group of friends took it upon themselves to "vandalize" the party's racist billboards. In April 1972, Medea organized, at the Chicago Loop Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the first conference in the Midwest on the subject of rape. Out of that conference came the organization Chicago Women Against Rape, of which Medea was one of the founders, and the book Against Rape, which Medea wrote with Kathleen Thompson. Against rape Against Rape was published in 1974, going through seven printings before its official publication date. It was serialized in hundreds of newspapers around the country and remained in print for eighteen years. It was a time when women across the country were coming to terms with the issue. Organizations similar to Chicago Women Against Rape were formed in other large cities and small towns. Women created and staffed rape crisis hotlines and worked to reform treatment of women in hospitals, by police and by courts. Other important books on the subject were published, including, Rape: A First Sourcebook for Women by the New York Radical Feminists (New American Library, 1974). In 1975, Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will added a profound historical element to the discussion. In Against Rape, Medea's groundbreaking self-defense methods were first developed and published. Not long after its publication, Medea founded Chimera: Self-Defense for Women. Chimera, Inc. This innovative form of self-defense combined street fighting, some martial arts techniques, and a great deal of non-physical strategy that pre-figured Medea's conflict resolution theories. That strategy was based on both her street fighting experiences and her martial arts training. Medea's focus on analyzing a conflict situation has remained at the forefront of her work throughout her career. As she later said in an interview in the Chicago Reader, "The basic mentality behind Chimera is you think and you keep thinking and you do not let someone psych you out. You need physical skills, but your brain is the most important thing you have." Against Rape was the primary text for the self-defense courses of Chimera, Inc., for more than a decade. The Chimera program expanded to six states and trained upwards of 50,000 students. Medea's conflict continuum Medea's Conflict Continuum has been the basis of all her conflict management work. She developed it while teaching courses using this theoretical model as a lecturer at Northwestern University and DePaul University and an instructor at the University of Chicago. According to