Vivian Rothstein

Vivian Leburg Rothstein (born 1946) is a labor rights activist, feminist, and community organizer. She was instrumental in the civil rights movement and the peace movement. She also cofounded the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

Early life

Vivian Rothstein was born in Jamaica, Queens in 1946. Her parents divorced shortly after her birth, and, in 1952, Rothstein's mother moved Vivan and her sister with her to Los Angeles, California.

Activism

While at Berkeley, Rothstein worked as a tutor and lived in cooperative housing. She tutored students in Oakland, California which she has described as her “first real contact with the low-income Black community.” She took part in protests against two businesses, a market called Lucky's and a restaurant chain called Sambo's, for their discriminatory hiring practices. During her first year at Berkeley, she also took part in the Auto Row demonstration against a number of car retailers, for which she was arrested for the first time.

Rothstein has also done influential community and labor organizing work in Los Angeles. Rothstein was the executive director of the Ocean Park Community Center, a nonprofit organization in Santa Monica, California, with services for homeless adults, families, and battered women with children. She worked with the community-led union, Respect, at the LAX project, which worked to raise wages and ensure benefits for service workers at the Los Angeles airport .

Chicago Women’s Liberation Union and the Liberation School

Rothstein's work in Vietnam, where she met with the Vietnam Women's Union, inspired her to be a cofounder of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) in 1969, where she focused her efforts on working-class women.

The CWLU was an explicitly radical, anti-capitalist, and feminist organization that committed itself to creating a multi-issue women's liberation movement. Rothstein described the goals of CWLU in a speech in 2014: "We wanted to build a pluralistic, inviting, non-sectarian organization where different approaches to liberating women could exist side-by side". The CWLU attracted many leading feminists in Chicago, including Heather Booth, Naomi Weisstein, Estelle Carol, and Diane Horowitz. It offered introductory classes on topics such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, the history of the family, and women in literature, as well as skills classes, and study and action groups on topics like racism and women's politics and women and religion. Students of the Liberation School for Women were largely service workers, professionals in women-lead fields such as teaching and nursing, as well as students and homemakers. The Liberation School worked closely with the CWLU and was represented on the CWLU steering community, and helped to make decisions about the Union as a whole.

Documentary Rothstein is featured in the documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry.