Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (24 page)

Cultural feminism received an ideological boost with the emergence of lesbian feminism. The experience of separatism, in the words of Furies founder Charlotte Bunch, allowed a process of self-discovery of lesbians “as a people.” As Rita Mae Brown, one of the founders of the Furies, put it,

A woman can best find out who she is with other women, not with just one other woman but with other women who are also struggling to free themselves from an alien and destructive culture. It is this new concept, that of women-identified women, that sounds the death knell for the male culture and calls for a new culture where cooperation, life and love are the guiding forces of organization rather than competition, power and bloodshed.
⁵⁶

Such language obscured the conflict that dogged the movement from its inception, especially the painful gay-straight split Brown herself helped to engineer. Its appeal lay in the dream of escape from “male” competition into “female” cooperation. The Furies were only one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lesbian communes, many of which persisted through the seventies and into the eighties. In such environments, talk of women’s culture seemed natural, linked to a separatist vision of economic as well as cultural independence.

When the Furies broke up in 1972, its members took the quest for female self-sufficiency in new directions. Having given up the view that they could withdraw into an entirely female world, they nonetheless set out to establish women’s businesses and oudets for women’s artistic expressions. One such company was Olivia Records, founded in 1973 by five women. Former Furies member Ginny Berson described their decision-making process: “We asked ourselves, what are we going to do next
in the women’s movement? what needs to be done? how can we gain power for women?” They decided that “… the way for women to get power was through economics, by controlling our own economic situation…. [W]e wanted to set up some sort of alternative economic institution which would both produce a product that women want to buy and also employ women in a nonoppressive situation—get them out of regular jobs. Second, we wanted to be in a position to be able to affect large numbers of women, and that had to be through media…. So we put the two together and got a women’s recording company”
⁵⁷
Their first disk, issued in 1974, was a 45 rpm single with Meg Christian and Cris Williamson. Other former Furies were involved in founding Women in Distribution, Diana Press, Moonforce Media,
Quest: A Feminist Quarterly
, and Sagaris Institute.
⁵⁸

After 1972, in cities across the country women’s institutions flourished. The Women’s Action Collective (WAC), an umbrella organization in Columbus, Ohio, was founded in 1972 and grew within 2 years to include a Women’s Co-op Garage, a Legal Action Group, a Women’s Community Development Fund, Women Against Rape, a Women’s Publishing Group including
Womansong
newspaper and Fan the Flames Feminist Bookstore, a concert production company named Women’s Music Union, and a lesbian support group. Its leaders were active in the initiation of women’s studies at Ohio State. The 1974 WAC “Statement of Philosophy” offered a vision that was widely shared by similar groups across the nation:

We are committed to change in our lives NOW. We believe the personal is the political and we must live what we believe. We must withdraw our support from existing sexist institutions and create new ones expressive of our philosophy. While we recognize the value of other forms of struggle, we are committed to building an alternative feminist culture NOW, even on a small scale, rather than expending our energy on large scale reformism.
⁵⁹

The rush of institutionalization in the mid-1970s ensured the continued existence of thousands of spontaneous, largely volunteer-run
feminist experiments. In 1976 Adrienne Rich described the idealistic vision shared by many:

More and more, however, women are creating community, sharing work, and discovering that in the sharing of work our relationships with each other become larger and more serious. In organizing a women’s self-help clinic or law collective or a writing workshop, in editing a magazine or creating a center for women’s work like the Women’s Building in Los Angeles, in running a press that publishes “lost” books by women or contemporary work that may be threatening or incomprehensible to male editors, in participating in a women’s prison project or a crisis center, we come to understand at first hand not only our unmet needs but the resources we can draw on for meeting them even in the face of female poverty, the hostility of institutions, the lack of documentation of our shared past.
⁶⁰

Cultural feminism had from the outset a strongly lesbian identity. It allowed lesbians to construct, for the first time, public spaces in which their sexual preference was acknowledged and celebrated rather than hidden and suppressed.
⁶¹
As one participant in a very early women’s living collective put it in 1971,

