flnlfT~R WlfDom
1j. .. -j,.

finifT~R WifDOm 13
A Journal of Words and Pictures for the Lesbian
Imagination in A II Women
Spring, 1980
Publishers: Harriet Desmoines &Catherine Nicholson
Editors : Catherine, Harriet, C.Colette
Review Editor: Julia Penelope
Poetry editor: Susan LeiJdt Star
Contributing Editors: Sarah Hoagland, Clare Potter
Shipping: Donna Saunders
Staff: Edy Ambroz, Jette A'Porta, Roxanne Claire,
Vicki Nogle, Janet Nyland.

Guest Editor: BETH HODGESSTAFF FOR THIS ISSUE:
Cover graphic, "Blood Sisters," by Jerusha
Cover design by Jerusha & Beth Hodges
The material for SW13 was solicited, selected, and edited
in Boston by Beth Hodges with the assistance of Barbara
MacDonald, Cynthia Rich, and Maida Tilchen. The issue
was produced in Lincoln, Nebraska:
Additional copyediting: Harriet
Typesetting: Harriet, Catherine, Julia Penelope, Janet
Nyland, Roxanne Claire
Arranj1;ement and Design: Catherine and Debbie A1icen
Paste·Up : Catherine with the assistance of Edy Ambroz,
C. Colette, Morgan Grey, Debbie Alicen

Printed by Iowa City Women's Press

This issue was funded in part by a grant from the Coordinating Council of
Literary Magazines.
ISSN: 0196-1853

Copyright ©Sinister Wisdom, 1980. All rights reserved to individual authors and artists.
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CONTENTS
In Memoriam : Claudia Scott
2
THEORY:
Racism and Writing
Elly Bulkin
3
Culture Making: Lesbian Classics
Melanie Kaye
23
VIEWS :
Whom Do You Write For?
A Collage
36"Sorry"Michele Connelly38
Ran Hall39
Feminary
Cris South40
Felice Newman
42
To the Azalea Collective and Lesbians Rising
Anita Cornwell43
Dark Horse
Linda 1. Brown
45
REVIEWS:
Conditions: Five
Ruth Farmer
52
Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover
Irene Zahava
53
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Michelle Cliff
56
58
The Black Unicorn
Harriet Desmoines
63
Lesbian Peoples
Suzanne Relyea
64
True to Life Adventure StorieslR Roberts
PUBLISHERS and PRINTERS : INTERVIEWSFrances Doughty
71Charlotte Bunch on Women 's Publishing77
Spinsters, Ink
Irena Klepfisz
81
Persephone Press
Cynthia Rich
86
Timely Books
Lee Kinard
87
Maida Tilchen
Helaine Victoria Press
91
1anet Soule
Metis Press
95
Naiad Press/Out & Out Books
ALTERNATIVES to PRINT :On the Other Hand
Kim Schive , Nancy Becker
97
Different and Equal
Kathy Hagen
99
Catalogue
Kady van Deurs, Eileen Pagan
100
101
Preserving Our Words
loan Nestle, Deborah Enel
106
Response
Barbara Grier
GRAPHICS:35
Tia Cross
35 ,51
Susan Fleischman
94
Amy Christine Straayer
34,50,62,66
lerusha67,68,69.70
Kaymarion
96
Hala, cartoon

See Important Announcement, inside back coverCLAUDIA SCOIT

October 31, 1948-December 22 , 1979

Claudia Scott , a personal friend of many and a friend of the gay community
at large , died on Saturday , December 22, 1979. Her death , by suicide , was apainful shock to all of us who knew her.
Since moving to Philadelphia from Chicago in the fall of 1976, Claudia was
influential in many community organizations and projects. She was central to
the functioning of the Sisterspace Lesbian Hotline , serving as a volunteer since
its beginning , conducting training sessions , and helping to write the handbook.
A skilled carpenter , Claudia was in the process of renovating her own home .
She shared her koowledl/:e hy teaching courses in woodworking and home
repair for The Free Women 's School. Her friends knew she could be called on
for help or advice with projects in their homes, and she devoted a lot of timeand energy to reconstruction work at the new location of Giovanni's Roombookstore.
Many of us knew Claudia as a poet , through hearing her read at local
poetry readings or seeing her work in publications such as Lavendar Woman
and Sinister Wisdom . She conducted writing workshops at the annual lesbian
writers' conference in Chicago , and was a member of the Philadelphia Rose
Writers' Group . Her book of poems , Portrait, was published in 1974 by
Lavendar Press .
In addition to the activities for which she was well known , Claudia's
interests ranged from bicycling to collecting railroad memorabilia. Because
she was unpretentious about her skills, even her close friends didn't know theextent and diversity of them. Few of us knew that she had a pilot's license ,or that she could read Latin and Greek (she graduated with a degree inclassical studies from Washington University in 1970). She loved all kinds ofgraphic arts , puzzles and games , and travelling.
Only a brief time has passed since Claudia's death , but her absence in ourlives is deeply felt. Because of her dedication to the Sisterspace hotline , wefeel it would be fitting as a token of remembrance to send donations to help
further their work . Contributions can be sent to Sisterspace , 3601 Locust
Walk , Philadelphia , Pennsylvania 19104 .
2- The Friends of Claudia Scott

TI1E.ORY

Racism and Writing
Some Implications for White Lesbian Critics
by Elly Bulkin

Whereverwe protest
we will go planting- Muriel Rukeyser*

Some months ago I began work on an article entitled "Homophobia andHeterosexual Feminists." I had begun the article out of a few years' accumulated anger at having to deal with homophobia in the " feminist" world of
publishing, teaching, and conferences. I wrote barely two pages before that
title seemed inadequate, and I stuck in the word ''white'' before the word
"heterosexual." If I- as a white lesbian-was so invisible to these white heterosexual feminists, how much more invisible were lesbians of color. Given thegeneral insensitivity of these writers/editors to women of color regardless ofsexual and affectional preference, insisting that they deal with their .homophobia confronted only part of the problem . Though my concern here is nottheir homophobia, it- combined with their racism- served as a catalyst for
my own exploration of racism.
For in nearly every instance of homophobia I planned to cite, racism wasat least as identifiable. While The Feminist Press' Out of the Bleachers: Writings on Women and Sport distinguishes itself by its total failure to include
material about lesbians, it also contains a paragraph in which a white woman
writer congratulates a Black woman athlete for speaking not "black lingo ,"but "perfectly enunciated formal English prose." l The special Frontiers issue"Mothers and Daughters" and the Feminist Studies one, "A Feminist Theoryof Motherhood ," each includes only a single poem written from an identifiable lesbian perspective and no critical or personal articles about lesbian
motherhood or co-parenthood at all . Neither contains any work about Third
World mothers .2
3Ellen Moers, whose Literary Women: The Great Writers has been called"a model of feminist criticism"3 and gets cited positively at women's studies
conferences, places lesbians under the heading of "freaks,"4 considers lesbianism one of the "worst scandals" that can be attributed to a dead woman
writer ''under the respectable heading of literary scholarship,"5 and lets lessthan a dozen lines about Lorraine Hansberry stand as her sole discussion of
Third World women writers.6 And Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on
Women Poets, with the exception of Gloria T . Hull 's two-page discussion of
Audre Lorde , completely ignores lesbian writers as a force in contemporary
women 's poetry. At the same time , it holds with stubborn perverseness to its
title , despite the opening sentence of Hull's survey of Afro-American womenpoets: "Black women poets are not 'Shakespeare's sisters' ."7
I fInd that my almost invariable initial response to what I read and what
I hear is to the issue of homophobia ; then , sometimes right after, sometimes
after a significant time lapse , I become aware of the existence of racism. At
last fall 's The Second Sex Conference: Simone DeBeauvoir 30 Years Later , I
attended a workshop on women 's writing led by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, editorof Feminist Studies, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, co-editors of
Shakespeare's Sisters. While DuPlessis at least specifIed that she was speaking
only about heterosexual romance, Gilbert and Gubar just spoke as if all women writers-with the exception of Alice Walker- were both heterosexual andwhite. Adrienne Rich was mentioned , but not as a lesbian; Alice Walker was
praised, but seen only within the context of a white women 's literary tradition . After some discussion , I objected to the heterosexism of the presentations and met fIrst with embarrassed silence and then with the assurance that ,of course , they were all well aware of lesbian writing-it just didn't happen
to receive attention in these particular papers. Going home on the subway ,I realized that I could well have objected to the white solipsism of the presentations and didn't-caught as I was in the immediacy of my anger at myown oppression. The following day , given a chance to speak at an open mike,
I made the connections I had failed to make the day before.
II

I mention this particular example as neither mea culpa nor simple successstory , but as a way of beginning to look at the dynamics and socializing factors that interfere with our confronting racism , both in ourselves and in otherwhite women. For I assume that I/we do not have to be non-racist in order
to be anti-racist. For me this has been a crucial realization. As a vocal criticof heterosexism , I have been able to raise my voice confIdent in the knowledge that my own actions, my own words do not reflect that very bias. In
taking an anti-racist position , I can make no such claim . Yet I can hardly wait
to take these positions until the day when I will be free of all I have beentaught about race and when I will no longer reap the benefIts of having awhite skin in this particular society. Increasingly , I am aware that such deferring of anti-racist actions effectively silences me .
I think it is essential that as white women , as white lesbians , we breakout of that silence, that inaction, that wait for the never-never-day when we
4

will be blameless enough to speak. In part, I see the process of doing this as
investing with inescapable concreteness the concept of racism. Rich has written in "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia":
The concept of racism itself is often intellectualized by white feminists .
For some , a conscientious, obligatory mention of "racism-and-classism"
allows it to be assumed that deep qualitative differences in female experience have been taken into account, where in fact intellectual analysis has
been trusted to do the work of emotional apprehension , which it cannot
do. (JVe all recognize the same phenomenon where male analyses of sexism
are concerned .) It is possible to make obeisance to the abstract existenceof racism, even to work politically on issues of immediate concern to blackand Third World women, such as sterilization abuse , out of an intellectual
right-mindedness which actually distances us from the point where black
and white women have to begin together. I have more than once felt anger
at abstractly "correct" language wielded by self-described political feminists :a language, it seemed to me, which sprang from learned analysis rather thanfrom that synthesis of reflection and feeling , personal struggle and criticalthinking , which is at the core of feminist process. 8
Much of what I have learned about racism comes from my participatiol!
in several anti-racism workshops, a white women's anti-racism consciousnessraising group , and a series of meetings on Black-Jewish relations. Both by recalling my own experience and listening to those of other white women, I
learned how pervasive racism is in each of us and how it creeps in even when
I am most conscious of avoiding it (perhaps too in this article). Yet exploring
my own memories allows me to begin to undo my racism, to start to rousefrom the inertia it fosters in me . Asked to recall my earliest awareness that
there were differences between people of color and white people , I remembered two instances which symbolize for me some of the complexity of transcending my own racism to take clearly anti-racist positions . I recall my immigrant grandmother, who died before I was 6 , referring to Black people as"schwartzes," dropping a word of Yiddish into a stream of English sentences
and thereby impressing on me without further explanation that "they" (and ,by extension , other people of color) were so alien to my white world that
their very existence could not be acknowledged in my own language. Years
later, in the mid-fifties , I remember my parents speaking with the simple superiority of Northern liberals about civil rights for Black people in the South,
and thereby impressing upon me both that prejudice was a terrible thing andthat it could be defined ·.in terms of basic civil rights and the intellectual concept of racial equality. For them , racism was floating around someplace out
there - certainly in Birmingham and Little Rock; and if I only believed in theequality of all people, I would be forever safe from the corrosion in my grandmother's message.
In the past few years, I have learned better. I have not , after all, escaped .
Had I not these particular stories of the origins of my racism , I would haveothers that would have cut equally deep . The issue , I think, is not to belabor
this reality, but to explore what can , in fact, still be done in spite of it.
If we haven't already done so, I think we need to be involved in anti-racistc-r groupS.9 As white women , we need to use supportive formats developed5

oy women looking at patriarchal oppression and adapt them so that we canlook at how we have been taught racist attitudes and at how we perpetuatethem , despite our honest desire not to do so . It seems especially insupportable
for those of us who rage daily against the bias of heterosexuals and insist thatthey explore where they're coming from and do something about it to refuse
to take the same steps with regard to racism. If we were willing to spend an
evening learning how men (and nonlesbian women) oppress us, we should be
willing to devote at least as much time exploring how and why we function
as oppressors-and how we can stop playing that role or, at the very least,
how to minimize it. In doing this we can learn too how racism circumscribes
our own lives.
The other half of this self-education project involves filling the informational , cultural, political, and general historical gaps left by years of schoolingthat either omitted or distorted material about women/people of color. Dueboth to a flowering of writing by women of color and to their persistent
struggle against racism and sexism to make their work visible, an increasing
amount of it has been published during the past few years in both (white)
feminist publications and (non feminist) Third World ones. While special focus
issues (on racism, Third World women, Black women) have appeared in thewhite feminist press in the past year or so, at least as important has been thegeneral increase in some publications of writing by women of color. At thesame time , nonfeminist Third World publications (HooDoo; Callaloo, a Black
South Journal of Arts and Letters; Bridge, The Asian American Perspective;
De Colores, Journal of Emerging Raza Philosophies) have put out issues dealing with Asian American , Black , and Chicana women , while Freedomways: A
Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement has just printed a whole issue
about Lorraine Hansberry . One result of multiple oppression , Third World
women's general lack of access to fmancial resources , has drastically limited
the number of Third World feminist publications, though Azalea: A Magazine
for Third World Lesbians and Sojourner: A Third World Women's ResearchNewsletter have been appearing on an ongoing basis.lO
Those of us who have entirely or largely given up reading work by and/or
about men will find a growing amount of woman-focused material, but ulti-·
mately will find it impossible to learn about the lives of women of color
while holding to strictly separatist principles. Studying historical backgroundalone, we will find the lives of women of color often linked, at times inextricably, with those of Third World men: in slavery ; in World War II concentration camps built for Japanese-American citizens; in the government slaughterand forced settlement "reservations" of Native Americans; in land annexed(Texas and other Southwestern states) and colonized (puerto Rico); in institutions that systematically have scorned the languages, cultures, and abilitiesof people of color. As the Combahee River Collective has written in " A Black
Feminist Statement": "Our situation as Black people necessitates that wehave solidarity around the fact of race ."11
Even when the perspective is non-feminist or anti-feminist, work that explores the general situation of women and men of color and the dynamics
between them can be valuable, in part because it indicates the obstacles faced
by women of color who are- or would be - feminists .12 So it can be helpful6

to read Shantih's ''Native American Issue"; The Black Scholar 's two special
issues on "Blacks and the Sexual Revolution" and "The Black Sexism Debate";

Sunbury's American Born and Foreign: An Anthology of Asian American
Poetry; alternate press and mass market periodicals and books by/for TItird .
World people; and weekly or daily newspapers focusing on Third World communities . And each of these contains references of more things to read, listingsof lectures and political and cultural events that are most often open to white
women , if we choose to go. As the world in which women of color spend
each day becomes increasingly three-dimensional to us as white lesbian-feminists,
we move further and further out of the white enclave of thought and interaction in which most of us live , and begin to see its limitations-and its oppressiveness-in sharper perspective .
In addition, we have to begin much more seriously than I think we havethus far to apply anti-racist criteria to work by other white women . In part,I see our failure to do this as an aspect of our larger failure to be seriously
critical, though supportive , of each other's work. Too often we are so excitedby the appearance of a work that raises important issues and is positive about(white) lesbians that we fail to consider the aspects of the book in which theauthor does not push far enough in her own consciousness. It is, of course,
more comfortable to do this; none of us likes to be told where we have failed
or not been as successful as we might ; we find it difficult to resist identifying
with the writer whose work we criticize (and who perhaps will then spare us
when the critical tables are turned) . Yet I think this approach-which can leadto puffmg or sliding over serious problems because they seem too volatile todiscuss-shows little respect for our ability to learn and grow as a result ofserious criticism.
A few years ago , in an interview I did and then edited, Adrienne Rich referred to an anthology that "included blacks and other minorities; but womenand homosexuals were not included ."13 Though it was certainly not her conscious intent-nor mine in editing the interview-the wording sets up blacks
and other minorities and women and homosexuals as separate groups and makes
the existence of Black women or Hispanic lesbians a verbal impossibility. The
appropriate criticism that we received from Flying Clouds as a result helped
sensitize us to the issues involved. A consequence of the criticism was my own
increased ability to monitor my own work for racist language and assumptions.
Talking about criticism in that same interview , Rich has said : ''We need a kindof pointing toward what isn 't being dealt with, what is creating silences andevasions .... We don't explore our capacity until we're challenged."14Those of us who feel frustrated by the continual failure of all but a handful of nonlesbian women to speak out on issues of homophobia need to ourselves challenge racism and not leave it to be the task of women/lesbians ofcolor, one that all too often remains undone if they are absent. Those of us
who automatically flip to the table of contents or to a book's index to see
if lesbians are included need to teach ourselves to look automatically for the
inclusion of women of color; if we check whether "homophobia" is in theindex , we need to look for " racism " too. When we edit work , we need to do
active outreach for work by women of color , rather than waiting for themto take the first step. It is not ok to run a special lesbian issue (as Heresies
has done) that is all white or to acknowledge that "lesbians and women pf
7

color are not adequately represented," as Frontiers has done most recently
in an issue devoted to "Who Speaks for the Women's Movement?" when, in
fact, we/they are not represented at all; nor is it acceptable for Frontiers to
run a lesbian history issue which includes a questionnaire response from a
Black lesbian and a short performance piece by an Asian-American lesbianwho is not included in the table of contents- as its only recognition of theherstory of lesbians of COIOr. 15 While it is crucial to include work by womenof color , we should not leave it to them alone to raise issues of racism andto explore the implications of any issue for women of color. The responsibility for doing this lies also with us as white women.
III

As critics- and readers - we must not forget the vital interconnection between words and the everyday of women's lives. Minnie Bruce Pratt makes thisconnection in her lengthy letter to Chrysalis protesting Carol Fox Schmucker's"Has Anyone Read Gone with the Wind Lately?" which discusses Scarlett
O'Hara as "a strong, active, alive woman with a very healthy self-love" in anovel "filled with powerful women, including older women who serve as rolemodels."16 At the end of her article , Schmucker talks briefly about GWTW
as a racist novel, whose author's " racial consciousness . .. mars her vision"(my emphasis) but which has, nonetheless, "been kept alive by its appeal towomen."17 Speaking as a Southern white woman who grew up in the fifties ,Pratt writes :We were able to participate vicariously and comfortably in her rebellion
because Scarlett broke no major taboos of her culture, of Mitchells's culture , of my mother 's culture , or of mine ; she, above all , did not break the
racial taboo. For me , to read GWTW as a Southern white woman was toenjoy the pleasures of revolt without having to consider what actual rebellion against social taboo, against the racial taboo would mean in my life.
When the movie Gone with the Wind came to my hometown every
four years during my girlhood , I would go down to the Ritz, stare at theposters where Vivien swooned against Clark in vivid tempura colors , pay
my 25¢ and go into the theater through the swinging door to the left of
the ticket booth. To the right of the booth was another door; it led up
steep stairs to the balcony where the black people of the town sat when
they came to the movies. Schmucker's failure to discuss forthrightly theracism in GWTW makes me think of that balcony. She cites commentsfrom other sources (A. Rich, A.F . Scott) to prove that Southern white
women have positive attitudes toward black women and men . She does
not point out that by 1936, the year of GWTW's publication, black women and men were still being lynched both in the South and elsewhere(see "Lynching" in the NY Times Index, 1930-) and that Mitchell reproduces the very excuses used by lynch mobs to justify their actions .... In
chapter 37, when Scarlett hears of the rise of Klan activity during Reconstruction and of the black man murdered by a white "gentleman," supposedly in defense of white women, Scarlett is said to feel for the firsttime "a kinship with the people about her." . : . She identifies with thedetermination of the men that the South was "too dear a homeland tobe turned over to ignorant Negroes drunk with whiskey and freedom."
Mitchell , in writing a "historical" romance that condones the worst actions of racism , actions that tontinued at the very time of her writing,8

evades a struggle with significant moral issues. She, like her heroine Scarlett , participates in , and agrees with, the immoral actions of white men.
Can we then discuss Mitchell as an author of a "serio us piece of work"?
... To fail to see that GWTW offers us a heroine who is reactionary, notrevolutionary, to fail to see in what way Mitchell's endorsement of racism
may have actually increased or sustained the novel's appeal to white women readers , is to continue to accept this racism.IS
Pratt continues:
If we are to read GWTW nowadays, we should read it with the knowledge that white terrorism reigned in this country from the 1890's throughthe 1930's (and later) , with the knowledge that Klan activity is rising today, with incidents reported from California to Colorado to New Jersey(UPI, 10/21/79), with the knowledge that white men at West Point havedressed in Klan regalia and harassed black students "for a joke" (AP,11/79), that the Klan runs a summer day camp for white children in
Decatur, Alabama (and doubtless elsewhere) where white boys and girls
are given lessons in white supremacy and target shooting (WBRC, Birmingham). If we read GWTW now, we should consider that this fall people
participating in an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, were
gunned down by the Klan and six, black and white, were killed (AP, 11/
6/79). A woman who was married to one of the killers, said, "I knew he
was in the Klan, but I don't know what he did when he left home." If weare white women, we must ask what is going on outside our '''home,'' outside our familiar, accustomed view. To analyze GWTW as if the racial andsexual attitudes that are expressed in it no longer exist is to evade a moral
responsibility, just as Margaret Mitchell did.
I have quoted Minnie Bruce Pratt's letter at such length because it seems
to me to model the type of anti-racist criticism that I think we-as white lesbians who are feminists-need to do more of. She takes her early life and uses
it as a means of analyzing racism and filling in the gaps left in Schucker's description of the white Southern female response to GWTW. She incorporates
an analysis of the impact of racism into her evaluation of Scarlett, GWTW asa whole, and the white Southern response to it, rather than tacking it on as
something of an afterthought, a rather unpleasant fact that must be acknowledged someplace in the article without interfering with its overall thesis.
Equally important, I think, she has taken the responsibility as a white woman
to "ask what is going on outside our 'home,' outside our familiar, accustomed
view." As a result, she .is able to bring to her analysis the kind of informed
critical sense that allows her to place both the book and the article in a concrete historical context of lynching and other forms of white terrorism. By
having learned that history, she is able to approach racism in terms of its very
real connection to people's lives, not as an abstraction which it is somehow"good" to oppose.
In fact, Minnie Bruce Pratt responded to the Chrysalis article shortly after
the Greensboro killings and while her students were writing their responses tothem. In a letter to me, she wrote about that experience:
One of the older black women in my fresllman comp class (in her forties)
delayed and delayed handing in the assignment on the Klan. She discussedwith me how writing about her experience brought back dreadful memories
and anger and pain - and she didn't want to bring it all up- she finally tumedqthe paper in-it told of her family being driven off land that they had owned
for five generations-and implied that she had seen her mother raped, perhaps beaten by the Klan - told of her responsibility as the oldest for hiding
the other children during the Klan visits when her mother pleaded withthem to leave, but they came and searched the house - watching them tramp
through from her hiding place.
(December 29 , 1979)
Even as this description helps put into perspective both Schmucker's article
and Chrysalis ' decision to print it, it also underscores the extent to whichracism and sexism are interconnected . Whereas the rape of the studen t's motherwas possible because she was a woman , the specific attack-the entry of herhouse by the Klan - took place only because she was Black.
I see Pratt 's response to the Schmucker article as emerging from a consciousness honed by her own openness to the type of concrete experience she
mentions in her letter to me. It emerges, in part, from what Rich has describedas crossing "barriers of age and condition ... sensing our way into another'sskin, if only in a moment's apprehension." 19 If we accept the premise thatwriting- our own and others'-can both reflect and perpetuate racism, if weknow - or know of-women of color who have been deeply hurt by racist writingby white people, including white lesbian-feminists, the impetus for developing
and applying anti-racist criteria becomes compelling.
IV
When I first picked up Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical
Feminism in galleys nearly a year and a half ago, I found myself in full agreement with her that "the oppression of women knows no ethnic, national, or
religious bounds," that it is , in short , "planetary ."20 I agreed too that all
facets of this oppression should be thoroughly researched and strenuously opposed . Still , I was concerned with her use of white Western sources that seemed
likely to be , for the most part, not just sexist but also racist , and about her
avoidance of race and class as substantive issues in her chapter on American
gynecology . Ultimately I felt that her failure to consider the biases in manyof her sources and to explore more than tentatively the ways in which raceand class influence the nature and extent of women's oppression seriously
undercuts the effectiveness of her argument and the reliability of her research.
I waited patiently for feminist reviews that would, in some way, reflect
my concerns. But, except for Mariana Valverde's comment in Canada's The
Body Politic that Daly "is quite insensitive to the peculiarities of ethnic groups
and historical periods," none appeared .21 Instead, review after review in feminist periodicals sounded the same note . In off our backs, Susanna J. Sturgis
wrote:

