Vivian Rothstein (1946-)

Vivian Rothstein grew up in Los Angeles, CA and attended the University of California at Berkeley where she got involved in the civil rights community and joined the Congress of Racial Equality. Here she was trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and began participating in various demonstrations associated with the Berkeley Free-Speech Movement. In 1965, as part of the Freedom Summer program, she went to Mississippi to work with SNCC volunteers on voter registration. Later that year she moved to Chicago to work on a Students for a Democratic Society project in the Uptown neighborhood called JOIN (Jobs Or Income Now) Community Union. The object of this project was to organize poor whites in the community with the goal of creating an interracial movement of the poor. In 1967 she visited Vietnam with a delegation of American peace activists and was inspired by her encounter with the Vietnam Women’s Union to create a similar women’s organization in Chicago. On return she joined the West side Group, (reputedly the first second wave women’s group in the U.S.) and began plans for an organization that resulted in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) founded in 1969. As co-ordinator of CWLU until 1972, Rothstein’s role was to build the structure of the organization around which others could make their contributions, arguments, and decide as a group what was to be done. During this period she oversaw CWLU’s rapid expansion into a multi-purpose, umbrella organization that established a Liberation School, speakers bureau, legal clinic, various work groups, Womankind Newspaper, and many chapters throughout the city. In 1972 she left Chicago and moved with her husband to Denver, CO where she worked with the American Friends Committee doing antiwar work and had two children. Since then she has continued to do political and labor organizing and peace work in California.