• Socialist feminist organization founded in 1967
• Deems America a sexist, racist, oppressive nation

Founded in 1967 by Shulamith Firestone, Radical Women (RW) describes itself as "the oldest socialist feminist group in existence … a trailblazing … organization [that] is the revolutionary wing of the women's movement and a strong feminist voice within the Left; [that is] immersed in the daily fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and labor exploitation; [that] views women's leadership as decisive to world revolution and trains new women to take their place in the forefront of the struggle; [and that is] an autonomous, all-women's group, affiliated with the Freedom Socialist Party on the basis of mutual respect, solidarity, and shared socialist feminist ideals."

Based in Seattle, Radical Women also has regional branches in New York, California, and Oregon; internationally it has chapters in San Salvador and Australia. To disseminate its message, RW sponsors informational meetings, discussion groups, panel discussions, slide shows, video presentations, and guest speaker addresses.

RW views capitalism as an oppressive system that inflicts "burning injustices" upon all its "victims," particularly women. To summarize its beliefs and objectives, RW has produced a Manifesto whose preamble reads, in part, as follows: 

"The position of women around the world is as much one of second-class status today as it was in the 1950s … International capitalism has proved itself incapable of providing the most elementary democratic rights for women. Instead, the system increasingly depends upon the exploitation of women for its very economic survival. Today, women are still discriminated against in jobs and professions, education, legal status, social freedoms, political life, and family/sexual roles. … And this subjugation, despite years of a mass international women's movement, is accelerating daily! Capitalism is in desperate straits and will even resort to smashing all civil liberties and ushering in fascism — the ultimate destroyer of women's rights — to protect its profits."

RW defines its mission as: "exposing, resisting and eliminating the inequities of women's existence." "To accomplish this task of insuring survival for an entire sex," explains RW, "we must simultaneously address ourselves to the social and material source of sexism: the capitalist form of production and distribution of products, characterized by intrinsic class, race, sex, ethnic and caste oppression. When we work for the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into a socialist society, we work for a world in which all people may enjoy the right of full humanity and freedom from poverty, war, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and repression. … we are destined to play a vanguard part in the general movement for revolutionary social change."

Alleging that minority women in particular are assaulted by the twin evils of American racism and sexism, RW views that demographic as the most important purveyor of its organizational message. "They [poor minority women] have the least to lose and the most to gain by eliminating capitalism," explains RW. "They are radicalized and tempered by their actual victimization in life, not just by intellectual choice. Their experience is indispensable to a movement that must challenge the pinnacles of the bourgeois state and ultimately go so far as to seize power on behalf of all the humiliated and outcast. It is precisely such women … who are destined for leadership of the entire movement."

Consistent with its belief that the U.S. is a nation infested with racism and injustice -- particularly in the criminal-justice system -- RW endorsed an October 22, 2002 National Day of Protest exhorting Americans to "Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation." The document announcing this event condemned new "[l]aws and policies that drastically restrict civil liberties"; "cops who brutalize and kill people" with impunity; racial profiling and the post-9/11 "round[ing] up of  thousands of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians" who suddenly "disappeared"; and the Patriot Act's "new set of repressive laws and restrictions." The document explicitly defended figures such as Lynne Stewart, Jose Padilla, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Leonard Peltier -- depicting them as persecuted political prisoners of a repressive American government.

Twelve days after the 9/11 attacks, an opinion piece by RW member and organizer Helen Gilbert appeared in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Titled "U.S. Created Conditions for Horrendous attack," the piece read, in part, as follows: "[I]t is time to examine how the U.S. created the conditions for this horrifying terrorist attack. We must not give our rulers permission for the kind of military interventions that have made the U.S. the most hated country in the world. Bush struts his machismo and threatens war against not only the alleged terrorists, but against whole countries. In the names of the thousands of innocent people who died on September 11, he proposes to kill thousands more innocent people in other lands."

RW was a Cosponsoring Organization of the April 25, 2004 "March for Women's Lives" held in Washington, D.C., a rally that drew more than a million demonstrators advocating that women be granted unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.