The New Feminist was published by the New Feminists, an influential radical feminist group founded in 1969 in Toronto.

According to the New Feminist constitution, the goal of the organization “shall be the elimination of sex roles”. The first issue of the The New Feminist expressed the basis of the group this way:

“New Feminists are a group of women in search of their humanity in a society that demeans them.

We are children of our times and our world. Each of us bears the scars of having grown up as women in a man’s world. We are groping to understand and change – first ourselves and then the distorting society.

Our ideas vary. Some of us believe that marriage must be abolished. Others that marriage can be reformed and be saved, much changed and for the few. Some believe that all women must have a job; others think that whether man, woman, both, or neither are employed is irrelevant, providing their lives are productive.

Some think political and economic revolution is necessary for the liberation of women. Others think that 19th-century ideologies are not the answer to the problems of the 20th-century woman; we must find our own way.

On this, we are all agreed. Our society is fundamentally built on separate but unequal sex-roles for men and woman. The first, fundamental step in the liberation of women is the rejection of a society so ordered. A new society where prepackaged sex-roles are irrelevant is our objective. We must be humans before we are male or female, and society must be reconstituted to express this.”