wi/Dom

Inside the Archivesuui/oom 11
A Journal of Words and Pictures for the Lesbian
Imagination in All Women

Fall 1979
Founders and publishers:

Harriet Desmoines & Catherine Nicholson

Editors: C. Colette, Harriet Desmoines, Catherine Nicholson, Carolyn Shafer
Poetry Editor:

Susan Leigh Star

Review Editor: Julia Penelope
Contributing Editors: Sarah Hoagland, Beth Hodges, Mab Segrest
Cover Design by Beth Hodges
Cover Photograph by JEB
Staff: C.Colette, Lynda Koolish, Cheryl Long, Janis Morariu, Vicki Nogle,
Julia Penelope, Donna Saunders
Special thanks to:

Dodie Bellamy, Sandy Boucher, and Donna Travis

Printed by Iowa City Women's Press
This issue was funded in part by a grant from the Coordinating Council of
Literary Magazines.

Copyright ©Sinister Wisdom, 1979. All rights reserved to individual authors and artists.
Published quarterly
Individual subscriptions: 1 year (4 issues) $7.50
2 years (8 issues) $13.00(For out-of-the-U.S. subs: $9 for 1 year; $15 for 2 years; U.S. dollars only)
Institutional subscriptions: 4 issues, $12.00
Back issues, while available:
Issues 1,2,3 sold out
Issues 4, 5: $2.25 eachIssues 6, 7, 8, 9: $2.50 each
(Add 60 cents postage when ordering 1-2 single copies)

Address: SINISTER WISDOM, Box 30541, Lincoln, Nebraska 68503

CONTENTS
2,3,6,11,13, 66,68, 70
Photographs by JEB
23,40
Photographs by Lynda Koolish62
Photograph by Katherine Bouton
29,43
Pen and inks by Sarah Clark
3
Lesbian Herstory Archives: An Interview by Beth Hodges
14
Meg Jochild
Why There Are No Ghosts of Wimmin Martyrs
16
Marilyn Hacker
Poems
18
J. Z. Grovera story
Beginnings
THEORY:24
Susan L. YarbroughLesbian Celibacy
30
Andree Collard
Random Thoughts on Victimization
39
Barbara Hammer
Stillness and Motion
43
Trebilcot
Joyce
Women
Conceiving
51
RESPONSE:
Pat Kuras, Martha Yates, Martha Courtot, Joanna Russ,
Eleanor, Judith Schwarz, JR Roberts, Tracy Moore, Sue-Ellen Case
REVIEWS:
Julia Penelope
Letter to Readers
Deborah Snow
Review of Eye to Eye
Julia Penelope
Review of Wanderground
Katherine Sturtevant
a story
Photographs of Energy and Color
Perle
Quimetta"Embroidered Breast"
POETRY:
Lawrence
MoragaCher'rie
Jan Hardy
Janice Maiman
Elizabeth Alexander
Teresa Anderson
Becky Birtha
Julie Blackwomon
Terry Wolverton
Diane Stein
Announcements
Contributors' Notes

67
69
71
74
83
84
87
88
90
91
92
93
94
96
100
102

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AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAN AND DEBORAH OF THE
LESBIAN HERSTORY ARCHIVESby Beth Hodges
Photographs by J EB

In 1974 there was a pantry, dark, and empty except for a single filecabinet. I knelt on the floor to examine the contents of the cabinet, a complete set o/THE LADDER This was the embryo of the Lesbian Herstory
Archives.
Five years later the Archives has outgrown the pantry, spills into the
kitchen, the dining room, the front hall, the bedrooms of the upper WestSide apartment that houses it. In the pantry where I first held THE LADDER,
shelves of our serial publications line an entire wall. And all over the apartment I see walls of books, of file cabinets, flyers, posters, collages, framed
photographs, and a bulletin board whose announcements include notice oflesbian raft trips, a black bibliography, a southeastern lesbian writers' conference, a Jewish lesbian anthology.
Today there are over three thousand volumes in the Archives collection.
How many unpublished papers and letters and articles, clippings, taped interviews, radio shows, videotapes, photographs and manuscripts there are,no one knows exactly.
The Archives collective has lost members and gained members, but three
have been constant from the beginning. Valerie Itnyre, Deborah Edel and
Joan Nestle together have done the day-to-day work of the Archives these
five years.
In April I spoke with Deborah and Joan, the two who share their homewith the Archives collection and with the hundreds of women who visit eachyear. Since much of our conversation concerns beginnings, visions and quests.
Joan.starts out with the story of a woman who chose to begin her joitrnev at
the Archives
3

Joan: The Archives reaches out in ways that we didn't plan for. One day
we were sitting around and there was a knock on the door. I went to answer
it and it was a woman, probably in her mid- to late forties, and she had ahuge backpack on.
Deborah: A little lady.
/: She said her name, she said she was from Hawaii and she'd tried tocall us but the line was busy so she just took the risk of coming. Her story
was that she had been married for many years. She had raised, I think, fivechildren the oldest was in his twenties. She had gotten a divorce, gone tolaw school, and come out as a lesbian woman. She'd just finished law school,and "before she got married to another institution," is how she put it, shewanted to make a pilgrimage through, or to, the lesbian community as she
had understood it to be from Hawaii; and she had certain places on her journey that she was going to stop. She'd made no previous arrangements.
The place she wanted to begin her journey was the Archives. So wewelcomed her, and I went to take her backpack from her, and it must haveweighed at least sixty pounds. She stayed here for three days. What she
would do, she would get up in the morning, have her healthy breakfast, andshe would sit she didn't even sit on a chair, she sat on the floor in a cornerof the Archives-and she would just reach out and pull out things.
We would have dinner together and she would tell us her itinerary. She
would say she was going to Buffalo and we would say, "but" I don't want
to use her name "but woman," we'd say, "it's terrible snow storms up there
now, you know: you're from Hawaii." "No, no, that's oJc., that's where my
spirit tells me I have to go," and then when she left she said she knew she
was right to begin here, that it was like sitting under a waterfall, in theArchives room.
We said good-bye to her and we told her to keep in touch with us. Andaround two months later two women came to the Archives from the Actors'
Sorority, a lesbian theater group in Kansas City, and they said Jackie says
hello. So she was making her trek. It's this image of an older woman launching herself into the lesbian world, and finding it, that symbolizes the Archives.
D: She did something that I thought was very brave also. She had written
a series of coming-out letters to old friends, and if their responses weren't
fully real, she wanted to go deal with them directly.
/: Her courage and her spiritual vision and her faith that we'd all be there
is symbolic of the Archives. Her courage to journey at this point in her life.
Something we found from the Archives is that many, many of our womenare on journeys. The Archives gives them a stopping-off place, a renourishingplace. We are a very brave people.
Beth: Will you tell about Mabel, a brave woman who has been important
to you on your journey?
J: Mabel was the first resbian woman I knew. I was around ten years oldwhen I met Mabel. She was sort of a buddy of my mother and also was hiredby my mother to take care of me-my mother was a working woman. Mabel
used to read old lesbian paperbacks and she would keep them in her raincoat
pocket with the book cover turned outward so I couldn't see the covers.
And one day I took it out of her pocket-it was an invasion of privacy and1 read, devoured this lesbian novel. And Mabel just watched me grow.
4

D: How did you link back up with Mabel?
/: Mabel always stayed friends with my mother because they went to therace track together all the time, and they helped each other through hardtimes. So I knew Mabel, and Lillian, the woman she lived with for forty
years who died this June.
Mabel was the witness to my coming-out, and to my mother's upsetness.
Mabel told me something the last time she was here, that when. I was coming
out, my mother called her in the middle of the night and said, "If my daughter
is a lesbian, I'm going to kill myself"; and Mabel said to her, "There's nothing
you can do, she chooses, that's her life, you have to let her do it." Mabel
was sort of the bridge between me and my mother.
I remember the first woman I was involved with, Susan. Mabel was at
the house and my mother came home drunk and was in a very bad way.
Susan got very scared and ran out of the apartment. I was holding on to mymother, trying to get her to calm down, and Mabel turned to me and said,"Now you leave your mother alone and go after your woman." And I ran
out the door after Susan. This was the first recognition and support for myrelationship.
But how we got together again was, when I was out, I guess around 1960,
I was with Carol, and I'd been off and on in touch with Mabel. And Mabel
told me there was going to be this big dance up in the South Bronx. It wasgoing to be drag dance, for male and female homosexuals. I wanted Mabel
to meet Carol so we went to their home and spent the night there; and wewent to this dance at this ballroom. It was just incredible, hundreds of people,
women in suits and men in dresses.
D: What did you wear?
/: I wore a dress, Carol wore a suit, and I remember to this day coming
down the steps and a woman saying to Carol, "Can I borrow your woman?
She's really saying something."
D: And you love it, you love it!
/. I love it to this day, being an old femme.
B: You said once that the Archives really began with Mabel. That she
was an example for you of strength and self-cherishing.
/: Yes. Mabel was raised in the south by her grandmother and then cameto New York when she was about seven. She stayed for a short time withan uncle who molested her. She ran away and worked in white people's
houses from the age of nine. She said she was a lesbian from when she wasa little girl playing in Winston-Salem.
Years ago she was doing the things that we as a community are doing
now. In her own way she was an archivist. Her whole life she was always
looking for lesbian images. She taught herself to read; and she'd save theWonder Woman comics because they were images of strong women.
D: She saved the old paperbacks.
/: She had a lot of the fifties paperbacks, which she prized.
She was political in her own way. She was cherishing of her own history,
and knew there were other women like her. She tried to find the hidden
images. And she was also seeking another way of knowledge; she joined the
Rosicrucians in a search for a spiritual vision which she preserves today in5the Eastern Star. Because she had a strong sense that things were wrong, thatmen were keeping women from their full power.

B: What is Mabel's relationship to the Lesbian Herstory Archives today?
J: She has become very important to the Archives. In fact, she uses it
more than any other woman. Even though reading for her is very hard because she's had cataract operations, she spends hours in that room, reading
through what she's missed. It's like a hunger. She's just finished reading
Patience and Sarah. And she just read Ethel Waters ...
D: And Ann Shockley.
6

J: Yes, if Ann Shockley could hear this, Mabel wants so much to thankher for Loving Her which she read three times and made sure we gave copies
to every one of her friends. She felt it was such an important work for her.
We sent her the newsletter. And Mabel, who is living on social security,
sent us a donation when she's donated her whole life. And she tells all her
friends about the Archives.
D: Also she gave us her thirties, forties, fifties paperback collection. Ourcollection has grown since then, but it's what she had saved all these years
that started the Archives' collection.
/: We've been doing an oral history with Mabel. And finally around amonth ago she said, "All I want to do is be remembered."
B: I don't think she needs to worry.
/: It's beautiful to see the kind of recognition she's getting now. One day
there was a woman working here in the Archives and she just kept seeing we
had all these pictures of Mabel, Mabel working at her desk, and the woman
said, "Is this woman a writer? Why do you have so many of her pictures?"
And we said, "No, she's Mabel Hampton. She's a lesbian woman." And reallyit's about her that the Archives is. And all the other women like her.
B: Judith Schwarz has been a member of the collective for about twomonths now, hasn't she? How did you get together with her?
/: One of the very exciting things about the Archives is that so many
women are beginning things, particularly research in lesbian history. They're
working without support, those that aren't academically based. It's excitingthat we share beginning moments, and one was when Judith Schwarz, whom
we did not know at all, who has now become a member of the Archives andalso a member of our family-she wrote us a letter about how she'd been
doing grass roots research in the Library of Congress, hours and hours, after
her ACLU typist job, and women told her she was crazy, all she was interested
in was dirty linen, why did she want to know about women's private lives,that was gossip.
She wrote us a letter saying, "Am I crazy?" It was a very finely typed
and finely worded letter. I read it and I got so excited, I sat down and typed
one of my emotional outpourings about how it was just the opposite, thatwhat she was doing was putting the center back into things, that she could
not listen to those who questioned the importance of what she was doing
because they were the ones who created the emptiness in the first place. And
I was so afraid that my letter was going to be too crazy ...
D: . . . for this proper woman, who typed so neatly.
/: She wrote back and she was so grateful we just exchanged letters almost
weekly after that.
D: Also, both of you had discovered the connection of your mothers'
deaths which was very present for both of you at the time, and it was anotherbond between you.
B: Does this happen often, that you bond with women who write you or
who come to use the Archives?
J: That's another thing that makes the Archives so special. Since theArchives is in our home, when women use it, they do share in what is goingon in our lives. One of the principles of the Archives is that it be an integral
part of lesbian reality, not an isolated collection. We try not to let what's
7-

going on here personally get in the way of a woman who has something concrete and special to do. But what we found-we've had hard times here-is
an incredible caring on the part of women who we have never met before
and may never meet again but who come here and, either through a conversation or through something they overhear us say, become involved.
I have gotten incredible caring and support for my own difficulties. It isa world of caring that grows out of that room, a center that radiates. A caring
for the collectiveness of all of us also deepens the caring for us individually.
So whenever I hear women saying they don't know where the lesbian community is, it's very hard for me, because we always feel that...
B: . .. you live there ...
J: .. . we live there, that the Archives is at the heart of things.
D: It's also been incredible because it's never stopped; no matter what
was going on in our lives, it's always managed to keep on flowing. The week
Joan was in the hospital two women were staying here . ..
J: . .. working on their anarchist record of lesbian music . ..
D: . . . taking telephone calls and occasionally letting women in for us.
B: Will you talk about what the Archives has meant to you?
J: It has meant life to me.
It started as a political and philosophical and personal issue, but I neverimagined it would be as personal as it has become. It's, I would use the word
magic how can I say it? it's almost as if it has an understanding of things,
almost as a living person. During the time I've been ill, whatever I can do,
the Archives has something for me to do. It has never made me feel uselessor valueless or completely dependent. There is always something to create
with it, even if it's just clipping articles, which is what I do sometimes.
B: You once said that you would remember these early years of theArchives as its golden age. Why?
/: I just see it as very gentle and very personal, the way it is now. There's
a glory to it, in its simplicity, in the smallness of the room, and in its coherency. We don't have large amounts of money to worry about now and it's
all very manageable. Now every woman who comes, helps create it, and it's
still small enough that every woman can see her own impact, can touch everything that's there. Women sit shoulder to shoulder, as if the voices could allhear each other still. As we grow as a culture, or as we accumulate more asa culture, some of that immediacy won't be there. But now there's a quiet
strength to it that I wish all lesbian women could share in.
B: Fran Winant is an example of a woman seeing her impact on the Archives.
J: Yes. I had known Fran superficially for years and years but never have
I been able to tell her how really important she is. To me she is one of ourwomen who has kept her own voice and her own imagination and is constantly
growing with it. There's a wonderful integrity to her. And she finally camethe other night to the Archives. Way before we knew she was coming, we
had made a blow-up of one of her paintings of her dog who's very dear toher.
B: She wrote a whole volume of dog poems.
D: Yes, and did a whole series of paintings. . .
/: . . .with her special language. And we had posted it. Someday we'd liketo have the originals, but we do what we can, so we made a slide and we8

blew it up. She walked into the Archives room, this woman who I thought
would know for sure how at the center of things she was, and she wept.
What she wrote in the book, we read afterwards, was, "This has broughttears to my eyes. You understand." And for us it was such a gift to be able
to say to her, "You have to understand too, you have to know how it'svoices like yours who've kept our spirits intact." So it was a beautiful momentof being able to say thank you to someone I wanted to thank for many
years.
B: Do you dread the future, that the Archives will change so much andyour relationship with it will change?
D: We realize that the Archives has to grow ...
J: ... into its own entity. We have a future vision of it, of its having ahouse with various rooms for all aspects of lesbian culture. So our visual
artists would have space, our performing artists would have space, our sculptors
would have space, and there would be room for women to sleep in and to
eat together in. There would be a living creating of culture at the same time
it is being documented. The Archives house would be a living symbol of ourcherishing of generations. And it would have its own kind of excitement andits own kind of spirit.
D: I hope that it will always have a sense of caring that so many larger
spaces lose in the process of becoming larger and dealing with more money
an'd more objects and more things. There can be a hollowness to a building.
I'm sure that won't happen, because in the shaping of the Archives, we will
have already created a nurturing space, and so it can't grow into a hollow.
B: How are you shaping the Archives?
J: We thought that the first, say, ten years of our life with the Archives
would be spent building an atmosphere as much as building a collection. We
would be creating a world of confidence in us who are working with theArchives, an attitude of acceptance, and getting our community used to theidea that there would be an on-going intergenerational place that would be
for all lesbian women. Not for a specific school of thought or a specific age
group or specific class or specific cultural group, but for all of us.
How the Archives does things is as much a part of the culture it has createdas what it collects. For instance, it wouldn't be our Archives it wouldn't bea lesbian archives if it ever was some place where lesbian women didn't haveaccess to it. It wouldn't be our Archives if you ever needed a letter of referral
to be able to use it or if there wasn't a place for women to rest when they
were tired or to eat when they were hungry.
B: Or if there was a fee to use it.
D: Or if we got swallowed up into someone else's collection. Even if it
was a feminist library.
J: We drew up some principles that we hope will be picked up by thenext generation. One principle we hope will always stay loud and clear isthat the word lesbian will never be diluted, will never be lost. And ourArchives will never be turned into a woman's archives or a gay archives. But
will be the one place that the word, the noun, lesbian will echo through thegenerations.
Though we know that women each time may choose a different word tocall themselves-I mean, when I first came out, dyke was a very hard wordand now it's a wonderful word. Each generation will take the glory of naming
itself. That's the spirit of the Archives, that we take what has been abused
and turn it into cherishing.
B: Are you training another generation to come along and take over foryou?
D: We see that as part of what we have to do.
J: The first thing that we have done we hope when this interview ispublished well be incorporated-is set up a legal identity that gives us a way
to hand down what we've created and keep it safe from the patriarchal
society. We have created a foundation, and we hope that the Lesbian Herstory
Educational Foundation will become an umbrella group to encourage andprovide sustenance for lesbian cultural workers in all different fields, andthat out of these women working will come those who take on the Archives
as their generational commitment.
But we've realized that in any time there'll be only a small group of
women who can say, or will want to say, "Yes, this is my way of being
political; this is how I want to live, giving all my time and energies to theArchives." So we're working out other ways. For instance, having what wecall Daughters of the Archives, women who undertake a project for a shortperiod of time and don't have to say, "I'm giving all my life, I will becomea vestal virgin of the Archives," but instead can say, "I will work," forinstance, "on documenting lesbian photography from 1970 to 1980."
Once we build up a sense of our endurance and our integrity and ourcommitment, and we do as much of the shit work as possible, like getting
the incorporation out of the way, getting our cataloging, setting up the procedures so that when women come into it they don't have to do the paperwork but can be more imaginative once we do this, we think that we really
won't have any problems in getting women to commit themselves to working
on the Archives.
Also, there's a whole generation now of lesbian archivists. We've got intouch with several who've been trained in patriarchal archival schools who
are now saying, "How can I contribute my skills to the Archives?"
And we hope eventually the Archives will be able to pay us a salary, will
be able to reimburse women who are giving their skills.
B: Do you have a lifetime commitment to the Archives? Do you see yourself working in the Archives, in the middle of the Archives, until you die?
J: We do have a lifelong commitment. We've also learned that lifelong
can be as long as tomorrow or ten years or fifty years.
B: Deb, do you have any reservations about a lifetime commitment to
the Archives?
D: As long as I can see myself in a fluid relationship to it, no. But I
would, if I thought we would be so involved and so tied to it that we would
end up creating an atmosphere that would exclude other women. I have astrong sense of commitment to the Archives, but it doesn't mean that thirty
years from now I'm going to be living with the collection, either literally or
figuratively, on such a day-to-day basis. That 1 have no way of knowing. Ten

10years ago I had no vision of the Archives, so it would be wrong of me to try
to be literal and say, "Yes, in ten years I still will be cataloging." But I havecommitted myself to the Archives, to helping it grow.
B: Can you talk about how your life has changed, living with this collection?
J: Our days are in layers; we never know what's going to happen. The
telephone rings all the time. The other night it began with a woman here
using the Archives. She was going to hear Kate Millett speak the same place
we were and since she lived in Westchester and didn't want to go all the way

back, we said, "OK, why don't you stay for dinner?" Then another friend
came, and then a woman from Boston, Monica, called and we ended uphaving ten for potluck dinner.
B: Are you kidding!
/: No, it just grew. And then we all traipsed over to Gay Women's Alternative.
But very much, that's what happens, depending on the women's needs andwhat's going on in the house. A visit to the Archives seldom stops with using
the material. It becomes women sitting down at the table and talking about"why are you interested in this?" or about an issue in the community; it's
women sharing food.
B: Do you find there are greater numbers of women coming hero'.'11

J: Yes. Sometimes there are so many women working here that nobody
knows who lives in the house-just the final statement that we've changed
the nature of the apartment. Tee Corinne was one of the women working
here and never knew who the women of the Archives collective were until
she saw us much later. If women have been here several times, they'll givethe tour of the Archives. Whoever is in the house with the most knowledge
about things sort of takes over.
B: Do women ever come as groups?
J: Yes. Groups are using the house, which is wonderful. I never went toa private school; it gives me the first feeling of a dormitory. There are field
trips to the Archives. And there's a group taking a course in lesbian literature
at Barnard, so they come in groups of three and four to work here; andthere's a wonderful feeling of all this young energy. I can shtup them withcoffee and soup.
B: I remember the first time I stayed here. It was the 1974 Gay Academic
Union, and you had women sleeping all over the floor. You were so happy
to have a lesbian houseparty.
J: I haven't changed much in five years.
D: She's still trying for pajama parties all the time.
B: And you. Deb, how has your life changed, living with the collection?
D: It's been incredible, the sense of women passing through, and they
are always passing through. It's trying to hold onto a certain amount ofprivacy and space that I need, at the same time that we've opened up our
house to women coming into it. It's been incredible because we've met wonderful wonderful women.
But there are some days that I think if I see another piece of paper or an
index card I will puke.
B: I find your generosity amazing.
/: The Archives is based on our principles of resource-sharing. We have awhole history of resources that allows the Archives to come into being. If
we didn't have the size apartment we had, which means, if we didn't havethe jobs that we have ...
We say, "What is it that we want to do? What do we have that we canshare?" We didn't have money to rent a separate building, so we used ourapartment. We didn't have the money or the knowledge-we hadn't gone toarchival school-so we went to libraries and we spoke to women who did.
We learned about archiving and we found places we could buy things cheaper.
Every time a woman comes to the Archives there's another sharing. Women
will say to us, "Oh, you need stationery? OK, I'll rip it off from my office"or "You need xeroxing? I'll do that."
The Archives is an act of empowering. We have taken a power or we havecreated a power. We must not stop at the limits imposed upon us but must
think imaginatively, "How far can we take what we have?" And I think oneof the givens of being a lesbian is that we have huge amounts of imaginationand strength.
This is a message to the whole community: I see us as a colonized people,

12and one thing a colonized people know is that the society who thinks you
shouldn't exist in the first place isn't going to make it easy for you to create
or to survive. And so, rather than talk about what we don't have, we use
what we do have.
B: How did you come to see us as an oppressed people?
/: It was reading a passage in a book. This was around five years ago. I
had been teaching a third world studies program for six years. I had beenreading the literature of colonized peoples and part of me knew that being
a lesbian in this country is to be colonized. But it didn't hit home until I
read The Colonizer and the Colonized and I started to change the pronouns
to she. There was one incredible paragraph about how the colonized are
ruled out of time, and how they lose their sense of lineage. The last sentencein the paragraph was, "The colonized are condemned to lose their memory."
It was the word condemned. Condemned. It's the image of imprisonment
to death. Without our memories we are in an endless prison. It became thebanner of the Archives, to reverse the condemnation.
B: What is the motto of the Archives?
J: In memory of the voices we have lost.
END OF PART ONE

You may reach the LESBIAN HERSTORY ARCHIVES at PO Box 1258, New York,
N.Y. 10001, 212-874-7232 or 873-9443.

