Womankind is the monthly outreach women's publication of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU). Womankind was created because we felt there was a crying need for a paper whose function was to reach women who were not already in the women's liberation movement. Being a new paper, our distribution is still limited. Our goal is to be a combination of a subscription newspaper and a newspaper used by the CWLU as an organizing tool.

At a membership conference last April of the CWLU, a decision was made that we needed two publications, the CWLU news, an internal newsletter, and an outreach paper for women who contacted the Union and for us to use in our work. The outreach paper would be explicitly a part of the Union, would reflect the political direction of the Union, would be responsible to the Steering Committee and would advertise the survival, educational, and struggle programs of the organization.

We've tried to analyze where we see the women's movement going, who has already been reached by women's liberation, where we think we should go now, and how to get there (who to organize). These discussions are by no means complete. So far we are aiming at younger (under forty), white women with definite, overt efforts being made to research housewives, working class women and high school women. We try to talk about all issues: the economy, health care, divorce, lesbianism, and the war to name a few.

We see many important advantages to our relationship to the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. People reading Womankind have a real sense of who we are; there is no nebulous feeling of "well, who put this out anyway??". Also, we are part of an organization that is doing work in different areas, so women who read the paper can find something to at a level of commitment they feel good about. Also, we have a kind of support for our work that could not be achieved in other situations. We have structural ways to get feedback, we run less of a risk of becoming isolated from the rest of the struggle, and we have more of a sense of what we are accomplishing.