Introduction
From 1972 to 1997, New York City was home to The Lesbian Switchboard (LSWB), a grassroots telephone service dedicated to serving the local lesbian community with resources, information, and peer counseling. LSWB was founded by a small group of lesbian women in 1972, a time when gay and lesbian hotlines were on the rise across the country. The collective first operated out of the Liberation House on East 11th Street in Manhattan before moving into the Women’s Liberation Center on West 20th Street, where it remained until 1987.[1]
Colloquially known as “the Firehouse” (because the city-owned property had once been a working firehouse), the Women’s Liberation Center was one of several institutions created by feminist women across the United States as hubs for community organizing, resource-sharing, and grassroots social services in the 1970s.[2] Catalyzed by the New Left movements of the 1960s—including Marxist, student, civil rights, black power, antiwar, anti-imperialist, and countercultural movements—women’s liberation emerged at the interstices of multiple radical organizing traditions. The movement emphasized the idea that the “personal is political” and positioned abortion, birth control, rape, sexual freedom, and equal employment as central concerns for feminists. From the ongoing legacy of the civil rights movement, feminists carried forward a commitment to direct action, including sit-ins, demonstrations, and boycotts, and a rejection of racism. From the antiwar movement they carried forward opposition to warmongering, imperialism, and male violence. From Marxism they brought analysis of the material consequences of sexism for women, including unequal pay and unpaid labor in the home. Put together, these diverse influences created a robust, multi-issue feminist movement with ambitious goals and a large following.
By the time of the Lesbian Switchboard’s founding, women’s liberation groups like Redstockings and New York Radical Women (NYRW) had already made waves in New York’s political scene and on the national stage, organizing highly publicized protests like the 1968 Miss America demonstration (the famous “bra-burning” action); lobbying federal, state, and local governments for “no fault” divorce laws, abortion rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment; and creating alternative institutions like domestic violence shelters and women’s bookstores, which provided access to shelter, health care, education, consciousness-raising, and other forms of support.
[1] Amanda Davis, “Women’s Liberation Center,” NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, March 2021, https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/womens-liberation-center/.
[2] Examples include the Women’s Building in San Francisco, CA; the Crenshaw Women’s Center in Los Angeles, CA; and the Austin Women’s Center in Austin, TX.