Gyn/Ecology is written to us, for us , from our experience , about us, theuntamed, the Hags .. .. Gyn/Ecology, this wonderful, brilliant, amazing
Hysterical book, spins itself beyond the words that Mary Daly wrote . I t isa creation, the work of a revolutionary feminist ; it is a vision of strengthand integrity of sisterhood. 22
And Susan Leigh Star said in Sinister Wisdom:This book is the total connuence of method and content, of the personal
and the historical, of the reach for change and the unflinChing examination10

of suffering, that I have come to know as feminism . Where this book is ,there is feminism ... . Gy n/Ecology, by specifying more broadly than any
scholarship to date , the background, origins, and assumptions of patriarchal
scholarship, creates for the first time a feminist sociology of knowledge. 23 .
The critical word-lesbian-feminist variety - was in , and Gyn/Ecology receded
into the recent past as a Great Event in lesbian-feminist history.
The reviews upset me . Only my discussions with other lesbian-feminists I
know prevent me from discounting my own perceptions-my own decision
not to "gynuflect"-as some sort of craziness on my part. The issue, it seems
to me, goes far beyond the book itself to its implications for the lesbian community, especially the lesbian writing community . Will we accept as a veritablesacred text a theoretical" book written by a white lesbian feminist that excludes
the concerns about racism expressed repeatedly by Third World feminists?
Will we consider how the lesbian community- Third World and white- suffersfrom again finding total acceptance by white lesbians for a book that excludes
these concerns? Will we accept without question scholarship as unbiased simply because it is put together by a (white) lesbian-feminist academic whose
tone assumes great authority?24
I am, for example, disturbed as I read through the Second Passage chapterson Indian suttee, Chinese footbinding, and African genital mutilation by Daly's
almost entirely uncritical use of white Western sources, nearly all male, andby her failure to acknowledge the racism both in passages she quotes in Gyn/
Ecology and in those she omits from her book. Although she fmally does
discuss the "unabashed" (172) racism of Dark Rapture: The Sex Life of theAfrican Negro, she consistently ignores possible racist bias in her focus on
the plight of women (who are, after all, both female and Third World).
She cites, for instance, the words of Joseph Campbell on Indian suttee orwidow-burning:
In spite of the suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the painof suffocation, we should certainly not think of the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate. For these sacrifices were not properly, infact, individuals at all; that is to say, they were not particular beings, distinguised from a class or group by virtue of any sense or realization of apersonal , individual destiny of responsibility. (116-17)
Daly comments : "I have not italicized any of the words in this citation because it seemed necessary to stress every word. It is impossible to make any
adequate comment" (117). While adequate comment is certainly difficult tomake , Daly consistently focuses in these chapters on the incredible misogyny
of men to the exclusion of anything else, including the potential racism ofher sources. So the bias in Campbell's perception of Ollr "reactions," the reactions of white Westerners, as innately different from those of Asians slips
through Daly's pages without comment. I have heard too many Hollywood
and television descriptions of Japanese kamikazee pilots, Chinese "hordes" invading North Korea, and "fanatically " single-minded (North) Vietnamese which
ass ume that " life is cheap in the Orient - they don't value life as much as wedo" - not to recognize this particular racist attitude when I read it.
Yet Daly is not through discussing Campbell. She writes:
IIAfter describing the live burial of a young widow which took place in 1818 ,this devo tee of the rites of de-tached scholarship describes the event as "anilluminating, though somewhat appalling, glimpse into the deep , silent poolof the Oriental , archaic soul [emphases Daly's] ... . What eludes the scholar
is the fact that the "archaic soul " was a woman 's destroyed by Patriarchal
Religion (in which he is a true believer) , which demands female sacrifice .
(I 19)
Here her objection is explicitly to the misogyny which is both clearly present
and appalling . But Daly does not confront the other half of the bias evident
in Campbell 's words , which reveal someone who believes in the stereotype ofthe "inscrutable Oriental " ("deep, silent pool of the Oriental , archaic soul " ) .
The existence of this racism in Daly 's sources in no way mitigates the woman-hating . But I do question chapters that cite source after source written
about women of color by men who are white and Western with no overall
look by the author at what their whiteness , their Western background , theracism of their anthropological field , mean in their reports of these atrocities. 25
Daly gives us valuable information about the horrors perpetrated against these
women , but she essentially ignores that part of the authors' blindness thatcomes from an angle of vision that is white and Western as well as male. Certainly their attitudes reflect their patriarchal devaluation of women. But thatis only part of the story.
Even more disturbing in certain ways is Daly 's failure to mention the incredibly blatant racism of American writer Katherine Mayo . Daly uses Moth er
India (192 7) as a source for her discussion of Indian child brides who areforced to marry , have intercourse , and bear children . Daly describes the bookby the American writer as " an excellent work " (119) which occasioned strenuous attack from women-hating critics . " Feminist Seekers/Spinsters ," shewrites , "should search out and claim such sisters as Katherine Mayo .... We
must learn to name our true sisters . . .. In the process of seeking out thesesister Seekers/Spinsters , it is essential to look at their own writing" (emphasis
Daly's, 129-30) , rather than at thei r male detractors' .
So I looked at Mother India itself. And found Mary Daly doing to Third
World people exactly what she (accurately) charges men of doing to women .
In a reference to a misogynist writer who discusses Chinese footbinding , Dalysays : "The author either concurs in tlle erasure or didn 't notice it. All of thisboils down to about the same thing : doublethink or de-tachment from women's oppression " (144). In Daly 's non-response to Mayo 's racism, in her
wholehearted lauding of her book , we have an analogous phenomenon. Early'in her book , Mayo writes :The British administration of India , be it good , bad , or indifferent , has
nothing whatever to do with the conditions above indicated . Inertia , helplessness , lack of initiative and originality , lack of staying power and ofsustained loyalties , sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life-vigor itself-all
are traits that truly characterize the Indian not only of today , but of longpast history. All , furthermore , will continue to' characterize him in increasing degree , until he admits their causes and with his own two hands uproots
them . No agency but a new spirit within his own breast can set him free.
And his arraignments of outside elements , past , present , or to come , serve
only to deceive his own mind and to put off the day of his deliverance .26
12

Indians are, Mayo says on the next page, "a huge population, mainly rural,
illiterate, and loving their illiteracy" (my emphasis).27 In Mother India's thirdchapter, '''Slave Mentality'," Mayo maintains:
The whole pyramid of the Hind u's woes, material and spiritual - poverty,
sickness, ignorance, political minority, melancholy, ineffectiveness, notforgetting that subconscious conviction of inferiority which he foreverbares and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness to social affronts-rests upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is, simply, hismanner of getting into the world [as offspring of a child bride] and his
sex-life thenceforward [my emphasis] .28
You can "find them," Mayo concludes the chapter, "at the age when the
Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, lowspirited, petulant ancients; and need you, while this remains unchanged, seekfor other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands
are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of government?"29
These words were, we should note, written thirty years before Indian independence, after centuries of British rule, and during a decade when American immigration laws were increasingly being tightened to keep out Asians
and other "non-Anglo-Saxons."30 If Mayo's words are those of a "true sister ,"whom I/we "should search out and claim," Daly and I certainly have different
standards. While the societally supported practice that Mayo reveals of taking
child brides who are then forced to have intercourse by their husbands is unquestionably loathesome, it can hardly explain "the whole pyramid of the
Hindu's woes." I do not know, of course, whether Daly read the comments
by Mayo without registering them as racist or whether she consciously chose
not to include them in her discussion of Mother India. But the result is effective ly the same: judgment offered, information presented, as if racism werebeyond notice, beneath mention.
Another kind of "erasure" occurs in Daly's chapter on American gynecology, in which she seems to me equally unwilling to admit and explore theextent to which women of color and poor women of all races are victims ofwhite male professionals. Repeatedly in this chapter, Daly has the opportunity
to use "graphic and detailed material" to describe "the horrible physical reality"(150) of the impact on women of color and poor women of the white, malegynecological establishment. Writing about G. Marion Sims, a nineteenth-century gynecologist, she says: "He began his life's work 'humbly,' performing
dangerous sexual surgery on black female slaves housed in a small buildingin his yard" (225) . In a no te at the bottom of the page, she states: "MarySmith, an Irish indigent, suffered thirty of his operations between 1856 and1859. The black slave Anarcha had suffered the same number in his backyard
stable a decade before" (225). This information is, in itself, upsetting. Yet
that "graphic" detail that Daly correctly berates male scholars for omitting
when writing about footbinding is conspicuously absent here. Daly's source,
G. J. Barker-Benfield 's The Horrors of the HalfKllown Ufe: Male Attitudes
toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. is far more
explicit:
Although anesthesia had first been invented at the time (the 1840s). Sims
did nol know of il .. . . His first patienls endured years of almost unheliev13

able agonies . . .. Sims scoured the countryside for appropriate surgical subjects. Significantly, given the need for their endurance, passivity, and utter
helplessness, they were black female slaves, some of whom Sims bought
expressly for his experiments - that is, when the owner was skeptical about
Sim's methods . He built his own private hospital in his backyard to housethem. Rumors circulated in Montgomery that Sims was using human beings as guinea pigs for his surgical ambitions . The rumors were accurate.
As long as he was in Mon tgomery, "it was far harder to operate on white
women than on Negroes" because white women were more in a position
to express their will in the relationship with Sims. "The pain was so terrific that Mrs. H. could not stand it and I was foiled completely." So theblack slaves served as "adeq uate material" in Sims's "storing" of experience,"finding out more about the applicability of . . . silver sutures" until theinvention of anesthesia and of Listerism dissolved the resistance of wealthy
white women and Sims could apply to their bodies the teclmiques he had
perfected on the bodies of blacks. 31
Daly 's characterization of his practices as "brutal" (225) seems hardly adequate to describe these series of operations done withou t anesthesia on women who because of tlleir race and consequent slave status or their combined
poverty and recent immigrant status had no recourse. I was, quite simply,
shocked tha t , while Daly is perfectly willing to numb the reader with theagonies of women of color in other countries. she seems consistently reluctan t to do so closer to home .
This pattern of mentioning American women of color and poor womenas gynecological guinea pigs and immediately insisting that their race and/orclass is not pivotal in their selection (or that they are not the 'intended " targets) ,and then moving on to a discussion of white middle-class women ultimately
erases race and class as significant. Daly writes:
This blatant statement legitimates the use of women as unirlformed guinea
pigs for such drugs as The Pill and the morning-after pill. The temptation
might be to imagine that such destructive experimentation is confmed toa particular time (the past) or to particular segments of the female population (e.g., low-income and nonwhite). While the latter are victimized ina special way, their "higher-class" sisters are taken care of in a different
way. Thus well-educated (mis-educated) upper-middle-class women who"willirlgly" subject themselves (are subjected) to mutilating surgery andestrogen replacement therapy are uninformed objects in a refined sense.
(my emphasis, 259)
Daly's use of parallel terms and the verbal speed with which she moves frompoor women and women of color to middle-class women (overwhelmingly
white) is remarkable. Her parallel phrases ("in a special way" and "in a different way") give equal weight to the oppression of each group and has the ultimate effect of ignoring the suffering of women that is determined/affectedby their race and/or degree of economic privilege.
Rather than detailing this suffering, Daly moves on to a string of statistics
which, though informational, lack the immediacy which concrete examples
could brirlg to her study - and which she is perfectly wiIling to use in her discussions of Chinese, Indian , and African women. Here, as elsewhere in her
chapter on American gynecology , she follows the admission that women of14

color and poor women are "targeted" (269) for sterilization only with statistics and an immediate disclaimer : "It would be simplistic, however," Daly
writes , "to conclude that poor women are the essential targets of the intent
of gynecological gynocide" (emphasis Daly's , 270) .
Several pages later she demonstrates the same reluctance to look closely
at the impact on different groups of women of gynecological experimentationand mistreatment :From the inception of their profession , gynecologists have used black,
immigrant, and other poor women as guinea pigs , experimenting uponthem without their informed consent , in order to later use the "expertise"thus gained in lucrative private practice . Yet a class analysis is inadequate
here for it falls short of explaining all of the dimensions of autocratic
atrocities . The fact is that experimentation is part of the routine procedureof gynecology for women of all classes. As I have already indicated , poorand nonwhite women are usually totally uninformed of how they are being
used for "study ." So also middle- and upper-class women are often simply
not told anything , or when they are given "information ," their miseducation gives them the illusion of informed consent. (my emphasis , 269)
This paragraph is strikingly similar to the one I have just discussed on "womenas uninformed guinea pigs ." Again Daly uses parallel terms ("usually" andoften") that effectively eliminate any real difference in the quality of healthcare these groups of women receive , as well as in their potential access to both
adequate health care and feminist health information. Her quick dismissal ofa class analysis because it doesn 't explain "all of the dimensions of autocratic
atrocities" erases too women's economic position as a determinant in the quality of health care they can receive : while private gynecologists can mistreat
women horribly, certainly the woman who can afford to be both a private
consumer and purchaser of health services is in a far better position to have
her needs met than the woman who is forced to rely on clinics that will accept
medicaid or medicare or, in the absence of both heal th insurance and cash ,will accept installment payments .
Daly 's leveling of difference-even after her brief verbal acknowledgmentof it-fmds no support in the work done by feminist healthcare workers andresearchers, as reflected in the monthly health news columns and regular articles
in off our backs and other women 's periodicals ; the publications of suchgroups as CARASA (Committee against Restrictions on Abortion and Sterilization Abuse), CESA (Committee to End Sterilization Abuse) , Feminist Alliance against Rape , and Women Free Women in Prison ; the writings of such
Daly sources as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English ; material listed in thesyllabus on Black women 's healthcare put together by Beverly Smith; and inother feminist health publications. 32 Since extensive, thoroughly detailed feminist material demonstrates overwhelmingly the degree to which women ofcolor and poor women of all races are used as medical guinea pigs in waysthat (predominantly white) middle- and upper-class women are not , I fail tounderstand why Daly chooses not to document their sufferings in this chapter.
I cannot help but wonder about the connection between the absence of serious
recognition of this situation and the validity of Daly 's contention that "thepotential object of such studies is Everywoman" (25<)).
I find that the erasures in Daly's book ultimately rorm a pattern. For that15

reason, I think it worthwhile to consider these many examples. They are notisolated, random omissions . Daly writes with regard to male scholarship ofhow "pattern-<ietecting- the development of a kind of positive paranoia-is
essential for every feminist Searcher, so that she can resist the sort of mindpoisoning to which she must expose herself in the very process of seeking out
necessary information" (125). While we should follow her advice and develop"pattern-detecting" with regard to all forms of gynocidal patriarchy, we should
also consistently apply such criteria, as she does not, with regard to racism
and classism . They too are forms of "mind-poisoning." The kind of overall
pattern that I detect in Gyn/Ec%gy, one that can only be described accurately as racist, compels , I think , a re-evaluation of the book as a whole.
yIf, as white feminists, we prefer to ignore the pervasiveness of -racist oppression in the lives of women of color and to see women - or lesbians alone as a fairly homogeneous group, our preference emerges directly from ourwhite-skin privilege. If I can go through a whole day without a sharp awareness of racism, if I can put together - or think someone else can put togethera viable piece of feminist criticism or theory whose base is the thought andwriting of white women/lesbians and expect that an analysis of racism canbe tacked on or dealt with later as a useful addition , it is a measure of theextent to which I partake of that white privilege . If I can read a book like
Daly 's that says in its preface that it uses "Big Words . .. for it is written for
big, strong women , out of respect for strength" (xiv) and simply relish myidentification with those women, I have perhaps forgotten how , in this society ,learning the skills to do such reading has far more to do with having beenamong the token women able/allowed to overcome barriers of sex and raceand class than with any innate or acquired "strength ."33
We need instead writing/criticism that signals that we have been Listening
to women of color and understanding what they experience. Examples ofracist incidents abound. My morning paper carries an article about two white
California men convicted of randomly killing a deaf Black man because they
hadn't shot a deer on their hunting trip; the white woman who had accompanied them had already been convicted of second-<iegree murder. In the courseof their spree , one of the convicted men "tried to shoot at three black men
standing by a truck, but their rifle misfired . He then tried to shoot a young
black woman in the face .. . but missed at point-blank range."34 Spared byluck, the young woman was clearly a victim of racism, not of gynocidal patriarchy (though , perhaps on another day, that too will target her) . She just happened to be a woman. Her race and her near-victim status , however, were no
accident. Nor was the slain Black man saved because of his male sex. The incident has its countless parallels in communities of people of color all over
the United States-and, where white people have power, elsewhere in the world.
Truly, a planetary phenomenon.
The interconnectedness of oppressions- rather than their "hierarchy" - inthe lives of women of color gets stressed in the Combahee River Collective's"A Black Feminist Statement":
We ... often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.
16

We know that there is such a thing as a racial-sexual oppression which isneither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g. , the history of nlpe of black
women by white men as a weapon of political oppression. 35
The development of feminist theory and criticism by white women that'incorporates this type of ongoing recognition of the role of racism in the livesof all women of color and of economic powerlessness in the lives of the vast
majority of them is a requisite for truly empowering ourselves as feminists.
We can , of course , see this kind of inclusion in negative terIps- we don 't want
to oppress women of color. But we can see it far better as a positive stepthat underscores a healthy growth and complexity in a feminist vision ofchange for all women , not just for white middle·dass ones .

VI
It might be helpful , in attempting to develop such an anti-racist approach,to begin to work out a list of guideline questions that, although open-ended,
can help us formulate a critical position toward what we write and what weread. I developed the following specifically with non-fiction prose and collections of prose in mind, though it would be important also to formulate suchquestions in relationship to other genres..and collections . Though my list isnecessarily incomplete, I hope it will serve as a starting point in the development of a comprehensive one :Representation-To what extent are works included by women of color who represent
different racial and cultural backgrounds?
-Are women of color represented by work dealing with race and racism
and with topics not primarily focused on race (relationships with family ,sexuality, work , aging , etc.)?
- Does work by white women consider the implications of their subjects
for women of color?
Audience-Does the writer make any assumptions about the race of her audienceand , if so , what implications do they have for women of color?
Language- Does she use terms connecting "black" to evil and negativity (blacklist,
blackout, black sheep ; "it was a black day for her when her mother died")and "white" to goodness and innocence (white lie, whitewash)?
-Does she use terms to describe people of color that assume whiteness tobe the norm (i.e ., nonwhite)?
Critical A ttitudes!Assumptions- Does she give equal value to women of color and white women?
-When she speaks about "women ," "lesbians," "feminists ," are her statements applicable to white women and women of color?
-Does she recognize the differences in experience between women ofcolor and white women?
-Does she recognize differences among various racial and cultural groups(i.e., Puerto Ricans, Chicanas, Cuban-American) and anlOng individual
members of each group?
- Does she consider the class implications of being a woman of color in acountry where white people/men have the economic power?
- Does she incorporate race and racism into her analysis/evaluation or
simply men tion/list it?
\7

- Does she acknowledge the effect of race and/or class privilege?
- How does she perceive women of color who have defined their politicalcommitment in terms of their own Third World community/people?
- Does she show an awareness of the impact of racism on men of color?
- Does she show an understanding and knowledge of the historical framework in which racism has developed and of the histories of different groupsof people of color in this country?
- Does she show an awareness of her own limitations as a white woman
in discussing women of color and racism?
- How does she view women of color who do not speak "standard" (white ,middle class) English?
SOllrces- Has she considered the racial and cultural background of the author ofany sources she has used in terms of possible racial bias?
- Do her sources accurately reflect the experiences and perceptions of
women/people of color?
- Has she used sources written by women of color (and men of color if
she is using male sources) and observed any differences in approach andperception between Third World and white sources?
- Has she been creative and persistent in finding sources reflecting the experience of women of color when such sources were not immediately
available to her ?
- Does she show an awareness of work done in her field by women ofcolor and include that work in her bibliography?