/9*£Mfcr

Meg Jochild

WHY THERE ARE NO SKELETONS OF WIMMIN MARTYRS
A Story"Of course, many of my acquaintances from the outside are SUUCK by
the oddity of this lady who lives with me. They have said she seems tobe, at times, removed from reality, or a visionary. 1 think I will have toagree with them on the word visionary. She is a visionary; she has beencalled such for several centuries, though they do not know it.
"As for the lady, she is very happy here, incredibly happy. If she werenot, I would return her, or find another place for her. But she wishes tostay by me, in my bed, in my world; and upon her real death, what she
has written will fill several more volumes. The dry period of her last decade before I came has vanished.
"I think she is most pleased when I show her the books we were
taught from in school, for in them she is held up as the example, theWriter, that she feared she never was. It must be a stretch of the self-concept to know that children are reading words she wrote five hundredyears ago, reading and understanding and being swept with an emotion
half a millenium old. No, wait her greatest pleasure came the time I
took her to a play based on her life. She laughed long afterward, andwhen she could finally speak, she said, They were so close, and yet so
far from knowing.'"Here in the collective, of course, she can be herself, and that is who
we know and love. Age has not lessened the 'boldness like a wren' of her,nor the chestnut in her hair. And she still wears white, but her hair falls
free over her shoulders, and the Amazon just arrived next door is teaching her to ride a horse.
"And when we love, she is a girl again, a wild-hearted girl who loved
too greatly for her time but not for mine. I am trying, very hard, to makeup for the decades she lived with a broken heart. I think I can do this because I loved her for decades, reading the lines both written and silent
that told how like me she was.
"And her oddity to those not part of the collective, part of the secret,is no real threat. We are all considered to be odd, we here on the sprawlof land and mountain we have claimed as ours for a livelihood and a home.
And if our numbers seem to grow suddenly, it is explained by the appealof our freedom, the lure that calls in wimmin needing a sanctuary.
"And this is no lie. From the very moment 1 made my discovery (orwas given the secret by the Mother, as Beata insists), I knew how I would
use it. 1 had waited too long for the womon separated from me by my14

birthtime to consider anything else. The rest of it came when I realizedthat my dream was not alone, that other of us here had room and needfor their own heroines. And so now we are a great gathering of lovers,
poets old and new, who listen to one another with an intensity that can
only grow from having been torn apart.
"Next to the first journey, where I gained my love, the best was whisking the French maid from the flames. She wears trousers and short hairwith no fear now, and hears the voices of angels each time she speaks withus. Her eyes are so very brown, and the pain is faded altogether.
"Last week I returned with the Amazon, from the Steppes, who could
see the erosion of her nation-tribe coming soon. I am going back often tothat place there are many who wished to come. What? Yes, of course
they lied, all the accounts of what happened to our eldermothers werelies; -y couldn't very well say that a witch appeared as they neared deathand u.ey both chuckled merrily as they vanished, now could they?
"I tell you all this, my friend, because you have joined our clan andyou can be trusted with the secret. Also, I sense that you may have yourown request to make of me, a need to save someone from the womonhatred of her time. Aha! I thought so; well, it won't be so difficult. Can
you get me her last known coordinates and the date of her disappearance?
Good. What did friends call her? Melly? Alright, then, I shall bring Melly
fo you tomorrow. Only you must promise to give her all the room sheneeds to adjust and you must let her return cheerfully if she prefers thatto being part of now.
"Yes, I would have returned my lady if she had asked it. But I think
I would have gone with her, to ease the loneliness of the huge old houseand that cold world. You see, I have always loved her. And I wanted toshow my love from the first time I read the plea in 'My life closed twice
before its close '"Hush, now, here comes the mother of us all. Yes, she is short, andquite dark, but the Greeks were in those days. Wait till you hear the verse
she composed yesterday...

15

PETERBOROUGH
Another story still: a porch with trees-maple and oak, sharpening younger shoots
against the screen; privileged solitudewith early sunlight pouring in a thin
wash on flat leaves like milk on a child's chin.
Light shifts and dulls. 1 want to love a woman
with my radical skin, reactionary imagination. My body is cored with hunger;
my mind is gnarled in oily knots of anger
that push back words: inelegant defeatof female aspiration. First we're taught
men's love is what we cannot do without;obliged to do without precisely that:
too fat, too smart, too loud, too shy, too old.
Unloved and underpaid, tonight untold
women will click our failings off, each beadinflating to a bathysphere, our needencapsulated in a metal skin,which we, subaqueous monsters, cannot infiltrate. The middle of the road is noon.
Reactive creature with inconstant moontides (no doubt amendable as nearsightedness, but sacred to How Things Are)
my blood came down and I swarmed up a tree,
intoxicated with maturity.
Woman? Well, maybe but I was a GrownUp, entitled to make up my own
mind, manners, morals myths-menses small priceto pay for midnight and my own advice.
By next September, something was revenged
on me. Muffled in sweat-soaked wool. I lunged
out of seventh-grade science lab, just quick
enough to get to the Girls' Room and be sick.
Blotched cheeks sucked to my teeth, intestines turning themselves out, hunched over a churning womb fisting itself, not quite thirteen,
my green age turned me regularly green.
Our Jewish man GP. to whom I carried
myself hinted sex helped; once you were married.
Those weren't days I fancied getting laid.
Feet pillowed up, belly on heating pad,head lolled toward Russian novel on the floor,
I served my time each hour of the fourdays of the week of the month for the next ten
years, during which I fucked a dozen men,16not therapeutically, and just as well.
Married to boot, each month still hurt like hell.
The sky thickens, seeps rain. I retrospectively add my annals to our tribe's collective
Book of Passage Rites, and do not say
a woman gave notebook leaves to me today
whose argument was what I knew: desire,and all the old excuses ranked, conspired:avoid, misunderstand, procrastinate;
say you're monogamous, or celibate,sex is too messy, better to be friends(thirsty for draughts of amity beyond
this hesitation, which has less to dowith her than my quixotic body's too
pertinacious tua tarn pertinax
valetudo, neither forward nor backward malingering, I ask, or healing.)
I like her: smart, strong, sane, companionate.
I still love a man: true, but irrelevant.
Then, unavoidably, why not?
She was gone (of course) by this time; I sat
mirrored, eye-to-eye, cornered between
two scalp-high windows framing persistent rain.

HOW IT HAPPENS
Really, it's a co-educationalboarding-school. The big girls complain about
the boys: spotty, spoken-for. They do without
those gymnastic recreational
pastimes, compensate in the dining-hallwith Scrabble and lime fizz. One gawky sweet
long-limbed math whiz and one dour Semitic Latin grind are keeping their council
on the topic, trudge in the woods in the raininstead, get giddy at intramural
events, slope off, slanting, before the bell.
Doors wedged shut in a pink-wallpapered room
they prime their adolescent epicene
genius on specialized curriculum.
—Marilyn Hacker,•-,

J. Z. Grover

BEGINNINGS

A Story
Beginnings: where aid it start, then? Before consciousness, with Nana
braiding my hair (the envy of Rumpelstiltskin, she assured me), breathing
love and need into my neck as she combed, telling me I was her golden girl,her pearl beyond price? Or much later, with Maureen seducing my scruples
at the Chicago MLA? With her silver flash, winking away a world as she cast
it in that silent noon-day forest ten years ago?
It is a tradition in my trade (when I had a trade; when I had something
to trade) to begin, like all good narrators, in media res. 1 opt instead to begin
with my beginning, that free-flying point I have scooped and caught andtaught to be my thirty-three year old perception of the truth and where it
started.
In the beginning, then.
In 1960, I was a sophomore in college. Yes, indeed. At Thanksgiving in
my sophomore year I drove to San Diego to eat dinner with two of mymother's old friends from World War II working days. Dorothy and Jean
had retired as Lieutenant-Commanders out of Point Magu and headed, liketrue Navy lemmings, for San Diego. They had written my mother imploring(so she said) that dear Virginia's daughter spend the holiday with them.
I drove skeptically down the San Diego Freeway from Immaculate Heartand up into the hills above the harbor. There was a turkey waiting for mein the oven. There were two Scotties and a Siamese waiting for me in theliving room. And of course there were Dorie and Jean. Their eyes crinkled
at the edges (years of gazing out to sea?), they both chain-smoked and they
wore good tailored clothes. Their house was filled with flowers.
We sat out on their patio; the railings and light were blinding white looking down to the sea. Pink and purple petunias ("Imagine that! at Thanksgiving!"
Jean enthused) and ice-plant grew in mounds, marred only by brown scars
where the male Scottie lifted his habitual leg. We drank daiquiris.
We laughed and guzzled through the afternoon and I was near delight attalking for the first time on a parity with people my mother's age, people
who had seen the world, for with a child's casual cruelty, I had expelled mymother from that earthly paradise for the simple crime of answering to myown demands, sure sign of her essential frivolity.
We joked about Jean's tan, acquired through ritual daily sunning on thebeach below, and I admired the scarabs she wore on a chain around her
brown neck. I remember the necklace, my library-white hand holding thelimp gold away from Jean's neck as I marveled at how lean and unlined she
was compared to my mother.
18

The turkey dinner was not like later holidays' meagre Swanson's fare: we
had three kinds of stuffing and cranberry sherbet and four pies. We drankwine, fed the Scotties and Siamese immoderate amounts of turkey skin andlater we drank Cointreau in the living room as the lights over San Diegoharbor glided out of the fog. As coup de grace, Dorie and Jean took the kid
for a drive around the harbor, where they pointed out different kinds ofnavy ships, a friend's ketch, an old clipper-ship, all with proprietary pride.
We drove home laughing and singing and I fell asleep surprised.and happy
that I had taken up my mother's suggestion. Two such likeable ladies . . .
Next morning, the unsuspecting heart trod out into the living room. Doriewas emptying ash trays, pulling open the drapes overlooking the harbor.
"Morning," she said; "How's the beach sound?""Fine." A little awkwardness there; in daylight, behind nothing but ahangover and near-sobriety, friendship with two middle-aged women struck
me as improbable and futureless. I wondered if they were doing this out ofloyalty towards my mother, if she had implored them to take me on as acause to get me out of the library and into what she sanguinely referred toas "life."
Dorie gave me a clap on the back and looked me straight in the eye.
"Come on," she said. "Let's see what kind of a breakfast we can throw together out of that bird before Jean staggers out."
We made turkey egg foo yung. Dorie drank a beer while she made sweetand-sour sauce and whistled "The Washington Post." Her silence was companionable, accessible, and I fell into ease. Her life seemed plausible, attainable and happy; I wondered what had kept her from marrying.
Jean emerged with a Scottie. Her hair was wrapped in a towel and shewore a terry robe with a monogram on the breast-pocket. From the pocket
she drew a pack of Camels. She lit one. "Whew," she said. She sat down andsmoked the cigarette in silence.
Dorie smiled at her, one of those direct eye smiles. "Coffee?""For sure.""You eating?"
Jean eyed our meal. "You're going to tell me we're applying ourselves tothat damned bird again. I can see it. What is that shit?""Turkey egg foo yung.""Ill pass. Any cranberry sauce left?"
We ate in silence. After finishing her cranberry sauce, Jean lit anothercigarette and clapped her hands together. They were tan and lean like therest of her, like her neck, and they made a dry sound as she rubbed them
together. "Well. Anyone for the beach?"
I looked over, watching her rub her dry hands together. Then I saw her
neck.
It was covered with fresh little bites.
They hadn't been made by a Scottie.
I stared, I felt I could never drag my guilty eyes from Jean's neck. I don't
know how long I looked; time dropped away, we all stopped, the three ofus frozen in tableau. I tried to drag my eyes from there, turning to lookcasually at Dorie, but I only swivelled my stare to her neck.
19

Clean.
Back to Jean's.
Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.
I felt a horror rising, a dulled recognition, a feeling of having been co-opted,
duped, trapped into someone else's game. I began replaying the previous day
in my head, trying to find hints in what we'd done or said that would have
led ineluctably to this moment: glances, phrases, insinuations ... It was likea drug-field: time imploded, outward correspondences dropped away. I do
not know how long we sat there while dull Toad Ellen struggled to sort out
what had happened and what my relation to it was.
With the vindictiveness of the ambushed, I almost hoped one of themwould try to explain it away so that I could return some snappy, vicious
rejoinder, proof that I was nobody to fool around with.
Instead Dorie said to me, "Yeah I'm vicious."
Jean just sat and looked stricken.
Dorie began to clear the table. "Jean. Wake up. You want a beer?"
Jean swam out of her daze. "Theodora," she began to me.
Dorie cut in. "For christssake, babe, it's not the first time the kid's seena monkey bite. Or do they call them something else these days?""No .. .Monkey bites," 1 said, trying to be helpful. "Although sometimes I've heard, oh, some people call them hickies, PB's ..." Chartless,this was a chartless sea.
"What's a PB?" Dorie asked, all alert for new topics.
"Passion bite.""Oh." Silence, as all tred in fathomless waters.
Jean surfaced. "Does anyone want a cigarette?" she asked; there was suchurgency in her voice that I took one just to distract her.
"I didn't know you smoked," she whispered.
"I don't. I thought maybe I could learn," I said. "It seems as good a timeas any."Jean smiled. "Maybe you're going just a bit too fast, Theodora," she said.
Her smile wobbled, but she kept urging it up.
"You don't want to start smoking," Dorie yelled. "Christ! Talk about
perverted habits youll die an old dyke like me." She grinned, marshallinga sinister theatricality. She added, "You will please notice that I have now
broken the ice."
But the graceless Toad Ellen didn't choose to tread on it; after secondsof silence in which the aura of disaster dissipated, I loaded the dishwasher
and walked out of the kitchen with stagey promises of taking a long shower
and washing my hair.
I figured that would give them time enough to hold a conference andget a plausible front together .. .
I stood in the shower, washing away my outrage with a half-tube of Prell,
working its green jelly through my hair again and again. I cowered under the
spout: could I stay here until they both went away, hide years under the tap
as they aged and died, were buried in each other's arms, dust and monograms,
20terry robes and all, in the house's other rooms?
Someone tried the bathroom door; I shrank against the body-warm tile.
Would they actually pursue me into the shower to present their case, rip
open the glass door to plead for understanding and forgiveness?
Perhaps they proselytized for their cause ...
I stayed through water hot to warm to cold and blue. When it ran wholly
cold and hard, I sighed and stopped, using the black towels with new suspicion (black.. . ?).
Back in the living room, Dorie and Jean were assembled formally along oneedge of the couch. I stalked in, my head a malt resisting thought or feeling.
Dorie got up after fixing me with an elliptical stare. "I'm going to put onsome Duke Ellington," she announced. "You mind Duke Ellington, kid?""I don't know," I said. "I think my parents listen to him." Dumb, dumb,you are so dumb, Theodora.
Dorie laughed. "Yeah, your mother-she always loved jazz. I remember
when we were all stationed together at Magu during the War ""Done,"Jean said.
"For christssake, Jean, you're not my moral monitor . . . Let me finish
what I was going to say: your mother, Theodora, your mother used to go
to service clubs alone and sit in the corner with a bourbon and water andget so wrapped up in the music that she became invisible. You couldn't see
her. Her whole soul was caught up in it; there wasn't room for normal humanconversation with her at all. She'd sit with her mouth open, transfixed ...
Servicemen didn't bother her; no one ever went near her. This little girl inbrown with her whole heart pouring out into the band ..."
I sat, mute witness to my mother's past, Dorie shiny-eyed and inward as
she told her tale.
"Dorie was very fond of your mother," Jean translated.
Dorie pulled out of her fix to stare at Jean. "Boy," she said finally. "Thatwas brilliant. A brilliant conclusion.""How fond?" I wondered.
Dorie stared back at me from twenty-five years ago, distantly. "Fond."
Swept away. First the maiden totems of my childhood unmasked as old
Navy dykes, then my mother revealed for a jazz fiend pursued by (at least)
one of the naval inverts. I stood picking the lint from my (mother-made)robe while edges of my mind tried to crawl, lichen-like, across the opening
sutures.
Jean got up, flapping in her terry, and squirreled through the drawers of
their walnut secretary. "Here, Theodora," she said. "Maybe you should readabout us. I'm sure this is a shock for you, but it's not all that unusual. There
are a lot of books we've collected over the years," and she began spilling
paperbacks, hardbacks onto the floor, peering nearsightedly at their titles,
tossing them over the couch back at me.
"Here, this one's good; it was written a long time ago," and The Well of
Loneliness flew in my direction.
"What about that study, hon? The one where he talked to every dyke inthe land?" Dorie asked, watching Jean, smiling at her, her absorption, her
21
activity.

I turned away; I could not witness her terrible tenderness.
"Oh, yeah, The Grapevine, that's a good one," and a paperback sailed
across the room.
More books flew, their covers racy or sinister, titles a welter of despair
and damnation: women embracing in shiny black slips and curling red hair,whip-brandishers and caressers of net-stockinged legs. Red lips, cutting eyes,
pecador, pecador.
When it was over, Dorie and Jean stood smiling together, Tweedledum
and Tweedledee in their monogrammed robes. "Maybe you'll learn a little
about the whole thing, Theodora," they said, and exited, stage left, leaving
me with their dreaded wares.
Or merely dreadful. From my afternoon's reading, that dizzy deoxygenatedspin through the unfamiliar coils of nicotine and sapphism, I surmised thatdamnation was certain, if painfully enjoyable; that women who were thatway came in two shapes (crypto-cock and cunt); and that (let's hear it again)
The Tale of the Young Invert is an unhappy one. Much gin-drinking (fatalprophesy), much apartment and bar-hopping, an edema of consciousness.
I smoked, gagged and read, my eyes a fundament of tears. Was this what
Dorie and Jean's (my mother's?) lives meant?
When the light cut too low for reading, Dorie materialized on cue fromthe back of the house. "How's tricks, kid?" she asked, her old snappy self
again.
I had long since sunk below depression, realizing my own life-curse in
the grim tracts I'd read.
"How can you go on?" I wept.
She stared back humorously. "Go on? Why not? Want a drink?" Shepatted my shoulder, lingeringly.
"And the drinking," I cried.
"Shit, you probably do more drinking with your little college boys. It's
no worse for me to have a drink than it is for a fraternity kid. Drinkers
you know what they have in common? Drinking."
She put her blue terry arm around me. "Hey. Nobody writes books about
happy people, right? They wouldn't sell."I honked and wheezed, uncontrollable before my great recognition. Loneliness and waste: I could feel them sucking me out of that brave pure andwhite tower at Immaculate Heart where only two days before I had cavorted
in happy unconsciousness with Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Gerard
Manley Hopkins and the boys.
"I don't want to go, I don't want to go," I cried, and threw myself in
Dorie's lap like a hatchet.
She bent to my neck and kissed it softly, running her flat dry palm down
to the cleft in my back. "My dear, my dear, it's not so very bad in here,"
she said.

22

THEORY

photograph by Lynda Koolish23Susan L. Yarbrough

LESBIAN CELIBACY"Lesbian Celibacy " was a paper given to the Sixth Annual National Conference
on Feminist Psychology held in March 1979 in Dallas, Texas.

I do not know exactly why I'm here today, but I am sure that it is notwithout anxiety. I am not a "woman in psychology," but I am one of yourclients formerly a very frequent one, but now rather infrequent. By professional training, I am a teacher of Women's Studies, and I am also a celibate
lesbian.
You will, however, be delighted to know that, in spite of my clienthoodand my celibacy (which I define to include masturbation), this is not a "confessional" paper.1 Rather, it is a brief and preliminary consideration of lesbiancelibacy2 from four loosely related perspectives: (1) the non-treatment it isreceiving in readily accessible and putatively feminist books about women's
psychology, (2) some social difficulties and political criticisms encounteredby celibates, (3) the possible impact of celibacy on the client-therapist relationship, and (4) the nexus between lesbian celibacy, self-nurturance, andradical feminism.
My research methodology (to the extent that I have employed one at all)has been crude: I have not worked with psychological abstracts or journals,
nor have I bothered to read any library books about celibacy, for most ofthem appear to be by and about religious men. Instead, I have looked atthose women's psychology books which are both intellectually challenging
and economically accessible to many laywomen, and to many lesbians whoare puzzled and mystified by what professionals say and do not say about
us and the lives of our minds.
Primarily, of course, authors of women's psychology books have chosen
to ignore lesbianism entirely, and not since Phyllis Chesler gave us one wholechapter seven years ago has anyone ever again given us one whole chapter,
except for Charlotte Wolff, who gave us one whole dreadful book. Indeed, aquick check of several indexes and tables of contents of books long sinceread and shelved reveals that Jean Baker Miller's and Jean Strouse's anthologies
got no further than a man's ideas about bisexuality, that Juliet Mitchellmentioned lesbianism only three times in the course of Psychoanalysis andFeminism, that Baker Miller once again ignored lesbians in Toward a New
Psychology of Women, as did Jungian Irene Claremont de Castillejo in Know­
ing Woman. Most recently, Dorothy Dinnerstein reduced lesbians to a footnote, and all of what Nancy Chodorow has to say about us could be put on
one page. Needless to say, none of these books mentions celibacy, either
24lesbian or non-lesbian. Interestingly, some earlier women psychologists gave
more attention to lesbianism, although none to celibacy. On Women, a selection of Clara Thompson's work edited and prefaced and foreworded by men,contains two "pieces" about lesbianism, both of which reflect Thompson's
pathological and heterosexist approach to homosexuality an approach also
apparent in the works of Karen Horney in the collection entitled Feminine
Psychology.
Obviously, this dual underrepresentation of both lesbianism and celibacy
in popular books about women's psychology is discouraging, for there isvirtually no printed word to help us toward self-understanding. And selfunderstanding is what we greatly need, for a consciously celibate lesbian ismost assuredly embattled on at least three borders-those of her womanness,her lesbianism, and her celibacy and the fear of being deeply violated by the'perpetual thrusting of this oversexed yet undereroticized phallocentric culture
is very hard to still, especially without books and words to comfort and encourage.3 Lesbian celibacy, then, asserts itself as a particularly female-identified
erotic style, necessarily and acutely counterpoised against all other permutationsof active and inactive heterosexualities and homosexualities.
This is a difficult position to maintain, both socially and politically. Evenother lesbians sometimes react with incredulity and skepticism tinged, perhaps,with some resentment and reproach toward a woman who is so completely
in control of her own life. Still others say nothing directly, but subtly imply
that celibacy is symptomatic of extreme emotional shriveled-upness-that thecelibate is so "totally into herself" that she is unable to give and receive love.
What is not perceived, however, is that lesbian celibacy is, as Mary Daly would
say, a "state of Self-possession." In other words, our celibacy is not merelyor simply a reaction to a culture which so daily ana brutally insults andassaults our lesbian aesthetics and sensibilities. Rather, it is an affirmative
action a woman's moving toward her self and her center and, as such, it isworthy of strong social and therapeutic support, if not occasional recommendation.
Lesbian celibacy can also be targeted for political criticism, e.g., that it isan "individual solution" and therefore impermissible. Such pejorative labeling
however, is based on false consciousness from any feminist political perspective. From a lesbian separatist point of view, celibacy should be endorsed as
an act of deeply authentic separatism. From a radical feminist viewpoint,celibacy must be respected as a paradigm of self-empowerment and of thetaking back of one's body. And even from a mainstream feminist perspective,a celibate should be seen as a healthy role model for female independence4
and for the liberation of personal energy towards political work in the women's
movement. As Dana Densmore once wrote, "Erotic energy is just life energy
and is quickly worked off if you are doing interesting, absorbing tilings."5
Moreover, lesbians who politically condemn celibates on the basis of such
facile slogans as "an army of lovers cannot fail" not only implicitly adopt thesaying of a man (Oscar Wilde) and his explicitly naive military mentality, butthey also contribute to the replication of those male and heterosexual patterns
of promiscuity which dominate present culture. The message is clear: in order
not to be a straggling failure, one must enlist in the army of lovers. Lesbians,25however, must guard against cooptation by catchy phrases, cultivate andvalue our ability to be self-loving women, and know that revolutionary potential is only as strong as the individual woman. To paraphrase Adrienne
Rich, each woman must constantly expand the meaning of her love for herself as a woman,6 but in the process of doing so, we must also resist thelabel of narcissism, for the protagonist of that mighty myth was a male.
Which somehow brings me to the topic of therapy. With regard to thepotential effects of lesbian celibacy on the client-therapist 7 relationship, I
would suggest that it might lead to some distancing or pulling away by theclient, for celibacy often seems like an unspeakably private 8 affair, neverhad by many people in this culture, and, consequently, not well enoughunderstood to risk talking about in depth. In addition to withdrawal by theclient, however, there has surely been a failure by therapists to treat lesbiancelibacy's radical finding of the female self9 as the welcome realization andend of what the best of feminist therapy is all about-bringing a client tolove and have high regard for herself as an individual woman 30 to becomecompassionate 11 and affectionate with herself, to be so empowered as aradical female that she is strong, competent, and self-centered in the womandefined meaning of the term. In other words, lesbian celibacy could be viewed
as a healthy breaking away from dependence on therapy, and a therapist ofhigh consciousness and integrity 12 might want to raise the question of whether
or not it is time for the formal therapeutic relationship to end.
If it is not, tnen the therapist can help the client focus on the special
insights being gotten through this rare and valuable closeness to the self.
Additionally, celibacy might lead to disentanglement of some of the moretroubling aspects of the ongoing transference process, and, freed from many
distractions, the client could thus be enabled to work especially productively
and effectively in therapy, and to approach the inside of her psychic self
more easily.
Finally, I want to speak of the connection between lesbian celibacy, selfnurturance, and radical feminism. For the purpose of this paper, I will adopt
Jane Flax's definition of nurturance, as articulated in her recent article in
Feminist Studies: "[Nurturance is] the expression of love that conveys a
deep concern for the well-being of the person receiving it, without requiringthat the person prove herself worthy or fulfill the nurturer's own needs,
fantasies and so forth as the condition of receiving such care. Nurturance
also has a sensual aspect as well because the care extends to the recipient's
body as well as her psyche." 13 Fortunately, some of our best lesbian word
artists-Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Monique Wittig-have begun
to talk to us (as have some women in psychology) about the intricacies andintimacies of all types of relationships between and among women. Rich
speaks of our eroticism with each other, and of our shared perception ofdanger, 14 while Lorde talks of self-definition and bonding among Black
women.15 In her new book, Gyn/Ecology, Daly describes radical female
friends, sisters, and lovers; and in the novel Les Guerilleres, Wittig conjures
up a mythically strong vision of an unconstrained society of females who
protect and care for and work with each other as they live close to the earth.
26

