At the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, on the first evening when all 400 feminists were assembled in the auditorium, twenty women wearing t-shirts that read "Lavender Menace" came to the front of the room and faced the audience.Flora Davis Moving the mountain: the women's movement in America since 1960, University of Illinois Press, 1999 p. 264 One of the women then read their group's paper, "The Woman-Identified Woman", which was the first major lesbian feminist statement.Cheshire Calhoun Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement, Oxford University Press, 2003 p. 27 The group, who later named themselves Radicalesbians, were among the first to challenge the heterosexism of heterosexual feminists and to describe lesbian experience in positive terms.Carolyn Zerbe Enns Feminist theories and feminist psychotherapies: origins, themes, and diversity, Routledge, 2004 p. 105 In 1971 NOW passed a resolution declaring "that a woman's right to her own person includes the right to define and express her own sexuality and to choose her own lifestyle," as well as a conference resolution stating that forcing lesbian mothers to stay in marriages or to live a secret existence in an effort to keep their children was unjust.Leading the Fight | National Organization for Women. NOW. Retrieved on 2014-07-25. That year NOW also committed to offering legal and moral support in a test case involving child custody rights of lesbian mothers. In 1973 the NOW Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism was established.