VII
I am certainly under no illusion that developing and applying such criteria
is a simple matter. As I venture out in the guise of an anti-racist critic, I cannot help but know how open to countercharge I leave myself-by white women expressing their own anti-racist concerns and perhaps seeing far moreclearly than I; by women of color who understand the issues as I cannot andwill necessarily see me as " representing the group " oppressing them. 36 Theirright - their obligation-to raise their own criticism of what I say or fail to say
is undeniable . It emphasizes , in fact , the crucial issue of accountability . On
all levels, the options are clear : to remain passive and silent or to act withthe awareness that doing so is a necessary business .
The option to speak out now finds support in recent anti-racist writingby other white lesbians : Carol Ann Douglas' "Impressions and Confessions
about Racism" ; Deb Friedman 's "Rape , Racism and Reality"; Minnie Bruce
Pratt 's letter to Chrysalis; Adrienne Rich's " Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism ,Racism , Gynephobia"; Mab Segrest 's "Southern Women Writing: Toward a
Literature of Wholeness" ; the contributions of white women to Top Ranking:
A Collection of Essays on Racism and Ciassism in the Lesbian Community. 37
And behind them stand the anti-racist poetry of Muriel Rukeyser , the essays
and fiction of Lillian Smith , the novels of Jo Sinclair. 38
As feminists standing outside the patriarchal world view , as lesbians stand ing outside the circle that all but the exceptional non-lesbian has drawn about
herself, we have learned much about the chasm between intentions and acts .
As feminists, as lesbians , as white-skinned people in a racist society , we canread Adrienne Rich's words from several perspectives:
18

I try to understandhe saidwhat will you undertake
she said

will you punish me for history
he saidwhat will you undertake
she said 39
Put in a context other than its original one , but still framing a dialogue between oppressor and oppressed, her poem can be seen to ask us - as whitelesbian-feminists committed to anti-racism - the most basic of questions : What

will we undertake?
I greatly appreciate the criticism and support of those women who read this article
in draft : Dorothy Allison, Maureen Brady, Jan Clausen, Harriet Cohen, Barbara Gaines Leovna , Audre Lorde, Judith McDaniel, Rena Grasso Patterson , Linda C. Powell, Minnie
Bruce Pratt , Adrienne Rich, Arleen Rogan , Julie Schwartzberg, and Barbara Smith.
A Note about Language: Throughout my article I use the terms "Third Worid women"
and "women of color" interchangeably as positive terms adopted by such women themselves. I find myself in something of a politico-iinguistic transition period : usage of "womenof color" is increasing, though it is still used more by feminists in the Western U.S. than in
the East, where I live. Perhaps in a few years we will have a more generally agreed-upon
term. In addition, it is important to recognize that "women of color," especially Latina
women - who belong to no single racial group-can be as white~kinned as I am, while still
being victims of racism . My characterization of other women and myself as "white" refers,
in fact, to a complicated intersection of racial and ethnic identity . The term "Third World"on the other hand seems to imply the priority of "first" and "second" worlds in whichwhite people form the majority . Though it is not my subject, I think it important wnnm
the framework of my topic to acknowledge the complexity of the language I/we use.

NOTES
*Rukeyser, "Wherever," Breaking Open (New York : Random House, 1973), p. 59.
I. Pat Jordan, "Sweet Home: Willye B. White," Out of the Bleachers, ed. Stephanie L.
Twin (Old Westbury : The Feminist Press and McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 86 . For a copy of thepetition protesting the book's racism and homophobia and a letter written by Rena Grasso
Patterson and me in response to the press' reply to the petition, see Matrices, vol. 3, no. 2(February 1980), pp. 3-5 .
2. Frontiers , vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1978); Feminist Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (June 1978).
The Frontiers issue contains one article by a woman whose biographical note indicates that
she is probably Black, "Motherhood in the Novels of Margaret Drabble" by Ann Rayson, ateacher of Afro-American studies.
3. Ellen G. Hawkes, "Private Female Resentments" (review of Literary Women), Ms.,
vol. 5, no. 1 (July 1976), p. 104. A blurb on the inside cover of the paperback edition(Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1977) quotes Tillie Olsen as saying: "Literary
Women is a catalyst, a landmark book . Authoritatively establishes the scope, depth , variety,of literature written by women ."4. Moers, pp. 164 , 166.
5. Moers, p. 220.
6. Moers, p. xviii. For Alice Walker's comments on Moers' discussion of Hansberry , see"One Child of One's Own : An Essay on Creativity," Ms .. vol. 7, no. 2 (August 1979), pp .
. 72-73. See also Gloria Hull, "Afro-American Women Poets: A Bio.{'ritical Survey," Shakespeare's Sisters: Femillist Hssays Oil WUII/C'II Poets. ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gullar(Bll1()min~t()n: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 181 .
19

7. Hull, p. 165.
8. Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York : Norton,1979), pp. 3034. (Originally published in Chrysalis 7,1979).
9. "Face-to-face, Day-to-<lay Racism CR n (guidelines for CR groups), Tia Cross, Freada
Klejp, Barbara Smith , Beverly Smith , Sojourner (May 1979), p. 11; reprinted in Women 's
Studies- Newsletter. vol. 7, no. I (Winter 1980), pp. 27-28; and in Top Ranking: A Collectionof Articles on Racism and Classism in the Lesbian Community. ed. Sara Bennett and Joan
Gibbs (Brooklyn: February 3rd Press, 1980) . See also "Lesbians Struggle wit\1 Racism,"interview by Cindy Stein, Gay Community News (March I, 1980)' pp. 10-11, 14.
10. Publications mentioned here and in the following paragraph are listed, with ()rdering information, in the Selected Reading List.
t I. Combahee River Collective, in Capitalist Patriarchy: A Case for Socialist Feminism,
ed . Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press , 1978) , p. 365 .
12. See also Barbara Smith's letter, Sojollrner (September 1979), p. 2.
13. Elly Bulkin, "An Interview with Adrienne Rich : Part I," Conditions: aile (April
1977), p. 59.
14. Bulkin, "An Interview with Adrienne Rich : Part II," Conditions: Two (October1977), p. 62.
15. "Lesbian Art and Artists," Heresies 3 (Fall 1977) ; Editorial Collective, "To Our
Readers," vol. 4 , no. I (Spring 1979), p. iv; "Lesbian History Issue," Frontiers. vol. 4, no.
3 (Fall 1979). See Barbara Smith's responses in Judith Schwarz' "Questionnaire on Issues
in Lesbian History ," pp. 1-12 ; and Christine Wong's "Yellow Queer·, " p. 53 .
16. Schmucker, Chrysalis 9 (Fall 1979), pp. 63, 64 .
11. Schmucker, It. 69 .
. 18.. Pratt, letter to Chrysali~ December 27, 1979 ; printed in Top Ranking.
19. "Disloyal to Civilization ," p. 307 .
20. Daly, GynjEcology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. HI. All page references areto this edition.
.
21. Valverde, "Beyond Equal Rights : Mary Daly's Gynocentric Vision ," Th e Body
Politic (October 1979), p. 32.
'. 22. Sturgis, review of "Gyn/Ecology ," off our backs (March 1979), pp. 18-19.
23. Star, "To Dwell among o u}Selves ," Sinister Wisdom 8 (Winter 1979), pp. 87-88 .
24. For the response of a Black lesbian-feminist to Gy n/Ecology, see Audre Lorde's"An Open Letter to Mary Daly," May 6 , 1979 ; printed in Top Ranking; for a more general
discussion of the issues involved, see Barbara Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,"
Conditions: Two. (Fall 1977), pp . 2544.
25. For a discussion of the issues raised bY' white anthropologists doing fieldwork in
Third World countries, see William S. Willis, J L , "Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet,"
Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 121-52.
26. Katherine Mayo,Mother India (New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 16. A~though
the publisher· differs from the one Daly lists (Blue Ribbon) , the tex t and pagination appear
to i:orrespond exactly.
27 . Mayo, p. 11.
28 . Mayo, p. 22 . Mayo takes her chapter title from a reference to the British "to whose
oppressive presence' the Indian atfiibutes what he himself describes as the 'slave mentality'of 247,000,000 human beings" (Jl. 21).
29. Mayo , p. 32:
3'0. For a discussion of American atti tudes about race at the time Mayo wrote MotherIndto, see Thomas F. Gossett's Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York:
Schocken, 1963).
31 . Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New. York: Harper & Row,
1976), p. 10 I. In her review of Daly's book, Joanna Russ says: "This section would be moretelling if Daly-remembered to remind us that 1. Marion Sims ... [operated] without anesthesia" (her emphasis); Frontiers , vol. 4, no. I (Spring 1979) , p. 69 . However, she does notconsider the implications of this omission .
32 . CARASA, 386 Park Ave . South, NY, NY 10016 ; CESA, Box A 244 , Cooper Station ,NY, NY 10003 ; FAAR, P.O . Box 21033, Washington, DC 20009 ; Women Free Women in20

Prison, P.O. Box 283, Nyack, NY 10994 ; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her
Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, NY : Anchor/Double·day, 1979) and, for a detailed discussion of the dumping in Third World countries of drugs
even the FDA thought unsafe for American women, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark Dowie, Stephen
Minkin, "The Charge: Gynocide / The Accused: The U.S. Government," Mother Jones (November 1979); Beverly Smith , "Black Women's Health : A Syllabus," unpublished (I am
grateful to Beverly Smith for se nding me a copy of the syllabus and annotated bibliography.)
33 . Daly's words have,l think, the impact of either flattering the woman who can easily
understand them or degrading the one who cannot. Cris South, a working-class lesbian who
is on the Feminary collective, writes: "I read only to the part where Daly gives her warning
about 'Big Words' and I stopped. The statement infuriated and insulted me. The implica tion
to me was that only those women able to understand 'Big Words' were worthy to read thebook . (I have no objection to occasionally consulting a dictionary .) But I found Daly's words
particularly offensive when I read that the words were written out of respect for 'big, strong
women.' I don ' t feel that a woman's inability to understand 'Big Words' make her any lessstrong or intelligent. Daly's comments alienated me drastically from her whole message and,on certain levels, from her as any model of a 'feminist' theoretician. I put the book down formonths , unable to resolve my anger in any way that would allow me to finish it. I did finallyfinish Gyn/Ecology but only very recently." (letter to the author, March 21,1980).
34. Wallace Turner, "2 White Men Get 25 Years in Random Murder of a Black ," NewYork Times (February 28, 1980), p. 16A .
35. Combahee River CoUective, p. 365 .
36 . Nancy Hoffman writes in "White Wom an:, Black Women : Inventing an Adequate
Pedagogy": "Only sometimes will your own anti-racism and your solidarity with other women protect you from representing the group oppressing black women"; Women's Studies'
Newsletter, vol. 5, nos. I and 2 (Winter/Spring 1977), p. 22.
37 . Douglas, off our backs (November 1979), pp. 16-17 ,20; Friedman, Quest (Summer1979) , pp. 40-52; Segrest, Feminary, vol. 10, no . 1 (1979), pp . 28-43.
38 . See, for example, Muriel Rukeyser 's '"The Trial" (part 3 of '"The Lynchings of Jesus")
about the 1931 Scottsbo ro trial; Lillian Smith's essays in The Winner Names th e Age (1978),edited by Michelle Cliff; Jo Sinclair's The Changelings (1955), as weU as her political (andpositive) depiction of Debby, the lesbian in Wasteland (946).
39. Rich , "From an Old House in America," Poems, Selected·and New, 1950·1974(New York: Norton , 1975) , p. 243.
PERIODICALS CITED

Th e Body PolitiC, Box 7289, Station A, Toronto, Ontario , Canada M5W lX9 ($1; $10/12
issues) .
Chrysalis, 1727 N. Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90012 ($4.50; $ 13/4 issues) .
Conditions, P.O. Box 56 , Van Brunt Station , Brooklyn, NY 11215 ($3; $8/3 issues, $6"hardship" subscription; free to women in prisons and mental' institutions) .
Feminary , P.O. Box 954, Chapel Hill, NC 275 14 ($2; $5/3 issues) .
Feminist Studies, Women 's S!udies Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
20742 ($4; $10/3 issues) .
. Frontiers, Women's Studies Program, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 ($3 .75;
$ 11 /3 issues).
Gay Community News, 22 Bromfield St., Boston, MA 02108 (50¢; $17.50/52 issues).
Heresies, P.O. Box 766 , Canal St. Station, NY, NY 10012 ($3; $15/4 issues).
Matrices . Dept. of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588 (free).
offour backs, 1724 20th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009 (75¢; $7/ 12 issues) (free toprisoners) .
Quest. P.O. Box 8843, Washingto n, DC 20003 ($3.35; $9/4 issues) .
Sojourn er, 143 Albany St. , Cambridge, MA 02139 (75¢; $5/12 issues).
Women's Studies Newsletter, Box 334 , Old Westbury, NY 11568 ($2; $7/4 issues).

21

A SHORT READING LIST ON WOMEN/PEOPLE OF COLOR AND RACISM"Ain't I a Womon" Issue, off our backs , July 1979.
American Born and Foreign : An Anthology of Asian Am!!rican Poetry, Sunbury 7-8, 1979
(Box 274, Jerome Ave. Station, Bronx, NY (0468).
"Asian American Women ," Bridge: An Asian American Perspective, Winter 78-79 and Spring
1979 ($1.50 per issue; P.O. Box 477, Canal St. Station, New York, NY 10013).
Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians ($1.50; Joan Gibbs, 306 Lafayette Ave.,
Brooklyn, NY 11238).
"The Black Sexism Debate," The Black Scholar, May/June 1979 ($2; P.O. Box 908, Sausalito, CA 99965).
"Blacks and the Sexual Revolution," Th e Black Scholar, April 1978 ($1.50).
''Chicano Materials Issue," Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, 1975 (Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1841 Broadway, NY, NY 10023).
Conditions: Five , the Black Women s Issue, 1979.
In the Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black
Women and Writing, ed. Juliette Bowles ($5; Institute for the Arts and the Humanities,
Box 723, Howard University, Washington , DC 20059).
"La Cosecha, Literatura y la Mujer Chicana," De Colores, Journal of Emerging Raza Philosophies, 1977 ($2.50 ; Pajarito Publications , 2633 Granite NW , Albuquerque, NM 87104).
"Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light ," Freedomways: A Quarterly Reviewof the Freedom Mov em ent, 1979 ($2 .50 ; 799 Broadway, NY , NY 10003).
"Native American Issue," Shan tih , Summer-Fall 1979 ($3 ; P.O. Box 125, Bay Ridge Station ,Brooklyn, NY 11220).
No More Cages, a Bi-Monthly Wom ell's Prison Ne wsletter ($1.50 ; Women Free Women in
Prison, P.O . Box 283, Nyack, NY (0994) .
"Portrayal of Asian Americans in Children's Books," Interracial Books for Children Bulletin ,1976 ($3).
"Puerto Rican Materials Issue," Interracial Books for Children Bulletin , 1972 ($3) .
"Race , Class, and Culture ," Quest, Spring 1977.
"Racism and Sexism Issue," off our backs, November 1979.
"Racism as a Woman's Issue," Sojourner, May 1979.
Racism in the English Language, Robert B. Moore ($2; The Racism/Sexism Resource Center, 1841 Broadway, New York, NY (0023).
Sojourner, a Third World Women's Research Newsletter (free; Harriet G. McCombs, Psychology Dept., Wayne State University, Detroit, MI48202) .
"Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other," Heresies 8, 1979.
Top Ranking: A Collection of Articles on Racism and Classism in the Lesbian Community,
ed . Sara Bennett and Joan Gibbs ($2.50-more if/less if; February 3rd Press, 306 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11238; checks payable to Bennett/Gibbs).
"Women Poets: A Special Issue," Callaloo 5, a Black South Journal of Arts and Letters,
February 1979 ($3; Charles H. Rowell , Dept. of English, Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington,
KY 40506) .

Culture Making: Lesbian Classics in the Year 2000?
by Melanie Kayewhen beth hodges asked me if i'd write something on lesbian classics inthe year 2000 , i laughed . the concept of classics has for some time seemed
to me one more way in which they get to be pompous and we get robbed of
our own taste : what do you mean you don't like Idylls of the King? it's aclassic! laughed and got intrigued . i thought of my favorite books-but what would becomea classic? it seemed megalomaniacal to assume that whatever mechanism says
make it, get known, sell, be heard, get requested, reprinted, endure would
coincide with my personal taste .
. so what is a classic?

***
judgment.
the mechanism .
a classic is a book that stays in print?
who decides what stays in print , what gets remaindered, whatmakes it into paper, onto the supermarket paperback displays , backinto hardbound collected works?
toni morrison 's first novel- the bluest eye - is out of print; sula
is available only in hardbound .1
alice walker's first novel-the third life of grange copeland- wasout of print for 7 years (reissued 1977).2
come to think of it , how much of aphra behn, emily dickinson ,christina rossetti , willa cather , gertrude stein, h .d. , virginia woolf,
etc. , were out of print before the women 's liberation movement?
besides, while few books stay in print , fewer still get into printin the first place.
so a classic is a book that at least gets published?
the masterpieces - mistresspieces- sisterpieces- thelanguage intervenes , throwing some inadvertent light on the subject- a book no one reads has no chance of becoming a classic , nomatter how wonderful.
so if my book is printed and distributed and well-read and liked by manynote : since in writing this i didn't use upper case letters , it seemed stupid to add them,sort of like wearing makeup for compan y. also , i del' ided to give full publit:ation info rmation for small press books, since these are less widely distributed : and for large press blll,ks
to give only dates, since i d on't feel like giving credit tll businesses smartl'nough Il' makemoney olT us.

people. it will become a classic?
printed by whom? distributed how? (take a moment to mo urn
the demise of WIND- women in distribution - which will seriously
affect our question.)but even if we assume the book gets printed and read. the answer
is: sure , if those people who read and like it include an editor fromdoubleday, a critic from the lIy review of books, several professorsof literature at prestigious schools who will men tion your book in
their lectures and their books , include you on their reading lists andclass syllabi. encourage their graduate students to write dissertations
on you and on those around you , start sessions about you at the
MLA where they have heated discussions about your imagery andfictional persolla. 3
in fact, even if 110 olle likes your book except for editors, critics, and professors, your book stallds a good chalice of becoming a classic.
(Does getting your own classics comic make you a classic?)***a historical digression. by way of explanation .
shakespeare in his own time was extremely popular , the best. his popularity
occurred in the context of a popular theater . a whole audience accustomed
to regular play-going , a "hot" audience with a shared and growing frame ofreference , like the audience for rock in the late sixties , or (on a smaller scale)
women's poetry in the early seventies , exploding with mass energy and creativity. shakespeare's popularity meant that many of Ius contemporaries werefamiliar with his work , language , ideation . thus elizabethan/jacobean cultureat least around london 4 - theater. language , literature incorporated his workso that he went on being familiar. the cultural web around him spun larger
and he was part of it. he schooled the ears of those who shaped the language.
he gave the story tellers his version of stories which interested him.
today his sentences sound "poetic," while ben jonson's-a gifted contemporary - seem peculiar , because jonson 's rhythms and even vocabulary are un familiar. the intrigues of volpone (one of jonson 's better plays) are harder tohandle than those of romeo & juliet, who have at least on the level of stereotype passed into mainstream culture . so questions of "greatness" aside (including the question of why shakespeare was more popular than jonson) , no one
today approaches the work of shakespeare and jon son with an equal headset(shakespeare is another word for "great writer" : who do you think you are,shakespeare?; or familiarity (volpone , volpone , wherefore art thou volpone?).
it's not that a classic is necessarily good- what's good? it 's that somethinglarge and encompassing grows from it. a classic is a book , a writer, chosenand it is also an institution.
as an institution , a classic is hard to avoid. it will be crashed into here andthere, openly or covertly. we breathe it. a signpost of a culture, or one of its
common foods. a classic knits a connection among people of a culture , sothat many many peopl~ can respond with a kind of intimacy and knowJedge. 5
and those who don't respond , unfamiliar with the signal or reference?
a classic in a given culture always has a supportive relationship to the culture
and to those empowered by that culture.
24

that is, a classic may praise or critique - but never ignore - what the empowered think is important. it doesn't matter much what shakespeare says
about heterosexual love and marriage, or the death of kings . that his plays
ask us to obsess on these subjects is enough indication that male elizabetham(and contemporary anglos) take heterosexual coupling and royal deaths very
seriously. furthermore, though marriage is considered an adeq ua te concl usion
for the majority of elizabethan plays (called comedies); and royal death ends
most of the other plays (called tragedies); contemporary male anglo culture
has managed to avoid the obvious question : what does it mean when people
can envision only two possible ends to any story?6"b ut ," says the innocent , she-who-trusts-good -will-tri umph, the idealist 7
who buys the cream theory of greatness (greatness rises to the top , like creamon milk), "isn't it different with lesbians? none of us runs the ny review or
random house ; we aren't owned by shell oil; some (few) of us are college
teachers but not all of us go to college . many of us have other , freer connections with the printed word. so won't our great works survive?
assuming they get written and published , that is ."it's true that lesbian culture - like any culture that matters to people, if
not suppressed and driven underground - thrives outside universities and othertraditional institutions of cultural production and evaluation . we exchange,
are inspired by, learn from , hear about each others' works in 'a variety offeminist publications , bookstores , word of mouth , women 's studies classes ,etc .
though we have often had to fight for visibility, as lesbians.
these feminist institutions exist because of the strength of lesbian feminist
culture, just as the culture is nourished in and through these institutions. only
because of this dynamic, nourishing relationship does the concept of a lesbianclassic even arise.
but we should recognize some things.
to the extent that lesbian culture represents the experience , inSights , values
and interest of most lesbians , it will have a combative relationship to thosein power- because lesbians , still , are hideously oppressed.
rubyfruit jungle doesn't change this fact, though it may just changea few minds, or give a bit of hope (at least to those white workingclass lesbians who are perfectly brilliant, beautiful , untroubled by
self-doubt and self-hate , politically astute in the face of massive
mystifica tion).·so lesbian culture - for it to be ours, belong to and represent most lesbianswill be antipatriarchal, antiracist and anticapitalist, one cultural edge of a revolution we require. si require.
a sign of the times : even among lesbians , the word we sounds
presumptuous; the word "revolution" seems pretentious. these arepolitical problems as much as linguistic observations .
this means that lesbian cult ure will always be in danger of repression, cooptation, and absorption in tricky ways9 until such time as lesbians have control of our own lives .
a society that takes creative work as lInscriously as the USIO can always~Stolerate a few clear thinkers, even revolutionary artists: put them on panels,
anthologize their sappiest work. or isolate them, make them stars , interview
them on TV, deprive them of the deep popular connection which fed theirwork in the first place and gave them support , information, and, above all ,honest criticism. when all else fails, destroy their presses-or encourage themto destroy each other's presses- publish their books and don't promote them ,buyrights to their books and don't film them, or film and distort them .l l
but apart from them, is the THEM in us , the daddy's good-girl, she-whoreally-does-think-like -them. the fact: that whenever we are not consciously
fighting against the hierarchies we were born into, we will imitate these hierarchies and reinfo rce the oppression of other women . but we can say thismore simply; how many lesbian feminist publications are controll ed by women of color? by women of working-class background or without college
training? by women who are poor?12
white middleclass lesbian culture can ignore, coopt , or patronize poor lesbians and lesbians of color. tlus happens not mysteriously or through moral
flaw , but through the facts of oppression . the less oppressed tend to havemore access to money , education, and other resources required for cultural
nourishment , production , and control ; and to old-girl networks which influence such decisions as what gets printed , heard about , sold , who gets invited
to speak at what college on which panel, who gets money to fly to the opposite coast to appear at which conference, who wins which feUow(sic)ships
and grants or gets teaching positions where.
the effect of this is much larger than the particular women who do anddon 't get to make a living off their creative work - though this is large enough.
it's a question of which lesbians will lesbian culture honor and support?
whose experience will come to be represented in the books women will readyears from now? which languages will be preservedthe barbadian-brooklyn english of paule marshall's characters inbrown girl, brownstones? the working class inflections of sharon
isabell 's yesterday's lessons ?13

film

*

if i taught everyone to talk , future generations would not find abrooklyn jewish accent unpoetic or conlical or hard to understand.
but if someone from the british aristocracy schools our poetic
sensibilities, my voice will never sound c1assic . 14*
the questions extend to include , what kind of consciousness will women
have when they pick up which books in wluch language representing whose
experience? who will they be, choosing great/ not great?

***when i got beth's letter i was in the nliddle of a book by maricla moyano
called beginning book. IS it had already been re'printed once, though i'd neverheard of it before i picked it up in women's works , a bookstore in brooklyn.
which existed because of the women's movement ; because there was/is a demand for women's books; because women reali zed that without
our own bookstores, we'd be slighted .
26

on the back there was a quote from ti-grace atkinson . "i loved it. it's beautiful. i think it the most beautiful writing to come out of the new women 's
literature."ti-grace-feminist theorist and leader . i know her name - her name is ·a name-because there has been a women's movement. her blurb asks
me to read moyano in a context of feminism and rebellion . withouta women's movement no one could have placed moyano 's work inthis context ; there would have been no such context. 16
so i bought the book, read it, liked it. it's a coming out story , with a childhood narrative , broken and juxtaposed against passages which seem to leapout of moyano's current (at time of writing) journal : process notes , wit , alively perception, and , an emerging narrative of its own , moyano's abandonment of her male lover and commitment to a woman .
because the story of how we came to this silenced invisible unthinkable and obvious love is so central to who we are , coming out commitment as well as discovery - will be a central event in ourclassics .17
in fact , whenever women matter to each other ; or choose women ;or reject and betray women with a consciousness of pain or necessity;
we're looking at lesbian possibility, fulfilled or choked or somewhere
between.18
on the first page , it says : "These writings were put together in Paris and
New York in 1962 . Nothing has been changed ."but the date of first publication is 1973 . think how many works
emerged from drawers and dusty boxes through the women's movement ; so many writers out of the closet ; so many dykes out of thecloset into an open space cleared by others.1 9
when jan clausen concludes the title poem in after touch, "i ama lesbian ," we know we are somehow providing protection for atleast some women. when lorraine bethel and barbara smith writethat one lesbian publishing in conditions: five. the black women's
issue , felt the need to use a pseudonym , we know we have not provided enough protection yet.2U
as the childhood story is told , as the father dies and is mourned , moyano
concludes beginning book:
I have left Juan definitely . I left him on August 24 , 1962 . He is moving
out of the loft this week. My books are still there and must be moved. Aboutfive days before the final fight, explosion with Juan, I had written to Francesca - the first attempt at reconciliation. Since then we have been writing
back and forth. 1 called her on the phone there in Grenoble , through Patricia
who had to go out and find her , and spent sixty dollars on that or more,which I payed with a check from TIME magazine and by hocking my typewriter .
I am very concerned with leading again a morally clean life, an orderly
life. That is why somehow I feel it is almost a duty to offer myself whole ,my life , to Francesca, with whatever painful implications or consequencesthat might have. If I love her, which I do, and if I love her sexually , which
I have, I must offer her the full commitment of my love which is my life.
27

That I have never cared so irrefutably for another person, or had with themso satisfying or fascinating an exchange, is true. That it always leads , in me ,to an ume to fuse further, to fuse finally, to fuse sexually brings in all thecomplications and is to the world (in which I live) morally reprehensible and"unhealthy ." It must all be rooted in the almost total fusion I had with
Mother as a child . So that I cannot conceive of that with a man, and if I do ,begin to feel the emotional entrapment, the claustrophobia of being tied toa man . I felt often claustrophobic with Francesca , but that was out of frustration mostly, I think . I don't know. I don't know what will happen between
us next, or what should. I also don't know how much the claustrophobia
has to do with my blind fury, incapacity to be subservient to a man, to be
the "second sex."
i quote at length for two reasons. because the passage - the mind at work/
play - gives me pleasure
at least in part because i've been prepared by the incredible emergence of women writers via women's liberation to welcome newvoices. to value clarity. accuracy. and honesty - because we needeach other's accurate stories. (my entire graduate training made funof the concept of "sincerity" in art.)
also i quote at length in order to introduce the readers of this essay to abook i liked .
as a woman with access to print. i can bring women 's works into thelarger circle of awareness. 21 i know that if moyano 's book is widely
read by lesbians . and loved. and used to inspire other writings ; or is
critiqued and responded to in that often useful way - that 's not how
it was , here 's my story - then beginning book some 20 to 50 years
from now may be considered a classic. and. conversely. if no one
reads it ...
in this way i exert some small influence on the making of lesbian culture.
so do any of us with access to print. publishers (eyes or ears) , or classrooms.

***
in talking of classics , then. i mean who , what will come to seem central
to who we become and what our culture becomes.
and we can't know these things yet
though we know th.at we will become partly through our culture ;our classics will be "chosen" partly because they have made us
become.
and we can suspect. adrienne rich's women and honor: some notes onlying filled such a need and has been taken instantly into the culture 22 - howmany uf us have given a new lover a copy, either to start things off right , orafter the first big fight? a value : to be honorable with each other. a form :women and .. . . susan griffin 's woman and nature; a piece i wrote (for SW9) , "women & violel2ce."23 all of us asking to be read in a context of: letwomen be the lens on the world .
monique wittig's les guerilleres seems another core work - the tribal voice("the women say ... ") made possible - it seems- the collective voice in woman
and nature, as well as the non-linear form of griffin's book and much or my28

own writing and that of other women . so that although wittig's work seemedstrange to many women when it first was getting passed around (early 70s),
it seems less strange now.
nowhere is this process more evident than in the work of virginia woolf. .
as women readers have articulated not just separate taste , a separate list of
bestsellers, favorites; but also a developing network we can call culture, woolf'srole in this culture becomes clearer, more obviously key. she wrote about
textured lives , the secret currents between women, towards each other, against
men , even against each other but always in terms of male and female. manyof us have imitated/will imitate woolf to discover what she has to offer in theway of style and vision . and since so many women use woolf, her work becomes more familiar, "easier."
judy grahn, on the other hand , accessible from the start- language, subject,price - reclaimed the word "common" (a reclamation that continues to echothrough our literature ; rich's dream of a common language; myself, "are we
ready to name / with a common tongue?"M) as her language honors the speechof ordinary women: "the common woman is as common / as a rattlesnake."has a sentence ever crackled so across a page?25 tillie olsen's silences, broken ;alice walker's mother's garden.26 as long as we cherish the creativity of ordinary women and value what women themselves have valued (instead of depending on a patriarchal and snobbish art establishment to determine value
for us) , we center exactly on the passionately egalitarian vision named in "women's liberation ."now if those who control what gets passed on are antagonistic to thisvision and therefore claim that grahn's language is flat and a bit rhetorical(instead of powerful and clear and incantatory , which is what i think); orthat rich has lost something (clarity of form? compelling imagery) by bringing her work progressively towards clarity of thought , accessibility to thevast majority ; or that walker has unfortunately fallen prey to white feminist
manhating in her last two splendid articles in ms;27 then rich, grahn , andwalker may appear in literary history - if at all -as minor writers . and since"lesser" writers whose work connected with theirs will be excluded altogether ,none of them will be read in a context of like-minded peers, and their work
will seem eccentric rather than central ; and will become marginal to the culture which passes on. 28
conversely, if black and white feminists and lesbians confront-in life andin art-the substance of what is between us, historically and currently, separating as well as joining us , so that a genuine bi- or multi-racial antiracist tradition is incorporated into lesbian culture , then the relationship between
meridian and lynn in alice walker's meridian; or that between lillian hellman
and sophronia in an unfinished woman; will be explored as painful beginnings.29
or , when audre lorde tells a room full of women, many lesbians, many
black women , though not so many of either as there should be, might bewere the MLA not the MLA, "your silence will not protect you," tears slwck
my eyes;30 and gloria hull writes " poem" jilr al{(ire. which concludes :Dear Eshu's Audre
please keep llll
teaching us

~l)

how
to speakto knowthat now"our labor ismore important thanour silence"and this poem is chosen to introduce conditions: five , the black women's
issue; we know we-'re in the presence of something classic_ the invocation _31
the passionate connection _the exhortation to speak _similarly, muriel rukeyser , recently dead and one of our great poets, celebrating kathe kollwitz: ''What would happen if one woman told the truth
about her life? / The world would split open " ;32 and louise bernikow picks
up on this to title an anthology of women's poetry over 400 years, and one
which makes a point of including women's blues, prison and work poems-as
much truth as she could fmd _33
or conditions: five i have already referred to five times , a sign of its impact.
the method of production - control by black women, massive solicitation ofmaterial including much previously unpublished writing (and writers) , as wellas the high quality of the gathered work- so that C5 not only re cords the
emerging black feminist/lesbian culture but has helped to evoke it-thesethings make C5 a model for lesbian/feminist institutions willing to put theirmoney where their mouth is : journals , anthologies , women 's studies programs,presses, coffeehouses which host poetry readings , galleries where women show
work _off our backs and heresies have published this year issues for and by
women of color; these and C5 and azalea will have been groundbreakers or
one-shot aberrations depending on what happens next. we have seen again andagain that what women - lesbians , poor women , women of color- need in order
to be represented, is not special favors, but simply access to information , resources, and space_ as asian, native american , and chicana lesbians, and lesbiansin the new immigrant cultures - vietnamese , cuban , haitian , and those yet tocome to this country- articulate their cultures, those of us with access tofeminist resources can welcome the opportunity to move on over and expand
our circle ; or we have betrayed our best visions _***if lesbian culture includes all possibilities among women , lesbian comes tomean very much the same thing as feminist - which is what lesbian feminists
have often claimed, to the dismay of homophobes_ as dolores noll pointed
out some years ago, many dykes feel a clear need for a name that means"women who sleep with women"- how else do you know who won't put you
down for wanting her? in fact, while love between women has been mocked ,discouraged , and often punished, sex between women has been made unthinkable_ 34 in light of this it's surprising how little we find in our art that 's explicitly sexual , as if we're embarrassed by the sexualness of lesbian se xualityoceans , flowers , caves, and revolution, ok , but sex - ?35 if we remember thatsome of our people lived - and live - sexless, in terror , we will be careful to ex-30

pand protection for sexual freedom and honesty as we fight to rid our livesof horrible violent offensive porn , art , junk , and other things we don' t wantaround. " to some people, our very existence is pornographic." 36 and one way
to expand protection for sexual freedom is to assert it. if our culture supports
and encourages explicit lesbian sex in our art , then explicitly sexual art andliterature - tee corinne's work , for example - will perhaps replace exclusively
floral interpretations of our cunts·. june arnold 's sister gin 37 will reverberate
for us not only as a celebration of female love and middle-aged sexuality andintegrity but also as a depiction of explicit lesbian sexuality ; as will this incredible poem of stephanie byrd 's:
I can feel it in my lips
My ass moves towards warmthPress warmth upon my buttocks
my breasts
rub my crotch the lips
I am warmed , hot water in a bathI can feel breath in my throat
I choke up phlegm
Lick my chest , the lips
Dart in to make me choke again
I can feel sight in my eyes
Push sight into my eyes , the eyelets
I see writhing eyelets clearer
Eat meEat meEat mealive 38
if we continue to self-define ; to value solidarity (to revive another wordwith a slightly old-fashioned ring) ; "the courage to be there when another
woman needs you";39 "Any woman's death diminishes me ";40 then lesbians
will read judy grahn's a woman is talking to death a bit the way the greeksthey say - sat around listening to homer. it will be key in our culture , notjust because it is (let's face it) great , but because the values it embodies will
be our cultural values-and because grahn will have helped to make them ours .
to remember what we do with each other was called indecent. to redefme

indecent.
Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?
Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal women to die before
my eyes or in my ears or under my hands because I thought I could
do nothing , I am gUilty of leaving a prostitute who held a knife to
my friend 's throat to keep us from leaving, because we would not
sleep with her , we thought she was old and fat and ugly ; I am gUilty
of not loving her who needed me ; I regret all the women I have notslept with or comforted , who pulled themselves away from me forlack of something I had not the courage to fight for , for us, our life.
our planet, our city, our meat and potatoes, our love . These are indecent acts , lacking courage, lacking a certain fire behind the eyes.
which is the symbol , the raised fist, the sharing of resources. theresistance that tells death he will starve for lack of the fat of us. our
extra. Yes I have committed acts of indecency with women allLl
most of them were acts of omission. I regret the m hitterl y.4J
31

NOTES
I. morrison, the bluest eye (1970);sllla (1973) .
2. walker, third life (1970), in paper (1977).
3. the M LA , for that vast majority of lesbians who could care less, is the modern language
association, a professional association of college teachers of language and literature; they holda yearly convention at which jobs and reputations are sought. for the last several years, femin·
ists and lesbians have had some (hard-won) programs at the MLA .
louise bernikow's introduction to her anthology, the world split open , fOllr centuries ofwomen poets ill englalld alld america, /552·/950 (! 974), gives a lively and accurate description of how literary history (the history of the literature of white upper and middle classmen) gets made. bernikow's essay, incidentally , i'd call a classic, though at this point in the
essay, it's begging the question .
4.just as now , a writer, even one of ours, who lives in NY , boston , Sf." , maybe LA, hasmore chance of impacting on the culture than one living in oshkosh.
5 . for example: it's not just that the rolling stones WOUldn't have named it "let it bleed"without the beatles' "let it be" (i'm indebted to page du bois for the observation and theparallel with elizabethan theater); it's also, what would "let it bleed" mean without the
beatIes' echo?
6. as with religious parallels of salvation and damnation . that contemporary culture forthe most part values the "death" plays as higher art than the "marriage" plays suggests thatthe tragedies embody and were used to tutor us toward the assumptions of individualism
and capitalism (my life and what's mine matters) and away from the (also sexist) assumptionsof communalism (marriage means birth; life goes on). in more recent literature , the new
blend that emerges as individuals feel way too powerless to matter , is the romantic story where the individual matters, at least to one other person .
7. by idealist, i don 't mean "visionary"; a visionary should be clear-sighted. i mean
she-who-in-us-thinks·as-she-was-taught, in terms of essences; who sees reality as static rather
than dynamic; who fails to recognize that what we think of as "great" is a historical pheno·menon; that we are a historical phenomenon.
S. anti·imperialist as well; gertrude stein spoke perhaps more in~itefully than she intended:"Patriarchal Poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry" (excerpts from patriarchal poetry are
reprinted in bernikow 's anthology) .
9 . virginia woolf pointed out that dangerous books are often absorbed into the literarycanon as "children's books"-she cites gulliver's tra vels and moby dick; i was assigned emily
dickinson's "i'm nobody" in grade school, and along with all NY public high school english
students, read cather and george eliot (50s and early 60s). think about lesbian books getting
shunted off onto children!
10. that is , a racist society which makes a best seller of, e.g., baldwin's th e fire next timemust have a bizarre and indirect relationship to the content of creative work. one of the newperspectives brought to american culture by the liberation movements of the 60s and early70s, including the women's movement, was that content mattered . the white male intellectual elite had revolted against meaning-in-art because (1) a new generation needed newtheories to publish new books, create a new set of dogma , etc.; (2) they were suspicious ofany political implications, especially possible tinges of communism (post·war mccarthyism) ;and (3) they knew somehow that they had nothing to say. see susan sontag, "on style," inagainst interpretation (1966), for an intelligent version of the argument against paying attention to content (if you're sensually [emotionally/spiritually/morally I dead, the priority is
to wake up).
II. i don't spend a lot of time figuring out how powerful men think , and i'm not naive
enough to think conspiratorial control of culture is this explicit or even conscious. still, it
goes on almost as if it were.
12. i have heard only of azalea, a publication for lesbians of color; see below, discussionof conditions: five.
13 . marshall (1959) ; isabell (1974) , the women's press collective, 525 I broadway, oakland, ca. 9461S. see judy grahn's "murdering the king's english," the introduction to vol. I
of true to life adventure stories, ed . grahn (197S), diana press, 4400 market st., oakland, ca.
94608 (and the stories themselves, many of which are written in language usually excluded
from literature).

14. the fust time i heard muriel rukeyser read-she was a large woman with a loud NY
jewish voice-my heart sang; i realized i needed to hear her voice as i had needed to hear
women's voices against a drone of male ones. the implications of this bear on all oppressed
cultures.
15 . published by magic circle printing, spring~ummer 1979 (1st pub., 1973); all comments, queries, orders to m. moyano, c/o war resisters league, 339 lafayette st., nyc 10012 .
16. i owe this insight- that the blurb on a book jacket helps to place the book in thecontext in which it was meant to be read-to blanche boyd, novelist, who was explaining
why she especially wanted tillie olsen to write something for the jacket of her second novel.
17. some possibilities, favorites of mine: joan larkin's "some unsaid things," in housework(out & out books, 1975); olga broumas, "sleeping beauty ," in beginning with 0 (1977); sandy
boucher's "mountain radio," in assaults and rituals (mama's press, 4500 market st., oakland,ca. 94607, 1975).
18. i'm invoking barbara smith's classic, yes, insight that among black women writers, alesbian perspective emerges when we look for the primary female connections, "towards a
black feminist criticism," published in conditions: two (oct. 1977) and now as a chapbook
for out & out books (1980) .
19. many women's fust books, published in the early 70s, were written at an earlier date(in some cases, much earlier : the mercator's world poems in jane cooper's maps & windows(1974) were written between 1947-51). but women's books had little context, support, or
possibility for publishing. more recently grahn, editing true adventure stories, and betheland smith, editing conditions: five (autumn 1979), actively recruited closet writers, with theresult that many working class and black women writers "came out."
20. see also the editors' dedication in amazon poetry, eds. joan larkin and elly bulkin(out & out books, 1975; last i heard they were intending to put out a new expanded edition).
clausen,after touch out & out books, 1975).
21. to demystify my particular access to print-or how it happens that beth asked me towrite this: at the MLA lesbian caucus in 1974 i heard about, and then contributed to, thelesbian literature issue of margins which beth edited in 1975 (an instant classic in its own
right).
22. rich, originally printed in heresies 1; as a chapbook by mothereot publications (214dewey st., pittsburgh, pa. 15218 ; 1977); and reprinted in the volume on lies, secrets, andsilence, selected prose, 1966·1978. women and honor was adopted without-as michaele
pointed out to me-even a critical response, exploring those situations in which we do lie.
sometimes the instant leap into usage encourages the development of jargon, almost passwords. when women talk about "spinning" as a political activity without awareness thatthey're using a metaphor, i know something's a bit out of control (spinning, from marydaly,gyn/ecology , 1978); but there's no mistaking the need for our own namings.
23. griffm (1978). in a class i taught with paula king, we gave an assignment with interesting results : "after reading women and honor, keep notes in your journal for 3 weeks(you fill in the blank). shape these notes into
focused on women andsome form." (women as creative artists, portland state univ. (oregon) women's studies, fall,
1978.)
24. "naming" in we sp~ak in code (motheroot publications, 1980).
25. that these lines barely require citation shows now they've taken hold; but early iesbian publishing efforts should be recorded: " the common woman" was distributed in 10 t
mimeo'd copies; printed by the oakland women's press collective in the early 70s (undated),
with edward the dyke and other poems for only $1.25; and now appears in grahn's collected
poems, the work of a common woman (diana press, 1978).
26. olsen , silences (1978); walker, "in search of our mother's gardens," ms. (may 1974).
27. walker , "confronting pornography at home-a fable ," ms. (feb . 1980); "breaking
chains and encouraging life," a review of conditions: five and a tribute to the courage of
black lesbians, ms. (april 1980).
28. for example, tillie olsen tells of returning to writing after decades of abstention anddiscovering that josephine herbst (an older contemporary and another rare woman writer on
the left) was out of print and virtually unknown ; in her day , tillie reports, jo herbst was as
popular and as major a writer as hemingway, or odets. i have this informa tion via elinor
langer who's writing herbst's biography.
29. walker, meridian (J 976) ; hellman (1969) .

33

30. a talk given at the lesbians and literature panel of the 1977 MLA, december, chicago;
panel entitled "the transformation of silence into language and action," published in sinister.
wisdom 6.
31. for example, j, discover that mitsuye yamada and i each have written a poem "fromtillie olsen": yamada , "homecoming" in camp notes and other poems, shameless hussy press,box 424, san lorenzo , ca. 94580, (1976) . (s.h. press deserves a tribute of its own, as doesalta, its founder); kaye, "bastille day : mary moody emerson speaks" (which also celebratesmme), in we speak in code.
32. "kathe kollwitz" in the speed ofdarkness (1968) .
33 . bernikow, the world split open , see above .
34. see a. rich, talk on panel , cited above with lorde, published in sw 6 .
35. i discuss some reasons for this in "sexual power" (fall 1979) which i hope will appear
in the heresies issue on sexuality . it's interesting that most of our best-known lesbian-feminist
writers were not out 10 years ago . what this means is that lesbian feminist literary cuItureat least - is largle being defined by post-feminist lesbians; and the experience of dykes whocame out prior to women's liberation is under-represented . i wonder if this downplaying of
explicit sex in our culture is connected to this underrepresentation. on proofreading thisessay , i suddenly realize i've neglected to mention the ladder!-one indication that i too ama post-feminist lesbian who didn't for years depend on the ladder as my connection to lesbian
culture. barbara grier and coletta reid have edited three volumes gleaned from the ladder,
all published by diana press in 1976 : the lavender herring: lesbian essays from the ladder;lesbian lives; and lesbians ' home journal: stories from th e ladder (i especially love this last
title) . getting information on these volumes from my local santa fe library was very interesting; i discreetly, cowardly, asked for "stories from the ladder" and got back titles blazing
the word lesbian." no more masks! no more closets!
36 . michaele , conversation, fall 1979.
37 . arnold , daughters , inc., 22 charles st. , nyc 10014 (1975).
38. byrd, in 25 y ears of malcontent, good gay poets press, p.o. box 277 , astor station,
boston, rna. 02123 (1976) .
39. michaele , defining womanhood at a woman's meeting, spring 1979.
40. a. rich , the last line of "from an old house in america," the last poem in poems,
selected and new, 1950·1974 .
41. grahn, a woman is talking to death , , with graphics by karen sjoholm , the women'spress collective (1974) ; reprinted in th e work of a common woman .

34

publishers
readers
writers
editors
Barbara Smith

Stephanie Byrd

photo by Till Cross

photo by Susan Fleischmann

35WHOM DO YOU WRITE FOR?

A COLLAGE

I write for people who feel that they are alone with their feelings. I also write
for my friends, lovers and strangers. Right now I am writing for myself- Stephanie Byrd
My "audience" has been women, in most cases, women who identify themselves as feminists, but also women who respond to the Judaism or the suburban experience in my work. Finally, I write for myself, from a need to grapple with my sister, my friends, my lover, my job. Though I'm certain I want
my work . to reach BEYOND my own typewriter.
-Robin Becker
Basically, I've always written for myself My lifetime attempt to make senseout of a situation that makes very little sense, i. e., life under white-boy patriarchy. When I began my journals my first year of college, I was creating avoice that understood somewhat better than I did the destructive chaos aroundme.
I write for other Black women who know first hand the chaos of which I
speak and who are struggling in beautiful ways to change it. I also write for
the Black women in my family who raised me and who did not have the chance
to write themselves. Although I know that they would not necessarily agreewith what I write, I am sure they would feel proud that I am a writer.
-Barbara Smith
I write for myself five years hence, as a critical guard against fine-sounding
images and impressive general statements that will make no sense to me later.
My mother keeps saying plaintively, "I wish you'd write one book I could
give my friends . .. I suspect my ideal reader is one who is already giving mybooks to her friends. I have no ambition to be socially acceptable or politically correct since the job of fiction is to deal with what is rather than what
ought to be.
-Jane RuleI write for anybody who elects to read my work. I do this with the hope thatthe message I am trying to impart, for there is always one, will come throughclearly, and cause readers to think more perceptively, try to initiate changes,
and learn to accept different races, as well as individuals within them.
-Ann Allen Shockley"If God IS a curious green cat-then She shall see what She shall see. .. I writp.
for a curious green cat, I think. I write for a part of the self Since words canbe received by different parts, I speak to a special part of the self-even when
I am angry, remonstrating or some such - a self that is most pure, most honest,
most sensuously aware or sensibly aware. An intermittent self; idealized perhaps
but there somewhere in all us green cats. I'm pretty sure that in writing to thisself I don't write for women only. But if I write for men it is not to pleasethem.
- Jane Gapen
I feel I know Renee Vivien deeply from her poetry and am obligated to try
to translate her work as well as possible. This I do for Her and for Lesbians
who do not read French, and for anyone else who enjoys beautiful poetry.
- Margaret A. Porter
A long time ago an English teacher warned my class that we shouldn't think
about going into writing seriously unless we craved it as much as we craved
food and sleep. Hal I crave it as much as I crave vacuuming.
I honestly never intended to become a writer, but then I never intended to
become a lesbian either, so it's interesting that one has followed from theother. I'm a writer because I'm a lesbian.
-Ruth Baetz
I write now for myself and for my sisters. If a few men can ·hear what I write,
I am glad. Why do I still talk with men at all? (as in my book of dialogues,
Remembering Who We Are). Because they sometimes put to me questions
which I want to know my answers to. And because I do persist in believingthat there is "a ghostly woman in every man" (as Adrienne Rich once wrote,though she now questions the term). It is a ghost unbelieved in by most men,of course. But when that ghost seems to me to put in an appearance, I talkwith it.
-Barbara Deming
I write for other members of the various oppressed groups that I identify with.
I write for women, primarily. Perhaps some of my writing is also for gay men.
Among women, much of my writing is specifically for lesbians, some is specifically for black women, and some specifically for black lesbians. Sometimes
I write a poem that is just for one other person. And of course I write for me,too.
I don't mind being read by people who are not members of the oppressedgroups I am writing for, but they will have to make the effort. I'm not soconcerned with trying to raise their consciousness as I am with providing material for us, for our culture, for our creation of a lesbian-feminist reality.
- Becky Birtha
I write for the woman who sent me a letter saying, "Your poems make mework so hard, but it's always worth it. "-Susan Wood-Thompson
I write for my daughter. I know no fiercer demand for truth than hers, andthrough hers, my students' and all our children's instinct and demand for it.
I write for my responsibility to her: a strategy of words, that earth and lifeand difference continue.
- Joan Larkin37

SORRY

we cannot accept
inform you of our decision
sorry your poem/s
reason checked below-we only liked 1 of the 5 poems you sent
but sorry kept the others for months
while we looked for our favorite
it was eaten by the copy machine-love is not a political tool
does not sorry foster the revolution(suggestion : send it to "gay romance")-we feel this would be a better poem
if you cut the first 2 and the last 3
sorry lines of each stanza and changed
the title to The Stripper-it took a year for all the members of our collective
to read your story sorry oh so sorry wewanted to publish it but by then only
2 pages were left open in the book and your story
was too sorry-although we advertise for the not-so-perfectwriting that shows potential we only publish
marge, adrienne, olga, ellen , audre and joanna-we do not accept poems that spell wimmin patriarchally-we do not accept poems with non-standardized spellings-we have an overabundance of lesbian shoveling snow poems-because poetry is a losing
business we have changed our format to givepriority to the sorry booming
sport of lesbian ice hockey
please let us.sorryfurther help
rememberstruggle for all of us
in sorryhood38- Michele Connelly

AAnHALLThe fust lesbian book I ever read was Patience and Sarah. I was marriedat the time and had just had my second child. I was also in love with a woman
who was engaged to be married. We called our love friendship. It was a deeply
emotional and an extremely painful relationship because we could not recognize what we felt. Lesbian literature was hard to frnd on the library bookshelves.
It was five years before I read Rubyfruit Jungle. I had moved to Florida, leaving
behind that relationship which had been destroying us both.
I read Rubyfruit to my husband who enjoyed Rita Mae Brown's humor
almost as much as I; but while he was laughing, I was slowly absorbing what
Rita Mae was saying: "It's OK., in fact, it's great!" Now that was a whole newthought for me! She used a word that I heard and knew the meaning of but
had never thought of in relation to myself or what I felt-lesbian. She made mequestion my choice of mate and regret that I had not followed my desires five
years earlier .
Two more wasted years passed and then the phone rang. With her first word
it all came back, the pain and the fear and the love that I had tried so hard toforget. After a couple of months and ridiculous phone bills, she came for avisit. The years had taught both what we wanted. My search for words became
serious as did my awareness of myself as a woman. Robin Morgan's Sisterhood
Is Powerful gave me places to look for answers. One step led to another andslowly the hidden world of women revealed itself-lesbian centers, bookstores,
resorts, bars, and other women's books , magazines, and newspapers. The discovery that I was not alone made me high for months. I remember the firsttime that I went to a Lesbian center. I called on the phone , and they said they
had a bookstore . I was terrified, but I had to go. I do not know what I was
afraid of, maybe of being thought of as a lesbian, or maybe of the womenthemselves. Whatever it was, I knew I had to get those books . I went andbought as many as I could carry. On the way home I was filled ..yith a curious
new feeling of pride. With my husband in the other room, I opened mytreasures. Hungry for knowledge and understanding , desperate to touch thisnew world ahead of me , I read every word and wanted more.
The next year was one of doubt and certainty, confusion and discovery as
my woman lover and I sorted out our lives and ourselves to finally "betogether ." I read Sinister Wisdom in the bathtub; I have read it while ridingin the car at night by the passing street lights , on supermarket lines, and in
bed with my morning tea. I have re-read every issue and every word. I read
The Notebooks That Emma Gave Me while I waited four hours on line at thedriver's license torture chambers, and I have read it while walking to the store.
I have read like a starving person eats. The words gave life to my reality andblock out this imaginary p1ace where my body resides.
For years I read words that were not written for me, that ignored my very
existence, blatantly and without apology; words that referred to all beings as39

he, to all thought as his, to all people as man and to spirit and soul as man's.
The effort to translate is beyond me at this point; I am deaf to their words as
they are to mine.
I look at my bookshelf and see Sarah Aldridge, Rita Mae Brown, Barbara
Grier, Coletta Reid, Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, Jane Rule, and Adrienne
Rich . I read and with every word I feel a deepening gratitude for the women
who have the courage, strength, and love to write these words for me. Their
gift has given me the strength to think and feel and love as a woman, as alesbian , and as a writer. Every time I read the words of a lesbian I say a silent
thank you .

CAlf fOUTH

FEMINARY: OUR NEW SOUTHERN FACEAs Southerners, as lesbians, and as women, we need to explore with others
how our lives fit into a region about which we have great ambivalencesto snare our anger and our love . .. We want to provide an audience forSouthern lesbians who may not think of themselves as writers but who haveimportant stories to tell - stories that will help us fill the silences that have
obscured the truth about our lives and kept us isolqted from each other . . .
We want to know who we are . .. We want to change women's lives.

from the FEMINAR Y collective statement
You don't think of concepts being brought to life in the midst of fruit salad ,tea glasses, and sandy bare feet, on the screened porch of a beach cottage. I
have always imagined the "birthing" of new ideas as taking place in a more
ethereal, glamorous setting and manner . Perhaps the new concept for FEMINAR Y,
as a Southern literary journal rather than a local feminist publication, came into
existence because of our own stubborn ways of being and doing; two native
Alabamians, two native North Carolinians, all devotedly , doggedly Southern inour outlooks and attitudes. So four collective members , Mab , Susan, Minnie
Bruce, and I, sat among the bowls of food, propped ourselves in fold-up chairson the porch of a rented beach cottage, in the hot , humid summer air, andmade the decision to radically change the depth and focus of FEMINAR Yin
an effort to reflect and preserve this part of the country and our Southern sisters, to all of which we are so attached by both our collective heritage , andby our individual emotional ties.
The South has been an embroiled, tumultuous area from the days of plantations and slavery of the 1700-1800s, to the civil rights movements of the 1960s,

40but in the midst of the stereotyping and problems , a powerful tradition ofSouthern womanhood is being seen and felt. And all of us on the collective
have felt a strong need to pull the lives, the thoughts, the stories, and the visionsof Southern women out of the murky , weak , scatter-brained image most people
have of us. A point of reclamation is at hand for many of us and in spite of ourown ambivalences about this area in which we live , we all feel an immense pridein and love for the women around us , our friends , lovers, mothers , grandmothers,
aunts, cousins, sisters, for the stories we have heard and have re-told , for theparticular sort of richness we have found in our own lives and backgrounds.
However, the fact that we had conceived of FEMINAR Y, a feminist journal
with emphasis on lesbian vision , didn 't mean the journal sprang into being easily .
All of us, as individual women from varying backgrounds , had different approaches
to the same loose concept. We shared experience only to a certain point and thenour personal outlooks and ideas about Southern life and Southern voice diverged.
Mab had an intense vision of a new Southern literature ; Minnie Bruce was a devoted Southern rebel , breaking the silences head-on; Susan embraced the surfacing
stories and bonds with calm , gentle caring; and I was searching fOF coherence anda sense of Southern herstory. We overlapped , moved apart , became excited , laughed ,dropped with exhaustion, worried over money , worked long hours , held what felt likemillions of meetings , and began to turn our very broad original concept into a moredefined, clear reality. The women on the collective grew more securely defined as agroup , caring for and supporting one another , becoming more accepting of one another's limitations, approaches, ideas, and ways of getting things done . We began
to trade off the tedious parts of maintaining the magazine , such as coordinating
meetings and production sessions , handling the business, and an~wering lettersand queries. We began to organize the ever-mounting correspondence and details.
During this time , Helen, a part-time collective member , reaffIrmed her desire tocontinue to work as a fringe member, organizing the collating and mailings ofeach iSliue. And Deborah , a Black lesbian/feminist from Greensboro , joined thecollective with fresh ideas and insights .
After nearly tyJo years together as a collective , problems still exist that wehaven 't completely solved or resolved . Communication still breaks down occasionally ; production often lags or stops completely; we are often behind schedule.
We are constantly looking for ways to become better organized and to make thework on the magazine less pressured and diffIcult for each of us . I think, after
watching all of us grow and change over the past couple of years, that we haveconstantly defined and redefmed FEMINAR Y and our relationship to it. I havewatched each of us examine and explore our own Southernness , from inside themagazine and from without. I believe we are still searching for radical new ways
to represent Southern women and Southern vision . I have developed a more intense pride and attachment to this area and to the other women who live here .
There is a certain downhome quality in each of us on the collective as well aswith the magazine that we embrace and love, that we want to preserve.
Probably, if you asked each of us what we want the magazine to be and what
FEMINARY means to us , you would still get six different answers , from six different Southern lesbian women. Our visions are still growing . We still want toknow who we are.
41

FELICE nEwmAn
Much of my writing was done early. I was the person I was to become,and I was hell -bent , pushing myself, willing my skin to mature , arrive, bedone with it. I made my life 'in my parent's house, by the third floor
window , on a steep European street where I could see a part, and beyond
it, a sign tlaafting the weather atop the Gulf Oil Building in downtown
Pittsburgh . I had much to say, and even talked aloud to myself as I wrote
poems, an occasional essay, and many letters . But my written voice could
not satisfy the insistence of my spoken voice , could not hold all I wanted
to tell. I spoke out loud - to anyone I could nail down for an hour. To
Anne , whose activism persisted , year after year. To Anita, my teacher, mymuse , my sweet friend kicked ass-forward out of the University. To Janet ,my closest companion , whose discipline and craft I admired , at times envied . When I could not write anymore , I felt defeated , got sick , got lost.
I'd disappointed myself, and this seemingly self-invoked failure was morethan my stubborn heart could hold . I stopped trying , and my voice grew
awkward from disuse. Each attempt to write poetry became more painful
Successfully, I wrote about that. It was something, at least. But morethan a sign of productivity , that writing was an essay I am still quite proudof ("To Use the Using Usefully," Motheroot Journal, 1978).
Much of my writing has come from a need to be thoroughly effective ,deeply known, understood. That Gulf Oil si&.n,. flashing_ red and blue over mychildhood bed, angered and inspired me. The fact of corporate life in Pittsburgh, headquarters of not only Gulf, but U. S. Steel, Alcoa , Heinz .. . was
impossible to miss. New Directions, whose publications at 17 I thought were
the height of the literary avant garde , at 18 I discovered was owned by Jones& Laughlin Steel, who also had a sign , along the parkway, over-looking theAllegheny or the Monongahela (I could never remember which was which) . I
must have been pure , because I believed in my tough will .
I have lived with Frederique , my companion, copine, my love, for the
past year and a half. We are frighteningly alike -- at times impOSSibly so -at times impossibly different. I feel challenged and comforted by her
friendship, and once again , am driven to work. Together we are beginning
Cleis Press, a feminist publishing company.* In the spring, in between visitsfrom Mary Winfrey, who is eager to help us finance our venture, and Roberta
Arnold , whose passionate feminism could thaw the northern boundary waters ,and Frederique's mother , Nina , who is coming from France- we will be
pricing typesetting machines, dreaming of a printing press. We are finding
skills gathered in us like fruit. We live so rarely in concert as now .
I am obsessed with the notion that for women to continue depending upon
the corporate publishers will be disastrous. Let the men be left with theirown self-indulgent creations, and let them go bankrupt. We are looking forward to publishing serious feminist work . For the past year , Alexandra
Grilikhes and I have been corresponding about a collection of her poems
42

written to specific women artists - Marina Tsvetaeva, Barbara Blondeau,
Viola Farber, Simone Signoret, Carolyn Brown, her sister, Moira . I'm
excited about this gathering of forms, this dismantling of something so
arbitrary as "genre". Alexandra is a favorite poet; if I had a house andunlimited money, I would send her off, writing.
Cleis Press welcomes fiction and nonfiction book manuscripts from feminists -especiallylesbian feminists; send to Felice Newman, 3141 Pleasant Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN55408

AniTA CORnWELL
To the Sisters of the Azalea Collective and Lesbians Rising-A
Thank You Note for the Second Annual Third World LesbianWriters' Conference on April 12, 1980, at Hunter College,
New York, New YorkIt has been said that no writer is ever any good until she fmds the audienceshe wants to write for. To the layperson, I suppose that may seem somewhat
arty or even faintly absurd. But to a serious writer, that assertion is absolute
gospel.
One of the major problems facing the Black writer in America is the constant hassles that come from dealing with a white publishing industry. Because,
as Alice Walker wrote in her foreword to Robert Hemenway's biography ofZora Neale Hurston, "America does not support or honor us as human beings,
let alone as blacks, women, or artists."
Thus, it's not surprising that the Black Lesbian writer in this society ismore often ignored or vilified rather than given even minimal acceptance. "Nobody wants to read about stuff like that," the popular wisdom declares. And
so our ideas, hopes, and dreams remain buried or shamelessly exploited in themost inSUlting fashion.
Most of us know from long and bitter experience that listening to "thepopular wisdom" is at best a losing proposition. But still, how is one to know
the other side of the story when that aspect is almost completely submerged?
Consequently, it was with both anxiety and great anticipation that [ accepted your invitation to be a member of the panel discussion at your conference along with Candice Boyce, Linda Brown, Michelle Cliff, Joan Gibbs ,and Audre Lorde.
But even before the panel discussion began, [ had received my first major
surprise when a Sister greeted me with , "It's so good to meet you. I've enjoyedreading your work for years."
Then , noting the amazed expression on my face, the Sister went on to saythat she wasn't too surprised by my reaction. That often she had thought ofwriting to a Sister whose work she had admired, expressing her appreciation.
but had refrained from doing so, fearing she might be regarded as somethingof a bore.
43During the panel discussion, I tried to elaborate on the idea that no writer
ever considers the thoughtful reader a bore when she tries to express her feelings regarding a certain work.
But, of course, the highlight of that session was the stirring message fromnovelist Ann Allen Shockley , read by the poet Audre Lorde , which urged us
to create and promote our own "publishing modus operandi, markets andreadership ... . The time is ripe, the hour is here .. . " she reminded us.
The fmal shock of pleasure came for me that evening with the Sisters at
Salsa Soul where we had gathered to read our work , eat , and dance far into
the morning hours.
I had casually given one Sister a batch of my work- that I had hastily
gathered and brought along on second thought. And when I returned to thatside of the lounge, I could hardly believe my senses when I saw several other
Sisters earnestly reading those tattered copies as though they were indeed foodfor the soul.
The readings that night were truly inspiring. Perhaps one of the most poignant presentations was the dramatization of the events leading up to the suicide of a fourteen -year-old Sister , by Sapphire and Carletta Walker.
To sum up, that was a day and night I shall always be grateful for because
I was given the most precious gift a writer can receive , the knowledge that
she is not alone.
In the future, whenever doubts assail me and I think , "Well , who the hell
gives a damn if I never put pen to paper again?" I will remember the Second
Annual Third World Lesbian Writers Conference, and remind myself, "Theycare. "

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, $6;
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.

44

LInDA J. BROwn
Dark Horse: A View of Writing and Publishingby Dark Lesbians
When I was asked to pen something on writing and publishing by dark
lesbians 1 for Sinister Wisdom, one of the first things I did was to fish thru
my stacks of books for the copy of the first issue done by them (also editedby Beth Hodges) on lesbian writing/publishing. Thinking that this was a good
way to begin, by seeing our (dark lesbians') partial literary growth in the last
four years (the issue was put out in 1976), I leafed thru the many pages,
searching for words.
On the first page (after titles and introductions), was Audre Lorde's poem''The Old Days" speaking reverently, graciously, of foundations and beginnings.
Later, past many pages, Audre's comments were also included in an interview.
Were it not for Audre, I thought, dark lesbians would have had no placein the issue.
I "came out" as a lesbian in the fall of 1975; as a lesbian writer shortly
after. I've written most of my life, but had not focused my style ... energies... message ... responsibilities . .. to any particular thing, until that time I
fmally focused my self. In 1976, when the issue was published, I was penningmy first thin lines of love poetry to womyn.
During these past four years, dark lesbian writers-once hardly visible rightin front of our own faces-have made a definite impact on womyn's literature.
I don't quite know where to begin to tell about dark womyn who write andpublish their work. Happily, there are many different avenues to walk down.
I would use, as my first priority, dark womyn who are lesbians who are
writers. This is of major importance to me, as I feel we are the hardest to see.
There are many dark womyn writers whose work appears in various places,
but we're often left wondering whether or not a particular womon is a lesbian.
As being a lesbian in our society today (still) is not an accepted fact of lifeand as dark womyn are already the targets of the most serious oppressions
aimed at any segment of society-it stands to reason that we may be the least
eager to present ourselves as lesbians. Or to present that part of our work
which is womon-identifIed . Herstorically (as well as historically), dark lesbian
writers have not been recognized. Not coming from the privileged roots ofthe early white lesbian writers, dark womyn had to struggle-to write andlive-as dark people and also as womyn. Perhaps the struggle to also write as
open lesbians was too great. That's why it's important to me, now, to gather
and document-promote and celebrate-ourselves as dark lesbian writers. It's
A "dark horse" candidate in the political arena is one who comes from behind, unexpectedly
building support, ultimately winning the race.

45

important for me to work with a new kind of support network . I feel thatdark lesbians who are writing today should keep their lesbian perspective intheir work , regardless of what they're writing. It's important that we don't"disappear ."While it may be easier , nowadays , for dark womyn to write , the politics
of publishing remain another matter. Dark lesbians generally have little or noresources ($$$ , presses, distributors , etc .) to produce our own work . Generally
and traditionally , dark lesbians have had their work published in places whereother people have had the physical , artistic , and political control.
In the past few years , some existing womyn's and lesbian -orien ted publications have produced "special" issues devoted to the work of dark womyn .
The work that has been featured in these "special" issues has been wonderful
to see and to read , but what usually follows is nothing . By that I mean , after
the issue has been circulated (and they sell well , as people are interested thesedays in what dark womyn have to say) , the womyn whose work is used are
rarely heard from again. The publishers of the various magazines, don't retain
commitments to the dark womyn writers : not the commitment to publish
their work again , or to share any profits ($$$ or otherwise) with them . Thesepublishers seem to feel they have "done their part" by prod ucing the " special"issue in the first place. But nothing really changes.
Dark lesbians are beginning to turn to self-publishing. Many are producing
their work by simple means (o ffset , mimeographing , xeroxing) and distributing
the works themselves to womyn 's bookstores and throughout the lesbiancommunity .
As a person (and a writer) who generally works outside of existing, traditional structure (as they usually don 't relate to me as who I am), I feel it 's
important to make and support our own institutions: power originating fromself~efinition and determination .
I think most dark lesbians write about dark lesbians- what it means to be;what it feels like ; what we think , see , do , want , feel. .. . This fact is tremendously supportive to me. It speaks loudly of cultural celebration and identification; with no imitations.
Poetry , following our oral and rhythmic traditions, is what dark lesbians
are writing most of these days. The imagery , tone , color , and freedom of
poetry may appeal more at this time to dark womyn than other styles ofwriting . Our cultural and linguistic traditions have deep roots in poetic style.
Performing written work (readings , theatre) is also an area where dark
lesbians are he~vily concentrated . For me , there is little to compare with seeing womyn 's words come alive thru their voices and bodies : the excitementof combining the written , oral, and visual into one goes beyond the defmitionsof art or performance - letting us become celebrants of the total experience .
However , the performing aspect of dark lesbian literary achievements isoften praised while the literary merit is ignored. I've often heard womyn lauding the performance of a particular group or individual with words that havea condescending twist ,' that play heavily on racist stereotypes of dark people
being good only at "dancing and singing" (or having to do with our sense of"natural rhythm ").

46

While poetry and performances may be the easiest things to see right now ,there are a substantial number of dark lesbians who are novelists , critics , journalists , political theorists, and playwrights (who , interestingly enough , don ' t
receive a lot of recognition in the womyn's comrnunity-even tho it is their .
plays being performed) doing major work in these areas . Fine, inspiring, beautiful work.
But it's my feeling (from being a novelist and journalist myself; also fromtalking with other womyn who ·are novelists and journalists) that we work
primarily in solitude. There aren't (to my knowledge) support groups fordark lesbians (or white lesbians , for that matter) who do this kind of writing .2
Also, Ann Allen Shockley (Loving Herj3 is the only dark lesbian - who admits to being so - I know who has published a novel about lesbians , or anything else.
It's important here to understand some more of the politics of publishingfor dark lesbians . To publish work , especially a "novel-length" publication ,costs $$$ (for typesetting, printing , graphic & layout work). In order to get
the work out, you must have a good distributor (to contact bookstores , tocollect and pay you your fees) or you must have the time, knowledge , andresources to do this yourself. Most dark lesbian writers work full time at another job in order to eat , pay rent, stay clothed. The economic situation ofdark people (here , as well as in many parts of the world) dictates this as away of life.
So there is little or no time to undertake the production and distributionof a long work.
In most cases it's necessary to solicit someone to publish the work for you.
There don 't seem to be many offers made to dark lesbians to do this .
Also, understand the politics of having to (in most cases) give up control artistic and otherwise- of your work to someone who possibly doesn 't understand what you are saying. I (and other dark lesbian writers I know) have hada substantial number of articles , etc. accepted for publication , whose major
body has ended up on the floors of editing rooms , edited by various publishers
for "clarity."
The network among dark lesbians who write and publish their own work
is at its very beginning stages because the concept is still all too new. Beingan "out" lesbian who writes womon-identified material , and then taking thatwriting and publishing it yourself (or in such a way that guarantees you theartistic , political, and financial control over your own work) are things thatdark womyn have just begun to explore. Many womyn (dark and white , alike) ,upon catching a piece of news of the network in the air , are understandably
hungry for more information of and more voice from it. But, oftentimes ,supplying the information or documenting the voice is not a simple matter .
In attempting to gather things together about ourselves as writers and publishers, I have met obstacles that cannot be overcome or dealt with in shortspaces of time. One is the reluctance of womyn to be " out " about who they
are as leshians , and so they don 't want their names revealed , although they
may sometimes feel safe exploring themselves in a par!icular small community
or circle of friends where trust has already been estahlished . But for mrulY
womyn the thought of nation -wide (or even t;ity-wide) exposure is still very47

frightening. This is particularly true for writers who are working in isolated
situations. Even when there are a substantial numher of womyn working together in a particular place, often things like fmanciallirnitations and not being able to locate sisters in other areas , make it hard to continuously build
the network.
I would urge all sisters to seek out one another and send information out
to others about yourself/your group. Hopefully, someday in the near future
there will be a network of dark lesbians that can begin to put together anddistribute information/resources pertaining to dark lesbians who write andpublish.
I would also like to encourage womyn to avoid the pitfalls of what I call"star-making" and "star-tripping." This is the promotion of one womon's/
group's work over another. Often, true to the "american way," the womyn
who are already well known are the only ones who receive any support (theones whose readings are well attended , or whose books are bought, or whose
work is published). I would remind womyn that support is a necessary thing
every womon needs to grow , to work.
Some writing and performing groups and work collectives have been formed
among dark lesbians to deal with the different aspects of writing/publishing,
and to support our own work. The list : 4
Writing and Performing Groups
Naps, Black lesbian performing ensemble, contact Donna Allegra, 60 East
4th Street/no . 18 , NY, NY 10003 .
Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Co., 135 Eastern Pky/8K, Bklyn, NY 11238 .
Study Group on Black lesbians, contact Brooks, c/o LHA , Box 1258, NYC
10001.
Political Groups with Newsletters/Position Papers
Lesbians of Color Caucus newsletter, Lesbians of Color, LCC, 1824 -12th
Avenue , Seattle , Washington 98122.
Lesbians of Color newsletter , Lesbians of Color , Box 5077 , San Diego , CA92105 .
Salsa-Soul Sisters, 3rd world gay women's organization , newsletter 3rd World
Women's Gayzette, contact Candice Boyce , editor, 41-11 Parsons Blvd./
no. 616, Flushing, NY 11355 .
Combahee River Collective, 3rd world lesbian feminists , contact Beverly
Smith, 149 Windsor St./no. 3, Cambridge, Mass . 02139.
Committee for the Visibility of the Other Black Woman: The Black Lesbian,contact CVOBW, c/o Brooks, Box M564, Hoboken , NJ 07030.
National Coalition of Black Gays, proposed newsletter , NCBG , Box 548,
Columbia, MD 21045.
Publications
Azalea: a magazine by and for 3rd World Lesbians, writing , graphics , photos
by 3rd World Lesbians , published quarterly:
306 Lafayette Avenue, Bklyn , NY 11238
314 East 91st St./5E;NY, NY 10028
1000 Grand Concourse/7B, Bronx, NY 10451
Jemima: From the Heart, poems by the Jemima Writers ' Workshop members,
Yvonne Flowers , 271 Sullivan Pl., Bklyn., NY 11215 .
48

Other Publications (not published by dark lesbians , but including their work)
Brown Sister, publication by dark womyn, includes some writing by dark
lesbians, Brown Sister, Schneider College Center , Wellesley College , Wellesley , Mass. 02181 , quarterly.
off our backs "special issue by & about wimmin of color, " produced by the
Ain't I a Womon? collective , a collective ofwomyn of color , vol. 9 , no. 6,
June 1979, includes writing , photos, art by lesbians of color, oob , 1724
20th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009.
Heresies: 3rd World Women, issue 8 , includes writing, art by 3rd World womyn, including some work by lesbians, editorial collective of dark womyn
for this issue , Heresies, Box 766, Canal St. Station, NY , NY 10013.
Conditions: Five, the Black Women 's Issue, includes writing by Black lesbians,
edited by Black lesbian-feminists Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith, Conditions , Box 56 , Van Brunt Station , Bklyn , NY 11215.
Dyke (not publishing anymore) special issue on ethnic lesbians, no. 5, Fall
1977 , includes some writing , art , info by and about 3rd world lesbians.
Tomato Publications, 70 Barrow St., NY, NY 10014.
Individual SelfPublished Writers 5
Joan Gibbs , Between a Rock and a Hard Place, poetry and a prose piece,
February 3rd Press , NYC , 1979 , 1. Gibbs/306 Lafayette Ave./Bklyn, NY
11238.
Robin Christian, Lady, These Are for You, poems , NYC , 1978, R. Christian/
314 East 91 st St./NYC 10028.
Rose Marulanda, Toni; A New Day; Death, poems published in small booklets, NYC, 1974, R. Marulanda/ 1433 Coney Island Ave./Bklyn , NY 11230.
Linda Brown, To Be More Real, poems, NYC, 1976; Kiwi, journal pieces,
NYC, 1978 , L. Brown/314 East 91st St./NYC 10028 .
I have been fortunate (perhaps privileged) in being able to do a lot of myown work, and to find other dark sister-writers whom I can work with. Fora time I was a member of the Jemima Writers' Workshop- a group of black
lesbian writers in the NYC area who came together to do work around writing
and reading our material .
Presently , I am one of the editors of Azalea: a magazine by and for 3rd
World Lesbians. We publish quarterly-(articles, fiction, poet, y , commentary ,reviews , graphics , photos) and have been for a little over two years. We usean alternative structure; working collectively and rotating the editorship witheach issue to insure the division of work and the sharing of skills and the
avoidance of unchecked power. Our editorial policy is structured to allow all
dark lesbians an opportunity and space to have their work published . We
print all things we are sent by dark lesbians (except of course those things
that may degrade us as dark womyn). Printing, layout, and distribution aredone solely by the collective , so we have maximum input into publishing thework of dark lesbians.
Also. I have published two small books mysel f- one poetry , To Be More
Real, NYC , 1976; and the other a book of journal excerpts , Kiwi, NYC, 1978.
I am currently preparing a book of short stories, Th e Rainbow River. that will
be released at the end of May 1980.
In closing , I would like to thank all my dark lesbian writer sisters for the49

work you're dOing. Thank you for being there : a tangible force to identify
with and learn from; a well of support I (and I'm sure so many others of oursisters) desperately need to continue to be strong. To do my work. To be
who I am.
the shape
long un-identifiable
has come into focus
clearly ...
this is the year for victoryfor coming into our own
writing our own poems
knowing our herstory.6
NOTES
1. I prefer the term "dark lesbians" to "3rd world lesbians" because I feel it moreaccurately speaks of who we are in this society, this country.
2. I am constantly seeking feedback and conversation about my work . I'd appreciate
your comments on this article. Please write: L.J. Brown/314 East 91st St., 5E/NY, NY
10028. Thanks.
3. Ann Allen Shockley, Loving Her (Avon), 1978 .
4. All references listed are based on my own knowledge (which is admittedly limited,me being centered in the northeast, in NYC) . There may be other groups forming as I
write this. The network is new and developing.
5. Again, very limited, based on my knowledge of local womyn.
6. from "another poem for the victory of women," in Between a Rock and a Hard
Place by Joan Gibbs, February 3rd Press, New York City , 1979.

I

I

50

REVIEWS

Six Contributors to Conditions: Five I. to r., standing:
Hillary Kay, Barbara Smith , Donna Kate Rushin, Fahamisha
Sharriet Brown; I. to r. , sitting: Beverly Smith, Brenda
Haywood photograph by Susan Fleischmann51

A review of Conditions: Five, the Black Women 's Issue, coedited by Lorraine
Bethel and Barbara Smith, 1979 . Available from Conditions, p.o . Box 56,
Van Brunt Station, Brooklyn , N.Y. 11215, $3 .00.

Reading Conditions: Five, I felt there was particular significance in thearrangement , especially in the placement of the opening pieces , both by Gloria
T . Hull.
In ''Poem'' Hull raises an issue that is at the core of the Black woman's
existence, that is , silence. Why are we silent? Because of our heritage and present existence , we are silent out of fear - fear of being looked at too closely ,and thus being found lacking, fear of being looked at wrongly and thus being
misunderstood , fear of being looked at at all , and thus becoming visible. Visibility is not easily accepted when one is not considered the "nor)T1." But
Black Lesbians are , and must remain , visible in order for our heritage to be
maintained.
Hull states that" 'our labor is / more important than / our silence .''' The
Black Lesbian writer needs to keep writing because of the scarcity of publishedwork available even approximating her true existence. Hull's essay " Under theDays" gives an example of what happens when a writer , out of fear of visibility , cannot (or will not) write fully from herself.
"Under the Days" could have been written about any number of Black
Lesbian writers. It is about Angelina Weld Grirnke , a Black Lesbian who lived
and wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . Thwarted byher race and sex, stifled by her sexuality and inability to express it openly ,her creativity was crippled . Her work was never able to hold its true meaning.
it was never tully expressed or understood. Because she had to hide behind
innuendos, her work was muted, melancholy , and many of her pieces she
never dared try to have published because of the obvious woman-identified
subject matter . Eventually , she ceased even trying to produce work.
Hull 's essay and poem are aptly placed at the beginning of Conditions: Five,almost in explanation of why this issue is so badly needed : to help end thesilence of Black women , to help make Black Lesbian writers more visible.
Conditions: Five shows that there are Black Lesbians alive and writing andtalented enough to be read.
Though there is a lot of poetry, I didn 't find this imbalanced the book.
The prose poem "'The Sisters" by Alexis de Veaux is one of the most
touching and erotic woman-plus-woman stories I've read in a long while . This
poem is lyrical, magical , titillating. It shows two women loving each otherwithin the limitations of their environment. There is so little material by Lesbians dealing with the sensual , romantic part of Lesbian life and love , one begins to feel that we forget that our feelings for each other are not purely
political.
In the poem "Among the Things That Use To Be" Willie Coleman looks
at beauty parlors from a different point of view: "Lots more got taken careof / than hair / we carne together / to share / and share / and share." Coleman's52

language is simple and direct. She looks at a very counterrevolutionary place
as a potential setting for fostering change. What better place for a revolution
than a beauty parlor where we Black women gathered because of our dissat~s­faction with our non-European looks. Now we are proud of our naps, but
we still do not use our gatherings to foster revolution .
Conditions: Five includes journals, essays, fiction, reviews. The inclusionof song lyrics is unique. Each song deals with 'ifferent issues of being a woman, from the differences in our lifestyles to 0 : need to come together as
people sharing the same experiences.
The most inspiring piece in the book is Lorraine Bethel's poem "WhatChou Mean We, White Girl?" It is a scathing reproof of the blatant racismdisguised-as-feminism that exists in the Feminist community. Bethel hits somany sore spots in her poem , I'm sure she has gotten plenty of flak as wellas pats on the back because of it. The essence of the poem is expressed inthese lines: ''We're not doing that kind of work anymore / . .. letting lesbian/feminist racial transvestites / ... with no libations for black female spirits /pick our brains steal our culture, style, identities / for free or below the minimum wage ... /while we wonder where the next real job ... /the first car ... /are going to come from."
This sentiment is the main reason Black women need to band together tohelp build up some strength so we may, in the future, not have to have a'Black Women's Issue' in order to show people we are around. There would
be no need to be legitimized by anyone before we are taken seriously.
Conditions: Five is an important literary work that, because of its contents,
origins, statements by and about Black women , should be read by everyone
who feels she (or he) knows what Black Lesbians are about. It shows Hlacl<
Lesbians for the diverse people we are with a multitude of talents and waysof expressing those talents. This is just one step in the journey toward fmallyridding ourselves of the silence pervading our existence.

-Ruth Farmer

A review of Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover: Stories by Jan Clausen, The
Crossing Press, Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886, May 1980.
Jan Clausen is best known to many of us as a poet. Now , with the publication of Mother, Sister, Daughter,"Lover she will undoubtedly become justas highly thought of as a short story writer.
.
Clausen's voice is still the expressive tongue of the poet, equally effective
whether she is describing a ten-year-old girl or a borough in New York City:. .. she is wearing a tube top the color of those violent pink artificiallyflavored ices you buy in pizza stores . ..
Behind her is Brooklyn , a habit, a tropical nightmare she takes for reality,
a street of heat and heroin, ailanthus, open hydrants and women in advanced
states of pregnancy pushing strollers.
(fr0111 "Child ren's Liberation")
53

The nine short stories in this collection are about lesbians: lesbians andtheir children, their lovers, their friends, their sisters and their mothers . Mostof the stories are set in New York City . We meet street-wise women here :women who know judo and attend political demonstrations; women who
know how to cope with stubborn landlords and with unemployment offices;
women who are invited to "alternative" publicity parties in fashionable SoHo
lofts . But these stories reflect the reality of the lives of -non-urban lesbians as
well. We may not all be lesbian mothers living in Brooklyn walk-ups but wehave all been daughters and many of us have sisters , friends and lovers.
Four of the stories deal with the fragile , ever-shifting relations between
mothers and children ; specifically between lesbians and their own or theirlover's daughters. "Daddy ," with its deceptively simple style , could almost be
a model for the "Stories For Free Children" section of Ms. magazine . But it
is only on a superficial level that this story can be read as a modern-day tale
for children. The words may appear to be licking at you, but in fact they are
biting you to the bone. This is a painfully brutal representation of the realityof a divorce , with the child struggling to ride a ridiculously unbalanced seesaw .
"Children's Liberation" tackles the difficulties a daughter faces in accepting
her mother's lesbianism. Lisa, from the self-righteous vantage point of theyoung , desperately seeks " normalcy" for herself and for her mother, Chris.
The two women are locked into a painful battle. Chris has a vision of "little
apartments all over the city, single mothers trapped in there with their kids,
like one of those tortures where people are shut up with rats . Except in ourcase it's mutual." And Lisa , from the depths of her desire to be like everyone
else, cries out, "Other people's mothers aren't lesbians . Why do I have to havea fucking lesbian for a mother." Again, as in "Daddy ," we are not given a
prettied-up ending : the daughters of Amazons may not be ready to take up
the shield themselves ... not yet.
I was surprised at how easy it was to pick up the rhythm of the continuous, fragmented sentences that Clausen uses in ''The Warsaw Ghetto," a story
which records a day in the life of a non-biological lesbian mother. I found .
myself re-reading parts of this story, aware that I'd overlooked something
special by treating this as if it were linear narrative. There are probably more
examples of obvious poetry here than in any other story in this collection .
One of my favorite lines is : "Back in bed safe with her hair her warmth hercunt wet the fact that she loves me i touch gentle but later knead the flesh.
knot like dough it swells tough resilient under my hand.""Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life" traces the actions andthoughts of Alice , a lesbian who lives in a Brooklyn railroad flat with p er
nine-year-old daughter, Jackie. "I am myself," Alice thinks upon waking; butthen she' faces a day in which she must constantly weigh her own needs anddesires against the demands of others. She wonders what would happen if,
for just one day , she did precisely what she wanted. ("No one would everspeak to me again , that's what.") Her relationship with Jackie is portrayedwith realism and sensitivity . Alice lives through the bleak moments of theearly morning. ("Nothing is so dismal as eating breakfast with children ... ")and progresses to more hopeful thoughts : "I manage; I guide; we pass through54the moments of anger, misunderstanding, on the other side come together. It
will be all right.""Depending," "Blook/Milk," and "Thesis : Antithesis" are each concernedwith various iss'ues of lesbian politics. "Depending" portrays "single" lesbians
who are plagued with questions like" . .. whatever happened to simple friendship?" and complain about the incestuous quality of lesbian communities,
wondering ''where the others are in this infernal web of relationships ." Theaction of "Blood/Milk" takes place at a party for Nadine Grossman, a feminist
writer whose "confessional" novel has just been published by Random House .
Some women have come to celebrate the author's "womanenergy" and others
to condemn her commercialized exhibitionism . We view the party , completewith self-conscious feminist ritual , through the eyes of Nadine's former lover:("She used to take vacations, ... I was one of her vacations.") In both "Depending" and "Blood/Milk" Clausen demonstrates her finely-honed sense ofhumor . She never gives way to cruel put-downs but she does point out theabsurdities we are so often faced with: lesbian dances where you find yourself dancing with your ex-lover's ex-lover ; endless and heated discussions about"big names" who have sold out ; face-to-face encounters with former lovers at
political demonstrations or crowded parties.
Although I recognize it ·as an ambitious and important piece , "Thesis:Antithesis" seems to me the least successful of these stories. It is presented as a
pseudo case-study : a "political" rather than a "personal" interpretation of adeath of a friendship . The "narrator's" use of a self-imposed objectivity andsense of distance prevented my feeling any real investment with the characters.
The final two stories , "Yellow Jackets" and "Three-Part Invention," areconcerned with biological families: families that have nothing to do with chosen alliances and allegiances. These stories are about birth-connections thatbind with invisible and permanent ties . Reading them is like looking throughanother family's photograph album : an album that has fallen to the floor ,randomly scattering all the snapshots . Although it will take time to makesense out of the images , you somehow know it will be worth it.
In "Yellow Jackets," seventy-seven-year-old Laura Biehler discusses her
family : her dead mother, husband and son ; her middle-aged daughters; herconfusing, often exasperating granddaughters. Clausen involves us so fully
with the characters that it's disappointing when the story comes to an abrupt
end . I was left wanting to know more about everyone. In some ways "ThreePart Invention" continues where "Yellow Jackets" leaves off. The names aredifferent and the "photos" may even be of different women . But we are once
more enmeshed in the inter-dependencies of blood-ties. The three sisters inthis story run along parallel tracks that intersect only occasionally. They
would probably never be friends, and would certainly never be "sisters-in-the
movement." And yet their relationship is such that each one's life somehow
defmes the reality of the others'.
Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover is a brave collection. Clausen's writing isnever static: she takes risks , both in her chosen subject matter and in her
styles. Her story-telling techniques vary. Sometimes we are aware that there
is a technique ; at other times , we are too absorbed in t.he story to even notice.

- Irene Zahava
55

A review of Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Joan Gibbs, February 3rd
Press , $2.00. Books may be ordered from the author at 306 Lafayette Ave .,Brooklyn , NY. 11238.
In "Notes on Speechlessness" (SW 5) I talked about Simone Well's concept"of affliction , the condition of powerlessness, which is primarily characterizedby speechlessness . I said that this state of speechlessness is used by thepowerful to maintain that status of powerlessness , that speechlessness creates
an implosive rather than an explosive reaction--that is , it is she who does not
speak who is the victim. Ultimately , to not speak, is to not exist.
The poems and prose piece which make up Joan Gibbs's heroic andpowerful book are diametrically opposed to powerlessness and to speechlessness, and examine both conditions through a fine language and with anunflinching eye. These are works of politics and anger. Of love and history.
Of knowledge and understanding. These are the works of a black lesbian
feminist woman who has refused the silences proffered her. Joan Gibbs
speaks about maintaining speech within her own struggle :sometimes
I think of dropping out
pitching a tent
beside some lonely streamthat nobody passes
fishing

I wouldn't have to worry
about being "politically correct"
trying to workwith Black men
andwhite womenfor the sake of unity
or sisterhood
But something happens :the rent is due
the phone's about to be cut off
a brother on the street
calls me a "buUdagger "ora white lesbian says ,"I'm just as oppressed as you are."
Then I'm remindedof what Mama always says ,"You can run but
you sure can 't hide ."("Untitled Poem for My Sisters")

These works deal with the multiplicity of black women 's oppression , ofblack lesbian oppression--and recognize the necessity of confronting thisoppression in all its forms , and of connecting the forms to define theoppression. Gibbs talks of many women : of the "woman on the corner":56the man in the store says
she's been there for three hours
saying,"Don't believe everything you hear-the world has already ended!"saying,"David, bring back the stereo."saying,"Denise, I did the best I could." ("The Woman on the Corner")of her mother responding to two white men , who come to ask for the poet'ssister, "a month after her death"Her voicefull of "yes and no sirs"
without anger or smiles
just answers
automatically.
one hand touching the facein the other("One of the Pains")of an "old maid" in a southern town:
across the street
Ms. Selby's alone now :her parents
brothers and sisters
all dead:has young girls,
women teachers
staying with herfrom time to time
you can still hear
old and young folks say''What a shame--a life wasted."("Thinking South")

There are others. What Gibbs has done is to take the speechlessness ofthese women--whether the "madness" of the "woman on the corner ," thequiet acquiescence of the poet's mother, the silent testimony of Ms. Selby,
who takes in young girls and women teachers--and render it in her language,
the language of a black lesbian feminist poet, allowing us knowledge of these
women's lives, which allows them a certain power.
The necessity to recognize and describe oppression in language is a prerequisite for the language which will change that oppression--perhaps;
eventually; in some way. In the poem--almost an incantation--"To the True
Witches Among Us," Joan Gibbs takes on the various false transcendences
which would deny real political action. The "true witches among us," likeour foresisters who gathered around campfires plotting action , do not"gather in dark cafes/read tarot cards/watch stars"; they do not "talk about
us behind our backs/at private parties/in free spaces" ; they do not "gather
in dark cafes/scare your own kind/watch stars"--57

Please!
If you are who you say you areand can do what you say you canfight for us

Organize
revenge yourselves
Please?

(''To the True Witches Among Us")

Joan Gibbs is mindful of the past-mindful of the false promises ofliberation-aware that knowledge of the past is necessary for change.
yes ... yeseveryone says they understand"It's a small matter."the lives of Blacks,
women,
Blacklesbianwomen
have always been hard. "Don't you know ...
Joan Little put to death
the white manthat dared assume control of her body ."My thoughts are old ,unoriginal ,this morning
I woke up thinking of
pecan trees ,the smell of honey suckles
com growing.

("Sunday Thoughts")

This is an important book. I have merely touched on its importance.
-Michelle Cliff

A review of The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde (New York: W.w. Norton& Co ., 1978), paperback $3.95, 122 pp.

SWEET MEDICINE

I have been trying for a long time to understand why Audre Lorde's poems
are as powerful as they are. One way to understand poetry is to figure out
how it works: what the problems are that the poet sets herself, what artisticmeans she uses to resolve them. I don't know how to begin analyzing a poemin this way , and I don't think Audre Lorde's poems are particularly amenable
to that kind of literary criticism. Her language always seemed to me wild andjust on the edge between something English and not-English, her poems not
so much crafted as evoked. Chances are that she does write them line by line58

at a desk, but my mental picture of it is more romantic: the sky fills withlightning and thunder, flames leap up at her feet, she falls into trance andspeaks whole poems at a time.
.
Romance aside, it seemed the only way for me to say anything about The
Black Unicorn was to place it in a context and hope that thereby some of
the things the poems do would be illuminated.
In Navajo the word for ''healer'' means, literally, "singer." Traditional
Navajo medicine, traditional Navajo storytelling and song, and traditional
Navajo religion are inseparable; they are like the faces of the triple goddessdistinct in form, single in source. They draw upon each other. The healer, forinstance, diagnoses disease in an almost metaphorical fashion and then prepares the appropriate ceremony (with song and dance) to exorcise it: a psychic healing for a physical agony that is seen as originating in psychic imbalance, an out-of-whackness with natural forces. The basis of Navajo religion,
like all Native American religions of the Far West, is the spirit quest, whichis essentially a search for balance, a dangerous journey undertaken alone, butwith the blessing of the tribe, toward wholeness, toward ~he moment when
inner and outer forces merge, when one moves in harmony with the powersof the wind, the stones, the animals, the sun and moon. Finally, Navajo storytelling is a communal pleasure, a time filled with laughter, but a time alsothat is religious and serious: for it is the stories that enable children to become good, and it is the stories which make all things possible. l
Navajo culture, in other words, provides one example of a context in whichpoetry makes medical, religious, and esthetic sense.
Before white men littered the prairies with the bones of children and buffalo, the Native American healer-singer-poet could draw on hundreds of yearsof unbroken tradition to effect her cures. She was a woman equipped to deal
with her fate and the fate of those she cared for. As we-in this culture of
institutionalized violence and manipulated passivity-are not, having been institutionalized ourselves from birth in hospitals, schools, factories, offices,
prisons, asylums.2
But Audre Lorde is a more vivid diagnostician:
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his bloodas it sinks into the whitenessof the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction("Power," p. 108)
but look at the skeleton children
advancing against us
beneath their faces there is no sunlight59

no darkness remains
no legends
to bring them back as women
into their bodies at dawn.

("Chain," p. 22)

Loss of imagery, loss of magic, loss of legends, loss of the knowledge essential to power and independence, loss of heart. Audre Lorde's picture of
our shattered selves is as accurate as the nightmare which wakes us with theknowledge that the thing most dreaded has already happened.
The recovery of essential knowledge begins, like all knowledge, with images.
And here it is, I think, that Audre Lorde makes her most profound move. She
reaches back across an ocean and centuries of atrocity to the country of theDahomeyan Amazons, a homeland rife with imagery, with magic, with legend,with female Power.
It was in Abomey that I felt
the full blood of my fathers' wars
and where I found my mother
Seboulisa
standing with outstretched palms hip highone breast eaten away by worms of sorrow(''Dahomey ,'' p. 10)
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magicand the noon's new furywith all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman .
and not white.
("A Woman Speaks," pp . 4-5)

She knows, too, and does not forget, the history of what has intervened,
and how it has stolen the power of African women:
before we were broken apart
we dreamed the crossed swordsof warrior queens
while we avoided each other's eyes
and we learned to know lonely
as the earth learns to know dead("Harriet," p. 21)

The "true nature of'poetry," as Adrienne Rich names it in "Ongins andHistory of Consciousness," is "the drive / to connect. The dream of a common
language."3 The Black Unicorn connects black women with each other throughthe common imagery of their finest past, the Dahomeyan Amazons, witches,60

warrior queens of the southern continent , the first home of human culture.
If Audre Lorde stopped there, she would be politically powerful enough.
But she goes on to envision the tentative beginnings of a common language
between black women and white women , according to the prophecies of the 'Dahomeyan mother of the Vodu, "high over halfway between your world
and mine / rimmed with full moon and no more excuses ... "When we meet again
will you put your hands upon me
will I ride you over our lands
will we sleep beneath trees in the rain?
You shall get young as I lick your stomach
hot and at rest before we move off again
you will be white fury in my navel
I will be sweeping night
Mawulisa foretells our bodies
as our hands touch and learn
from each others hurt.
we have high time for work and another meeting
women exchanging bloodin the innermost rooms of moment
we must taste of each other's fruit
at least once
before we shall both be slain.
(''Meet,'' pp. 33.34)
I suppose that the only women who would long to lie together "for aseason out of the judging rain" are lesbians-the common language conjured
up by The Black Unicorn is an Amazon tongue . It is also a language whichbespeaks a longed-for, dreamed-of culture of wholeness, a context in whicha poetry that heals, exalts, and caresses makes eminent practical sense-inwhich the healer is, literally, a singer.
The Navajo songs and stories which teach children to be good and makeall things possible are primarily songs and stories of culture heroes. A culture
hero is one who makes the world and the things in it thinkable, one who
makes actions possible. Culture heroes often do funny things , sometimes evenridiculous or destructive things ; they are certainly not worshipped as gods.
But tli.ey are sung about and spoken about, quoted in song and story, andgiven their due as forerunners , as those who go before and mark the ways.
If we are ever going to experience a lesbian culture that grows out of thestrengths of all the places we come from. I think we had better start by acknowledging what we owe our culture heroes, Audre Lorde among them, as
well as journeying at least awhile along the ways on which they have left theirmark.
In "The Erotic as Power" Audre Lorde defmes the "erotic" as "a measure
between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our deepest
feelings ," and describes its significance as a touchstone : "Once having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognized its power , in honorand self-respect we can require no less of ourselves ."4 The Black Unicorn. in
Audre's own way of using words , is erotic poetry - healing, exalting. caressing.
61

the fruit of a SplItt quest aimed at the reconstruction of essential knowledge,
at the moment when inner and outer forces merge and we move in harmony
with the powers of the wind, the stones, the animals, the sun and moon. Again,in the words of Adrienne Rich (their poems seem to go together), "We will
not live / to settle for less We have dreamed of this / all our lives. "5
NOTES
I. Barre Toelken and Tacheeni Scott, "Poetic Retranslation and the 'Pretty Languages'of YeUowman," in Traditioruzl Literatures of the American IndiDn, edited by Karl Kroeber(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).
2. Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Boston: Fag Rag Books, 1978),p. 87. The passage continues: "There are very few of us who can do what the majority ofpeople .throughout history have always regarded as essential human activities: grow our own
food, make our own clothing, build our own homes, make our own medicines, create ourown gods."
3. The Dream ofa Common Langullge (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 7.
4. In Chrysalis 9 (Fall 1979), p. 29.
5. "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," in Dream of a Common Langullge, p. 6.

-Harriet Desmoines62A review of Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. by Monique Wittig
and Sande Zeig, Avon Books, 1979, paperback, $595, translated by theauthors. Originally published as Brouillon pour un Dictionnaire des Amantes.
Paris, Grasset, 1976.
''Dictionary: The assemblage of words, what dictated their choice, thefiction of the fables ... constitute lacunae and therefore are acting upon
reality ."Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig's rough draft (''brouillon'') sketches out alesbian utopia which might be the worlds of Wittig's Les Guerilleres (Avon,
1973) and The Lesbian Body (Avon, 1976) combined. Certainly its threehundred and forty-seven lexical entries provide a welcome gloss for thoseworks; but more than that, they extend them. They cover the globe withwidely diverse mythical lesbian communities living in a Glorious Age one
step beyond our own, which Wittig and Zeig call The Concrete Age or The
High-Speed Steel Age.
What I especially enjoy about Lesbian Peoples is its immense good humor.
. '!'he Glorious Age began when half the population "took a powder" and''both parties forgot each other," bringing to a close many dark ages (Stone,
Bronze, Iron , Steam, and Concrete/Steel). During those awful times the nomadic amazons of the original Golden Age were reduced to the final degradations: they became "woman" and "mother." Lest you angrily (and wrongly)
conclude that Wittig and Zeig delight in metaphoric potshots at the massesof real-life women, I hasten to add that, on the contrary, the authors wish
to call our attention to the literal "belonging to another" of etymolOgical
wo-man and real wife, and to the isolation from other amazons , the community
at large , and daughters which the category "mother" institutes. Among the"companion lovers" such distinctions disappear because they are no longer
functional ; their only purpose was to create oppression during the dark ages,
and the amazons have created a world in which great differences exist without causing dissension or struggles for power over others.
For such utopian vision Wittig and Zeig will undoubtedly be chastised.
They do not give us a prescription for action, a literal way out of poverty,
battery, or sexual slavery to men. They give us magic, new myths (along withsome mighty handy versions of the old ones), and, most important of all, avisionary lesbian history and language. For they believe that reclaiming or
creating history while projecting into the future , both with a lesbian's eyeview and combined with the resolute chiseling out of our own understandingsof what words mean, that these endeavors do change reality. And that prop- ·osition is at least worth expending some lesbian energy to evaluate.
"History" is in fact the longest entry in Lesbian Peoples, while historicalaccounts often verge on the cryptic. Some history is even self-evident ; theheading "Sappho" is followed by an entire blank page. Most of what we currently call by that name is irrelevant ; under "Germany" we read : " Late in
the Concrete Age an international lesbian front was created in a German city.
Some companion lovers say that the idea of making half of the population
take a powder originated amidst this front." All history is certified by those
who wish to see themselves as its focus and essence and who have the power
among themselves to create that perspective: "If an affirmation is repeated63two times, on the third it becomes a scientific truth."
History is a text and men have choked off, invalidated, or destroyed lesbian words for two thousand chaotic years . So "Language" is Lesbian Peoples'
second longest entry , its history forming a crucial part of the first. Wittig andZeig clear the space to tell our stories and fill it with words consonant withour cultures. They say some amazons of the Golden Age 's harmonious garden
wandered to cities and dissension arose when many stayed there to do nothing
but watch their abdomens swell . The mothers and the amazons developed
separate languages; the mother~, having foregone physical exercise and thecarrying of weapons , fell into servitude , while the amazons scattered until the
Glorious Age. But then, the authors tell us, not everyone agrees with this interpretation. Some say there's no way to know what happened .
Indeed, we will never speak the ancient amazons' magical "language ofletters and numbers " which , like the Hebrew patriarch's beginning ''Word ,''could spawn life and strike death . The city mothers permanently deformed
its immediate power into representation, for unlike their amazon sisters, they
did not live in direct contact with nature , but walled themselves indoors, making it necessary to re-present reality in order to communicate . Thus language
has become a recapturing rather than an experiencing.
But even in its fallen state (of approximation) language can be reactivatedso it operates on our lesbian realities . Our stories can be told , our culture
celebrated . The Golden Age may be over . But there are among us lesbian
peoples who say that if we bear our fables , forge our weapons , and wage ourwars , our rage and laughter will ring in the Glorious one.
- Suzanne Relyea

A review of True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. 1, edited by Judy Grahn ,Diana Press , Oakland , caUf., 224 pp ., $5 .00 .
Before its demise as a book publisher, Diana Press brought out True toLife Adventure Stories, Vol. 1, an anthology of writings collected and edited
by poet Judy Grahn . This fust volume of a projected three-part series painfully reminds us of the loss our culture suffers when our presses cease to roll.
Here are published many working-class lesbian writers who are not valued orrecognized by mainstream publishers catering to middle-class heterosexual
standards. As Grahn wrote in her introduction to the stories, "Our language
like our lives should belong to us," and so must our presses if our l~guage
and lives are to be authentically voiced and shared with one another.
Fortunately we do have this first volume in which editor Grahn effectively
bonds together a diversity of stories and characters whose experiences arethose of working-class women. They are lesbians mothers on welfare ; they
are older women; they are children ; they are black and white and they are
Jewish. They work in offices, live in the wilderness and in the cities ; they
get put in jail , are prostitutes, and go to college. They struggle alone and together , and they learn to survive as best they can in a world indifferent , if
not adverse, to their survival.

64

Perhaps it is Gralm's political vision more than any other factor whichbrings these stories together. In her challenging and provocative introduction ,"Murdering t he King's English," Grahn identifies commonalities in content
and form . The stories, she says, are "true to life ," that is , "they are based on
information which is close to, or is , the original source of the story." Most
stories show women "realistically grappling with real life situations." Grahnbelieves that if women's writing is to be useful to other women, it must workin our interest , it must not divide us nor provide false information which
could be used against us. Gralm applies this concept of "true to life" to form
as well as content , two elements not to be separated . "How a thing is said ,"contends Gralm , "has everything to do with what is said ." Thus stories by
and about working-class women in order to be "true ," authentic, and usefulmust be told in working-class language. In these stories, Gralm and Diana Press
have chosen to preserve and validate the integrity of working-class language
by not "translating" Common English into Standard English. Still Gralm does
not totally throw out the idea of "standards ." Her standards, rooted in feminism, are clarity, unsentimentality , and in tegrity . Stories were chosen because
they "provoke , teach , arouse strong emotion, reveal women to other women ,and redefine.".
Among the contributors are the previously published Sandy Boucher, Sharon
Isabell, Linda Marie, Pat Parker, and Judy Gralm , while others are not widely
known. Twenty "stories" of differing styles and forms are offered. Technically ,some are not "short stories" but are poems like the intensely moving "In Memoriam: Carolyn Johnson" by Chris Llewelyn . In this memorial from one
secretary to another secretary who has died, Llewelyn's integration of soundand meaning makes for a powerful, effective piece best read aloud . ''Poem''
becomes "language" rather than "writing form."
Styles of writing range widely from realistic literal prose narratives (whichmost of the stories are) to symbolic fantasy portrayals (Nancy Green's "Mirrors
and Masks") to fables (''Woman Fables, 1-12" by Dell Fitzgerald-Richards.)
The first time I read them, the fables and fantasies were difficult to relate toas "true to life adventures" and seemed to stand apart from the general fabricof the collection . Yet many of us will readily recognize as our own the painand elation Era feels in ''Mirrors and Masks" as she peels off one by one all
the stereotypical masks of social conformity and expectation hiding her true
woman self beneath. And what lesbian will not identify with the female rabbit
in the fable "The Rabbit Who Wouldn't" who refuses to submit to compulsory motherhood and heterosexuality. Through the use of animal characters,
the traditional people's fable, and symbolic fantasy, the authors are able tosimply and clearly reveal and teach us about our lives and struggles as women .
A few stories aren't as effective as others, possibly due to lack of development. Often these stories have potential in terms of characters and plot but
aren't developed enough (Ruth Babcock's "Three Bears") , or not enough isrevealed about the changes or growth characters are going through (Linnea A.
Due's "The Light.") And we are left not quite satisfied.
Most stories dramatize women or woman children struggling with a certain
set of obstacles or experiences : childhood sexual abuse, unequal and dependent relationships with men , complex, painful relationships with women, withfamily , defining one's identity , surviving "the system," i.e., courts, prison s.
65

unjust economic system, welfare system and oppressive work situations, coming to terms with death and dying-experiences which many of us are confronted with during our life times. Some stories express the anger and rage
we feel when some of us in fact don't survive. What is inspiring and strengthening is how women alone and together are able to challenge, overcome , andlearn from those situations which could potentially harm, destroy, or keepthem from self-actualization and self-respect, even when the cards are stacked
against them. Sadly too, as young Frances learns in "The Shoes," survival
sometimes comes at great costs-the suppression, and denial of one's own
needs, desires, and emotions.
Like the mockingbirds in Dell Fitzgerald-Richard's fable who confront theirtraditional enemy the cats, we dare to confront and conquer the enemy, theoppression , the fear, and then in our own voices to name it and to reveal it
to each other thereby demystifying its power over us so that we and the women after us might better learn to survive it. ''Whatever their reasons, they(the mockingbirds) feathered their nests with the soft warm (cat) fur while
their young grew stronger each day and even less afraid than they."-JR Roberts

66

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PRlnTE.Rf

PUBLlfl-lE.Rf

Frances Doughty Talks to Charlotte Bunch
about Women's Publishing

F: Will you talk about why you think reading and writing-which somethink are becoming obsolete arts these days- may be more important than television , speeches, tours , and other kinds of media?
C: My interest in print per se grows out of my sense that the basic tools of
thinking , for being able to think imaginatively , for being able to think foryourself, grow out of people being able to read and write. I think it's not
surprising that most revolutionary movements have always seen literacy as oneof the tools of revolution because the fust process of literacy enables people ,in this case women, to understand what our situation is ; it also gives us words
for our experience and helps us to figure out what we want to do and how
things could be different.
The stories that we all grew up with are still very true - the stories of women
who grew up in environments where reading was their only access to any
other reality than the one they lived in . And their ability to imagine that
their life could be different was based on what they could get to read. Now
occasionally you can get 15 minutes on TV. But if you get 15 minutes on
TV, it goes on when they want it on , and there's no way that an ordinary
woman can have that for herself to repeat. It's not permanent , and it's notunder the woman's control. One thing that's nice about the printed medium
is that once we get out our books and our magazines, the women who havethem can do whatever they want with them . We have control in producing
books and magazines that we don't have in other mediums. And we also havecontrol in using them that the other mediums don't lend themselves to as well .
There's very little equipment , very little expense involved in the printed wordcompared to other media, so it's accessible to a wider range of women fromdifferent backgrounds. I think the other media lend themselves to controlling
people much more completely , and that our whole sense of existence is tied
up with the ability of people to think differently than what the mass culture71

tells them. The ability to create your own reality, to create new space-print
is very important to that. It's also important to theory, which requires theprocess of thinking through and putting out ideas. You can do films, you cando art that's based on that same set of ideas and communicate them in adifferent fashion, but I still think that we need the ABC process of reading
and writing as the basis for taking other mediums and developing them further .
F: So you would say that print is our primary vehicle for the developmentof an educated feminist movement, educated in the sense of being able toreach conclusions for oneself, being able to digest different messages, interpretthem, and see what they lead to, in both action and theory?
C: I think that other vehicles may be primary to first reaching someone
with an idea . But print is still the primary vehicle for the development ofthat and expansion of it.
F: For those of us who weren't directly involved in it , the Women in
Print Conference has a legendary aura about it as a place where many important things happened, but I'm not sure what they are.
C: For background , the Women in Print Conference was held in Omaha,
Nebraska, at a Campfire Girls' campsite in August of 1976 . It was the visionof June Arnold that women involved in publishing, including presses , journals,
newspapers, bookstores, and distributors-all aspects of women in print- shouldcome together from around the country and discuss what we had learned andhow we could cooperate better. She took the initiative and was the driving
force to get the rest of us to help organize and make it happen . It was a reallandmark-slightly over 100 women came from around the country. We spenta week together with the grasshoppers and the duststorms. You can't say there
is anyone result because the emphasis of the conference was on what is now
called networking with each other and developing resources for cooperating
more. A lot of the people who were there are no longer working in print andsome of the groups no longer exist, which in itself isn't an important statement. But one of the things the conference did was to end the isolation a lotof people felt in their own particular work , and it enabled us to see how
mammoth the women-in -print moveme,nt was . It was a magnificant feeling you
had-that early women's liberation sense of everybody finding each other,finding the people who had the same problems and were working on the same
issues you were. Most of the people who came were working on projects that,on the average, had four to six people in them. Most of the projects survived
by a very small number of people sticking together over a long time to work
very long hours in underpaid conditions to create whatever part of the process
they were doing in print. You become so involved in the survival of the
project you're doing that without special effort you can also begin to feel it's
you agai,nst the world and to lose track of the fact that you 're a part of alarger movement and that the problems you face are not yours alone and are
not because you're failing to do it right. It's funny that in 1976, after years
with women's liberation ideology in which we learned that the society oppressed
us, in which we learned that society was a capitalist patriarchy, that big business and multinational corporations control , that small businesses were, infact, on the way out , we nonetheless all still felt that if we just worked harder ,if we just did it better , our projects would survive. Some of that mythology
broke down at the Women in Print Conference because when we sat down and72

talked about some of the problems in getting out a journal- things like the factthat no matter what price you set your journal at , even though you kept thinking it cost too much, you still couldn't make it financially - we learned that no
publication survived solely on selling its product-that they're all either subsi- .
dized by major corporations or they're subsidized by universities or they're
publications of organizations whose membership subsidizes them. We had a
lot to learn about publishing in America.
F: Did you find that discovery liberating, energizing, depressing? What effect did it have on you?
C: It liberated us from individual guilt. I don 't know whether it was energizing . It was energizing to look for other solutions. In another way it was
like reality crashing in on you. It was not going to get better just by working
hard for a couple of more years. The mythical break-even point where thisparticular bad period would be over was never going to come . I think it meantthat each of us had to make more realistic decisions about what we were goingto do . Some of the realistic decisions were for some publications and groups toto close and to stop trying. Others began to develop other structures to try tosurvive . Or to accept , as a couple of the journals and newspapers have, theless standardized version of reality as an OK way to be : that if you didn 't
come out four times a year , but you still produced interesting issues that werevaluable , it was OK--that we didn 't have to meet the standards of the main
culture's publishing world to still be a valuable enterprise.
A turning point for me was that I faced the limitation of the small press
world much more harshly than I had been willing to before that. I had torealize that we were not going to become the press instead of the alternatepress. Some of the exciting , idealistic theory we had put forward was simply
not true. If I was going to continue to work in that press, I would have towork there because it was still what I wanted to do and not with the illusionthat it would reach the masses of people or become the popular culture. If
I wanted to reach the popular culture in that way, I would have to be more
willing than I had been up until that time to deal with some of the mainstream presses and publications, although not necessarily to the exclusion of
women's presses, but in addition to that. I think that was a clear choicethat I began to see--I think other people did too--from that experience.
F: So when you're talking about popular culture, you're talking about
mainstream American popular culture. I've been wondering whether within
the lesbian feminist world we 're also developing some kind of split between
popular lesbian feminist culture and a somewhat less widely spread culture ofpeople who are more interested in theory than in, say , music. Did you feel
any of that kind of split when you were working with Quest?
C: Defmitely. Quest started at the same time that Olivia Records started ,for example. We were friends . We both started in Washington . A few of us
were ex-Furies members. It was very interesting to me to observe the difference in the development of those two projects which came out of relatively
similar politics and yet took two very different media to develop . It was
sometimes hard to watch Olivia Records--which I liked and I was glad to see
succeed--take off in the popular culture of the lesbian movement in the waythat theory did not. Yes , there are those divisions . I think that we at Quest