Without naming it celibacy, Mary Daly refers to the ability to be radicallyalone as a requisite for the ability to be a friend to another woman, and she
also states that radical friendship between women means "loving our own
freedom, loving/encouraging the freedom of the other, the friend, and therefore loving freely." Furthermore, a woman who is a friend to herself possesses
an inherent and highly individualized strength upon which the best of femaleidentified bonding is based. Because she knows that only she can judge herself, and because she has a strong sense of her own worth, she has the courageto accept her self, and is thus neither self-sacrificing nor demanding of selfsacrifice from her sisters. Wittig has also caught some of the rising exuberance
and revolutionary potential of celibacy, as evidenced in the middle stanza ofthe frontispiece poem for Les Guerilleres:
CONSPIRACIES REVOLUTIONSFERVOUR FOR THE STRUGGLEINTENSE HEAT DEATH AND HAPPINESSIN THE BREASTED TORSOS
THE PHOENIXES THE PHOENIXESFREE CELIBATE GOLDENTHEIR OUTSPREAD WINGS ARE HEARD

And the connection among all these female things? First, on a very material
level, by consciously becoming celibate a lesbian takes back her body in themost fundamental form of physical reclamation possible. She has thus effecteda condition of aloneness which is extremely radical within the context of anactively heterosexual male culture. Within her radical aloneness, she learns tonurture herself uncritically-that is, she develops concern for her own wellbeing, gives to herself without requiring proof of worthiness, cares for her
lesbian body and its sexual health and pleasure of expression. In the processof learning and practicing self-nurturance, the celibate lesbian also replaces
self-destructive behavior and anti-woman indoctrination with female lifegivingness to herself. As she begins to center and sustain herself, her energy
escalates, and, rising free of cultural and sexual expectations and entanglements,
she is able to love and work with other women in supportive and unencumbered ways.
In conclusion, then, lesbian celibacy is a physical and psychic condition
which has not received sufficient therapeutic attention or support. Although
it is a unique opportunity for a woman to experience self-strengthening aloneness, it is nevertheless a socially and politically uncomfortable position, andintelligent, sensitive feminist therapy will recognize feelings both of isolationand of strength, and the often difficult emotional dialectic which they produce.
It is exceedingly special to choose one's self as friend, as sister, as lover.
Certainly, celibacy is a new space for lesbians to build in, where our outspreadwings will be heard.

NOTES

1. See Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe (Robbins), 'Toward a Feminist
Aesthetic," Chrysalis 6, pp. 57,58.
and conscious
2. For the purpose of this paper, "celibacy" is defined as the voluntary women.
abstinence, unfactored by religious vows, from sexual relations with otherg"
3.1 write this word this way in respectful imitation of Mary Daly and her "A-mazin
way of enriching words by breaking them down and up.
Adult Women"
4. See Barbara Love, "A Case for Lesbians as Role Models for Healthyon,
Chicago, 1975).
(paper presented aUhe meetings of the American Psychological Associatin5. "On Celibacy" (heterosexual context only), in Voices from Women's Liberatio(Signet, 1970, ed. by Leslie B. Tanner), pp. 264-65.
to Expand"
6. "The Meaning of Our Love for Women Is What We Have ConstantlyBooks,
Pamphlet
Out
and
Out
1977),
26,
June
Rally,
Pride
LesbianYorkNewat(speechNo. 1,1977.
7. For the purpose of this paper, the therapist is presumed to be a woman.
and8. Janice Raymond has enlightened me about the difference between the personal
the private.
9. Again, Mary Daly's influence in this phrase.
10. Sometime early, Eileen spoke to me of seeing the self as 'Very precious."
11. Judith has spoken to me recently about this.
a thousandfold.
12. Janice Raymond has multiplied the meaning of this word for meaughter
Relationships
13. "The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-D
and within Feminism," Feminist Studies 4, pp. 171,187-88 (n. 4).
1977),
14. Elly Bulkin, "An Interview with Adrienne Rich," Conditions: Two (October
pp.53,57.
Black
15. "Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving," The
Scholar (April 1978), pp. 31-35.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

tion
Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Avon, 1972). Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduca Press, 1978).
of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Univ. of Californi1978). Irene
Mary Daly, Gvn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon,
Dorothy Dinnerstein,
Claremont deCastille'jo, Knowing Woman (Harper and Row, 1974).
Psychology
The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper and Row, 1977). Karen Homey, Feminine 1976).
(Norton, 1967). Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Beacon, Psycho­
Mitchell,Jean Baker Miller, ed. Psychoanalysis and Women (Penguin, 1973). Juliet
erapy for Women:
analysis and Feminism (Vintage, 1974). Edna Rawlings, ed. Psychoth
Women and Analysis (Dell,
Treatment toward Equality (C.C. Thomas, 1977). Jean Strouse,Wittig,
Les Gtierilleres
1974). Clara Thompson, On Women (Signet, 1971). Monique(Avon, 1969).

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by Sarah Clark

29

Andree Collard

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON VICTIMIZATION"Victimization " was a speech given at the April 8, 1979 rally held to protest
Boston College's harassment of Mary Daly.

You know that scientists are investigating "solutions" to the problems they
have created through modern technology. All over the world, their drawing
boards are littered with blueprints that further remove the human race fromits roots in nature. Men have always shown a profound alienation from nature,but it is more obvious today as both overpopulation and the tools of tech­
nology threaten life on this planet with destruction that is as painful as it iscomplete. In their re-combinated world, nature as we know it no longer
exists: they plan an environment fit only for the humanoids they are hard
at work designing, frighteningly artificial and sterile. This raises a number ofquestions. When the frame of reference that served to define our humanity
no longer exists, is it appropriate to continue to call the species human? Or
perhaps human is the right word, as the etymologies I'm going to sketch
will suggest. In which case it is an insult, and we need to invent another word
for ourselves.
Another question: How did this all happen?
30

Since the scientists who engineer the human future do all their basic re­search on animals, I wanted to start with the area of animal experimentation
as one of the ways to approach this question. Why animals? What does thatsay about their attitude to life, to nature, to pain? I think a great deal about
these things, and today I will try to relate some of my thoughts to the oppres­sion of women in general, hags in particular.
I said I was going to sketch some etymologies. It is very significant thatthe words we use to designate the non-human world are closely related to
the life principle and the process of growth. Animal is formed directly on
the Latin anima, meaning "soul," "breath of life." Vegetable derives from a
Latin verb (vegetare) meaning "to grow, rouse, excite," which is the sameroot that gives "to wake," in the sense of being watchful and aware. Nature
itself comes from a Latin participle meaning "born" (natus). In Greek, zoion. ("animal") and physis ("nature") have the same connotations of soul andbirth. As for grain and com, they both derive from a Greek word meaning"old age," which refers to the goddess Demeter—who also gives the word
cereal through her Latin name, Ceres. Legume means "that which is gathered"and is related to the Greek logos, meaning "speech, word, reason." And fruit
is something that simply means "to enjoy."
By contrast, neither Greek nor Latin have kept the identification withthese vital processes in their word for "man." Men formed both anthroposand homo (homo and its derivatives human, humanity, etc.) in opposition
to these processes, with the clear intention of differentiating themselvesfrom nature, of becoming non-divine, non-mythical, non-animal, non-mother,
non-natural (natural being taken to mean "irrational—that is, not subject toman's reason). Only the word mother retains its identification with thecreative energy that characterizes non-human life forms. It comes from theGreek meter, as in Demeter, and gives many interesting derivatives. Metropolis,
for instance. I like that. Metropolis: Mother-city. As for father all it meansis "chief" in Greek. Patriarchy is formed on that word meaning chief. The
true counterpart of "chief," the one that corresponds to the social reality thatgave birth to these words, is queen, gyn.
These etymologies I think explain much about the stress the fathers haveplaced on the earth, about the classification of life into superior/inferior
categories (as in higher and lower animals), and about the fact that nature,animals, and women have a parallel history and suffer similar treatment.
From the beginning of "human" life (I wish I had another word), womencelebrated animals, nature, and themselves as equal manifestations of power.
Then, as man invades the metropolis, he cannot identify with what is goingon in them because he is predator (he hunts animals), rapist (he subdues
women through rape), and above all he does not create life. In the beginning
was the Universal Egg, Plato said. Which divided by itself, he said. So man
names himself basically from a position of deficiency. History, in the senseof patriarchal forging of values and ethical systems, is the story of his search
to compensate for this lack by enforcing as immutable law the supremacy ofthat one attribute he claims distinguishes him: rationality, reason. I think itis this perception of himself that conditions the curious ambivalence withwhich he has treated nature, animals, and women. There is, there has always
been, a split between his self-image as benevolent nature-loving man and the31actuality of his behavior as agent of destruction. His need of her has led him
abstractly to worship her while his fear and envy of her independent power
have led him concretely to degrade, dominate, and violate the core of her
being, her integrity. In addition, his envy placed him in a competitive position
with respect to Mother/woman/Nature. He will out-do her by "prying open
her secrets" (these are his words), by eliminating her "imperfections" and"improving" what has worked best for him. In this frame of mind he is trying
to manufacture his idea of what life is about. The sole purpose of the genetic
engineers, the thing for which they rationalize the sacrifice of thousands ofanimals every day, is the re-designing of life and the complete monitoring of
all its functions. Since I'm not bound by their scientific code that prevents
them from making value judgments, I call this immoral.
When you criticize the immorality of patriarchal values (the damage theycause, the directions they take), when you criticize them from a radical femi­nist perspective you become very dangerous. It is then that your differentness
is most obvious. You are making it difficult for him to pretend that you are
his intellectual clone, which is how he understands the notion of equality.
"Those who are not with me are against me," said the Lord. The patriarchal
way of dealing with differentness is through punishment, and he has many
ways to punish. If he can't "harness" this differentness—that means exploiting
it to his advantage—he can try various tactics to silence it: torture, death,isolation, etc. Radical feminism intrudes upon the false sense of security they
achieve and maintain through uniformity of thought patterns and behavior(homo also means sameness); it intrudes upon their consciousness in a waythat threatens the survival of their homogeneous humanity. They react as if
they had just stepped on an electric eel.
To go to the roots of things, which is what radical means, is dangerous
only to those who will not leave the surface. I suppose the word radical
evokes images of cutting vital parts, judging from how they use it: radical
mastectomies^ radical hysterectomies, the eradication of animal species andthe uprooting of trees and people. Animals and trees don't need to go to theroot of things, they are already there. Nature and animals and women—if
only we could be left alone—don't need to "harness the keys to Paradise,"
we are Paradise. (I'm using the title of a recent Nova program here: "Will weharness the keys to Paradise?") Anyway-for all intents and human purposes,
nature and animals have been made utterly powerless; they are forced to livein Hell and to die in Hell.
To get back to the idea that radical feminists are perceived as dangerous.
You know how commonplace it is to say that animals are dangerous to man.
In their programs on animal conservation, animal behaviorists and ethnologists
are always portrayed as heroes who expose their lives by confronting the socalled dangerous wolves, bears, lions, etc. in their natural habitat. In reality,
it is man who is, and has always been, dangerous to animals. Animals are
dangerous to man only when man has cornered them and the animals fightback. They talk about dangerous women, too: the femme fatale, the vamp,
the witch, the castrating bitch, the vagina dentata .. . Perhaps there lingers in
the collective memory of men a vague sense of once having been offered as
sacrifice to the Great Goddess. The sacrificial king, as he was called, was con32

sort to the goddess for only one year, at the end of which he was killedritualistically. Animal sacrifice is said to have replaced this human sacrifice.
It is said to be a cultural advance. Artemis is credited with this change, but
we don't really know at what time in patriarchal history this accreditation
was made.
I want to read a paragraph from a book review of something called By
Reason of Insanity, by Shane Stevens. The review is from the New YorkTimes book review section, by a man called Jack Sullivan, who shows noawareness of the paradox in the title. By reason of insanity?? (He himself
has written a book called Elegant Nightmares). The name of the main characterin Insanity is Thomas Bishop, introduced as "the most resourceful massmurderer of modern times." He is being pursued by a "power-obsessed reporter
who states the novel's theme when he insists that Bishop is 'still the childliving the horror and doing whatever the terrified beast in his nature can do
to survive . . .When pushed for survival we all revert to animality, you know.'
The world is a jungle best described with crude animal metaphors: 'Where
else could he find anything like New York, with all its women and places tohide? ... For what he was hunting, New York was the biggest national gamepreserve there was.'" Bishop. A child living whose horror? We revert. Crude
animal metaphors. Women/game. The reviewer tells us that "Mr. Stevens wants
very much for us to take By Reason of Insanity seriously." The title of thereview is "Chopping Up Women." This reminds me of a bumper sticker I
once saw while I was driving. It said: "Do it in the woods with a bow." It
had an inset of a deer's head in a corner. Mr. Stevens might as well have said:
Do it in New York with a bow, since that is what the sticker implies, eventhough it refers to the deer-hunting season in which bow and arrow are allowed.
While I am on this gruesome theme, I will mention one more parallel since
the seal-hunting season is open in Canada. I don't see much difference really
between the fantasy-image of cavemen who clobber women and drag themby the hair back to their dens and the clobbering of flawless white-skinned
baby seals that end up in people's houses in the form of coats and trinkets.
There is a connection, too, between these images/practices and the dredging
of the ocean floor.
I mentioned earlier that man is split between his self-image as benevolent
lover of nature/animal/woman and the actuality of his behavior as agent ofdestruction that so often verges on sadism. A leading British physiologist
recommends and licenses the use of living animals in medical research. He
himself has performed many experiments, often on dogs. He talks about how
he loves dogs. He loves them so much that he and his wife go to dogshows
regularly with their own beloved pets. This picture of a scientist is very com­mon. I myself know a she-biophysicist who fits it to a T. They believe thata dog is man's best friend. But when they go to the laboratory every morning,
this knowledge vanishes as if by magic. The lab attendants have done thepreliminary work: they strap the dog to the experiment table and remove its
vocal cords so the scientist can perform his "experiment" and not be disturbed
by the dog's cries of pain. What happens to a woman who doesn't play man's
helpmate and insists on being herself is similar to what happens to the dog,
although the means they use to silence her, real and painful as they may be,
are not that extreme. They invade her privacy, violate her integrity, and use
33degrading ways in an attempt to silence her. They want to continue to preachthe catholicity of their gospel undisturbed by the woman's voice. To grab a
dog and force it to suffer pain within the inner space of its psyche without
allowing it to defend itself or seek relief in howling is as immoral as to invadea teacher's classroom and try to silence her through binding statements,
isolation, and demeaning harassment. But still, the woman is far better off
than the dog. She is not the Total Victim because she is able to fight back.
I'd like to go back a little to the idea that the antithesis of animal isintellectual, logical, rational. According to Aristotle, who lumps women andsquid together (tentacles?), non-men are all instinct and intuition and, in
addition, women suffer from impaired judgment because of our tendency to
get lost in our feelings. Lower animals are like inferior women when rational
man uses himself as standard of comparison. The ape didn't come into its own
as higher animal until Darwin tried to show that man descends from the ape.
More recently, dolphins have been found to have a sophisticated sound systemthey say "qualifies" as language: like apes, dolphins are "higher" because they
can be taught to speak humanese, which is seen as a sign and measure of theirintelligence. Personally, I would be far more impressed if a human learned to
speak dolphinese. I think the Cretan women knew the ways of dolphins when
they drew them—as they did so many animals—far more intimately, far more
intelligently, than any of these re-searchers can ever hope to know them.
Since man is, by his own definition, the opposite of woman, animal, andnature yet needs us in order to survive, he cannot consciously and systemati­
cally destroy the givers of life, the givers of food. That is, not yet. He canand does, however, breed them in order to insure that his supply will not
dwindle and disappear, for he relentlessly pursues his quest to create life byhimself and to engineer brain, emotions, and motor responses the better to suitliis needs and to fulfill his fantasy of "the good life." The breeding of fruit
flies, rodents, cats and dogs (to name but a few of the most common ex­
perimental animals) has the same purpose as the breeding of humans throughin vitro fertilization, embryo implantation, and the cloning of living tissues.
Again, the language un/dis-veils. To breed you know means "to hatch out by
warmth," the idea being that warming is breathing upon (breed and breathbeing etymologically related). What could be further from warming than thecold sterility of artificially manufactured life, of artificially manufactured en­
vironment, and the uses to which this "life" is destined to "live"? Whether forhuman consumption, scientific experimentation or as professional wombs,
these breeds can at best be left to brood over the loss of their original shapeand inherent characteristics. Does a featherless chicken brood over her lostfeathers, her nakedness? I believe she does, in her own silent way, miss the wellbeing of her feathers that regulate her body temperature and protect her fromoutside discomforts. With respect to human breeding and/or cloning, the object
is eventually to reduce the female population to a desirable twenty per cent,according to a team of scientists working in Chicago. These broods of female
bodies will be programmed, much more so than we are, to carry out man's in­tended use of them. Furthermore, they supposedly won't miss a thing, as tech­niques to alter memory are well developed—and so are the means to control
moods, emotions, and pain.
34

Talking about pain, Descartes, who flaunts his Latin when it suits him(cogito, ergo sum), must have been struck with selective amnesia when hecame to the word animal. (You remember that anima means "soul," or "mind,"as in psyche, the Greek equivalent of anima). He states categorically thatanimals cannot feel pain because they have no mind/soul. You can imagine
what a boon this was to the then budding physical sciences. Their practi­
tioners could slit open a live animal's body and believe that the animal did not
suffer pain. They didn't use anaesthesia on animals until the last few decades,
and even now they claim that, in some cases, anaesthesia would hamper theirre-search. Descartes' decree must have helped the 19th-century French phy­siologist Claude Bernard, who is called the first biochemist because of his
work on the chemistry of the liver. He is described by a visitor as follows:"In a narrow, damp corridor ... he stood before his animal table ... his fingers
in the abdomen of a large dog which was howling mournfully." When I readthis, I flashed back to a conversation I had with a French friend of mine who
had an abortion in France. She said that the physician made sure that she
would howl, he said, to punish her for aborting life. In her fight to liberate
the abortion laws in France, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the sadism of doc­
tors in much the same terms. There are two more interesting facts about
Bernard. He is remembered today for having established that the stabilityof the inner self (milieu interieur) is the precondition of a free independent
life." Whose life was he talking about? The dog's? His wife's? Because thesecond interesting fact is that his wife deplored his treatment of animals
and contributed lavishly to humane societies. After years of distress, sheseparated from him.
I would like to end these thoughts with two more analogies that bringanimals, women, and nature close together. Both are mythic transpositionsof patriarchal invasions of women's space through trickery and rape. I am
referring of course to Zeus and Hades who erupt on the peaceful, playful
scenes of women in the fields and who abduct two of them. Zeus swims
away across the waters with Europa on his back, and Hades carries Per­sephone down to Hell. The other image is that of Penelope and Argus
the dog, waiting for Odysseus to come home. She at her loom, weaving
and unweaving to keep her suitors away; he on a dung pile, waiting tosee his master before letting himself die. I wanted to connect the image ofZeus in the shape of a bull and the bulldozing of the earth—also, the ideaof Hades, whose Latin'name is Pluto, with the element plutonium and therecent "accident" at Three Mile Island. But I can only mention them be­cause I'm running out of time.
It is really important to remember these images and not spend our life­
time spinning and unspinning in this sterile way but rather to un-spin theirdeadly fabric as we spin, in Mary Daly's words, "our own cosmic tapestries."
It is important not to keep sitting on their dung pile, but to fight back andre-member flowers and animals even as we re-member our selves, to set free
our creative spark and re-member the squid, the dove, the deer, the dog,
the frog, the cat, the rat, the rabbit, the mouse, the horse, the cow, the35

goat, the sheep, the hen, the leopard, the tiger, the lion, the sea-urchin, thefruit-fly, the owl, the duck, the dolphin, the ant, the whale, the seal, thesnake . . . and the spider.

