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WITH THE EMERGENCE of the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many young feminists went looking for a "usable past" of women's achievement. In New York City, they did not have to look far. New York's tenant councils had, for decades, operated under predominantly female leadership. And in the late 1960s, these organizations supported a new wave of squatter campaigns aimed at relieving the city's shortage of affordable housing. As young activists rallied to support the squats, they encountered the senior generation of female leaders who directed local and citywide tenant groups. These older women became political mentors to the young volunteers, providing them not only with expertise on housing but also with a model of "actually existing feminism."1
This article argues that the tenant struggles of the 1960s and 1970s amplified the women's liberation movement in New York by linking young feminists with the Old Left generation of female housing organizers. Tenant campaigns served as a parallel space, alongside other political movements, in which women's leadership could and did flourish. The tenant story adds to our understanding of Second Wave feminism by revealing a set of affectionate mentoring relations between two generations of radical female activists, thereby challenging many narratives of feminist politicization that focus primarily on young women's rejection of what came before, be it postwar domesticity, liberal feminism, or New Left sexism.2
The senior tenant leaders were not entirely anomalous. Recent scholarship has identified a cohort of unsung organizers of the mid-twentieth century, people who kept the Popular Front flame from dying out during the cold war and passed it along to activists who ignited the political upheavals of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.3 But although tenant history extends these narratives, it also departs from them, particularly with regard to what might be called "political intentionality." In most stories of cold war connections, the struggles young people took up were the very struggles the senior cohort had intended to foster. That is, postwar civil rights activists paved the way for subsequent civil rights campaigns, cold war feminist strategies informed Second Wave feminism, and so forth. In New York's tenant arena, by contrast, senior organizers did not set out in a programmatic way to advance one of the...