By Cara Jepsen
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The CWLU, which moved from an office on Cermak to Lakeview and eventually ended up in Logan Square, was an umbrella organization that focused on education, social service, and direct action. Knauss taught a class on women’s health in the CWLU’s “liberation school,” which also offered courses on “everything from fixing cars to Marx and Freud,” says Diane Horowitz, another member. Estelle Carol, who had joined the the group after quitting the U. of C.’s chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, helped start the CWLU’s Graphics Collective, which trained women to silk-screen posters, which the group then sold. Their most popular works included an orange and green poster that said “Women Are Not Chicks”–it featured an image of a dead bird–and a yellow and black “Women Working” sign. Carol ticks off other poster subjects: “Women’s history, women’s theater, women’s sports, various lesbian-themed posters, Cuban solidarity, third world solidarity, farmworker solidarity, African solidarity.
“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.”
“They had this expression, women hold up half the sky,” she goes on. “We thought China’s position on women was far more progressive than that enjoyed by women in our society. I was struck by the fact that there were women performing all different kinds of jobs. There were women bus drivers. That seems commonplace here and now, but it wasn’t back in 1973.”
At one point the group’s dues-paying members numbered over 500. But there was never much of a budget. “We worked and put money into the organization,” says Horowitz. “We didn’t get grants. It’s not like now, where you develop a project and go to a source for funding. It was a movement and we just did it.”
