Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (46 page)

⁴⁵
“Impressions of Workshops: Human Expression—Play Workshop,”
ibid
.

⁴⁶
Popkin,
Bread and Roses
, pp. 46-47. Such events proliferated rapidly, marked by a joyful aura of self-discovery. A reporter for
off our backs
marveled about an Atlanta Women’s Festival in October 1970 that made her feel “good about being a woman” and “positive about the things we do.” Just “knowing that there is a festival going on which is created by, for and about me and my sisters cause we think so much of each other that we want to work and celebrate with each other,” left her with a warm afterglow. Jan, “Women’s Festival,”
off our backs
, vol. 1, no. 13 (November 8, 1970): 12.

⁴⁷
Maryse Holder, “Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement,”
off our backs
, vol. 3, no. 10 (September 1973): 11-17, quote on 11. Judy Chicago argued that there were “four patterns in women’s art,” including repeating forms, circular or breast-like forms, organic forms (plants, genitalia, and gardens), and a central aperture (heart of a flower, tunnel, portals, chasms, rifts, and cracks). See Judy Chicago and Edward Lucie-Smith,
Women and Art: Contested Territory
(New York: Watson-Guptill, 1999).

⁴⁸
“Female Culture/Lesbian Nation,”
Ain’t I a Woman?
vol. 1, no. 16 (June 4, 1971): 9.

⁴⁹
Barbara Burris with Kathy Barry, Joann Parent, Terry Moon, Joann DeLor, and Cate Stadelman, “The Fourth World manifesto: An Angry Response to an Imperialist Venture Against the Women’s Liberation Movement,” mimeograph, Detroit, January 13, 1971, p. 15. This paper was written in criticism of the “anti-imperialist women” who organized a meeting between Indo-Chinese women and Women’s Liberation. The authors claimed that “anti-imperialist women” were using the autonomous women’s movement and preventing the Vietnamese women from full access to the burgeoning movement. It was the clash at this meeting in Toronto that also precipitated the formation of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman chapter of NAAM when members of a Durham CR group felt criticized from both sides.

⁵⁰
Ibid.
, p. 27.

⁵¹
The claim that women were a “colony” had been employed at least since 1966, when a women’s caucus in SDS made a similar assertion. In this instance, the definition of women as a “Fourth World” suggested that they were even more oppressed than the colonized, non-Western “Third World.” The further step, however, of identifying that Fourth World with a “female culture” based on “the female principle” led the authors farther than they may have realized from the radical feminist emphasis on abolishing sex roles.

⁵²
Adrienne Rich, “The Anti-Feminist Woman,”
New York Review of Books
(November 30, 1972), reprinted in Adrienne Rich,
Open Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp. 67-88, quotes on pp. 71, 83-84. In the article, Rich concludes the latter quote with “(and with the ghostly woman in all men),” a sentiment she questioned in 1979.

⁵³
Elizabeth Gould Davis,
The First Sex
(New York: Putnam, 1971). This theory of a “golden age” has not been supported by subsequent scholarship.

⁵⁴
Rich, “The Anti-Feminist Woman,” 76.

⁵⁵
Adrienne Rich, “Trying to Talk with a Man,”
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 3.

⁵⁶
Rita Mae Brown, “Living with Other Women,”
Radical Therapist
(April/May 1971): 14.

⁵⁷
Ginny Berson quoted in “The Muses of Olivia: Our Own Economy, Our Own Song,”
off our backs
, vol. 4, no. 9 (August/September 1974): 2.

⁵⁸
Rita Mae Brown,
Plain Brown Rapper
, pp. 20-21, and Charlotte Bunch,
Passionate Politics
, p. 191.

⁵⁹
Women’s Action Collective, “Statement of Philosophy,” adopted by consensus May 21, 1974, quoted in Nancy Whittier, “Turning It Over: Personnel Change in the Columbus, Ohio, Women’s Movement 1969-1984,” in Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, eds.,
Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 180-198, quote on p. 190.

⁶⁰
Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work,” in Rich,
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
, p. 208.

⁶¹
Echols,
Daring to Be Bad
, pp. 243-245. On the emergence of new kinds of public space, see Anne Enke, “Locating Feminist Activism: Women’s Movement and Public Geographies, Minneapolis-St. Paul, 1968-1980,” unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1999.

⁶²
“Female Culture/Lesbian Nation,”
Ain’t I a Woman?
, vol. 1, no. 16 (June 4, 1971): 8.

⁶³
See Adrienne Rich,
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(New York: Norton, 1976).

⁶⁴
See feminist journals, such as
off our backs, Ain’t I a Woman?, Plexus, Lesbian Tide, and So’s Your Old Woman
, for detailed accounts of conferences, workshops, and cultural events.

⁶⁵
Marlene Schmitz and Carol Edelson, “National Music Festival,”
off our backs
, vol. 5, no. 6 (July 1975): 1.

⁶⁶
Ginny Berson, “First National Women’s Music Festival,”
off our backs
, vol. 4, no. 8 (July 1974): 2.

⁶⁷
Dorothy Dean, “A Growing Sense of Breaking New Ground,”
off our backs
, vol. 4, no. 8 (July 1974): 3. See also Mary Spottswood Pou, “Giving Music Back to Its Muses,”
off our backs
, vol. 4, no. 8 (July 1974): 3.

⁶⁸
Schmitz and Edelson, “National Music Festival,”
off our backs
, vol. 5, no. 6 (July 1975): 1, 18-21. Schmitz repeated the point the following year with a note indicating that she was no longer surprised. “National Music Festival’s Third Refrain,”
off our backs
, vol. 6, no. 5 (July-August 1976): 14.