36

Barbara Hammer

STILLNESS AND MOTIONA STUDY OF RELATIONSHIP AND FILM

Stillness. Together. I spent an entire day in complete and total relaxa­
tion with my lover in a space where we were together yet separate, shereading hers and me reading mine, our legs and feet touching across thebed. A trust. A commitment. To being there. The picnic, the baseball,the social grouping and cocktail-like party did not disrupt the continuityof our stillness. Across a throng of noisy people we were there in our to­getherness and separateness like boulders lying under a passing stream. So
there that in an instance of harmony we could go from quiet reading towalking out the front door to see a movie as if we were simultaneously
moved to action.
Stillness. Heightened by premenstrual sensitivity, vulnerability, huggability, touchiness; the time, she said, when I clung, the only time of thecycle when I held on. The quality of the time was sameness. Although wemight be engaged in different activities-eating, reading, hiking, lovingtime hung like an evenly strung necklace of mandalas encircling us. The
spaces were even, the balance weighted perfectly. No disruption, no dis­harmony, no ups or downs, but continuity. That must be the serene
blessing of a longlasting relationship I think, that stretching on and onof even time.
Motion. Abrupt. I move the luxurious quiet to a precipice, daring mo­tion, so unused to periods of stillness am I, unable to accept my inner
peace and so the world's. If you don't jump, I will. I introduce into ourtranquility, judgment.
She is too such and such. Instead of accepting the wonderful time we
spend. I get scared that this might mean an end to my search for the per­fect lover, and I introduce criticism, prompting my withdrawal. Not con­tent with stillness for any length of time, afraid it might mean 1 am not
growing, I disrupt. The motion produced is like a little whirlwind going
nowhere. A still disruption. Frenetic activity as I try and succeed at befud­
dling myself. You aren't good enough for me in this way or that, I chal­lenge, and we go around and around in a little dance discharging and re­charging without evolution. Revolution without evolution—so that the
motion is meaningless, does not produce change. Negative motion. For
naught.
To the adolescent, commitment by choice means the end of possibili­ties. The closure of a world. If I were to accept the peace and harmony
I found here, if I were to accept my lover, I would be putting a stop to37

my possibilities. A foreclosure on the adventures of life. Actually, I was
closing off to the adventuring with commitment, within a frame. The
bounding ego, boundless, shall know no home and always be seeking.
The adventure is determined as much by the question asked as any
thing. At the moment I was fooled. I thought I had adventure only inthe patterned way of new lover after new lover; but this format which
seemed like change to me was an illusion, for the habit was as rigid as anun's. Change and adventure for me now would become experiencing a"longterm relationship" (would that there were some new words to re­place these prison-sentence-like terms!).
There was a moment recently when many of my past relationships
seemed merged into the present. A sense of deja vu. Time played back­wards. When life seemed a rerun and stood still. The sense of repetition,of having been here before, gives a sense of stillness.
The experience of deja vu came from a phone call from my love. She
said she had presents for me and would give them to me on Saturday.
The day she called was Monday. As I lay on my cushion listening to her,my studio seemed to change from a place where I was engaged in thepresent, moving from moment to moment, to a frozen tableau. The table
and rug were the same, but my experience of them changed. Instead of
my taking them for granted, they became solid, unmoving, unchanging
objects of my past, and I felt caught and stolen away to this ice-cube
scene of the past. Sometime before I had been promised presents on a
Saturday, presents that never came.
Time moves slowly when we do similar things and moves rapidly when
we are in new situations with unfamiliar stimuli. A new relationship canseem like one of years^ and an old established one that varies little inhabits can make days seem like weeks. In my case of deja vu, time wasstill because a similar event/situation from the past reconnected with apresent one and gave the sense of an ellipsis of time, as if nothing had
happened inbetween.
From a study of physics we know that space and time cannot be sep­arated but are coordinates in a relationship. Time stood still and space
was frozen in a recall from the past. In the presence of new love timeflies, and space is charged by objects and people who take on a glow of
special significance. Space and time exist only in relation to a particu­
larizing consciousness. The stillness of a plateau in a relationship is tanta­
mount to a peaceful rest or stifling boredom, depending on who is ex­periencing it. Recently my lover and I experience stillness in motion, pla­
teaus in our relationships, in two different ways.
She experienced me cutting her out of my life. This reminded her of earlyfeelings of abandonment, and she went in a deep spiral down into herself
where the ultimate emptiness and stillness of loneliness lay like an unending
hole. Her therapist recommended she feel this utterly painful sense of nothing­ness and aloneness, the stillness that is so still and quiet like death that it
frightens, rather than find distraction in placebo motions of business, filling
her life with events and people to evade this stillness.
38

I experienced shutting off to motion naturally and willingly, seeing
fewer people, going out less, in order to have the stillness and alonenesswith myself my work requires. I appreciate and love these quiet, centered
times when the world of newspapers, daily events, friends and lovers spinaround me in their ongoing cycles yet I remain still and quiet. In fact, I
shut off the swirl like turning off a faucet, that my inner images might
flow. There is no way I can concentrate on a film, or writing, on a per­formance when I am moving from one date to the next so the week ap­
pears a veritable long weekend in my datebook. I need at this time—andthe cycle moves me here without my willing it—a long date with myself.
This plateau of stillness where I exist alone gives me the opportunity
to concentrate on Self and the images that appear like rocks and craters
on the moon. I have filled my time with motion to avoid the stillness forfear that there will be nothing there, but because I have built my identi­
ty, a self-construct, on being an artist, I am fed and nourished by what­
ever—even nothing should I find that-is in my stillness. This is the stuff
from which art is made; and if I don't go here, then I have nothing to
make. The social butterfly flapping her wings living years in a day withfluttery, hopping motions is at the opposite side from the still cocoon
where the meditation harbors, the images form and grow. In stillness
alone I find the motion for the moving images in film. It's like the per­sistence of vision where series of still photographs stopped in the film
gate of projected light for a short moment, l/24th of a second, appear as
motion. Owing to memory—our memory of the image that precedes—andthe continuous present that changes the moment we see it, the still photo­graphs appear to move.
In the stillness of my center, images come one after the other with theappearance of motion, of fluidity, of continuance. There is this flow, thiscontinuity, this progressing which eventually makes the work, but it is all
contained in the stillness and cannot be without it.
My lover who enters her stillness afraid of a terrifying loneliness, evenshe, claims that she would not do away with these periods, for she always
brings away new understanding. After we have an intimate sharing timewith another, it is an inner voice that demands we give attention to our
private selves. The voice says, "pay attention to me," "reflect on what I
am telling you." Each of us has an inner voice (or several) which guides
us in taking care of ourselves. If we don't listen and follow that voice,
we miss out on a relationship with our very self. In that case we could
go for days without knowing how we are really feeling, what it is we want
to do, what we need. By practicing a following of the spirit, of the intui­
tion, of inner suggestion, a balance will take place, and a circle of flow
without practice will eventually establish itself. At first it will take con­stant and attentive listening to the voice; late(r it will be second nature(truly the first and primary nature), and one action or contemplation
will naturally follow another.
This morning I awoke from a deep and dreamful sleep wanting to bealone. I had spent hours of the day before in intense and wonderfully in­
timate relating with my lover; much of the time was exceptional. This
morning I needed to reflect, to let the unconscious surface if she would.

39photographs by Lynda Koolish40

1 told my lover and she felt the same way; she needed time to herself as
well. A time of stillness so that the intensities of the day before could
settle themselves, find an interior home. We took our separate rooms.
Yesterday on the couch I was fallen in her arms, sunk into her bodyin restful giving as I can find in me when I need to, can find in me be­cause she's there for me to lie upon and be held by. As I lay upon her
I needed to reveal myself, reveal the mind/body split that tossed me, rest­
less with insomnia, night after night. 1 told her 1 was fearing an impending
conflict between my love for her and for another. That my love for her
was a physical and emotional one, that my body loved her, and that mylove for the other was an intellectual, ambitious head. Neither love was soclearly defined, but to make the distinction and understand the conflict I let
the division grow. I told her this and she heard without reaction or moral judg­
ment, and my telling and her hearing released an incredible and first-felt
surge of surrender in me. I don't have better words for it now and it de­serves better, but it was as if I gave up my ego-strength, my power of being,
my holding back, my resistances—and when I gave up those boundaries ofthe self, I experienced a very deep soul-felt release and acceptance. I had
given up my definition of myself and was still loved and accepted. 1 ex­perienced a sense of relief at being able to let go.
This was not an easy letting go. I felt frightened and warmed simultan­
eously. Frightened that if 1 let go of my self, she might dominate me in a
way that would not be good for me. At the same time 1 wanted to be dom­
inated, just a little bit. Dominate is not the right word. I wanted her to be as
strong, as powerful as I experienced myself-and that was quite powerful;hence, the strong sense in giving it up. 1 decided then not to make judgments
about myself but to experience my emotion without condemnation.
When we were in bed that evening and she began the delicious massage
of my back which led to her lying her full body weight on mine, and after
she began a movement with her buttocks and vulva pushing against minetrying to get in over and over in a rhythm I couldn't and didn't want tostop I began to make a judgment again. A judgment that this was hetero­sexual physical movement in our loveplay. And then I let that go, let thewhole left side of the brain go, and felt good because 1 wanted to. I want­
ed her apushing and abeating on me like that, and 1 wanted her fiercely andwas beginning to wonder if I would come just from the slight crumple ofthe sheet under me that would lightly brush my clitoris in our mutual
thrusting movements. Her hand slid down my hips, down to my fur, her
finger reaching, and she went for me. She went for me with all her intensi­
ty and push and 1 was there but not carried away, not carried away to cli­max, and when I felt her extended and expended and she pulled back,rolled off and over, belly up to me, wide breasts falling, white globes in the
candlelight, I didn't care that I hadn't come and that too was new. The
stillness came in with her loving me when we were moving in unison. In our
movement there was stillness at the center of the ride.
That evening every time we kissed we were unable to pull away, and one
kiss led to another or lasted itself a very long time. We danced and discoed
and 1 got wet pants and could have come with just a little more of her
41

right then and there but for the interruptions: the closing of the door, thewashing of parts that might be open to love licking later, the undressing,
the pulling back of the blankets. Another type of stillness. A cutting off, ourhabit of stopping where we were to make the setting more perfect. Not thestillness at the center of motion, but the stillness that comes from a knife
slice, a scissors cut, a snap. However and besides, we did move beyond thatstop to our riding passion movement, and she rolled off now all white andbellyside up like a porpoise in play, a live animal exposed. I couldn't help
it, I couldn't consider, I went for her breasts , sucking and pulling and get­ting a sweet sweat I wanted to drink and bullying and tossing them andrubbing them circular with my hard-pressed mouth all over her chest andatugging I went. She was the animal. I was the animal. We were deer lostin the woods to our fancy, and she'd be lost and I'd be lost and we gave
ourselves permission together to be lost and nonjudgmental and to do what
we wanted lost and most to find ourselves through our very lostness.
It happened everytime we made love. She, more and more aroused, would
give a sign, a signal, a cry of surrender that would heighten my passion, mywanting her, my surrender to my own passions that would become more in­tense by the surrender until only her cry of come would stop me, and I too
could roll belly over and up to her again.
No wonder this morning we needed our separate stills away from motion
together, away from relationship, away from the comes and goes between
us; we needed the stillness and quiet inside each one of us. To listen to thatstill lake, that still quiet lake of come of the self.

As the eye retains the image seen, I retain the image of the "other" dur­ing periods of absence in the mind's eye or memory to give the sense ofcontinuity. Persistence of vision, the time that the eye retains the image justseen, varies among individuals. I may need to see my lover/other every day
or have verbal connection with her to continue the sense of continuity.
Someone else can have an ongoing sense of relationship from weekend meet­ings. Still others carry a still image in wallets or prop them on their desk intheir workplace to recall a chain of images, a sense of flow and continuancein the present from this frozen image of the past.
The continuity of flow or motion we bring to a still photograph is not
an illusion, since we experience the continuance rather than the short, jagged,
cut-off events of the actual time/space spent with the loved one. If we fashion
a continuance, a persistence of vision, subjectively then it exists; and as ourregulating body organs continue and are the basic sense of life to us, so does
the ongoing quality of relationship give us a sense of meaning. I saw her thismorning; I hugged her and was stroked; she is gone and I won't see her for
two days. But the sense of her is with me in the present from the visual andtactile memory I keep.

42

t

CONCEIVING WOMEN:

Notes on the Logic of Feminism
by Joyce Trebilcot

Feminism is not just a matter of reordering what exists, of, say, moving
women from one "place" to another; feminism involves, rather, changes inthe very nature of things. In this paper I want first to explicate one reason
why feminism requires ontological change and then to give some examplesof ways in which these changes are taking place in our redefinings of women.
I
If we begin with the assumption that women should not be mutilated,violated, locked up, exploited, restricted—dominated, because we are women,
we have the basis for feminism in a narrow sense, a feminism that would
concern itself only with the mistreatments of women which arise out of per­ceptions of us as female. But to be a feminist is to care about women, and
it is arbitrary to limit our concern to just those aspects of our sufferings andlimitations which arise from a particular cause; so feminism, it seems to me,must be concerned with all of the harm done to women, regardless of its
source. This means that because women are oppressed not only because weare women but also because we are Black or Hispanic or Jewish, because weare Lesbian, because we are poor or handicapped or fat or young or old or
ignorant or (fill in the blanks), we must, as feminists, seek to identify, under­
stand, and eliminate all these oppressions.

They all have something in common. Their form is that a distinction is
made, which is a division into two; and one part or half is held to be superior
to the other; and it is claimed that the "superior" is justified in having powerover the "inferior." This, of course, is dualism. It is a dualism which is essen­tially evaluative and which functions primarily as an excuse for power over.
The dualistic pair is the unit of hierarchy-that is, a hierarchy consists ofoverlapping dualistic pairs. A classical rendering is the pyramid with God at
the apex, then angels, then man, then beasts, then the rest of the natural
world. On this scheme, God is distinct from and better than man, and entitled
to exercise control over him; man is distinct from and better than beasts,
and entitled to exercise control over them; etc. The pyramid, of course,
represents quantity: one on top, then a few, then more and more. While
this particular version of the pyramid is perhaps antiquated, the form itself
permeates dominant Western cultures.
It permeates received reality. At the epistemological level, it determines
perception: we see-sight rather than, for example, touch, is primary-it isobjects that are seen, and they are seen as having sharp boundaries. Moreobviously, dualism/hierarchy is the form of social organizations—governments,
businesses, schools, families. It structures the person—self/other, mind/body,
conscious and unconscious. There is even a dualism of right and left—theright hand, the right side, take precedence over the left. And so on.
In feminism, there is movement toward the elimination of all dualism,
not just of those manifestations of it which oppress women as women or
as members of other groups. One reason for this movement is the belief that
only by getting rid of dualism in all of its manifestations can oppressions
such as sexism, racism, and classism be permanently and thoroughly eradi­cated. Another reason is the sense that dualism as a form is discordant withwomen's values: even if no "inferior" category included women, dualism
would block the flowering of women's modes.
The elimination of dualism—of either a specific manifestation of it or allof it—requires change in the nature of entities which are related to one an­other in dualistic/hierarchical orderings. This is because the nature of theentities is determined at least in part by their participation in the orderings.
In academic terms, the relations among them are internal rather than external.
An example of an external relation is the distance between two cups on atable; a change in the distance does not alter the nature of the cups. A change
in an internal relation, however, does alter the nature of the things related.
A nurse, for instance, cares for the sick by assisting and following the ordersof doctors; if we eliminate her subordinate relationship to doctors, we change
the meaning of the word "nurse." Similarly, what it is to be a worker, anIndian, a wife-or, of course, a woman-is determined in part by relations
between these and other concepts in hierarchical orderings. Because the rela­tionships among items in dualistic/hierarchical orderings are internal, then,feminism, insofar as it is committed to the elimination of dualism/hierarchy,
is committed to changing the nature of things.

44

II
Here I want to give examples of just some of the ways in which internal
connections among items in hierarchies are broken by feminist re conceivings.
I focus on reconceivings of women because they are starting points and centersof feminist theorizings. These reconceivings are, I take it, political strategies
which weave bridges from patriarchy to women's spaces.
I use the distinction from academic philosophy between the descriptive
and evaluative meanings of a term. The descriptive meaning is characterized
as value neutral; it is supposed to imply only some facts about the thing inquestion. The evaluative meaning commends or condemns the facts described.
To call someone forceful, for example, is to ascribe a certain style of behavior;
this is the descriptive meaning of "forceful." But in addition, in most contexts,
to say that someone is forceful commends if the subject is male and condemns
if she is female; commending or condemning is the evaluative meaning of "forceful.'.
Now because we engage in feminist theorizings in order to re-experience,
to reconceive, that is, to bring forth new meanings, when we use a conventional
word as central in our theorizings, the descriptive meaning of that word shifts.
Sometimes the evaluative meaning shifts as well. Here I discuss three patternsof shift in evaluative and and descriptive meaning. The words used to exemp­
lify these shifts are "strong," "nurturant," and "lesbian." As these words,which
are used by feminists to describe women, are given new meanings, the meaningof "woman" changes too-and the conceptual bonds which hold us in our
traditional places in dualistic/hierarchical orderings are frayed.
1. Descriptive meaning changes, evaluative meaning remains the same:Strength. In patriarchy, a strong man is one who deals with difficulty calmly,
quietly, unobtrusively. According to the cliche, he is the strong silent type—
paradigmatically, the John Wayne character.
The patriarchal strong woman, like the strong man, handles or endures
difficulties quietly, without disturbing others. But in other respects she dif­fers from him. In particular, in accordance with the patriarchal practice ofdefining women in terms of our relationships to men and of our sexuality,
the strong woman is typically one who both lacks a heterosexual partner
and is thought to be sexually unattractive to men. She has no husband ormate (or, if she has, he is absent from the situation in which she is calledstrong) because if an appropriate male is present it is presumed that he takes
care of and protects her, not that she does this for herself, and so the term
"strong" is reserved for him. But even if she has no man, she can't be strong
unless she is heterosexually unattractive-usually she is imaged as old-because if she is attractive she should or might have a man, and again the term
"strong" is reserved, this time not for an actual but for a possible man. In
patriarchy, then, we generally must be both unattached to a man and un­
attractive to men in order to qualify for strength.
The feminist concept of the strong woman preserves the notion of strength
as dealing well with adversity-this is the common thread by virtue of which
the same term, "strength," is used in both contexts. But of course the heterosexist limitations of women's strength drop out. A feminist strong woman
may have a man-in many cases her strength is manifested primarily in her
45

struggle against a husband or lover. And she need not be unattractive to men—
we know that there are many young and conventionally beautiful women
who are strong indeed.
Further, in feminism the idea of strength as quietly, privately, unobtrusively
dealing with difficulty drops out. The feminist strong woman is likely to be
noisy, even loud; she is inclined to protest, to complain, to call attention to
her difficulty. This difference of course is based on the political difference
between patriarchy's interest in preserving present systems and feminism's
interest in changing them.
Thus, while the evaluative meaning of the expression "a strong woman"is the same in patriarchy and in feminism—it is positive in both contexts—
the descriptive meaning shifts: what is valued changes. This change is thebasis for a partial redefinition of the concept of woman. Whereas in patri­archy, strength in women is an anomaly, in feminism there is a tendency tounderstand it as essential, as an element in the definition of woman: all
women are potentially strong. But this move breaks one link in the internal
connection between the concepts of woman and man. In patriarchy, women
are weak as compared to men; therefore women are inferior; therefore women
may justifiably be dominated by men. But if women are by nature strong,
the syllogism fails.
2. Descriptive meaning changes, evaluative meaning changes: Nurturance.
The term "nurturance," whose root idea, of course, is that of a mother nursing
her child, is being given both new descriptive and new evaluative meaning by
feminists. Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin, in their article, "The Answer
is Matriarchy," provide an account of a feminist definition of nurturance whichclearly differs from patriarchal ones. 1 To nurture a child, they say, is to sup­port "the unique will of the child to grow into its full potential as a selfregulating individual"; again, to nurture is to strengthen "the unique will ofeach individual to form open, trusting, creative bonds with others" (184).
This concept of nurturing retains the connection with the mother-childrelationships, but otherwise contrasts sharply with patriarchal views of nur­
turance. In patriarchy, the aim of childrearing is not to strengthen the child'swill, but to direct and control it, to dominate it. In patriarchy, the aim of
the "training" of children is not to enable them to think for themselves, butrather to prepare them to take their places in existing institutions. Barbara
and Elizabeth note that "in capitalism the child's will is directed toward
serving the interests of corporations; in socialism it is directed toward serving
the state" (184). Their concept of nurturing as supporting the unique willof each individual to develop as self-regulating and self-realizing constitutes,
then, a clear shift in the descriptive meaning of "nurturance."
Evaluatively, nurturance is viewed positively in patriarchy, but as secondrate. Nurturing is a good thing for women to do, but not good enough formen. In matriarchal theory, however, the value of nurturing is expanded. The
nurturant mother-child relationship is to serve as the model of all relation­
ships, and all social institutions are to be designed so as to support nurturing.
Here, nurturing, a women's value, becomes the primary value.
But from a feminist perspective it is probably a mistake to say that matri46

archal theories make nurturing primary, for feminists tend not to be concernedto order values hierarchically. We may say, then, that what matriarchal theory
does is to horizontally expand the range of nurturance. Traditionally, only
women are supposed to be nurturant, we are expected to nurture men andchildren but not one another or ourselves, and nurturing is supposed to takeplace only privately, in the home. But a matriarchal society is one in which
nurturing is valued for everyone, in all contexts. Thus, matriarchal theory
not only gives nurturing a new descriptive meaning, it also radically expands
its sphere as a value. And if nurturing is not second-rate, then women are notin this respect inferior to men, and one of the struts holding up the patriarchal
hierarchy is toppled.
3. Descriptive meaning changes, evaluative meaning is reversed: Lesbian.
Another way in which patriarchal evaluative meanings are altered in feminism
is by simply reversing them. The patriarchal intention to keep us in line bycalling us dykes or bitches or hags is blocked when we describe ourselves inthese terms with pride and pleasure. We break out of secondary status, outof hierarchy, by flipping their evaluations over, by gladly acknowledging that
we are what they condemn.
This reversal of value is based on a reconceptualizing of the descriptive
meaning of the term in question. While patriarchal concepts of lesbianism
focus on women "having sex" with women—and on men (lesbians are women
who can't get men, who need men, who hate men, etc.)—feminist conceivings
retain only the emphasis on women, and transform it. Here are some samples.
From the Radicalesbians: "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed tothe point of explosion."2 From Ti-Grace Atkinson: Lesbianism is the "com­mitment, by choice, full-time, of one woman to others of her class." 3 From
Sally Miller Gearhart: "A lesbian is a woman who seeks her own self-nurturance."4 Such ways of understanding lesbianism depart from the patriarchal
concept in description and reverse it in evaluation. And they not only movelesbians out of our patriarchal places as inferior to heterosexuals and to men,they also have implications for the concept of woman: if some women—les­bians-are not dependent on and inferior to men, then no women need be.
Ill
I have so far talked about ways feminists recreate ourselves by giving newmeanings to words which are used in both patriarchy and feminism to describe
women. But not everything we need to say about ourselves can be expressedin this way. So feminists also describe women in terms not conventionallyused to describe women at all. I have chosen three examples here. One is"together," an adverb in standard English, an adjective in slang, and a feminist
adjective in the work of Inez Smith Reid. A different sort of example is a
new combination of ordinary words: "woman-identified." The third case isa materially new word, a word formed by combining parts of standard words—"gynergy." These are terms we have appropriated or invented for ourselves.
One might say that, unlike the words 1 discussed earlier, they are not old
words given new meanings, but rather new words; they are, anyway, newdescriptions of women. So to understand them as contributing to feminist
conceivings of ourselves is not to trace shifts in their meanings from patriarchy47

to feminism-"gynergy," for example, has no meaning in patriarchy at all; it
is, rather, just to understand why we need these new words, what they mean.
"Together" is used by Inez Smith Reid in her book "Together" Black
Women to describe politically conscious Black women. Many of these women
do not define themselves as feminists, but in their struggle against racism asa hierarchy of power they are clearly sisters of feminists. Inez's account of
how she came to use the word "together" in thinking about these womenhelps to illuminate one sort of politically-based conceptual shift.
Inez began her project with the intention of studying militant Black womenand so she selected her subjects on the basis of their "reputation in the com­munity for militancy." One of the questions the women were asked was todefine militancy. Among the responses: "To be militant you have to beaware . . ."; "Militancy is when you can actually analyze . .."; "a militant
person is, for Black people, anybody who decides it's time for White folks
to stop kicking my ass. It's just anybody who's tired of being messed over"(17, 18).
But most importantly, many of the responses carry a sense of dissatisfaction
with the term "militant" itself. This sense is perhaps best expressed by the
woman who says: "I really feel it's just a name that the White people gaveto the Black people. They call them that name because they speak the rightthings for the race .... I don't think there's such a word as that" (20). Thereis no such word as that. This woman not merely refuses to accept a characteri­zation imposed on her by the dominant group, she denies the very existenceof the word.
As Inez listened to the women she was studying and began to appreciate
their tendency to reject the standard concept of militancy, she herself moved
away from this notion and came to think of these women not as militant,but as "together." She cites the definition of "together" from the Dictionaryof Afro-American Slang: "to have one's mind free of confusion; to be positive;functional; to emerge as a whole person." Inez adds that in her work, "together"has "a more collective connotation," it is "characterized by a spiritual close­ness in a common endeavor—that of a singular or peculiar commitment to .
erase oppression." Further, the term "denotes a refusal to take on, uncritically,
the total value structure of the White community" (29). So here we have thediscovery of the negative evaluative meaning of a term and its replacementwith a new word, that is, with a word which in the standard language of thedominant culture is not used to describe persons at all.
The description of some women as "together" has, of course, implications
for the concept of woman. Inez Smith Reid's work suggests that all women
can be "together"-that is, free of confusion, whole, and sharing commitment;
insofar as this conception of women is inconsistent with patriarchal ideas ofwomen as scattered, incomplete, and at bdds with one another, it tends toward
transforming the concept of woman and so breaking the bonds which hold us
in our traditional places in hierarchical orderings.
Another approach to reconceiving ourselves is to make up terms. The
expression "woman-identified woman," introduced in the Radicalesbians' 1970
paper, names a woman who creates her identity in relation to women rather
than in relation to men and who makes women her primary commitment:
48

".. .we must be available and supportive to one another, give our commitment
and our love, give the emotional support necessary to sustain this movement.
Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors"(215). The paper provides a new, positive description of the lesbian feminist,along with a new name for her: woman-identified.
The meaning of the expression "woman-identified woman" has shiftedsomewhat within feminism. The expression has been used widely since its
introduction, with the understanding that while not all lesbians are womanidentified, all women-identified women are perceived by patriarchy as lesbians.
But then at the 1978 founding convention of the National Lesbian Feminist
Organization, a resolution was adopted which specified that membership in
the new organization is open to "all lesbians and/or woman-identified women
who agree with the purposes of this organization." "Woman-identified woman"
was included partly to make space for lesbians who cannot publicly say they
are lesbians. But it was understood also that this provision would admit tomembership women who in patriarchal terms are not lesbians.
So the concept of the woman-identified woman has taken on a life of its
own. Arising out of the rejection of the male practice of defining women in
narrowly sexual terms, and specifically out of the rejection of the narrowly
sexual patriarchal definition of lesbianism, the new concept at first simply
added to the sexual: a woman-identified woman was a lesbian who lived pri­marily with and for women. But then the term was used in such a way thatthe sexual criterion dropped out entirely. Thus our reconceivings of womenchange.
Another new word invented by feminists is "gynergy." Like "womanidentified woman," it has become a regular part of the vocabulary of many
feminists. (The women I know pronounce it with a soft "g.") Janice Raymonddescribes gynergy as "the woman power/spirit/strength that is building up in
Svoman identified women'" and as both individual and social: "... it proceeds
not only from an individual woman's realization of her own power of being
but from a collective consciousness, i.e., a feminist collective consciousness."6
Unlike the other concepts discussed here, gynergy is not an attribute ofindividual women; we do not speak of a "gynergetic woman." Gynergy issomething we as individuals feel ourselves participating in. I can think of no
patriarchal concept which works in the same way-that is, which expresses
something personal (not merely an atmosphere) which is at the same time
not an attribute of persons. It may happen, of course, that we will come tosay things like "Sybil has great gynergy." Then the term "gynergy" would berather like "spirit." But for now, it appears that gynergy is not only a newconcept, but a new kind of concept. And it too is part of our redefinings of"woman."IV
These are just some of the ways in which we are reconceiving ourselves:
taking on conventionally positive characteristics like strength, and changing
them; redescribing and reevaluating aspects of ourselves like nurturance andlesbianism; and using words not conventionally used to describe women to
express our becoming. These shifts all break internal definitional connections
49

which exist in patriarchal systems between concepts of women and otherconcepts, particularly between concepts of women and of men. By breaking
away from definitional connections which determine women's place in patri­archal conceptual systems and so in "the world," we move out of traditional
dualistic/hierarchical orderings.
From a patriarchal perspective, all the concepts of women discussed here
would be said to carry positive evaluative force, or to establish new ideals for
women. But this account misrepresents the spirit in which these ideas areset forth. It is men who have invented the concepts of good and bad and forwhom the making of value judgments is a major occupation. Feminists makevigorous value judgments about the patriarchy, but in our own worlds ourconcern tends to be more one of understanding and making space for processes
than of evaluating persons and acts. Feminists are highly sensitive to the needsof women to create ourselves out of our own experiences, to our needs not
to be told what we should do or be. The concepts of women I have discussed
here then are not ideals or models, but gifts from some women to others, tobe modified, transformed, abandoned, as each woman feels.
These conceivings of women are exercises of power: the power of naming
ourselves, and the power in our new names. This is not different from "real"
power. Although I have written here of words and concepts, the shifts I havesketched are also ontological; they are shifts from being women in patriarchy
to becoming women in our own times and spaces. What patriarchy might see
as logic, feminism understands as political strategy.
NOTES
1. In Our Right to Love: A Lesbian Resource Book edited by Ginny Vida (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978).
2. "The Woman Identified Woman" in Radical Feminism edited by Ellen Levineand Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1973),
p. 240.
3. Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974), p. 132.
4. "The Spiritual Dimension: Death and Resurrection of a Hallelujah Dyke" in Our
Right to Love, p. 187.
5. "Together" Black Women (New York: Emerson Hall Publishers, 1972).
6. "The Illusion of Androgyny" in Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 1,
Summer 1975, pp. 64, 65.

