Vivian Rothstein

"The women’s movement was a revolt that was starting from the bottom, from the grass roots  -- nobody controlled it.  There are probably tens of thousands of women all over the country right now who were leaders in the women’s liberation movement and we’ll never know their names because they were organizing and agitating in their church, or in their school, or in their neighborhood, or just in their marriage."  

Vivian Rothstein was a founder of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, one of the first feminist organizations of the 1970’s.  She served as CWLU’s first staff member, coordinated its representative decision-making body, and helped establish the organization’s Liberation School for Women.  Vivian’s activist career started with the Mississippi Freedom Summer project of 1965 and was followed by community organizing in Chicago to build “an interracial movement of the poor.”  In 1967 she participated in a peace delegation to North Vietnam.

For the past 17 years Vivian has worked with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), an advocacy organization working to lift standards for workers in the region’s major low wage industries.  Vivian also is a Board member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE).