Tamar W. Carroll.Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism.

Abstract

Tamar W. Carroll’s Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism chronicles several decades of leftist activism in New York City from the 1960s into the 1990s. It is an engagingly written book that makes major contributions to our understanding of various movements, such as the 1970s women’s movement and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). More broadly, however, Carroll’s provocative and persuasively argued work will be of interest to scholars of postwar U.S. politics and scholars of political activism in any period. Carroll makes two central arguments that help bind together the somewhat disparate activist stories she tells. First, she argues that looking at the interactions between different activist groups, as well as the dynamics among people of different backgrounds within single groups, alters our understanding of the function of identity politics in political mobilization and, especially, political effectiveness in the 1960s and beyond. Carroll writes that, contrary to the prevailing historical and political beliefs, examining individual activist groups highlights the fact that identity-based political mobilization and the building of multiethnic, multiracial groups, or doing coalition work across identity groups, were not mutually exclusive ideas. Her exploration of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW), a Brooklyn-based organization that brought together working-class Italian American, Puerto Rican, and African American women in a feminist organization focused on empowering women and fighting city and private sector divestment in their neighborhood, shows the ways in which “identity-based consciousness-raising for the purpose of multiracial community organizing” could be a powerful and effective tool in grassroots political mobilization (104). Her book documents the structures the NCNW used to ensure that women from all racial backgrounds felt comfortable within the group and that everyone had opportunities for leadership. As Carroll states in the conclusion, uncovering both the existence of successful cross-race alliances that were grounded in acknowledging the unique background each group brought to the coalition, and the structures that enabled such an organization to thrive, provides a useful framework for activists seeking to make the same kinds of alliances today.