50

RESPONSE
Dear Women:
The following paragraph is taken from an untitled essay written by Martha
Yates, which appeared in Sinister Wisdom 8:
Recently in Boston women organized "Women take back the night."
Along the way, there were small groups of men, each man with his hands
around a thin candle, about seven inches high, lit, which he held slightly
below his waist. It seems they think they must still bring us their light(so that we can see in the dark), and women are still letting them in somany different ways: semen, the seed of enlightenment, their word. .."I am outraged by Ms. Yates' paragraph, which I have quoted here, in full.
I was present at this "Women Take Back the Night" March and 1 would liketo comment on Ms. Yates' remarks and the men she has mentioned.
Men were urged not to participate in the march itself, which occurred on
August 26, 1978. However, they were encouraged to attend the rally that
followed afterwards. In my article "The History of Take Back the Night,"
which appeared in the Gay Community News, Vol. 6, No. 6, August 26, 1978,
I briefly commented on the proposed route of the Boston march. Here is aterse quote from my article: "The march will proceed through a section of
the Fens, dimly-lit tree-shrouded parks which, ironically enough, have been
the site of many attacks on gay men."Now, Boston is a city known for its violence that stems from racism. What
known is the fact that Boston also has a rampant brand of homophobiclesserisfed violence. In the years that I have been out as a lesbian, I have been bom­barded with (true) horror stories of gay men being beaten, stabbed, gassed
and strangled. Gay men know all too well the brunt of violence.
Mid-way through the Boston "Take Back the Night" march, my eyes behelda sight that was so wondrously beautiful, I almost wept. The march was ap­
proaching the Symphony subway stop. There, perched and standing near the
subway entrance, was a group of men holding single white candles of support.
Propped against a wall was a placard that signified them as: "Men Against
Violence Against Women." (For documentation of this scene, may I refer
you to the actual photograph of these men from this event which appears on
the cover of the Boston-produced "Walls to Roses" album.)
These men were faggots from the Gay Community News (GCN)-gay men
that I knew personally. (I had no idea they planned to show up during themarch.) They stood in silent support, smiling and waving at familiar faces
among the thousands of women that marched past them. I was so proud that
immediately upon seeing them, I shouted, "Those men are from GCN!" Then
I cheered and applauded them. The women marchers around me respondedwith warmth and appreciation. They understood the solidarity of the faggot
presence—no women were offended that these gay men stood on the sidelines.
I am quite angry with Ms. Yates for taking this beautifully memorable
incident (omitting some very serious facts) and twisting it to apply to her
51vague, poorly-written essay. (Another group of men and women, standing
further along the route holding candles, were campaign workers for Rep. Mel
King, a black man who is currently running for Mayor of Boston.) Further­more, I am amused by Ms. Yates' phallic paranoia. The faggots (as well as thecampaigners) who held candles did so as a sign of support-if there is any
symbolism in this, it is the (genuinely concerned) warmth of the flame, andnot an oppressive, male-oriented "light" as Ms. Yates suggests. If Ms. Yates
objects to the actual phallic shape of candles, I suggest that she vent her
anger at the people who manufacture candles and not the men who holdthem.
I am furious that Ms. Yates misconstrued this incident to fit her ramblingprose. If Ms. Yates honestly perceived the incident as she reported it (threat­ening, rather than supportive), then I am very sorry that Ms. Yates is incapableof identifying true allies when she sees them. For all the lesbians who readyour periodical, particularly those who have political faggot allies, I hope you
will publish this letter in its entirety. I will also deliver a copy of this letterto the editors of the Gay Community News. Thank you for your attention.
-Pat M. Kuras
Martha Yates replies:
In the footnote that Pat Kuras refers to I meant to convey a quick, notparticularly solemn impression. I was working on an essay uncovering theideology of light and sight which runs through Western and some Eastern
philosophical and religious traditions. Knowing how the physical and philo­sophical properties of light/sight can disguise a very patriarchal and oppressive
consciousness and, then, at the same time, encountering men holding up
their candles at the "Women Take Back the Night" march made for a veryironic and ludicrous sight. I was amused—I still am.
The part of Pat Kuras' letter which interested me was her description ofmen as allies. This implies shared fears, shared risks, a shared and common
cause. What, really, is common between men and women? In the light, inthe daytime, there seem to be mutualities. For instance, men and women
seem to share a so-called "human body." In the dark, on city streets, women
have found out how false this is. The "human body" is an illusion, ideologicalat its roots.
I also doubt whether women and gay men share the same attackers or
their attackers the same motives. My feeling is that those who are trying tomove beyond what is given find that they do not genuinely share anythingwith men, anything, that is, which is critical and at the edge of a radical
understanding.
The word alien is more descriptive of men. No one should be tricked into
thinking that all of us, so-called "members of the human species," comefrom the same place. Aliens can be dependent upon one another and caneven converse easily with each other, as James Triptree, the science fiction
author, has suggested in her short story "The Haploid Heart."
Of course, I didn't write all of this in the footnote. For it was just that—a footnote to a complex and difficult subject, the meeting with an abyss inlanguage, an abyss within thought itself.

Catherine & Harriet: I want to send this poem to Catherine in reference to her "deafness"queries. My own problem, being the one who listens too closely, has been illuminated by
SW 8, Catherine's questions and others' responses . . .
Martha Courtot

LISTENi have listened
as a slave listens
leaning my ear into the wind
as if the world could be a seashelland my ear the only one
to hear the roar of the ocean
and what it insists on tellingi have held lives to my ear
and taken their hollow sounds inside me
and made of myself a fluted hollow soundand i have sung these songs back to the world
if you saw me with my ear to the rail
hands clawing the dirt
and i told you the train of your life
was coming you would have believed me
packed your bags and left
forgetting to wave good-bye
i am trying to tell you something
can you hear me?
or is my voice like the sound of traffic
sage and steady a murmuring a lullaby
to drift off to sleep bylisten:i want you now to open
to be open to me as an ear is open
to open like the womb opens
when it wants to surround life
i want you to listen to hear me
as if i too were a crucial note
you must invent-Martha Courtot

53

The following letter is in response to two articles in Sinister Wisdom 9:
Bertha Harris's "Melancholia, and Why It Feels Good" and Irena Klepfisz 's "Lesbian Literature and Criticism."
Dear Sinister Wisdom,
Someone ought to step between Irena Klepfisz and Bertha Harris. Bertha
is being outrageous, as usual, and she rather deserves the Response, but
Bertha is-in her indirect, dramatized way-right too, especially in one throwaway line: "the onerous inhibitions lesbian-feminist politics seek to place on
the writer of genuine talent."
Bertha Harris is the author of a very fine book, the best Lesbian novel
I've ever read and possibly the best novel of the last thirty years, Lover.
Lover has been mostly ignored in the women's press and when it hasn't, it's
been called Politically Incorrect (to my knowledge) though a Feminist Review
of Books reviewer recently rediscovered it.
Why?
Most artistic and literary criticism in the women's press is very bad. It re­acts to having its P.C. buttons pushed. Much of it is practiced by refugees
from the misuse of the high culture tradition in high schools and colleges tobully and stupidify the young—this is largely class warfare, owing most ofits virulence to the teachers' own insecure class position and their defensiveness about it, teaching having become (since high schools and colleges losttheir elite character some time in this century) a road to upward mobility
for children of the lower middle class. There is also the problem of thecompensatory Instant Junk Food commercial culture which pretends to bea popular alternative to the poisoned (and often poisonous) high culture, andthe consequent false split between "art" and "entertainment." And of course
the priggishness of certain revolutionaries who really wish to escape from in­dividual personality, individual voice, idiosyncrasy, and any interpretation oflife that demands all three. Women (as Phyllis Chester once said) have a realterror of difference.
What Bertha is trying to defend, in her exasperated, flamboyantly offen­
sive, Southern Gothic fashion is (I think) her right to her own artistic ob­
sessions and her own sense of fantasy—that is, she's defending in a deliber­
ately nasty way (because attacked and exasperated) what every artist must
defend: the absolutely inescapable, crucial fact that expression is logicallyand chronologically absolutely prior to analysis.
Bertha Harris has given much of her life to feminist publishing, has final­
ly cut her ties to a self-sacrificing job in women's studies which was ex­tremely harassing and energy-draining, and has been either ignored or be­
littled by the very women's community she's been trying so hard to serve,
and has had to watch the stupidest sort of mediocrity praised far above herwork. (I'm not talking about Irena Klepfisz.) I'm not surprised that she ex­
ploded—and knowing Bertha, that she did so elliptically, cryptically, and as
angrily as possible.
Every few weeks someone sends me some incredibly clunky artifact ofwomen's culture which falls helplessly on my desk and instantly expires of54sheer unworthiness to live. In between the lousy poems and the excruciat­
ingly dull fairy tales, some singer who can't stay on key and whose un­trained voice can't sustain a note for more than two seconds arises andproclaims: Wooh-mun/Will be far-ree-hee-hee! wrenching her diction, choos­
ing the wrong vowels for her words, letting air escape uncontrollably past
her glottis, and radiantly telling interviewers she is "self-taught" and there­
fore innocent of sexism. This isn't a new, woman's style, it's not a blues
style, it's not any style. It's simply incompetent.
Incompetence-praised incompetence, revered incompetence-has (I sus­pect) driven Bertha Harris mad.
It drives me mad.
Do I want therefore to suppress such efforts? Not at all. They're absolute­
ly necessary. (Irena Klepfisz is not talking from the point of view of incom­
petence, of course. She's talking as someone who's absorbed everything The
Boys teach as "art" and is busy throwing much of it out, in an extremely
sophisticated and analytical fashion.)
But The Boys are still, by and large, custodians of the most technicallyrich and adroit literary culture that exists in English, even though it isn't the
only literary culture (they pretend it is) and it has no monopoly on all theother virtues. (They pretend it does.)
Books aren't bad because they include long words and subtle literary de­vices. (Surely a classless world will include education in all literary traditions,even the one now called "high culture.") They also aren't—quite obviouslybad because they don't.
I'm speaking from Harris's corner and to Klepfisz because the latter is be­
ing rationally persuasive, I agree with her, and Bertha, instead of arguing,simply went Stomp Smash Crash Blonk and walked out.
We must try to exercise some sense of where people are coming from andwhat they really mean instead of fastening on each individual statement andwalloping it. The latter leads to nothing but aggravated tempers, hurt feelings,
and increased insecurity for everyone. I'm not suggesting a meaningless "toleration"-only that language is a very imprecise medium and that 85% of
most statements are in a code that really means / want, I need, I feel, mysituation is... To consider these as positive, precise statements of a consider­ed political position is male-style linear thinking. And how much more poli­tically incorrect than that can you get?
Different needs aren't betrayals. Incompletenesses (Mary Daly's lack ofawareness of economics, Ellen Moers' white solipsism) are not deliberate be­
trayals, either. Though if we handle them that way long enough, we may
produce plenty of real betrayals. And a large lack of women left to demon­
strate any kind of solidarity with.
Bertha, come home. We love you. A dozen long-stemmed American
Beauty roses await you. The intelligent, rationally persuasive, brilliantly
talented Irena Klepfisz is favorably reviewing Lover. The entire membershipof The Oppressed Lesbian Mothers' Grim Denim Bikeathon and Deprivation
Society has donned elegant riding habits and mounted chestnut mares andis exquisitely dashing about the bois, calling your romantic name. Comehome!
All is forgiven.
x~>
„Kuss
•
Joanna

The two following responses are portions of letters that Ann Alien Shockley
received after a short story of hers appeared in SW 8 (Spring 1979). That
story, "A Meeting of the Sapphic Daughters," is an account of Lettie andPatrice 's reactions to the behavior of white lesbians at a meeting in which
they are the only black lesbians present. With the permission of all concerned,
we're printing these letters-which were not written for publication-as afirst step toward sharing information in SW about how racism manifests itself
among lesbians-what it looks like, what it feels like, where it comes from,
how to stop it.
1. "Patrice applied lipstick. . ." My first reaction was that in 1979 you
won't find any Lesbian caught dead wearing makeup. Then I remembered a
new bar that Cheryl and I went to recently. I thought I had stepped back­ward in time. It was mainly black and Latina and strictly butch/femme, com­plete with superfly outfits, sheer disco dresses, and the makeup.
Another thought: in 1970 at my first and only DOB meeting, I deliberately
wore a dress to let any prospects know that I wasn't butch. Even then I re­jected the role-playing bit; but, forced to make a choice, the "butchy" womon
was more attractive to me than the simpering, dependent female. At that time
only feminists were in combat boots and lumber jackets, and they were allwhite and straight.
2. The location of the meeting is perfect! My first contact with DOB wasin New York: a dance in a loft, in the warehouse district. Your description isabsolutely photographic.
3. "... large husky woman with hostile face. .." Yes, 1 still see that face,distorted with the distaste of a racist. I used to see it in all the bars and thestreets of Provincetown. I see it in bars now, and yes at Mountain Moving,
though rarely. I'd long ago stopped allowing that face to get to me. In thepast, B.C. (Before Cheryl), it was affirmation of my fears that a particularplace among Lesbians would not offer me a source of finding a womon-thatplace would therefore become even more inhospitable than straight places,
where my mind was at ease with the acceptance of there being no possibility.
4. Patrice and Lettie were lucky; the DOBers in Boston wouldn't even lookat me (". .. gazing at them from behind cold masks ..."). That's what I re­member most—the collective consent not to recognize my presence, not toacknowledge my existence. And I, like Patrice, still stupid enough to thinkthat my non-negro, college-educated accent would make them welcome me.
Ann, I never did find out how you became aware of this phenomenon. Did
you experience this personally?
5. Oh yes, those dreadful potluck suppers. How I hated them. One or two
were plenty for me. Heavy, starchy, tasteless food of questionable quality
and so-called Lesbians everywhere but all unapproachable.
6. Trollope's "mannish appearance." This is the image I would have hadof the type of Lesbian you describe but in terms I would not let myself use
to describe her. What I'm expressing is an ambiguity/conflict within myself:56

a refusal to accept the definition of a Lesbian as an imitation man; along witha refusal to adopt the Lesbian costume of the 50s or the once-feminist-nowLesbian/feminist-and-even-ordinary-population garb for wemyn of the 70s(simply because I reject the idea of a uniform and have always hated to dress
to prove a point and have always hated anything that smacks of playacting
or pretense); along with an uneasiness about dressing in a "feminine" mannerthat might indicate a fear of being identified as a Dyke, which I certainly do
not have (I really do dress just from what appeals to my eye, then what's
comfortable-only); along with always liking to see Lesbians in "Dyke garb"it having great sensual appeal to me, probably stemming from it being a markof identification. This conflict was demonstrated recently on the Donahue
show when a Lesbian complained of society's bigoted stereotyping, andDonahue asked why then did she wear a man's shirt, tie, and vest. His ques­tion silenced her; and a response came from a faggot whose feeble retort was,"When Diane Keaton wears the same outfit, it's called fashionable."
I've asked myself the same question: If you reject prickness and prickdom,
why adopt the clothes/characteristics of pricks? I personally feel that I dress
in a way that rejects the male ideal and standards set for womon's dress by
my not adopting the dress of prickdom, which to me is the dress of whores,
stripteasers, and men in drag. I wear no heels, but I also wear no combat
boots. Anyway, 1 think I just answered the question recently. The descriptionof the mannish dress-compared to what? Compared to prick definitions ofwhat is male and female, with separate sets of everything according to his
standards. Well, why not take a vest and a tie and short hair and call it notmannish but Lesbian? Man has set the standards, created all the definitions,established all the opinions. My answer involved my right (our right as wemyn)
to set our own standards, make our own definitions, etc. If we want to wear
a tie and say it's proper to us, then "abracadabra" it's proper to us. I under­
stand now how artificial and manufactured are definitions of masculinity andfemininity and how we are unwillingly and unconsciously caught up in them.
At one time I could only call a Lesbian such as Trollope "mannish." I had
no other image or words, but I always felt guilty about it. Now I know there's
no such thing as "mannish" or "effeminate" except for the pricks who use
those terms as a means of controlling thought and social development. So, that
expression of the "mannish" Dyke is offensive to me because I hate to associ­ate anything of man with womon (including his designation of himself), andI reject the idea that the "Dyke garb" is mannish because there is no suchthing as mannish. There's no such thing as male vs. female characteristics, but
only human characteristics. An aggressive woman is not mannish but strong,determined, independent. A Dyke in a tie is not wearing man's clothes-justclothes. In other words I am choosing to make my own definitions, whichhave got to be better than his. I become the authority, the "bearer of standards."
I'll set the tone, and he can accept or go to hell—it's immaterial. (This too is
my reason for rejecting the spellings woman/women.) Thus had I written that
description, I would have left out the word "mannish." Also in that sentence
is an indication that her voice was that of a womon despite her clothes beingthat of a man. Again, I've come to see this as meaning that a womon's voice
should be of a certain quality only or else she's mannish, while the opposite
would be true for the "effeminate" man-and 1 reject these definitions. It's
57

also saying that a womon is less a womon to the degree that she's aggressive,
bold, determined, strong, assured, etc. I do not see a laughable contradiction
in a womon who wears what someone called "Dyke schlep" but may have ahigh-pitched voice—this is because I do not accept prickdom's definitions ofwhat is proper to man and not to womon.
7. May I say that I find this story as something I certainly could havedictated just as you have written it, at a time B.C. Then 1 was so hungry andso vulnerable, 1 rejoiced to find myself among Lesbians only to find myself
attacked because I was black. This story expresses all the rage and venom I
then felt, and still remember, as I looked at their racism and then in vengenace
proceeded to condemn everything about those damned white dykes-their ap­
pearance, manner, speech, philosophy, politics, ideas, books, togetherness,emotion-all I saw. Like jesus in the temple, this story rises in an all-consuming
anger, sweeping the tables clean, scattering their symbols, rejecting all, ridiculingall. Being kept from having any part of it I would destroy it all. I say thisbecause now, from a secure position, 1 am sometimes able to look upon sucha scene with feelings of sharing and love. Thus at this point in time my firstreaction to your story was: "But she is ridiculing and deriding." But an instantlater I took a different and maybe unique reaction, a reaction I don't knowwhether or not you had any intention of drawing. I find validity in the story,
including your terms and characterizations, with one purpose in mind-a chance
to get some "gitback." A chance for me to use these written, tangible linesof derision and ridicule to fight back, to get even, to take delight in punishing"them" for what I've suffered from them. In other words the story for me
is a cussing at them, a chance to rant and rave at all those white dykes, pastand present and future who have looked at me with racist eyes. It's saying,"This is what I think of you, and if it hurts your feelings, good! This is what
I want to do-hurt you back." I can laugh at racism from the white man; it
is negligible, no matter the genocide, compared to what I feel in the face ofracism from Latinos, Native Americans, Lesbians-all those who should know
better. So 1 say more power to you, Ann, for giving me, through your words,
my chance at a delayed scream, a running amok at a DOB meeting, potluck,bar, etc.—even though I doubt you wrote toward this end. Everything com­municated by one means something different to each hearer.
8.1 still have problems with "Lesbian community," too. I still feel thatthe concept is a bunch of bull, just as I feel the concept of black community
is a bunch of bull. And I have no life to waste addressing what is to me piein-the-sky nonsense. Cheryl and I together, plus whatever wemyn we can fromtime to time spend some time with, are plenty community for me.
9. Movements of resistance always drop off the edge of the opposite
extreme, and those movers always bounce back toward the middle in later
years with egg on their faces, looking stupid. I refuse to let myself go so far
out on a tangent that I can't get back on the road with my dignity still on
straight. I will not jump on anyone's bandwagon.
10. Your depiction of J. L. is all too accurate. The first bar I went to wasat the invitation of some wemyn I met at a DOB softball game. It took aphenomenal amount of courage to finally ask one to dance-oh the distaste
58and revulsion in her eyes as she said, "Let's wait for a fast one." Conversation,
or rather her notification, during the "dance" was an unsolicited, "Not too
many black lesbians come here. I don't know how to advise you where tofind some." Translation: get this straight, nigger, none of us wants the likesof you. Some poetic justice a year or two later. I ran into this womon, samebar, on a date with a womon 1 had gone to bed with and who just days prior
to that I had refused to see. In effect she wound up with my cast-offs.
11. Unfortunately, you will undoubtedly pick up a lot of denials fromwhite Lesbians; a lot of "But it's not like that anymore"; and a lot of zeroingin on criticism of details, like I started with "mannish"; and a lot of "Butthe time is here for solidarity," etc. However, I'd be surprised if your reaction
from black Lesbians is not one of knowing head shakes and gratitude. There'll
also be criticism (and I can see this point, except that I have no solutions I
really want to offer-I mean, Lesbians or no, if a racist, I'd rather see themdead than reformed) saying that the story gave no message in terms of how
to approach it or what to do about it: no hope on the part of Patrice andLettie that things would change, but rather a retreat toward a wish for a
black Lesbian community (witness notices of such in the literature, and I justfound out about all-black Lesbian bars in D.C. that refuse admittance towhite wemyn). But again, for me, it is complete as a simple and accurate
statement of what for me personally has been a devastating reality, and I
really don't give a damn as to whether or not anything is done about it. It
does not resolve itself in the story because it isn't resolved now—and won't
be. That's the way it is, and I offer only condemnation, not solution. Your
story is purely an "In case you didn't know-this is what goes on." My final
reaction to "Sapphic Daughters" is very strong, but that is my nature. Thisis precisely why I don't jump on bandwagons—I tend to be dictatorial andfanatic, and I might find myself being just stupid enough to die for somethingor other. So I keep on a tight rein. I've taken note of the pathetic Eldridge
Cleaver, the silenced Angela Davis, the pimpin' Huey Newton, and the mousy
Andrew Young—I will not follow them. I'll just stay on the outside and grina lot.
—Eleanor

Dear Ann,. . . Your short story in Sinister Wisdom was, of course, excellent writing,but more than that, I finished reading it full of anger and annoyance. Memoriesof 1960's Daughters of Bilitis meetings in San Francisco came back to hauntme-none of them so hostile or so blatantly open in their racism, but surely
uncomfortable for any black, chicana, or Chinese lesbians who came to themeetings or dances. I remember wondering why they never came back to asecond meeting, the constant questioning by the group, "How can we makeour organi/.ation more attractive to third world women?" No one ever thought
to ask the women themselves about what we could do to make them waul
to stay. I wondered how it fell to be isolated not only in terms of sexual
preference, but also within a white world when that wasn't your own skin•\Dshade. We made bad jokes, my one black friend and I, about summer tansand how nice it would be if one day everyone woke up and were shaded likecats, some with stripes, spots, patches of this color and that. Sometimes it
all seemed so senseless, and often for long periods the whole subject of racism
wouldn't come up—until the next time two or three (seldom one woman byherself) black or brown women came to a meeting. Black lesbians had theirown bar, 1 remember being told. It never occurred to most of us to go there.
We "won't feel welcome." The rumor was out that a woman we sort of knew
had gone there and been beaten up. Who knew or asked why? Who was ex­cluding who from what, we asked? Several women 1 worked with in thefactory were very open in their fear and hatred of any women not completely
like themselves in background, color, religion, etc. We who considered our­selves liberal before we learned to be ashamed of that word simply avoided
them as much as possible. I need to examine that time and experience more.
Bells went off in my head while reading your story in terms of similar incidents
where I felt people were avoiding me or didn't want me around because I
wasn't college educated at the time, or they saw me as "different," "crippled,"
or whatever went on in their sick little brains. The anger just eats you up
whenever that happens. It's a wonder more people don't let it out in violent
ways. Even now, I sometimes wonder whether some people are only friendly
with me because I'm writing things that they like, not because I'm personally
their type at all. Will we ever get past all the garbage in our heads we grew
up hearing and unthinkingly incorporating into our beliefs? A very thoughtprovoking, strong story, Ann.

-Judith Schwarz

conditions:,fivethe black women s issue
Available August, 1979
Conditions is a magazine of women's writing with an emphasis on writing by lesbians.
Conditions: Five is an issue devoted entirely to writing by Black women, guest edited
by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith.
SUBSCRIPTION RATES (three issues): regular, $8; students and unemployed, $6i
supporting subscriptions, $15, $20, $25; institutional, $15; single issue, $3. Overseas
air-mail, add $4.80/subscription, $1.60/single issue. Back issues still available.
CONDITIONS, P.O. Box 56, Van Brunt Station, Brooklyn, NY 11215.

60

Notes on the Etymology and Usage of "Dyke"

The following is in addition to my article, "In America They Call Us
Dykes: Notes on the Etymology and Usage of 'Dyke'," which appeared in
Sinister Wisdom 9. Feedback from my friend and associate, Chris Czernik,
made me aware of my tendency to oversimplify complex historical process­es. I would like to say more about the changes which transformed women'sroles in the late nineteenth century, and may have led to the demise of thenineteenth century female culture identified and described by Smith-Rosenberg, and thereon to the development of strong taboos in the twentieth cen­tury against women's relationships with each other. It was during this periodof change that the meaning of dike also appears to have changed, as did themeanings of gay and Lesbian—they took on homosexual connotations.
Researchers are only beginning to unravel how and why women's intimate
and close relationships with one another, once commonly accepted as a wayof life in nineteenth century middle class America, became so taboo in thetwentieth century. This complex social change can only be briefly and ten­tatively stated here with reference to other researchers' work. 1 The nineteenth
century female networks, which were based on mother-daughter relationships
and extended kinship and friendship systems, seem to have gradually disap­
peared by the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was within the con­text of these networks that women's close, intimate and long-lived relation­
ships had existed. Echols speculates that these networks died out due tochanges in family structure and function, and in women's sexual, social, andeconomic roles resulting from industrialization. As the factory displaced thehome as the economic center of productivity, the roles of middle-class womenbecame more based on their economically dependent position in the nuclear
family as wife, mother, and homemaker. Women as a group became a sourceof cheap, temporary labor whose work outside the home was not valued.
Women could be exploited along with minority groups, children, and theworking class generally. Thus, it was increasingly profitable in an industrial
capitalist patriarchy for women to be tied to men where they not only
served as unpaid domestics but also as underpaid laborers.
Echols also demonstrates the increasing push towards male/female rela­tionships for women, whereas in the nineteenth century there seems to havebeen a considerable social and emotional gulf between the sexes. The trend
away from positive same-sex relationships during the first quarter of thetwentieth century was aided and abetted by the medical/psychiatric system,
and was likewise reflected in magazine literature for adults as well as chil­dren. 2
No doubt during the nineteenth century, when women's close relation­
ships with one another were more or less the norm, there probably were somerelationships which were overt, carrying over into the sexual. Still, all hougha certain amount of physical interaction was permissible, there probably wasftlphotograph by Katherine A. Bouton

62

a point beyond which such overtness would not have been acceptable. How­ever, these relationships wouldn't have been so noticeable because the "norm"
acted, in a sense, to camouflage or hide them, somewhat like an immense"closet." But as the female networks disappeared and the taboo against
women's intimate relationships with one another developed, these lesbian
women would have become more noticeable, with society attempting to de­fine and label those women who did not "fit" for one reason or another:radical feminists, lesbians, women who sought alternatives to traditionalfamily structures, women who refused society's dress codes, those who de­sired careers, education, and independence from structures such as marriage
and motherhood. Such "deviants" were often seen as "masculine" since
there was no female role model which they represented. It was feared thatwomen's emancipation would turn women into men. According to Faderman,
this was one of the greatest fears of the twentieth century. It was also at
this time that medical and psychiatric science were labelling love between
women as "unnatural," "degenerate," and "sick." "Masculine" characteris­tics of both a biological and psychological nature were attributed to lesbian
women, as well as to other women who deviated from male-defined norms.
Thus, the word dike, which in the nineteenth century had meant a "welldressed male," or "the full set of male clothing itself," could have evolved
into a twentieth century slang term used to describe lesbians and other
women who dressed in "male clothing," passed as men, or who acted andappeared "masculine" in other ways, i.e. being assertive, independent, andself-defining. The changing definitions of dike and lesbian probably reflect
the changing ideas and conceptions about women's roles and lesbianism.
I am interested in hearing from readers and researchers who might comeacross the word dike being used to describe a "masculine" woman or lesbianin 1930s and pre-1930s literature. Please send citations c/o Sinister Wisdom.
Endnotes^Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between
Women in Nineteenth Century America," Signs 1:1 (Autumn 1975), 1-24; Alice Echols,"The Demise of Female Intimacy in the Nineteenth Century or There wasn't a Dykein the Land'," unpublished paper, n.d.; Janet Cooper, "Female Crushes, Affections, andFriendships in Children's Literature: or, Covert Feminism in the Children's Book Indus­
try," unpublished paper, April 1977; Lillian Faderman, "Lesbian Magazine Fiction in
the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of Popular Culture XI:4 (Spring 1978), 800-17.
See Cooper and Faderman.

63

..*.'

Dear Harriet & Catherine,
Enclosed is a submission for the "dyke research" feature in 5IV. It is frommy Lesbian Things collection, and is of particular interest to me/us becauseof the original inscription and date. It is probably midwestern, possibly Iowa,
in locale, as it was found in an Iowa junk shop.
—Tracy Moore

64

Dear Sinister Wisdom,
I was impressed and educated by SW 9. I particularly liked the article on
the etymology of the word dyke. Last May I wrote and directed a play at
the University of California at Berkeley entitled The Roaring Girl. It was an
all-woman infiltration of a classical male text. There was a scene about theword dyke I would like to draw to your attention and that of JR Roberts,
who has done much good work on the subject already.
ANN: Did you hear the rumors about Gillian and Alexandra?
LOUISE: What?
ANN: That they're Lesbians.
LOUISE: (laughs) Oh, that old word.
ANN: What's wrong with it?
LOUISE: It's not specific enough—it could refer to anyone on the entire
island of Lesbos.
ANN: So I'll say "gay," is that better?
LOUISE: No, say Dyke.
ANN: Dyke? I thought that was kind of like "nigger."
LOUISE: No, it comes from Sappho-she had a lover named Mnasidica andshe called her Dike. (Quotes Sappho)
Although clumsy
Mnasidica has a moreshapely figure thanour gentle Gyrinno
ANN: It's a little artsy-fartsy, don't you think? I hate it when people defend
sex by making it so ... Greek.
LOUISE: (quoting Sappho again)
Tomorrow you had better
Use your soft hands
Dica, to tear off
dill shoots, to cap
your lovely curls
She who wears flowers
attracts the happy
Graces: they turnback from a bare head.
The scene continues, but turns away from this subject. Of course, I invented
this etymology, but it is possible and worth claiming for our own-it is certainly
a use of the word closer to our own than "one who wore men's clothing." So
let's add it to our lexicon . . .
1 will be in Berlin most of next year and want to show your journal to
the Lesbian feminists there (of which there are many).
We will all keep up the good something together.
-Sue-Ellen Case

o.
a

f
O

REVIEWS
Dear Readers:With this issue of Sinister Wisdom I have become the Book Review Editor,
and wanted to begin my work in this capacity by describing for you my rea­sons for believing that it is an important task and the purpose 1 hope ourbook reviews will serve. First, and most obviously, books are an indispensa­
ble medium in our lives at this time. If they weren't important to us, noneof us would be writing them and none of us would be reading them. The
print medium provides all of us with a means of transmitting our ideas andimages to each other across space and time; it enables us to share in the cre­ation of our culture whether or not we've met each other or know eachother's name.Because print transcends both spatial and temporal distances,
it is also the means by which we will transmit ourselves and the news of ourlives to those Lesbians of the future who seek us. A book review is one wayof celebrating the appearance of yet another document and telling other wimmin of its existence; it is a way of connecting us and acknowledging the workthat wimmin are doing for all of us.
I choose to work with Sinister Wisdom because I believe that this maga­zine is one of the connecting links in a network of vision, and it is that vis­
ion that I hope our book reviews will serve. Since I offered to handle thework involved with soliciting and accepting reviews, I have thought about
how I conceive the function of the critic with respect to our lives and theculture we are creating together. I believe that all of us are working in ourown ways to make real our vision of a Lesbian culture. Some of us workwith wood, some with words, some with microscopes, others with metal,
electricity, the soil, animals, stone, relationships. All of these activities areintegral to our lives because Lesbians are doing them, and each of us pursues
her chosen work within the context of our vision. As I see it, it is the func­tion of the critic to articulate the place of a given book in the context of
our lives and our vision, to tell us what it brings to us, whether it's new in­sights, new connections, or explorations. Such a definition assumes that the
Lesbian critic brings to her understanding of a book its relationship to themany facets of our experience and our culture, and her judgments of theworth of a book will grow out of the connections it makes possible in ourlives. In some way that I haven't yet articulated for myself, a book "fails"
to the extent that it fails to enlarge or clarify our lives. If it "succeeds,"
it is because it is the medium of the author's participation with us in thedaily struggle to maintain our vision and deepen our grasp of the bonds weare weaving in these days. I hope that the book reviews that appear in Sinis­
ter Wisdom will be yet one more link in our bonding together.
--Julia Penelope57

HHf Xq qdwSojoi(dA review of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians by JEB; includes a herstoryof lesbian photography by Judith Schwarz; Foreword by Joan Nestle. GladHag Books, P.O. Box 2934, Washington, D.C. 20013. $8.95. Distributed by
Persephone Press and Naiad Press.
During the second wave of feminism Lesbians have been emerging fromclosets, becoming visible not only to an unwilling world, but more impor­tantly to ourselves who have been straining to see. Eye to Eye: Portraits ofLesbians is an important and necessary volume. It makes our seeing easier.
With this collection of thirty-nine photographic images, JEB has given us
a bold yet tender portrait of our Lesbian community. As a photojournalist,
she has looked at our culture from the inside out, capturing our dignity andintegrity. We are a diverse group with a collective spirit shining through ourindividuality, and JEB has visually portrayed this.
As both Lesbian and photographer, I love looking at Lesbians, and am aware of our need for visual images. Through the lens of a Lesbian photogra­
pher, we can touch our laughter and tears. We can trace the contours of ourbodies and the hollows and wrinkles of our faces. We can feel the serene
beauty of a naked body in candle light or be mesmerized by the mutual
love of mother and daughter in the soft glow of a morning light. Most im­
portantly, we can be moved to open our eyes and see into the spirit andpulse of a movement.
I wish there were more images and fewer words. There needs to be trustin the strength of visual images, and here is JEB's major weakness. When I
look at Chris, Spotts, Connie, Priscella and Regina, Darquita and Denyeta, I
do not need words to guide or influence my thoughts. In fact, I often foundthe corresponding text distracting. Such is the case with the image of Maraand the excerpt from Mothers and Amazons. Looking at Mara, I am taken
into the flow and tranquility of an internal exploration; that flow is inter­
rupted when I read an academic interpretation of the egg. In other cases,
the words may complement the image, but they are still extraneous, as with
the image of Priscella and Regina adjacent to Audre Lorde's "Woman." Thecomposition, the understanding and use of light, and the subject work to­gether to make a powerfully poetic statement. I am in awe of the beauty ofthese two women:.the fullness of their lips, the warmth of their skin, thetrust with which they lay in each other's arms. This image needs no words
just as the poem needs no picture.
Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians is a pioneering work. The strength ofthe cover will draw you in. Let yourself be drawn—the volume is a special
treat.
-Deborah Snow**Kditor's Note: Although the topic is briefly dealt with here, Deborah Snow's review
raises the aesthetic question of what relationship there is/can/should be between visualand verbal reflections of our culture. We are aware, as Deborah is, of the complexityof the arguments on both sides of the issue, and hope that our readers will offer ust>9their opinions on the subject in future issues of Sinister Wisdom.

photographs by JEB
70

Julia Penelope
IMAGINING OUR FUTURE: VISION AND REVISION
A review of The Wunderground: Stories of the Hill Women by
Sally Gearhart, Persephone Press, P.O. Box 7222, Wat.ertown,
Mass. 02172, 196 pp., $5.00._______________________
Those of us who still find pleasure in reading books, especially those writ­ten by and about wimmin, have many reasons for doing so, all of them con­nected to our needs and determined by a complex of situational variables,
including current physical, emotional, and intellectual states and the extern­
al context in which our struggle to survive is going on. Our reasons for read­ing may be labeled "good" or "bad," but only in some immediately subjec­
tive fashion. Thus, some of us read for "pleasure," an adjective that covers
a wide range of experiences, while others take to reading in order to "escape"from a harrowing or humdrum existence. Others read to learn something new(and possibly useful), to pass the time waiting for ______________(fill in the blank with whatever seems to be missing from your life thesedays), to find out something about one's self (usually a secondary, purely
fortuitous result, but one that earns a book the description "good"), to gain
insight into one's situation in the world, to acquire a better understanding of
our struggle, not only to survive in the most basic senses, but to perpetuateourselves as a movement, as the bearers of a vision. All of the above are pos­sible reasons for reading a "book; none of them are mutually exclusive, andthere are more besides.
Rarely, however, do we manage to find a book that manages to satisfy allof the expectations that most of us bring to the printed page. Sally Gearhart's
The Wanderground is such a book. It has, to be sure, its flaws, its loose ends,
discontinuities, inconsistencies, its typos. It is not a "perfect" book. Whocares? It's the second book in my life that I've read slowly, only because it
brought such pleasure to me, lingering over each sentence, each story, be­cause I didn't want it to end. (The first book I didn't want to end was Isa­bel Miller's Patience and Sarah, which, in spite of the roles that the two wim­
min use to define their relationship, delighted me with the clarity of theirmutual honesty and their successful struggle to be together. It was my first
fictional experience of a Lesbian relationship that wasn't sordid, except, per­haps, for The Price of Salt) Let me blurt out the awful cliche immediately
and get it out of my system: I couldn't put The Wanderground down! Now
I have to tell you why.
The Wanderground is unique in that it serves those purposes that justify
the publication of a book: its stories give immense pleasure, and its visionof the future is a welcome "escape" from the boring (and often unpleasant)details of our lives; but the tensions that hold the stories together are drawn
from the world of struggle that we all know too well, and it was from thesetensions, and the confrontation of them, that I learned new things about my­71
self and what I want to live for and how I want to live.

It is a deceptively "easy" book, by which I mean I found myself savor­
ing the experience of windriding, getting in touch with my lonth, enjoying
the facility of mind-to-mind communication with its demand for honesty,
craving the ability to communicate with other animals, to sing with cats, totalk to trees, and have them talk, too. In a very important sense, the storiesof the hill wimmin fed my fantasies, something I needed to have nourished.
I find it hard to keep my fantasies alive; sometimes I even forget them, adangerous loss in my life. But beneath and within the pleasure of playing
with the possibilities of our as yet largely unclaimed powers of being, thereis the tension of the painful struggle to survive on a world where men still
hold some measure of power, and it is the complications of survival thatweave these stories together.
Bit by bit, we learn that the several groups of hill wimmin are largely des­cendants of the wimmin who escaped from the cities when the New Witch
Trials began. The story is fragmented; we learn only what the wimmin them­selves have been able to re-cover and piece together in the Remember Roomsof the Kochlias, or from the memories of wimmin who survived and arestill living. The individual tales of horror and escape are real enough; we hearand read about their contemporary versions every day. Sometime after the
New Witch Trials had begun (some states passed laws requiring every womon
to be married, polygyny was sanctioned, "freaky-looking" wimmin wererounded up and "rehabilitated," many were killed, or raped and killed), theEarth herself rebelled against her own rape and destruction. Male engines ofpower, their guns, their penises, their bulldozers, ceased to function outside
their cities. Rape, war, the mining of the Earth's resources became impossi­
ble. The cities were now clearly the bastions of male arrogance and privilege,
and only within the cities were wimmin still the sexual and domestic slavesof men.
Within the city, men still nurture their love of destruction; without, theensconcements of the hill wimmin endeavor to re-claim the Earth for all be­ings that cherish life. The lines are more clearly drawn and there is less am­
biguity, but it is our world, perhaps only a few years in the future. Linking
the two cultures is an espionage network of those wimmin willing (and able
to "pass" as men) to rotate in and out of the cities , and a few men, the"gentles," who help the wimmin maintain their cover. But unpleasant things
start to happen that indicate that the men may be regaining some of theirpower beyond the confines of the city: wimmin are raped outside the city;
a few miles up the river, some men get a factory to run for a few months;
farm machinery is started up again. The "gentles" are disturbed; they con­tact the hill wimmin, requesting a meeting.
The four quarters (the Quarterfold) are called together for the first Gatherstretch; all of the wimmin will gather their collective energies together for
the first time to deliberate the wisdom of meeting with the gentles. Nothingis decided. A few wimmin volunteer to meet with the gentles as their own
representatives; it will be clear that they do not speak for all the hill wim­min. The meeting is not an unqualified success. The gentles have noticed
that the numbers of wimmin working in the cities nave been lower than usu­
al. When the numbers of wimmin in the city are too low, the gentles hypo­thesize, the men become potent beyond the city's limits. They want the hill
72

wimmin to insure that there are always sufficient wimmin in the cities tokeep the men in check.
Is the story beginning to sound familiar? The first collective gathering of
womonpower occurs at the request of the gentles. Some wimmin must be
willing to endure the hazards of the city in order to insure that male power
cannot extend itself and thereby threaten the rest of the earth. As Evonasays at the meeting: "Why does it have to be the women? Always the wom­en!" (Well said, sister!) There is no easy answer to that question, and Sally
Gearhart doesn't attempt one. But the meeting with the gentles is not kind;even the so-called "gentles" are still banging fists on tables, roaring, andmocking the autonomy of wimmin. We are reminded that even those men
who claim to be our allies do so with an intense ego investment, as Andros(one of the gentles-aptly named) reminds Evona: "We're not just your pro­tectors anymore. ...You have to trust us now, lady." Who hasn't heard thatparticular combination of scorn, pride, and wheedling from the lips of a man?
Those words must still be echoing somewhere in the mazes of the Kochlias. We should never forget them, or the hatred they betray, for it is that
hatred and its consequences with which the hill wimmin, all of us, must
live. Like them, we cannot be satisfied with what we have salvaged from thepast or maintained into the present; our strategies must insure our survival
into the future that The Wanderground foretells. Just as there are no easysolutions, there are no simple compromises with the enemy. For those of us
who are torn by the compromises and contradictions of our lives, Sally
Gearhart's stories of the hill wimmin is a rare gift. Speaking only for myself,
she reminded me of my own vision of a world of wimmin, made it real forme, made it possible for me once more, at a time in my life when I had be­
gun to forget why I do the things I do; I didn't even realize how hungry I
was for an affirmation of that vision, and I need that vision to sustain me.

