feminists fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights and equal pay in the workplace among their causes.
But in some circles today, "feminist" has become a dirty word.
"For many, many Americans, male and female alike, it connotes a woman who is anti-family, anti-motherhood and who wants to put her career before anything else, who wants to be identical to men," says Tanenbaum, author of Catfight: Women and Competition.
Some feminists, such as women's health activist Barbara Seaman, 70, believe new challenges to abortion rights might galvanize their ranks. Her book The Doctors' Case Against the Pill was considered groundbreaking when it was published in 1969.
"Now that they're realizing they might lose abortion rights, suddenly many of them are getting militant," says Seaman, who along with Chesler and others in 1975 founded the National Women's Health Network to give women a greater voice in their health care.
Fox is among those working to ensure an accurate picture of their legacy. She chairs the board of Veteran Feminists of America, a non-profit for the Second Wave, which will release a book this fall called Feminists Who Changed America: 1963-1975.
Chesler believes the future of the movement depends on a global view.
"If we're going to have a future, it's going to have to be a world future," she says. "If our ideas mattered for us -- and they did so nobly -- we're going to have to find a way to share that vision universally."
But just what that vision should be and who should lead the way are no more obvious now than in the past.
"We had no idea," Roth says of their fledgling efforts. "We didn't have all this awareness until we started talking to each other."
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