The importance of women's efforts in the United States and throughout the world to end the war in Vietnam has been subsumed into a paradigm that suggests that many women activists abruptly fled the antiwar movement in the late 1960s to take up the new feminist cause, abandoning the antiwar cause that had initially ignited their activist energies. This teleological approach tends to diminish the positive effects of organizational, theoretical, and personal lessons learned and insights experienced in the antiwar movement to the emergence of a highly structured, theoretically nuanced, and personally impassioned movement of, by, and for women, whose constituent groups, however diverse and disconnected, shared the idea of liberation from male authority.

In an era of revisionist 1960s scholarship that seeks to reexamine some of the assumptions about activism throughout the world, it is important to reflect, not simply on the origins of the feminist movement in the civil rights and antiwar movements, but also on the importance of women's roles in the movement to end the war in Vietnam as a self-contained historical phenomenon and as an inspiration to the new feminist movement in the United States and throughout the world. This task is by no means a simple or straightforward one. Women's struggles within the antiwar movement, even when these struggles were not specifically dismissed as “trivial,” have often been seen as an adjunct to those of male activists. Like soldiers on the battlefield, soldiers in the movement saw women as ornaments (at worst) or auxiliaries whose purpose was to make life on the barricades less arduous.