FRONTIERS A Journal of Women Studies
For the past four years FRONTIERS has been a uniquejournal which
has aimed itself at bridging the gap between community andacademic women' Each issue features a cluster on one topic plus
other articles, including creative work. Two recent issues.
Women As Verbal Artists The ways women communicate in a maledominated world and how and why female verbal artists have been ignored
Literature of the Women's Movement What are the new women writersconcerns? How do they express them"' And how is the women's movement
being ripped off'
Future issues Equal Opportunity Addiction Chemical Dependency Amoruj
Women, and Lesbian History

Katherine Sturtevant
PHOTOGRAPHS OF ENERGY AND COLOR

A Story

Maline Corliss, twenty-eight year old lesbian and feminist, felt a need toleave San Francisco. First of all, she was tired of typing insurance policies.
Second of all, she was tired of arguing about separatism, art, class, the poli­
tics of shoplifting and the authenticity of astral travel. Third of all, she hadjust broken up with her lover, Kathleen, and could not bear to see her any­
where.
Fortunately, there was somewhere to go. Maline's sister Iris and Iris's
husband Alan owned a small but sleek second home on the shores of a Nor­thern California lake. Maline had money enough for an extended vacationsay, six months if the food stamp program proved cooperative. It did. Maline
turned the bar into a darkroom and settled down to solitary bliss. It wasthere at the lake that she met Carol Pine, thirty-four, married, no children.
Carol was the most talked about woman in the small winter lakesidecommunity. The men thought that she was a bitch, and half the womenagreed unequivocally. The other half of the women agreed but loved her inspite of her outrageous bluntness and quick, catty tongue. Carol knew that
she was controversial, and felt both proud and hurt because of it. She knewthat she was strong (armored). She also knew—and hid from the community,
yet felt injured that her friends did not realize it—that she was hopelessly
dependent upon her husband, Kent. The community thought he was hen­pecked. He was hen-pecked. Carol demanded a thousand tiny services from
him in order to make up for the fact that she needed him more than heneeded her. She needed his constancy, and she needed his money—he wasin construction. She drew her strength from the high-beamed house that
Kent built, from the blue lake glinting through thermal glass in the livingroom. Microwave oven, crock-pot, the freedom to read Newsweek and Sun­set and Gourmet magazines in peace.
They had decided, six years back, not to have children (Carol had a tubal ligation). She thought children were like kittens, marvelous to watch, but
a nuisance after awhile. Cats were different. The Pine household was always
full of them; remarkably colored, aloof, almost hostile animals; variations on
their tense, dignified mistress. When Carol went into the bedroom and shutthe door, they cried until she let them in.
The lakefront was crowded with houses (long panes of glass, multi-layered
redwood decks) but when Maline arrived, shortly before the first ot the year,
she counted only twelve occupied houses in the two-mile stretch between
the market and her new home. The other houses stood hollow and elegant,and Maline experienced a rich, satisfying feeling of solitude. New Year's Eve
she spent mixing screwdrivers in the darkroom/bar and carrying them over74

to the couch, where she sat with her feet on the coffee table, gazing into
the fire before her (she was rather proud of it; it glowed bright orange inthe midst of dark ash, and, when she poked it, splintered obediently into
yellow flame) or at the dark plate glass to her left. There she could see herround white face reflected, and a faint, shadowy movement of needledbranches settling. At eleven she wrote her New Year's Resolutions. There
were two of them.
1. I resolve to explore the issues of political pressure and politicalresponsibility, and their relationship to each other in my life.
2. I resolve to discover and understand the true reason that Kath­leen broke up with me.
"Because you never let me alone!" Kathleen cried in one of their last ar­
guments. "Even now, you keep pushing me!"
"I've been pushing you for two years! That's the way I am, that's what
you value about me! Why should it suddenly be so terrible? Because of
Paula?""Yes, because she's helped me to see that it's not what 1 need after all.
I need space." Kathleen was crying. "Please see that. Loving you has mademe less and less myself. It's made me shrink instead of grow, I'm only halfa person."At two in the morning she called Kathleen. She called to say: Are you
growing, Kathleen? Are you bigger, taller, fatter? What are your measure­ments? Have you become an Amazon yet? She called to say: You talk about
wanting your own space but what you mean is that you don't want to haveto look at yourself, at who you are and how you are in a relationship. That's
what I push you to do, and you can't face it.
When the phone rang, Paula answered, sounding sleepy. Pain shot
through Maline's body, comprehensive. Propriety and territory. Paula had
answered the phone.
"Are you living there now?" she asked.
"What? Who is this?" Paula demanded angrily.
Maline hung up, humiliated, wondering if Paula had been able to recog­
nize her voice.
A week later the landscape was magnificently leveled by a record-break­ing snowfall. Maline used snowshoes to reach the top of the driveway where
the Volkswagen sat half buried; she swung her legs in large, stiff circles,
gathering fuzzy clumps of snow around the ankles of her Levis. For mail andgroceries, she hiked-to the market, carrying a canvas pack on her back. The
ploughs had scraped the snow into a tall, clean crust on either side of theroad, and she felt as if she were walking through a tunnel.
The market was owned and managed by Roy and Nancy Dock—Maline
had met them previously when vacationing with Iris. When Maline entered
the store Nancy was at the counter, looking friendly and efficient, with hergrey hair smoothed and sprayed behind her head. They exchanged exclama­tions about the storm while Nancy got Maline's mail from (lie postal window(a letter from her friend Jill, nothing from Kathleen). Maline bought stumps.
'.

75

Then she prowled the aisles of the little store, gathering together vegetables
and red winter apples, Cream of Wheat, bread, milk, and liverwurst.
Carol Pine came in, wearing a burnt orange sweater. Maline was attracted
at once to the fullness and bluntness of Carol's body, and to her rich color­ing. . .tight dark skin, glistening black hair and brows, shoulders that drooped
forward and breasts that slumped comfortably against her chest. Nancy intro­
duced them.
"Carol lives just beyond you, where the road goes up to the golf course.
I'm sure she'd be glad to give you a ride home.""Oh, did you walk? That's why your cheeks are so red!" Carol said.
Maline reached automatically to feel her cold nose, hot cheek. "Yes. It's
not so bad a hike, really. Invigorating." She made her voice put quotes around the word.
Carol drove a copper colored van. "Four-wheel drive," she explained as
Maline climbed in beside her and lifted in her pack full of groceries. "Iwouldn't live up there without a van."
Maline told Carol that she was a free-lance photographer. She had nevereven tried to sell or publish a photograph, but she needed an identity andwanted to represent something independent and artistic.
"How interesting," Carol said. "People have told me that I'd make a good
photographer's model, because of my coloring, but I don't know. . .what do
you think?""Yes, it occurred to me right away," Maline agreed. "Unfortunately, I
haven't got the equipment for developing color photos. But of course, evenblack and white portraits would reflect the. . ." she faltered, nervous. "In­dividuality of your face," she finished at last, glancing sideways at the curveof Carol's large, soft ear.
"I'd love to have my picture taken. I don't think I've seen a picture ofmyself since my wedding, and Kent is always saying I should have a studio
portrait done. How much do you charge?""Actually, I wasn't meaning to fish-""Oh, I know that," Carol assured her. "But I'm interested, really.""Well, why don't you look at some of my work, and if you like it I'll
try a couple of pictures for you at cost."
Carol didn't want to come in with Maline to see the photos. She hadfrozen foods to put away, and besides, no snowshoes. "Can't you drop off
your groceries and grab some pictures, and we'll have coffee at my place?"
she suggested. "I'll be glad to take you home afterwards." She waited in thevan with the engine running while Maline, wanting to hurry but unable,
labored on snowshoes over the deep reservoir of snow.
Inside the house she ran to her bedroom and began untacking photo­graphs from the walls. Pictures of the ocean and the park, of women hug­ging each other on Gay Pride Day, of Jill, of Kathleen, and Kathleen's dog,
and Kathleen's back yard. Carol looked at them one by one as they sat at
her glossy wooden dining table. Maline looked from the photos to the white
mist over the lake and back again.
76

"That's my friend Jill," she said. "And that's my friend Kathleen." Kath­leen naked, Kathleen in overalls with a paintbrush (the day they re-did the
kitchen in yellow), Kathleen crying, her face dark and shrivelled and wet.
Maline looked at the photo, remembering the odd, painful argument during
which she had taken it, in cold revenge, while Kathleen in vulnerable an­
guish had faced her through the separating, magnifying lens.
Carol glanced at the picture of two women hugging and put it aside with­out comment. The tension in Maline's stomach (the lake is not San Francis­
co, she thought) eased.
They made a date to take photos, and Maline walked home after all, want­
ing the cold, stiff air as a conductor for her energy and excitement. She
liked the strength Carol seemed to infuse into conventionality.
At home she read Jill's letter, detailing the political struggles of a foodco-op, arguments about fundraising, Jill's personal economic problems of the
moment—and hi from Kathleen. She glanced around at the blue and blondliving room, at the bar, the knick-knacks on the mantle, trying to pin down
affluence. The true wealth was the lake, of course: the mist darkening overit, shadows sliding across it, bordered by a row of silver icicles and a red­wood window-sill.
Carol and Maline became friends. Maline took pictures of Carol in slacks
and sweater, or in a hostess gown slit to the knee. Pictures of her holding acat, stirring a soup, looking out at the lake—stern, blunt-chinned. Maline
told her to look contemplative, but she could not. Carol was built of con­viction without a gap.
Maline came out.
"I thought you might be," Carol said.
"Did you think I was attracted to you?""Well, I certainly hope so. I think you 're attractive.""Yes, but finding someone attractive is a matter of aesthetics, being at­
tracted to someone is a sexual thing.""Oh, 1 see what you mean. I hadn't thought about it like that-are you?"
Maline grinned. "Oh, my appreciation is mainly aesthetic," she said. "So
far.""Terrific," Carol said. "From now on I'll think of myself as a work ofart.""What about me?" Maline said, hating herself for asking.
"Oh, you're a work of art too," Carol assured her.
Maline hesitated. "How do you feel about my being a lesbian?" she asked
finally.
"Well, all right. I mean, I can understand women sleeping together. You
know the way men are at cocktail parties, always leering." She shrugged and
got up to let one of the cats in.
But Carol was not a feminist. She had no sympathy for women who, un­like herself, were trapped in unhappy marriages, or stuffy kitchens, or wait­
ing on tables. "I chose my life and it's what 1 want," she said. "They shouldhave done the same.""Not everyone has the same choices," Maline insisted.
77

"That's not my problem. I mean, I believe in equal pay for equal workand all that, but don't expect me to think all women are wonderful because
most of them are very silly. You take Violet Jackson-I play bridge withher. She's always fluttering about Kent's marvelous blue eyes and talking
about sex like it was the be-all and end-all of existence. I mean, I like sex
too, but 1 try not to be adolescent about it. She thinks I'm a bitch-I know
because Nancy Dock told me. But she won't say it to my face. That's one
thing no one can accuse me of, everything I'm saying to you I've said toher."
Maline was scandalized and half-envious of Carol's dismissiveness, her re­fusal to take responsibility at any level for the oppression of other women.
She tried to make Carol see, pushed her to see the ways women are oppress­
ed, and to recognize the limits of her own life.
"Frankly," she said finally, "I don't see how you can find this life ful­
filling. You're removed from reality, isolated with your toys. Bridge, cook­ing, television. Don't you want something more?" She expected to shock
Carol, to offend her. But Carol was neither yielding nor resistant.
"No," she said, shrugging. "1 have everything I want."
And for a moment, Maline could see it. Lakeside beauty, idle fulfillment,
and Kent. The three of them had dinner together one evening at the Pine
House, and Maline found him likeable. He was mildly witty, easily gratified,affectionate. Maline analyzed rapidly: Kent thrived on Carol's power, Carolon Kent's playfulness.
One morning in March (while the snow was peeling away from the manzanita under the sun's pressure, leaving twiggy little holes) Maline received aletter from Kathleen.
Now that we have had time and distance, and can write without
anger, perhaps we can exchange helpful feedback about our re­lationship and where it failed. I know that I closed myself off toyou a lot, and that you pushed me too hard-those two things.
But what else? How did we fail to connect so often, why werethe missed connections so electrical, so painful?
Maline wanted to write: We never failed, it was you who failed—faltered—
could not endure (a suitably dramatic reply). Or to quote: "The unexamined
life is not worth living." But she was beginning not to believe in those an­swers. She thought of writing instead: The guilt that we collectively impose
upon ourselves as individuals when we insist upon political responsibility
killed our love. But that did not seem true either.
Finally she wrote:
How can I answer you? You've gone on to a new part of yourlife, and are looking back in peaceful, intellectual consideration.
I am still trying to encompass my solitude, to believe in the factof our separation, to understand the truth that you no longer
love me (as you see, I am unchanged—still frankly vulnerable).
Adding: P.S. We failed because you were too yielding and too resistant.
78

Maline began to want rather badly to become lovers with Carol, so that
she could feel herself superior, a conqueror, a seducer, and so that she would
not be alone anymore. And so that she could write Kathleen: I have a newlover. Or better yet: I am having an affair with a married woman. She knew
all this (continually self-challenging, continually self-critical) and was ashamed,
but not closed off to the actualization of her shabby needs if it proved possi­
ble. And it was—because Carol was flattered and curious, and perhaps, inspite of what she said, a little bored with her life. And, finally, in this stewof unromantic motives—because they were attractive to each other: Maline's
energy, Carol's color.
So they became lovers, invariably making love in Carol and Kent's big bed,
throwing aside the deep blue bedspread. Carol did not consider herself un­
faithful to Kent because Maline was not a man, but did not tell him about
the relationship "because of his prejudices." Maline gave up trying to pierce
the solidity of Carol's vision. She allowed herself to feel politically superior
to Carol and gave up arguing with her. Instead, she lavished all her energynervous energy, artistic energy, political energy—upon the appreciation ofCarol's body. She let her camera savor Carol's brown flesh as well, took pic­tures of Carol lying on the bed, naked; holding a cat, naked. But Carol was
uncomfortable. "My clothes give me confidence," she said. "Even now I'mbeing more vulnerable with you than I've ever been with anyone—even Kent."
Maline could hardly believe this. "You don't seem vulnerable," she said.
"Maybe you're insensitive.""I don't think so," Maline said, angry but controlled. "Maybe you're justso used to keeping things in, being repressed, that even when you want toyou can't let loose, can't express the vulnerability you feel inside.""Who wants to?" Carol said, shrugging her naked shoulders. Maline watchedher breasts roll against her chest.
"Why don't you ever come to my house?""Same reason.""Carol—don't you think you're being awfully insecure? Maybe you'd findyou don't need the trappings you think you need.""Maybe I'd find you and your rhetoric ahead of me at every turn if I
dared to set foot outside my-domain.""I don't think I'm as awful as all that," Maline said, beginning to feelmiserable, as though everything were spoiled. "Look, Carol—" knowing it
was a ploy "—you seem awfully defensive. Maybe you'd be more comfortable-maybe it would be wiser for both of us, if we just quit now-called it
off?" Feeling Carol's flesh still beside her, and then:"No. . .let's not do that."
And so they continued being lovers into the spring, now that Maline had
the evidence, verbal: No, let's don't do that.
She wrote to Jill: She is casually competent, lazily creative, shrewdly in­tent on power, and absolutely without guilt. This last, of course, is the real
attraction. Being with her eases me. And at least now I know it's not justme.
She did not write to Kathleen. It seemed unnecessary; she would hear itfrom Jill.
79

The hours that Maline spent with Carol were dictated by Kent's schedule.
Maline expected to be infuriated by this but wasn't. She was anxious forher hours alone, they were what she had come for. She photographed land­
scapes, read volumes of women's autobiographical writings, and began an
autobiography of her own, synthesizing and enlarging journals kept for over
five years.
When Maline and Carol were together they shared meals, watched TV,
played cards, went (after the snow melted) on photographic expeditions,and once rented a boat, taking it out to the middle of the lake where theydrifted, swam, ate a picnic lunch, cuddled and caressed, wet then hotCarol drove the boat. Maline watched her at the propeller, watched herbare arms on the steering wheel. She admired Carol's competence; remem­
bered Carol in her kitchen or in the copper colored van. At the dock Carolmade quick loops and knots with nylon cord, then repeated them slowly,
so Maline could watch and learn.
Carol paid for the boat rental, and Maline began to think about money
seriously. "Another month is all I have funds for," she told Carol. "Whatdo you think-should I look for a job in town?""I don't know," Carol said. "Do you want to?" She was sitting in a lawn
chair on the deck, looking dreamily out at the lake. Maline stood behind,playing with the long dark fabric of Carol's hair.
"I don't know," Maline returned. "How do you feel about it?" Do welove each other, or are we just playing, killing time? Shall I go back and face
the community now—untangle the political issues I keep tripping over when
I fall in love. . .shall I learn to be like you, Carol, closed, calm, at peace?
"Ever think of'leaving Kent and moving with me to San Francisco?" she in­quired of Carol finally.
"I thought of it, yes. I mean, it occurred to me. I would never do it, ofcourse.""Why not?""Oh, I like it here." Carol waved a hand at the flat blue water before them.
A boat buzzed and skimmed at its center. "The city's so dirty," she said.
Maline was quiet, hurt by the casualness of Carol's reply. She let go thehair; it fell down the back of the chair.
It was spring. Chains of carpenter ants wound their black, glistening way
through both houses, and the cats brought home mice and shrews. There wasa bird's nest in Carol's mailbox, so she and Maline walked to the store daily
to get their mail. It was a ritual, a way of fabricating a little of the routineof marriage for themselves.
Maline got a job in a restaurant in town that was taking on extra help forthe tourist season. She wore a dress and white apron, and flowers in her
hair. It was part of the restaurant's motif. She hated it, but smiled politely
at jovial men and their irritable wives, scooped the tips into her apron pock­ets.
One evening Carol and Kent came to the restaurant with Roy and Nancy
Dock. Maline saw the hostess seat them, and her stomach sent up ribbons of80

protesting acid: anger and humiliation that Carol should bring affluence andconvention to mock her. She took their order sullen-faced.
"What's the matter, Maline? You look like you have a toothache!" Kent
teased.
"My feet hurt," she said, giving him a slight, obedient smile.
"Ah, that's the working life. Whatll it be, Sweetheart?"
Maline looked steadily at Carol, who looked calmly from the. menu to herlover/waitress. "The veal scallopini, I think," she said. Maline chatted with
the Docks, and promised to send their regards to Iris.
The next day at Carol's, sitting cross-legged before the fireplace while thewind played the evergreens like pipes outdoors, Carol said, "I tried to talkthem into another restaurant, but they were determined. I didn't want to be
obvious.""How could you just sit there as though I were nobody?""What did you want? Did you want me to throw you tragic, romantic
glances?""Oh, I suppose so." Maline gave a tired smile. The fire's heat was giving
her a headache. Her anger felt forced; months of hurt, desire, and energy
seemed artificial.
"Don't look like that," Carol said. "You know 1 love you." She said it
confidently, complacently.
"Do you?""Yes," Carol said, rolling across the rug to where Maline sat, reaching herhead up like a snake to kiss Maline's forehead, lips, breasts underneath Maline's polo shirt. They made love, Maline passive under Carol's slow hands
and tongue.
Two weeks later Maline got a letter from Kathleen. Carol was with her at
the store the day she got it, and when they were outside she said, "Whatdoes Kathleen have to say?"Maline, who had read aloud to Carol letters from Jill and Iris, slipped theenvelope into her back pants pocket, saying "I think I'll read it later." Carolraised her heavy brows, then tossed her head (the long hair skittered on herback) and began to talk about summer vacation: she and Kent were going to
Los Angeles to see Kent's parents.
Maline did not read the letter until she got home from work that night.
It said:
Paula and I have broken up. I'll always be glad she came along, be­cause of what I learned from her about what I need in my life. In
my next relationship, I think I'll be able to stand firmer, more
solidly for what I need, and not let myself be bullied by my lovers...like you, like Paula.
Sometimes I get sad, think of you and me and how we can neverget back to what we had-the finest of what we had was the finest
I've ever had. I don't think anyone will ever mean as much toeither of us as we've meant to each other (correct me if I'm al­
ready wrong!). But I know we can never go back.
I hope, though, that when you come back to San Francisco (youhaven't settled there permanently, have you?) we'll be able tosee each other in new ways, relate to each other with more healthand more strength.
81

She signed it love.
Maline called her up immediately. "Do you have any idea of how mani­pulative the letter you sent me is?" she asked.
"Yes," Kathleen said. "But there are no lies in it."
"The whole letter is a lie," Maline said.
"No it's not. Are you going to come back?""1 don't know," Maline said stubbornly, knowing that she would.
She told Carol the next morning, while they sat with coffee at the dining
table. "I'm going back to San Francisco," she said gently. "I have to."Carol stared into her coffee cup, then out over the water, choppy today,
steadi­blotted and mottled blue and grey. "I've been expecting it," she said
going."
you'rewhy
ly, "But I really don't know
"Because I need the culture, the support...and total commitment insteadandof a piece of someone's life." And because I still love Kathleen and she
Paula have broken up.
her
Carol pushed her chair back but did not get up. She looked down at
eyes.
her
knees—blue slacks—and closed"You have Kent," Maline said.
"I hate Kent," Carol said, childish for the first time, and began to makele,a sound, a high wailing, with an abandonment of which she was incapabngboundicame-shelltortoiseskinnylake...athescarring her peace, the glass,put
Malinetense...
andyedround-estood,
thenacross the room to Carol's feet
late
too
it's
"And
ted.
comforandrsshouldebroad
Carol'saroundher arms
for me to come with you, isn't it?" Carol sobbed.
f, de­
A wave of shocked blood rocked through Maline: a chain of disbelie
Golden
in
them
of
two
the
dog,
her
and
n
Kathleesire, fear. She thought ofGate Park, and of Kathleen singing around the house. Of Carol's hostessandgowns—then felt their breasts together and Carol's tears on her neck,said, "No, it's not too late."
The"Yes it is, yes it is." Her sobs were coming chunky now, softer, final.
cat
the
take
to
away
MalinepushedCarolandtable,
cat jumped up to thecud­into her lap. "Hello furry-purry," she crooned. The cat purred as she
it.
asked
dled it to her chest. "Will you love me forever?" Carolng
They said their last goodbyes, for Maline planned to leave the followi
her­
of
raphs
photogul
beautif
dozen
a
with
morning. Maline presented Carolself, and went back to Iris's to pack.
At midnight that night, in a final moment of panic, Carol left Kent
drowsing over Johnny Carson and hurried through the blackness to Iris's
house. She found it dark, and the Volkswagen gone. Maline had becomegoingrestless, and by that time was miles down the Feather River Canyon,
been.
home, feeling guilt-burnt, but as strong as she had ever82

POETRY&-x^.

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embroidery, beading
6" x 6" x 4"

photograph by Vicky Johnson

IT'S THE POVERTY
for Kirn
you say to me"take a drive with me up the coast, babe
and bring your typewriter"
all the way down the coast
you and she stopped at motels
your typewriters tucked under your free arm
dodging the rain fast to the shelter of metal awnings
red and white 1 imagine them
you two snorting brandy
in those vinyl rooms
propping your each machine onto an endtable
this story becomes you
a fiction I invent with my ears
evoking heroismin the first description of the weather
I say my typewriter sticks in the wet
I have been using the same ribbon over and over and over again
yes, we both agree I could use a new ribbon
but it's the poverty
the poverty of my imagination we agree
I lack imagination you say
No. I lack language
the language to clarify my resistance to the literatewords are a war to me
they threaten my family
to gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything
I may create a monster
the word's length and bodyswelling up colorful and thrillinglooming over my mother, characterized
her voice in the distanceunintelligible
illiteratethese are the monster's words
84

understandmy family is poor
poor
I can't afford a new ribbon
the risk of this one
is enough to keep me moving
through it accountable
the repetition like my mother's stories re-told
each time reveals more particulars
gains more familiarity
You can't get me in your car so fast
you tell me how you've learned to write
while you drive
how I can leave my droning machine behind
for all
you care
I say not so fast not so fast
the drone, a chant to my ears
a common blend of histories repeatedly inarticulate
not so fast
1 am poorer than you
from my experience
fictions are for hearing
not living-Cher'rie Moraga Lawrence

WHAT DOES IT TAKE?
for Sally Gearhart
upon the death of Harvey MilkI
the martyrs they give us
have all been men
my friend she traces her life
through them a series of assassinations
but not one notone making her bleed

this is not the death of my motherbut my father
the kind one/the provider
pressed into newsprintin honest
good will
If they took you I would take to the streets
screambloody murder
but the deaths of our mothers
are never that public
they have happened before
and we were not informed
women do not coagulate into one hero's deathwe bleed out of many pores
so constantthat it has come to be seen as the way things are
my mother's death
was not eventful
expecting it
I put a hole in my arm
no TNT blast
but a slow excavation
my nails
in silent opposition
digging down to the raw part
inside the elbow
If they took you I would take to the streets
screambloody murder
what does it taketo move me?
(your death that I have ignoredin the deaths of other women)• \Isn't the possibility of your dying
enough?
-Cher'rie Moraga Lawrence86

MOVING OUT"You are not going to see the promised land, sisters
and brothers, you are not. But you better getyour ass out into the desert because if you don't
start on this journey, nobody 11 see the promised land.'-Rita Mae Brown
I can't imagine dyingout here, not seeing trees
or tasting water, tongue thickfrom silence these years
Our packs grown to our spines
we hobble like hunchbacks,
our holy robes
as yet only ghostly costumes
flapping at thin wrists and ankles.
This air like every stinging word
thrown at our faces
we have lived in this desert
even unaware, our love
flattened like these dunes,
distorted, brushed aside.
No footprints, no guide but the sunheat of shame newly turned to anger
We protect ourselves like cactus
grow sharp and hard, drawing rainfrom an earth closed against us.
Still, reachingacross glaring stretches of sandtoward some land where rain makes musicnight comes, not to hidebut to bless.
-Jan Hardy

87

THE HOUSEWIFE
the spoon sweeping
the pot's tin,
the bottom,
in smooth circles
sweeping again and again andthe pudding thickens inthe spoon's swirl
ing, the pudding
hot and heavy
and turning, the spoon's
trail,
the diamond of thering fogged and the gold
hot and heavy,
turning on the skinas the pudding hardens
on the pan's side,
the spoon sweeping arc
after arc af
ter arc,
the handsweeping again and again and the radio
crackling
the top ten
ten times each spinof the handturning again and again and the bubbles
beginningas the spoon spins
scraping the tin
as the hand tells three
and the books fall
and the t.v. turns on,
and channels one after one after
turning while thepudding burns
and the spoon
strikes the pot's tin again andagain and
again

88

-Janice Maiman

THE DIRT ON THE SIDES

thighs,in stirrups,
brown,
my mother's legs,
six feet,cold,
and bones,
my lover's spine,in the walls,
mud,
deeper,winter's reign,
numb space,deaf,(in a box,a pencil,plunging,
my mother's hole,
the wood,thighs unsettled,
the legs kick,my mother's legs,
dirt on the sides,
lumps hard,and flexing,
head first,
the mud,
my mother's womb,
like a fish,
full moon eyed,
limp,plunging,
my mother's hole,
the wood,stones,and bone,my grandmother's,in the walls,
fragments,
my mother's womb,
numb space,hollow,and deaf)

my mother's legs,
the muscles move,flexing,
her vagina,
dark,
rocks,
my grandmother's hip,fragments,
my mother's womb,
yesterday's rain,
frozen walls,
my mother's womb,
hollow.

