New York Radical Feminists was a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1969, after they had left Redstockings and The Feminists, respectively. Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Vivian Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "". The end of this essay announced the formation of the group and included a contact address and phone number, raising considerable national interest from prospective members. NYRF was organized into small cells or "brigades" named after notable feminists of the past; Koedt and Firestone led the Stanton-Anthony Brigade. Central to NYRF's philosophy was the idea that men consciously maintained power over women in order to strengthen their egos, and that women internalized their subordination by diminishing their egos. This analysis represented a rejection of the two other prevailing theories of women's subordination current at the time – Redstockings' "Pro-Woman Line", which emphasized men's subordination of women and women's often deliberate adaptations to that reality, and The Feminists' theory that emphasized women's subordination as being rooted in the unconsciousplaying out of internalized sex roles. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt left NYRF in 1970 over disagreements about organization and leadership with other factions of NYRF. Nonetheless, the group continued to be active through the mid-1970s. Its activities during that time included holding a monthly consciousness raising meeting, publishing a regularnewsletter, and maintaining a speaker's bureau. NYRF also organized a number of public conferences and speakouts through the early to mid-1970s on topics such as rape, sexual abuse, prostitution, marriage, lesbianism, motherhood, illegitimacy, class, and work. Florence Rush introduced The Freudian Coverup in her presentation "The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View," about childhood sexual abuse and incest, at the April 1971 NYRF Rape Conference. Rush's paper at the time was the first challenge to Freudian theories of children as the seducers of adults rather than the victims of adults' sexual/power exploitation. In 1982, NYRF was listed among the signatories to a leaflet produced by the "Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism", an ad hoc coalition put together by Women Against Pornography to protest the Barnard Conference.