⁶⁹
Georgia Christgau, “Does the Women’s Movement Have a Sense of Rhythm?”
Ms.
, vol. 4, no. 6 (December 1975): 39-43, quote on 42.

⁷⁰
Nancy Stix, “Southwest Feminist Festival,”
Big Mama Rag
, vol. 1, no. 4 (ca. April 1973): 15.

⁷¹
Debbie Squires, “Southwest Feminist Festival,”
Big Mama Rag
, vol. 1, no. 4 (ca. April 1973): 15.

⁷²
Natalie Reuss, “Redwoods, Lovely Women, New Culture,”
off our backs
, vol. 4, no. 10 (October 1974): 25.

⁷³
Judith Niemi, “Woman’s Music and Free Living,”
So’s Your Old Lady
, no. 15 (December 1976): 10.

⁷⁴
Lee Garlington, “Making Music in Michigan Mud,”
off our backs
, vol. 7, no. 8 (October 1977): 22.

⁷⁵
Shirley Hargrove, “ …‘Sweet Honey in the Rock,’”
Big Mama Rag
, vol. 5, no. 7 (August-September 1977): 13-14.

⁷⁶
For a discussion of feminism and transgendered people, including debates at the Women’s Music Festival, see Leslie Feinberg,
Transgender Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

⁷⁷
Off our backs
’ fulsome coverage of the festival is a window onto these various debates, their resolutions, and the decisions of the festival organizers. See Niemi, “Woman’s Music and Free Living,” Lee Garlinton, “Making Music in Michigan Mud,” and Mary Fridley, “Commentary: Women’s Culture or Mass Culture,”
off our backs
, vol. 7, no. 9 (November 1977): 14; The womyn of We Want the Music Collective, “Dear Sisters,”
off our backs
, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1978): 17; Tacie Dejanikus, “Michigan Festival: Music, Matriarchy, Malelessness,”
off our backs
, vol. 10, no. 9 (October 1980): 12-13, 17.

⁷⁸
Sue Dove Gambill, “Letter to the editor,”
off our backs
, vol. 10, no. 10 (November 1980): 23.

⁷⁹
Dejanikus, “Michigan Festival,” 17.

⁸⁰
Nancy Matthews, “Feminist Clash with the State: Tactical Choices by State-Funded Rape Crisis Centers,” in Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, eds.,
Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), p. 299.

⁸¹
Women’s Advocates,
Newsletter
, vol. v, no. 3 (July 1987): p. 3.

⁸²
Interview with Sharon Vaughan, May 1, 1998.

⁸³
Carol Lease, Sandia, Janet Sergei, and Jackie St. Joan, “Discussion: Dissolution in the Women’s Movement,”
Big Mama Rag
, vol. 7, no. 5 (June 1979): 9.

⁸⁴
Jill Zahnheiser, “Feminist Collectives: The Transformation of Women’s Businesses in the Counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1985.

⁸⁵
Pat Wagner, “Effecting Change Through Choice,”
Big Mama Rag
, vol. 7, no. 5 (June 1979): 10.

⁸⁶
Sandia, “Why Does Everything Seem to Fall Apart?”
Big Mama Rag
, vol. 7, no. 5 (June 1979): 11.

⁸⁷
Quoted in Ann Hunter Popkin, “Bread and Roses: An Early Moment in the Development of Socialist-Feminism,” unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, Brandeis University, 1978, p. 102.

⁸⁸
Ibid.
, Chapter IV, pp. 89-138.

⁸⁹
Margaret Strobel, “Organizational Learning in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union,” in Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, eds.,
Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 146-148, 162. Many original documents from the CWLU may be found at the following
website: http://scriptorium.lib. duke.edu/wlm/
.

⁹⁰
Leadership of CWLU included Heather Booth, Amy Kesselman, Vivian Rothstein, and Day Piercy (Creamer), all of whom had extensive organizing experience in the civil rights movement and SDS community organizing projects.

⁹¹
Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement” (Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, 1972), quotes on p. 1. This document may be found in the Women’s Liberation Collection at the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library and online at
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/ wlm/socialist
.

⁹²
“Signal of a New Harmony: Women’s Conference,”
New American Movement
, vol. 2, no. 4 (January 1973): 5. This conference was called by the New American Movement, which was founded in 1971 by former student activists wanting an “adult” organization that could provide an ongoing vehicle for political activism even as the student movement disintegrated. From the outset, feminism was one agenda of NAM.

⁹³
Barbara Ehrenreich, “Speech,”
Socialist Revolution
, no. 26 (October-December 1975): 92.

⁹⁴
See Karen V. Hansen, “The Women’s Unions and the Search for a Political Identity,”
Socialist Review
, vol. 16, no. 2 (March-April 1986): 67-95.

⁹⁵
“Socialist-Feminist Conference—San Diego, 3/24,”
Berkeley/Oakland Women’s Union Newsletter
, vol. 2, no. 3 (April 26, 1974): 9, quoted in Hansen, “The Women’s Unions,” 81.

⁹⁶
Hansen, “The Women’s Unions,” 77. See, for example,
Bernice
, “Chicago News: c.w.l.u.,”
off our backs
, vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1975): 20.

⁹⁷
Perhaps the most important of these was a paper by Peggy Somers and Kathryn Johnson that challenged the place of “reproduction” in classical Marxism, arguing that reproduction was coequal with the sphere of production in shaping human societies and the dynamics of historical change. Their work anticipated the later influential theoretical work of Joan Kelly-Gadol, Heidi Hartmann, Alice Kessler-Harris, Zillah Eisenstein, and others.