-Janice Maiman

89

MELVIN MILLSClouds muffle the moon:
only the river carries conviction.
In your woods deer must be moving,
their antlers confounded with branches,
like a reflection.
The river's arrangements are tangled in ice;
Let such knots be unraveled,and moonlight break free,and I'm up and away from that house like a witch.
My bones are as clean and as cold
as the ridges I cross, to where you arebreathing in darkness.
Still under quilts, you are little expecting
My body to slide in beside you,
Unsettling your sleeping,and clearing the air, like a frost.

PHILADELPHIA, 4 AM.
She woke up from a dreamof two strict aunts in Colorado;
she was shaken by it, grooved
into the agony of childhood;
I tried to reach her there, but"back off," she said, "leave me alone."
So I got up, in that strange expensive
town apartment, and, standing by the window,
felt my spirit spread away from me,
across the rooftops of the downtown city.
I told myself, oh yes, and, naked,
I made tea.
I watched the jasmine flowers open,
and float slowly on the surfaceof the cup; pale and bloodless,they spread themselves, like me.
90

Oh yes, I thought, all these greyhairs, these long used muscles, bones,
and tissues, are dissolving, andevery sad truth is coming home:oh yes, I am a woman taking in her washingat long last, stained by the rain.

-Elizabeth Alexander

SONG OF THE MOLE MOTHER

for Alice
These soft, dark places are mine,
the wet, black heart of earth
here under the porch where moss
grows hair roots for mushrooms
gliding by pearl-white spidersof tentative plans who waitominously under their caps.
The tender shoots are not hard to find
and we follow them awhile
and reach the embryo of snakeroots
and onions gleaming like eggs
suspended in dark water.
One day the sun will not rise
and a blind green fish from thedeepest crevice will call us to grasp
her tail and follow her to a warm center
where we will touch in whispers
and give birth to love children
with no eyes.

- Teresa Anderson

SMALLNESS, SHARON
smallness scares me
smallness, sharon
yours, all gathered inarms around your knees,chin tucked undercompact.
this once
1 wanted to reach acrossto youbridge this crazy canyon of sizes.
but I cringe from diminutives
and return to my house tonight
because I fit
because no one there is smaller than I
because(smallness scares me)
paula was small.
-Becky Birtha
Sun-up, second of November
6:15 a.m. cold
wind ripples
the morning a starched white curtain
You in thefrayed blue coat faded
kerchief black stockings kickround the corner backup Camac
street all to yourself aboutwide as your wide-stretched arms
clog mark hard on thecobblestones echo up thehollow, ring out the high brick walls
Come from your lover
you running your morning homerose sky in your eyes and her
kisses all over your face.
Becky Birtha

GHOST STORY
II(for my father)
I feel you
crawling through my rear passageways
returning through doors marked
one way,
this way out, and exit only
your persistent footfalls
echo along my narrow corridors
constricting,drawing in my center.
I feel you
stumbling through my nightmaresa blind vagrant who returns to me
because your cane remembers the way
and there is no place else to go.
I hear the splinter of wood,the clatter of falling hinges
as you assault doors that open into yesterday
seeking sunlit rooms
in which I used to call you daddy.

-Julie Blackwomon

93

CAROLshe is clearly the lioness the golden sun ruby fire goddess, theflame, the spark she is truly new in her learning she is truly
free in her givingin the cage, she paces back . forth . back . forth . facecreased by the effort to hold onto what she knows she could remember
if only the bars would lift, the glass shatter, the doors spring open
and fall away, pacing, eyes watchful, narrowed at those who
observe her: caged symbol of roaring and blazing.
clearly the chariot, pulled by winged lions, angel lions, clearly
the bringer of light, the gleaming trail across a darkened universe
announcing rebirth delight magic
pulled down, the angels bear incisions where their wings should be/
deep slices, looking into those crevices we can read the history of
removal, hope chest opens to reveal the remnants of bloodied down,
dripping scarlet feathers, now they are fans, creased by the effort
to remember flight.
clearly the free flier the golden space dreamer the power raiser
the sunlit dancer the radiant mover the sweeper the spinner
the runner the leaper
walls disrupt her. she watches crumbling, decay, walls, ceiling,
structure cave in, collapse, she remembers this, loving dissolution,
glowing orange against the rubble, the dying framework
she is essence escaping
light/he atlight/heatlight/heat—Terry Wolverton

94

for iva
the woman who is cat
whose brown fur sparkles/who crouches and watches slit eyes green
and knowing/who hides under the bed when the doorbell rings/who
crawls into your lap, snuggles down, stretches, kneads/who grrrrrrrs
into your ear, deep down humming moaning whiskers sigh/who curls up,
stays home, waits and rubs against your memory
encircles satin pillows velvet skins/who will not settle for lessthan what she wants and expects nothing/who delights in licking
herself clean/who cannot be coaxed into the street/gazes amethyst
through windows drinking the flight of birds leaves snow/whose leanmuscles ease across the floor but tightly-coiled, springing
the woman who cries for food or the stroke of a finger across her
throat/who would sink her teeth in to get away but always comes backfor milk or a bite of fishwoman who crinkles her face into mirrors and does not see herreflection.
—Terry Wolverton

"I AM FRIGHTENED BY THE SORROWThe thing that hit me was her eyes,
wild and sharp, ready first to flee
and then in terror to lash out. She
was afraid to strike or stay. Fourmonths of this in hiding was too long;locked from any men but jailors,
those with guns, you grow away fromlife, turning into lynx or hare but
always in a cage. When 1 stepped in,she spread her claws. She saw mesomething different and shrank back,then chancing all, she ran into myarms. "I'll get you out of here," I
said, "You just hold on. Fight me hardwhere they can see. I'll get you out."
I held her close a moment and thenheld her off, telling those outside
to put her in my car, telling them
my orders were to take her north,telling them to do it and to do it
fast. They listened, dragging her andkicking at her legs, tying tight her
hands and feet, shoving her still
wrestling them onto the floor in front.

I started up the Ford and we moved out.
Knelt below the seat she shook withtears. "We'll get away from here," I
said, "Are you alright?" She nodded
and I watched the road. I tried tostop and bring her from her knees
but she said, "no" and I drove on,
struggling with anger and within her
pain, till finally I pulled aside andlifted her and opened ropes and rubbed
the burns with carefulness and love.
Her limbs were hurt less badly thanher heart. She shivered small againstme, her head on my lap, silently andtense. We travelled hours into
darkness waiting out the miles, andhalting only once for drive-in burgers,
and a bathroom, and to fill the tank.
96

That night I picked a dim motel, andasking single space, we chose the furthestfrom the path. The diner there was open
through till dawn. "I'm so dirty," shesaid, "and so tired. I look a mess." I
washed her gently in the shower, she too
beaten now to protest or resist, thenhalf walked, half carried her onto the
double bed. "My clothes will fit you,"
I said, "We'll throw these out. What
happened to your own?" She only knew thatthey were gone. The bruises on her backand ribs were new; I touched them; shestarted to relax. "Where will you takeme?" she said. "Anywhere you want togo. North first, as far from here tillthey can't find us, then I'll take you
home." She slept, her fingers clutchedin mine, and I slid in beside. In
dream she cried and woke. "Diane," shesaid, "I have no home." "You have ahome," I said, "as long as I'm alive."

In the next hotel at evening we sat
together as I soothed a cream into herskin. She was stiff and sore, and thinnerthan a child. "Di," she said, "What if
I don't want to stay with you?" "Then you
can go," I said, "111 help you get toanywhere you want." "Now?" she said. I
asked her, "Can you do it now?" "No. . . ."She looked at me. "Di," she said, "I want
to stay with you. Do you still want me?""You know I do," I said, and kissed herhair, and held her as she fell asleep.
Later waking her was hard. She startled,
lost, and was too weak to rise. "We won't
go so far today," I said. "Tonight well
be in Washington, and we can stay theretill you get some rest." "But," she said,
they'll find us and they'll take me back."
I said, "Over my dead body!" "Yes," shesaid, and stroked my cheek, "I think you
would!" I felt her staring as we rode,
felt her try to talk to me and hold it
down. I brought her water in a cup Ifilled in Maryland where we stopped forgas. "I trust you, Di," she said, "1 want
to stay with you. We won't be lonely anymore."

She was too frightened yet to let mebring her into downtown noise. "I know
they're hunting us," she said, "I can't
go back." I said, "They haven't foundus until this, they'll let us go." "Iknow they'll find us. Please," she said,
and when we reached the cut off lane I
took the one away. "This takes us to
Bethesda and to Pennsylvania," I said.
"You're too fatigued to go much further,and we ought to stop. I'm getting
punchy watching guardrails, too." "1
don't Know how you've gone this far,"she said. 1 slipped an arm around her
and we took an exit to a grey old townof cottages to choose a room. "Fivemore hours driving time will take us
home," I said. I brought our suitcase
in. She said, "How did you find me?"
I said that "I just knew. And I just had
to try." She said, "I had no hope. I
can't believe its true." "I promise you
it is," I said, "and that you're safe."

We stayed there four more days, justloafing under blankets at the inn. FirstI brought her meals in bed from someone's
Home Cooked Kitchen up the way. We
slept and woke and slept again and talked
and went for walks. One day she asked togo alone. I put two twenties in her pocket
and a paper with my own address. "Incase we separate," I said. She saw myapprehension and she grinned: "I haveto see if I can do it, but I won't go
far." She came back minutes late with
an ice cream cone and flowers from somebody's
yard. "It's been four months," she said. I
knew I had to show her she could reallygo, but still she seemed content, anddidn't want to leave, and seemed a bit
upset if I was gone from her too long.

Sometimes she went herself to bring ourfood, but mostly she stayed with me, andshe grew less nervous and with less ofnightmares and of fear. She held herhead up higher. And she bloomed.

The final lap to Pittsburgh was ahappiness we shared. More calm than
I had seen her, she was stronger andher timidness was halfly gone. We took
the turnpike easily, with often halts
to try the shops or just to wait andsit there and enjoy the view. Only
among people would she sometimes flinch,
and then the ache that I once saw aspart, of her would draw against her
face. She retreated to a shell then,though a word from me would bring herout, and she would need me to be near.
We reached the limits of the cityin mid-afternoon and stopped again forgroceries for bringing home. "Just don't
expect my place to be too much," I said.
She said, "It doesn't have to be if
you'll be there." She moved to leanagainst me when we drove the streets,
and at the house I had to keep besideher or she wouldn't come. Her eyes werewatching mine as I unlocked our door. We
climbed the stairs together, holding hands.
-Diane Steinfor judy[Author's note: The title is a quote by James Wright, In the Face of Hatred.]99

ANNOUNCEMENTS
SOLICITING MANUSCRIPTS:
Linda McDonnell and Toni McNaron, two lesbian/feminists, are soliciting manuscripts
for a collection of women's poems and prose focusing on our experiences with incest.
We are interested in all types of incest: overt, covert, same sex, different sex, physical,
emotional. We don't want sociological or political tracts; or interviews. Aside from theselimitations, we are open to all forms-letters, short stories, poetry, journal entries, prosepoems. As incest victims we have conceived this project out of our own and other wo­
men's work. We believe breaking silence around this taboo is both transformationaland healing. We have been co-editors of So's Your Old Lady, a lesbian/feminist journal,
for the past three years.
Please send manuscripts to: Linda McDonnell, 2533 Lyndale Ave. South, Minneapolis,
MN 55405. If you wish your copy returned, enclose a SASE. Because we want to printsoon, our deadline is February 1, 1980.
We are planning an anthology of writings on the subject of child molestation. We are
seeking first-person writing: stories, poems, journal entries, and excerpts from longer
works, by people who have been molested as children. We are also interested in writingby other family members, from their own point of view. And, with the idea that thisanthology might be useful for young people in schools, we are open to writing by chil­dren as well. All material should be true, although you may change names or use a penname. Material may be published or unpublished (let us know about permission to reprint).
Please type, if possible, and enclose a SASE if you want your manuscript returned. Mail
as soon as possible to Ellen Bass, 240 Day Valley Road, Aptos, CA95003.

EYE TO EYE:PORTRAITS OF LESBIANSFEMINIST
JOURoNAL
FOR
THE
SOUTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEB

Emphasizing the Lesbian Visionpublished 3 times a year
Subs: $5 for Individuals$10 for institutions
P.O.Box 954, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514

100

A rare & powerful book
39 b&w photographs;
a herstory of lesbian
photography; Postpaid$10.50 to Glad Hag,
Box 233^, Wash. D.C.
20013 or bookstores.

FOR HANDICAPPED READERS:

Sinister Wisdom in conjunction with FEMINIST TAPING FOR HANDICAPPEDREADERS is making periodicals and books available to handicapped readers. At present
the project consists of ten women volunteers who tape Sinister Wisdom, Off Our Backs.
and Feminary. Since we would like to make these tapes available for no more than the
cover price of the book or periodical itself, we are asking women to help us by donatingsome money (any amount) that could be used to subsidize this undertaking. Or to do­nate the equipment needed to do the tape processing ourselves: a cassette-tocassette highspeed duplicator, cassette records, and 90-minute cassette tapes.
If you know anyone who would like access to the jourals we are taping, and is ahandicapped reader-please tell them about FTHR. Donations should be made out toSusan Wood-Thompson and sent to her at FEMINIST TAPING FOR HANDICAPPEDREADERS, Box 6516, T Street Station, Washington, DC 20009.

COMING - - - in

SINISTER WISDOM

2 Special Issues
SW 13 - LESBIAN PUBLISHING & WRITING. Guest edited by
Beth Hodges. Interviews, Reviews, and Theory. Send sub­missions with SASE to Beth Hodges
64R Sacramento Street
Tel.: 617-547-0704
Cambridge, MA02138
DEADLINE: March 15, 1980
SW 15 - LESBIANS AND PORNOGRAPHY. Guest edited by

Julia Penelope. We are seeking poems, articles, and short stories
that deal with any of the issues of pornography and violence and theways in which these facets of patriarchal culture affect Lesbian lives,
the way we define ourselves, our sexuality, our relationships withother wimmin, racism and pornography, classism and pornography,
incest as a specific form of sexual violence in the lives of Lesbians, the"compromise" distinction between "pornography" and "erotica," theuse of pseudo-Lesbian imagery in advertising (to whom do such ads
appeal?). Also of interest, in contrast, would be articles and fiction that
explore Lesbian sensuality as it is evolving now.

Address all correspondence and manuscripts (include an SASE)
toJulia Penelope
box 30541
Lincoln, NE68503

Subscribers, please read: If you move, please send us your address change
as soon as possible. The post office will not forward your magazine. If
you have moved recently and think you may have missed an issue, it wasprobably mailed to your old address and then returned to us. In that case,
we ask that you send $1.00 to partially cover the cost of remailing it.

101

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTESElizabeth Alexander is a poet from Concord, New Hampshire.
Teresa Anderson is a poet from Oklahoma.
workshop here in
Becky Birtha. "Thirty years old, I'm a member of a lesbian writers'
poetry has
Philadelphia, and do public readings whenever I have an opportunity.ofMy
my short stories
appeared in the special Black Women's issue of Conditions, and one,
is included in A Woman's Touch, an anthology exploring lesbian sensuality and eroticism
available from Amazon Reality.
Julie Blackwomon is a poet living in Philadelphia.
(Catherine A. Bouton lives in Santa Cruz, California.
andAndree Collard is writing a book on the patriarchal treatment of nature, animals,
Press.
Beaconbypublished
beto
women,
avocation.
J. Z. Grover is a writer living in Sacramento who photographs her friends as an(Viking,
Piece
ion
Presentat
and1976)(Knopf,ns
Separatioofauthortheis
Marilyn Hacker
New1974), which received the National Book Award for poetry in 1975. She lives inYork City with her daughter, Iva.
currently working
Barbara Hammer. "I am a lesbian/feminist/ poetic filmmaker and writercounterparts ofon a symbolic quest film of an aging heroine who encounters her cronein herseductress, guardian angel of consciousness, and wise woman of pain and suffering
backpack journey around San Francisco Bay. I self-distribute my films through Goddess
Films, P.O. Box 2446, Berkeley, CA 94702.
Pittsburgh
Jan Hardy. "I'm active in a lesbian-feminist theater/poetry/propaganda group in
and trying to use separatism to stay sane in all this missionary work."
workshops for
Beth Hodges lives in Cambridge, Mass., where she has taught writing
pub­
women and is now studying book design. She has been active in lesbian feminist
lishing since 1975.
hing
JEB (Joan E. Biren) is a left-handed glad hag photographer. She's been photograp
years.
nineforlesbians
Meg Jochild is a Texan dyke who has moved to San Francisco so she can be homesickwith more style. This is her first time to be published.
Lynda Koolish is a poet and photographer. She is writing a book on contemporary
women poets.
living.
Cherrie Moraga Lawrence is an L.A.-turned-Bay-Area poet who waits tables for a
World
Third
Radicalby
essaysofanthology
aneditingin
She is presently involved
Feminists along with other Bay Area women.
Janice Maiman is a poet living in Virginia.
the same
Tracy Moore is a dyke trying like many others to live in California and Iowa attime. Someday her writing may appear in Better Homes & Dykes.
has been
Julia Penelope is dropping her patronymic, Stanley. The name Julia Penelopen since her greathanded down on the maternal side of her family every other generatio
g the map
great aunt Julia Penelope defied General Sherman by chewing and swallowinrecently,Moretroops.
teconfederahiswithhiddenwashusbandher
where
showedwhiche.
bumblebeaandr,constrictoboaa,dragonflya,buttercupaasherself
createdshe hasSolstice
Wintertheasappears
occasion,
on
also,
She
though.
time,
same
the
Not all atElf, so be sure to leave out granola bars for her on December 21.
of my work
Quimetta Perle. "I am an artist living and working in Minneapolis. I thinkmaterial
as sewing a silk purse from a sow's ear. It is the process of transforming the raw
images.
complexandrichbeautiful,
into
guts
my
from
Deborah Snow is a co-publisher of Persephone Press.
Literature, andDiane Stein. "I am 31 years of age, holding a Master's Degree in IEnglish
working at minimum wage as a file clerk. My writing is my life. have been writing
since high school, publishing for the last 10 years."
Katherine Sturtevant studied creative writing at San Francisco State. She is currently
living in Portland, Oregon.
University
Joyce Trebilcot teaches women's studies and feminist philosophy at Washington
in St. Louis.

102Terry Wolverton is a Los Angeles writer and a director and producer of feminist theater.
She is also the co-director of the Lesbian Art Project, an exploration of lesbian sensibility.
Susan L. Yarbrough teaches women's studies and legal studies at the University of Massa­
chusetts in Amherst.

Second Class,rking Class
What it is like to join the union in Mexico. . . take off the veil in Iran . . .strikein Belgium . . . be a prostitute fromThailand . . . have an abortion in Italy.
An anthology of original documents, analyses and interviews on working
women Articles selected from the international women's press and trans­
lated for the first time into English.
$3/issue if ordered before Nov 30.1979[add $.50 for postage after Nov 30.1979)
Inquire for rates on quantity orders

Order from:
Peoples Translation Service
4228 Telegraph Ave.
Oakland. CA 94609

an independent womens newsiournal

women in struggle
politics, health, work, prison
news coverage and political analysis
on the issues that affect womens lives
contributing sub ill? or more
one yeai sub $h snmple copy bOe
loreignJKi Cdn.id.iS/
business Mnd institutions ?.,'('

oob, 172420m st. nw,
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103

Sinister Wisdom issues 6 through 11 are now on cassette tape. The recordings
are made in the style of Recordings for the Blind, with the donated labor of
Susan Wood-Thompson; she reads the text, describes the graphics, etc., for women
who cannot read the print copies. Each taped issue costs $3, and a year's sub­scription costs $12. Make check payable to Susan Wood-Thompson and mailyour order to Susan Wood-Thompson, Box 6516, T Street Station Washing­
ton, DC 20009.

SINISTER WISDOM POSTER STILL AVAILABLE
In the spring of 1977, a Tee Corinne solarized photograph of two women
making love appeared on the cover of Sinister Wisdom 3, followed by adeluge of requests for a poster. The poster was printed in the summer of
1977: a duplicate of that cover, black on gray, 17" x 22". You can haveyour own for a contribution of $3.00 toward the survival of Sinister Wisdom
plus 50 cents to cover mailing costs. (They make nice sifts for friends, too;bulk rates available.)
Send $3.50 per poster to: Sinister Wisdom, Box 30541, Lincoln, Ne. 68503.
Also available in feminist bookstores.

Sinister Wisdom
Box 30541
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I would like to subscribe to Sinister Wisdom.
————— Enclosed is $7.50 for one year (4 issues), beginning with issue 12—————Enclosed is $13.00 for 8 issues, beginning with issue 12
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104

SUBMISSIONS
Sinister Wisdom welcomes unsolicited manuscripts and art work. Please type(double-spaced) all written work. Reviews should be no longer than 3500
words; articles no longer than 5000 words. Enclose self-addressed, stamped
envelope and a 2-3 line description of yourself. At this time, we can pay
only with copies of the issue in which your work appears. Send all manuscripts
except poetry to SW, Box 30541, Lincoln, Nebraska 68503.
Sinister Wisdom will not be accepting poetry manuscripts again until after
March 1, 1980. After that time, send poetry to Susan Leigh Star, poetry editor,
52 Mars Street, San Francisco, California 94114.
BACK ISSUES, WHILE THEY LAST
Issue 4 (Fall 1977): stories of mothers and daughters and witches and lovers;
Joanna Russ's tale for the girlchild in all of us; Lesbian separatism from theinside; photo-essay; interview; reviews, letters and poetry. 96 pp., $2.25.
Issue 5 (Winter 1978): Susan Leigh Star, "Lesbian Feminism as an Altered
State of Consciousness"; Judith Schwarz, "Researching Lesbian History";
Michelle Cliff on speechlessness; Lesbian Day speech by Barbara Grier; fiction;
poetry; photo-essay; reviews; interview. 104 pp., $2.25.
Issue 6 (Summer 1978): Julia Stanley, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Judith
McDaniel, Adrienne Rich on language and silence; Marilyn Frye on separa­tism and power; fiction by Sandy Boucher, Thyme Seagull; poetry; inter­views; essays by Sarah Hoagland and Peggy Holland; drawings and photos.
104pp., $2.50.
Issue 7 (Fall 1978): myths, monsters, teeth, etc. Jane Caputi on patriarchal
fish stories; Judith Schwarz on being physically different; self-portraits inprose and poetry by Alice Bloch and Susan Wood-Thompson; feminist musings by Melanie Kaye; plus a wealth of fiction, poetry, reviews, drawings, andphotographs. 104 pp., $2.50
Issue 8 (Winter 1979): "did you say lu-uv?"; storytelling by Sherry Thomasand Audre Lorde; photographs by Deborah Snow; poetry by Judy Grahn;notes on deafness; essay on "that place where nothing is"; interview; reviews;"Scrambled Eggs"; and much more poetry and fiction. 104 pp. $2.50.
Issue 9 (Spring 1979): JR Roberts on the history of dyke, Michelle Cliff onanonymity, Melanie Kaye on violence, Susan Cavin on Lesbian origins, Bertha
Harris, Harriet Desmoines, and Irena Klepfisz on Lesbian literature; fiction by
Becky Birtha, Jan Clausen, Linda Marie, Kathryn Missett, Ann Shockley, Pearl
Time'sChild; an outpouring of fine poetry; photography; reviews; and a puzzle.
104 pp. $2.50.
Issue 10 (Summer 1979): Special issue on being old and age, guest-edited by
Susan Leigh Star. Includes Barbara Macdonald and Baba Copper on their 65th
and 59th year, respectively; Audre Lorde on surviving cancer; interview with
Mabel Hampton; essays on nursing home women, the time trip, being under21; poetry; photo-essay; fiction. 104 pp. $2.50.
(Add 60 cents postage for every 1-2 copies ordered)no. 11 fall 1979

2.5O