Female culture to me means lesbian culture, and until recently it has been invisible to most and silent…. Since Gay Liberation and Women’s Liberation, since the women’s living collective, since new women, who haven’t been hiding all their lives have joined the gay community, Lesbian Culture has come above ground some and broadened. Now I talk about it as women’s culture.
⁶²

The “women’s culture” that developed in the 1970s and continued in subsequent decades was a direct continuation neither of the isolated lesbian subculture (most visible in gay bars) of the 1950s and 1960s nor of the traditional “woman’s culture” based on women’s responsibilities for childbearing, child care, and household labor. Theorists like Adrienne
Rich or the authors of the Fourth World Manifesto made frequent references to the latter tradition and sparked an important reevaluation of mothering and motherhood.
⁶³
In practice, however, the new women’s culture expressed a separatist, New Age, lesbian communalism whose lineage could be traced only very circuitously to the many expressions of female collectivity that predated it, including women’s missionary societies, women’s clubs, sewing circles, mother’s clubs, and, most recently, the dense networks of suburban voluntarism. These were of course undergoing their own feminist revolution, but they were worlds apart.

The evolving ideas and practices of women’s culture can best be traced in the many conferences and festivals. Conferences reminiscent of the women’s rights conventions in the 1850s took place across the country on virtually every conceivable topic. Gradually, however, the emphasis shifted from conferences to festivals, from events whose purpose was to discuss and debate feminism to those in which enacting it took precedence. Conference reports described the intractable divisions in the movement between socialist, cultural, and radical feminisms, separatists and nonseparatists, spiritualists and politicals, and lesbians and heterosexuals, as well as the ongoing self-criticisms of the movement for its failure adequately to address issues of class and race.
⁶⁴
Understandably, many women were attracted to explicitly cultural events, such as poetry readings, art shows, and music festivals, which were congruent with the therapeutic turn in both feminism and the broader society. There, the focus could be on the art, on feeling good about being together, and when divisions arose, audiences generally suppressed conflict with the view that “we’re here to share music, not discuss politics.”
⁶⁵

Music festivals, in particular, became the most important venue for cultural feminism. Local groups held festivals from the earliest years. The first national women’s music festival in 1974 at Champaign-Urbana gave 250 participants a sudden sense “… that women’s music and culture is growing and flourishing.” Ginny Berson, founder of Olivia Records, avowed that at the Illinois festival “… for the first time there was a forum to understand and expand the dimensions of the explosion.”
⁶⁶
Participants who were new to the women’s music scene struggled for words to convey their excitement. “It was almost like going
back to my first consciousness-raising experience years ago. The floodgates opened and just being together strengthened us,” wrote one attendee.
⁶⁷

The festival in Champaign became an annual event. Because it retained some elements of a conference, however, by its second and third years (1975 and 1976) it showed signs of the strains in the movement. Reviewers for
off our backs
in 1975 said that they had a wonderful time “socially, physically, and musically” but commented that “It was surprising but understandable that a musical event would crystallize the most distressing and still growing splits within the women’s movement at this time—between lesbians and straight: women, socialists and separatists, blacks (there were no more than 10 at the whole festival) and whites—actually you name it and the need for more outreach was in evidence there.”
⁶⁸
Similarly, the
Ms.
reviewer found that in the “haphazard conglomeration of workshops … [e]very one I attended was bogged down in discussions about feminism.”
⁶⁹

Soon the most popular venues for music festivals were rural settings where hundreds, even thousands, could camp and enjoy the personal freedom of an all-female environment. Such surroundings allowed a playful, sensual, and erotic sensibility full sway. The new sexual revolution in which women claimed the right to enjoy their bodies was powerful for straight and lesbian women alike, and clearly both were present. For lesbians the sudden release of the erotic from the isolation of the forbidden closet into the bright daylight of a women’s community was an almost indescribable thrill. Two different reporters at the Southwest Feminist Festival/Retreat in March 1973 described “a weekend of singing, dancing, sunning, discussing poetry reading, film viewing and meeting with other women” with similar images:

I felt so high, playing, touching, dancing, living, and exchanging all sorts of things among women.
⁷⁰

The experience … of being with 200 women, loving, dancing, sharing, and singing is the closest: I have come to my ideal lifestyle…. The fact that the majority of the women there were Lesbian probably contributed greatly to the closeness and sisterhood I felt.
⁷¹

Sponsors of the Amazon Music Project in Santa Cruz, California were clear about their expectation that their festival in the summer of 1974 would be a lesbian-defined event. In a report for
off our backs
entitled “Redwoods, Lovely Women, New Culture,” Natalie Reuss described the atmosphere after several days: “On Sunday there was a general sense that women had become completely comfortable in this forest space they were occupying. There was a free sharing of wine, beer and herbs, lavender silk-screened t-shirts of an Amazon woman, more dance and music.”
⁷²

This sensibility received its fullest expression in the Michigan Music Festival held on 160 acres of rural land. The Michigan Festival began in 1976 and continues into the 21st century, drawing thousands of women every year. From the beginning it represented an “alternate reality,” an embodiment of women’s culture, in which “woman” and “lesbian” were treated as interchangeable. The first festival drew 2,000 women; the second probably doubled that number as word of mouth and published reports flew around the country describing a nearly Utopian experience. Judith Niemi wrote: “Last August I lived in Lesbian nation for a few days. Our city-state was the Women’s Music Festival in Mt. Pleasant Michigan, a lesbian Woodstock. A promise, a piece of the future being lived right now.”
⁷³
Another writer echoed similar sentiments the following year: “How often in a lifetime does a woman have a chance to experience an environment created by and for wimmin
^*
only? How often can wimmin walk outside naked without fear or hassle? How often can three to five thousand wimmin gather together for 4 days of wimmin’s music on 160 acres of gorgeous land? Answer: once a year in Michigan….”
⁷⁴

From the beginning, there were women of color at the Michigan festival. The second festival in 1977 offered a workshop on Third World
women and social change led by Bernice Reagon, founder of the African-American
a capella
group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Reagon urged a more expansive, diverse ideal of women’s culture: “I see a lot of people who think that, because we are women that in fact all of our issues are the same. And that is erroneous. We are separated by class, race and all of those things put a strong stamp on us…. Women have dual, triple and quadruple identities…. Everytime you see a woman you are looking at a human being who is like you in only one respect, but may be totally different from you in three or four others. So when you come together, you come together for your commonness, but give the child some space to be the other people that she is.”
⁷⁵

Michigan was not a Utopia. The physical discomforts of inclement weather, long lines for food (simple, vegetarian fare), insufficient toilet facilities, and inadequate sound systems or other facilities in early years were generally borne with massive patience and good will. Conflict over the definition of separatism, there from the beginning, was more difficult. Women did all of the work; the location was remote, and everyone volunteered several hours of their time for tasks like food preparation and standing guard. Tensions remained on two initially unresolved issues, however: the presence of male performers in a few bands and the attendance of male children. Audience hostility to male performers was so high that after the first year or two they no longer appeared. The problem of boys—the discomfort of some women with their presence versus the anger of mothers about exclusion and discrimination—provides one of the most extreme examples of where a serious effort to separate completely from men and maleness could lead. Those who sought the pure experience of a female-only space insisted that the presence of any male was a violation (in effect a source of pollution, making the space itself impure). Mothers, of course, were enraged and accused those proposing such rules of discrimination. Michigan Festival organizers dealt with it by allowing infants of either gender and setting up a separate camp for boys, 14 miles away, while girls had their own camp nearby and from time to time would join adults at festival events. An even more intractable issue turned out to be the attendance of male-to-female transgendered people whose presence in effect challenged the
very idea of an essential, biologically based difference between women and men.
⁷⁶