New England Free Press was a movement printer and publisher from 1968 to 1981. The Free Press printed for the movement in the Boston area, and did so at far cheaper rates than commercial printers. 

 

The Free Press published a wide variety of pamphlets on racism, women’s liberation, imperialism, the working class, and the economy. Most were reprints from magazines and were priced at cost. The low prices enabled organizers to buy the pamphlets in bulk.

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The shop was started by Mike Yokel as a newspaper called The New England Free Press. Here's the Harvard Crimson article.

 

The Free Press was organizing for the long term, spreading political ideas to a movement that was large and ever growing. Many of the articles were bought in bulk for use in organizing. 

 

A catalog of publications from 1970 shows 210 articles by such authors as Marge Piercy, Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Kathy Boudin, Florence Howe, Isaac Asimov, Roxanne Dunbar, Paul Sweezy, Jack Minnis, and Jane Stembridge. 

 

NEFP was a collective, owned by its workers. They paid themselves subsistence wages ($35 per week in 1969) and every staff member had a vote on the shop's policies. The lack of profit and low wages kept the printing and publishing prices low. 

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When the Free Press began in 1968, the civil rights movement had made important gains, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

The anti-war movement had succeeded in moving public opinion from widespread support of the Vietnam War to widespread opposition. Actually impacting the government and ending the war was much harder and would have to wait until the actual defeat of the American forces by the Vietnamese in 1975.

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Fueled in large part by women involved in those two movements, the women's liberation movement had found its voice, with women especially from SNCC

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Mary King and Casey Hayden, Susan Brownmiller, Jan Goodman Heather Booth and I were there," recalls Marilyn Webb Penny Patch, Elaine Delott Baker, Ruby Doris Robinson, Emmie Schrader, Carol Hanisch,Nina Boal, Emmie Schrader Adams

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Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique,

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http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/intro.htm

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the ideas, resources, and skills that women gained in these movements that were the new and necessary catalysts for forging the WLM in the 1960s.

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