73

have had to keep reaffirming that the ideas you work on in a small place do
begin to spread out in other ways and in other forms . That was one division .
The other division is with the mainstream culture. For me, joining the mainstream is to write in Ms Magazine , yet Ms Magazine is still not the mainstream.
I made a decision that I would try to write for more of the mainstream
women 's movement , for Ms Magazine and for NOW Times, which reaches
100,000 NOW members, I would try to take what we were developing in thewomen -in-print subculture into at least the broader sphere of the organizedestablished women's groups. The next step which I haven't taken personallybut I would consider is how to take that into the popular culture beyond
those places . Certainly Kathy Barry's article in Redbook which took some of
the themes she had developed in Chrysalis a few years before was a good
example of that. I think we need more of that because otherwise what we
end up having is a set of professional feminist writers who haven't had theexperience of the women's press movement. If no one from the feminist
press ever does that , then the division will become greater and greater.
F: How have you seen the women's presses go on since the women in
print conference?
C: I don 't think any of us that week realized the effect that being there
was going to have on us. I didn 't ~ealize the implications for the questions
I was concerned with. At the end of the Women in Print Conference we wereon a high. But the seeds had been sown for a more realistic assessment.
that came after that. For example, Women In Distribution (WIND) was a
distribution network that had been started by a couple of women. They
found themselves a year and a half after the Women In Print conference
further in debt than they had been when they started. They did a very carefulfmancial analysis whereby they were able to project that in the next year or
two they would not be able to break even. Furthermore , if they went out ofexistence at that moment, they would owe everybody a certain amount ofmoney , but if they kept on they would owe more money , and therefore would
have taken more money away from women 's presses and that they couldn't dothat. There were two central issues. One was that they had not chosen to
involve more people in the project, so they didn't really have a new group
to take over. The other was that fmancially they couldn't see any way outany way that they could responsibly go on existing, that wouldn't take somuch energy and money from so many women . They went out of existence .
The other real thing that a lot of us did alter Women In Print was to recognize that we couldn 't go on at the same standards we had wanted. We began
to scale down our operations in terms of the quality of paper , in terms of theamount of money we spent on production , such as one-<olor or .no-color covers
instead of three-color covers , or newsprint instead of nicer paper. All of whichwere goals a lot of us had set out with : to create products that looked the way
the society expected them to look.
I think the real question that has never been answered is do feminists consider the existence of their own presses and publications important enough to
subsidize them? Because unless the women's movement does subsidize those ,74most of them will not go on existing. Most of them are right now subsidized
by a small group of people giving volunteer labor and money. Most of thepresses survive on the money that comes from people working outside jobs . . A
lot of presses now do pay a small token salary, but to live off those salaries
you usually have to have had some savings or have a lover or friends who arewilling to help you get by .
So there's a number of different ways we're indirectly subsipizing thepresses and the publications. But we have to decide if they're importantenough to become more systematic about subsidies so it isn't simply the ones
with the best hustling ability or the best connections or the most endurance
who can do it--which is what determines it now in most cases.
F: Not only are women making 57 cents to the men's dollar these days , butmany women have children to support. When you're talking about trying to
subsidize feminist presses you're also talking about a much smaller pool for themoney to come from than there is in the mainstream society, which is one ofthose things that's both liberating and depressing at the same time . I think
what I'm hearing is not so much that the vision failed, but that the realities
got it.
C: You're put it in a nutshell. I don't think the vision failed at all . The
heart of the vision was that in order to build a movement and bring change wehave to have some kind of vehicle for our own words, our own expression, ourown graphics, our art, our own institutions. The vision of both producing ourown institutions and particularly the importance of producing them in the areaof publishing as a tool for communication as well as for developing ideas--all ofthat vision has not failed . The vision that we would be able to do it better if
we controlled it ourselves is still true. Certainly the brief experiences I've hadin publishing situations that are not primarily controlled by feminists have led
me to believe that we were absolutely right about the kind of indirect censorship, the slight distortion of your ideas that goes on , and that that's still true.
The part of the vision that failed was the part of the vision that had to do withreality. It had to do with, what does it take to make that vision possible? AtOmaha, in an indirect way, we faced the fact that our vision that we would become the main culture was probably not realistic.
F: I think one thing it does is let us see ourselves, instead of going back tothat total invisibility from which we emerged with such a struggle. Print inparticular is important for that sense that there is a community out there beyond individual problems.
C: Right, for example you walk into any library and see the amount offeminist work that is available. It's a real high. I walk into your study andeven though I know these books exist, just seeing them , seeing the magazines
piled up, it still can give me a lift. And that's even more important in moreisolated places than Brooklyn, NY. I've now seen it on an international 'scale.
I've worked with women who're putting out a radical feminist magazine in .
India. One of the women from that magazine came to NY a few weeks ago.
I wanted to give her everything I could. I wanted to sen!i her back withbrief cases full because every single publication, every single book she saw gave
her such a thrill . And there is that visible product sense of your reality thatis even more important when times are bad and even more important to women75

who are very isolated. In my traveling the dog-eared copies I've seen of thethings we sometimes take for granted have been a good reminder, not to speakof Barbara Grier's library which can inspire all of us to realize that we continued to exist through the 30's, 40's, 50's and we didn't even know it. The
history of our existence ... The Lesbian Herstory Archives--the vision does become slightly different in the 80's, and it has to be more of the vision ofwhat it means to survive with economic realities.
We aiso have to recycle our-energy. We have to recognize much more than
we did in the 70s the necessary process of what I call moving in and out.
Each of us has to have that both individually and as a movement.
For example, I see myself moving out into a popular culture place. I felt
isolated; I felt at a certain point that the subculture was stifling me in what I
needed to know about making change. I had to get out there and interact
more with women who were not committed feminists, but who were at least
friendly. I had to get out in the world and see what we were up against in adifferent way and try my ideas out in more hostile environments. That wasn't
just my missionary impulse to go out and convert them , which is also always
at work, but it was because my own work was suffering from lack of that
exposure. I think that it's time, and I think we need to allow each feminist
more space for her own rhythm, more space to say, "This is the period where
I am consolidating my ideas within the subculture , and this is the period when
I'm trying them out in the popular culture, whether that's in writing, or inprojects, or in activism in all different forms.
F: Something I've been wishing we could get written for people to think
about is a developmental psychology of being in the movement because I
think we really need it. I think we need an overt recognition of things we
all know, that people's chronological age or even the period of the movement
at which you enter determine a lot of things, but also some things seem to be
determined by a natural life rhythm that takes place once you're in the movement. There's a burst of energy and a lot of commitment, then a pulling back.
I think that's the place where a lot of people drop out. I think if we recognized that that was an ongoing life process and made space for people to dothat instead of saying, "Oh forget her, she's not working this year," I think
we'd have a much wider based movement and a lot longer life .
c: I think that also affects projects, that there's a cycle for projects as well.
There are new presses , Persephone Press, for example, that have come up andare taking the role that say Diana or Daughters Press had five years ago, of
being the new press willing to experiment, to hold the vision up. Perhaps
they'll do it more realistically, but even if they're not more realis.tic, even if
they simply do it for a while , I'm beginning to see that a particular projector group or person or even country may carry the forward edge of feminism
at a gIven moment, while the rest of us may be doing something that keeps
it alive.
F: Do you have any last words for the future or the past or our current
readers .
C: I think my last words for the future are to draw from the past-which
is giving me a lot more sustenance lately. When I think about some of the76

hard times that we seem to be in for in the 80s, I'm always sustained byremembering not only our heroines of the past , the Gertrude Steins and the
Eleanor Roosevelts that we've dug up, but perhaps even more by remembering
the Daughters of Bilitis, starting their organizations in the 50s during the.
McCarthy era and particularly--when we're talking about print-starting the
publication The Ladder which existed from 1956 to 1972-years during whichvery little existed for lesbians to read, but they kept that alive for all of us.
They could go out of existence in 1972 because of the present wave of
feminism and lesbian writing , but without their existence I don't know that
we would have had the present wave of lesbian writing. My final words are
to remember that history and our own work ebb and flow , but that keeping
alive the core of what we are about through those hard times has been done
by women in our past and they can serve as guideposts for us in facing thefuture .
F: Sometimes I think of us as a river. And sometimes we're flowing
underground and sometimes we're getting out there in public.

- transcribed and edited by the Boston staff

IPlnITEAI, InK
an interview with Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel
by Irena Klepfisz

IRENA : I know that your histories as writers and your involvement in thelesbian/feminist literary movement are quite different. I wonder if each ofyou would give a brief biography up to the point you decided to establish
Spinsters, Ink .
MA UREEN: I started writing when I was already 26 . I was living in New
York and working as a physical therapist. Initially I took some courses at
the New School. Then I got involved in a women's writing workshop--which
was also a CR group . That was around '69 or '70. I'd say it took at least
3 or 4 years before I built up to the idea of writing a novel--which is when I
began Give Me Your Good Ear. I wrote it over a long, extended period
because I had to earn a living and I couldn't write full time.
JUDITH: All my life I knew I wanted to write , but somehow it wasdifficult for me to get myself to write. I became an academic instead. But
in graduate school [1966] I took a poetry writing course and actually mademyself try to write. Later, as I became a feminist during the early seventies
my journals became important to me . I wrote a lot about relationships , butmore about how I wanted to write but couldn't. Other things seemed toalways take my time away--real things--my dissertation , classes to prepare77and teach , at one point a child to care for . But even when I had time , I'd
sit at my desk and stare . [t was incredibly frustrating and I didn't understand it.
Finally , it was the first of January , I opened my journal to a blank page
and wrote one word : lesbian. Then I stared. 1 felt like: oh, shit , now it's
down and I can't take it back. I knew something would have to change.
I was living with a man and raising his child--and all I could see was thatword "lesbian ." That was the year I began to do my own creative work
again . [t was the year I met Maureen .
M: Judith was very encouraging about my writing and my novel. And
about getting it published. We were frequently , at that time , in touch withpeople who were beginning to do their own publishing-usually poetry. But
I thought it was easier to publish poetry than fiction because fiction musthave justified margins and is more pages-J: --and you were wrong!
M: Yes, fiction is much easier to market and distribute . But I didn 't
know that. So I spent a lot of time and energy trying to get the novel
published by feminist and commercial presses. But there were always
people who would ask , Why don 't you do it yourself? [ kept replying that I
didn 't have the energy. I had to earn a living--and besides [ wanted to be awriter, not a publisher . But it fmally just sunk in. I began to feel--after enoughrejections and enough passivity--that self-publishing was the only direction to
go in .
J : We talked to Catherine and Harriet of SW , who were very supportiveand very helpful. And it was then we thought of our name , Spinsters , Ink. And
after you 've got a name-I: You 've got a place in the world . How did you begin setting up?
J: I have to admit I was reluctant at first. I think I was terrified of sending out letters asking people for donations.
M : We were broke-J: We really didn 't have a choice. If we were going to publish the novel ,we had to do it. We 'd heard about Womanfriends asking for loans . We decided if they could get loans, we could get donations for seed money. We
did, and we received an incredibly fine response from feminists.
I: And since then have you drawn any income from what you've published?
M: No , in fact we've put money in every month--$1500 in the last six
months. You go to the post office and take $1.50 out of your wallet and-J: --and pay for the gasoline to get to the post office-M: We end up accounting for that in our books. But we don't come backhome and take $1.50 out of SI.
I: I understand that kind of operation real well. It makes a guessing gameout of any attempt to defme terms like :'breaking even" or " profit."
J: How do you defme "breaking even" when you're not being paid, or"profit" when no one even expects to get paid?
I: And yet it has all the trappings of "business ." We go out and get business papers; we file tax returns, etc.
M : A lot of people in general just don't understand why you'd work fornothing , to say nothing of putting in your own money .

78

J: Of course, in an enterprise like this , we're not the only ones working
for nothing. We had friends and women we didn't even know come and give
us information and help.
I: How do you feel about your distribution?
J: It was a real challenge for me. 1 think we've done really well with that-we have to reprint double of both our books within the year.
I: Who's carrying the books?
M: Primarily feminist , women's bookstores. We've tried a list of literary
bookstores and we 've gotten very low return on that, maybe two orders andtwo inquiries. On the other hand , we found that when we took the books
directly to stores, we had no trouble placing them. That 's of course the realvalue of a distributor--we simply can't go shlepping around the country , saying, Look, here's our product.
I: One of the things I find disturbing is that women's studies departments
generally don't emphasize feminist presses. The focus is primarily on material
that is coming out of the commercial presses. There doesn't seem to be a
consciousness about either supporting or even disseminating information andmaterials that are available only through feminist presses.
M: I think that many women teaching in women's studies programs are
not educated about the necessities and hardships of the feminist presses. They
don't know the economics and the politics .
/: What exactly don't they know?
M: Well - the politiCS of publishing. There are many women who still believe that if you write a good book, even though it's written from a woman's
point of view - if it's really a good book- then it'll get published .
I: I think it's amazing that despite the women's movement so many people
still believe the myth that a talented writer is bound to be published-eventually-in the big time .
M : It's always being reinforced even as we try to counter it. For example,
someone was quoted in Chrysalis as saying now that women are publishing
their books through commercial presses they're available in regular bookstores.
That doesn't in any way research the question of what kinds of women's perspectives are coming out of those books, and consequently it only goes toreinforce the notion : if it 's a good book , then it'll be available not only throughcommercial presses but in regular bookstores . Other stuff is obviously notdeserving.
I : When I taught wl?men's studies this summer- I purposely put togethera reading list which was predOminantly made up of feminist or small press
books. lnterestingly- I found that only 3 out of 18 students had ever heardof-been in - a woman's bookstore. This is New York City- where there arethree women's bookstores!
M : Reaching women - the distribution- is really difficult . What are we goingto do in terms of reaching women who don't even know that women's bookstores exist? Or who live in a place where there is no bookstore to go towho have to travel to major cities to reach one? It's frustrating. That's why
I wish women 's studies courses showed more of a commitment to ·,,,,omen'spresses in general . That's one way of spreading the word - and educatmg at
the same time .

79

I : You mentioned earlier how you'd hoped to be able to publish otherpeople's work.
J: Yes. We have reached °that point. We're not going to be self-publishers
anymore.
I: I think that's a really interesting switch in process, and I know thatwhen I started working on Conditions, I had a very different feeling of having
to make public decisions and judgments about other people's works.
J: That doesn't scare me.
I: I don't necessarily mean scary But that it's different.
J: It is different. But we made judgments about our own work- what wewould use - that kind of thing- and was our own work ready for publication.
I think what concerns me more is putting energy and time into work that's
not my own or Maureen's. There is a certain kind of labor and money that's
being spent that is difficult to classify . I mean, where do you begin to draw
guidelines for what you've put in? How can you measure it in terms of money? How do you begin thinking about doing this for someone else? What do
you charge for it? We're of course very glad to see some other women's work
being published-now that we have some of the resources to do that-but M: What we 're experiencing now is a transition period - recognizing that
we're going to be publishing someone else's work and doing all that extra
work for them-and yet keeping in mind that it 's also for us and for our company. But we need to get used to that idea.
I: It sounds as if up to now you've identified more with the books themselves, rather than with Spinsters , Ink.
M: Yes, I think that's true. Spinsters , Ink has been Give Me Your Good
Ear and Reconstituting the Worldo Now it's going to be something else. I
think we're both excited and a little bit frightened by that processo
There is another thing I feel very strongly about. I don't want to be in aposition where suddenly people begin to look at us and say : oh, you could
publish my book. As a writer I went around for years thinking: oh, good, there's
another feminist press-they're going to be the ones to publish my book. Thatdidn't happen. I only now understand what feminist publishers meant when
they wrote a rejection letter and said our resources are extremely limited.
That's a really important point for all women writers to understand. I know
we're going to get more than one good work of fiction. Which of course
doesn't mean that everything we turn down is no good or unpublishable.
I: You're planning to publish two more works: fiction and a monographtype Can you tell me anymore about that?
J: Well, the fiction will be a novel. The monograph-we'd like to be eitherof women's studies importance or of feminist political importance. We figure
we've already put in a certain amount of time and energy into establishing
an audience. We feel tb-at as long as we've been °able to keep contact with
our market - we know it's there for us. We know the kind of reputation we've
begun to establish. We would just like to be able to become more solid as acompany by repeating the kinds of works we've already done - before we takeany additional risks in terms of publishing something different.
00PER!EPHOnE PAE!!
an interview by CYNTHIA RICH

The women of Persephone Press are Gloria Greenfield, Pat McGloin,
and Deborah Snow. The address of the press is P.O. Box 7222, Watertown, Mass. 02172.
Cynthia: In four short years , and with a staff of three women , Persephone
Press is becoming more and more visible as a publishing house that combines
integrity, risk-taking, and also notable success in making lesbian-feminist work
widely available. Will you tell us a little·about the very beginnings of Persephone?
Gloria: Well , the first book that we published was A Feminist Tarot, andmore than our choosing to publish it , it was given to us as a catalyst for the development of Persephone Press .
Pat: In April of 1976 , as Pomegranate Productions, we produced the fustNational Women 's Spirituality Conference in Boston, at which Sally Gearhart
and Susan Rennie were speakers . We had limited fmancial resources , and in orderto defray the cost of the conference they gave us their manuscript to publish
and we did - 300 copies.
P: It sold out at the conference - in one day-and got an enormous reception. That's how we were born.
C: You didn 't see yourself as a press at that time?
G: We had intended to become a publishing houseThe founders of Persephone were involved in Women's Studies. We werevery aware of the repression of feminist thought through censorship , and in
our research we had come across a lot of writings from the nineteenth century
that were more radical than the writings we have today . One of our dreams
or goals was to reissue these nine teenth century writings , and we had decided
that at some point we would devote the time to learning how to do that.
When A Feminist Tarot was handed to us, we realized that it was no longer
some day we were going to take the time to learn , that we were actually justgoing to jump in and do it.
C: Who was "we" afthat point?
G: At that point it was Pat McGloin , Mariarme Rubenstein , Carol Cain ,and myself. By June , Carol Cain had left. We reissued a second edition of A
Feminist Tarot in the summer of 1976 . We had 1000 copies printed , and theysold in approximately six months . By then we had decided to publish our
second book, The Fourteenth Witch, and that 's when Deborah became involved in Persephone . The book contains her photographs and poetry by
Shelley Blue . Deborah came out from California to work on the book, andwithin a month we asked her to join us. We had been living in Monticello ,New York, and we moved back to Watertown , and with that move the development of Persephone sped up. We released tlle first. printed edition of A
Feminist Tarot, 5000 copies , which again sold out rapidly .
81And then we published The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women by
Sally Gearhart. After the release of that book, Marianne left Persephone. We
released The Wanderground in February of 1979. It sold out in eight months,
and in November we released the second edition of 15,000 copies.
D: We started out with desire, dedication, and energy, but not a real goodunderstanding of how publishing works. I mean, starting with pamphlets-300
and then 1000-and 1000 seemed big, and then the next edition of the Tarot
was 5000 and that seemed huge, you know. And the fmances of that seemedhuge, and the work to get that out seemed a lot. Then we did The Wanderground, and by that time we were doing perfect-bound glossy covers. It's
been a continual learning process.
C: How did you fmance?
G: The seed money to start Persephone came from our personal salaries.
We worked other jobs and put our salaries into Persephone, and our families ,who come from lower-class backgrounds, gave us money. They gave us $1000
here and there, and it was their support that kept us going. We were surviving
on an unbelievable cash flow. There was no cash flow.
At that time we didn't understand budgets, all we understood was that weneeded x amount of money to pay for postage. We didn't even realize that itwas not our responsibility to pay for the postage! Persephone for two years
was a project that we paid for by housecleaning, by typing , by teaching, andby doing whatever we could to raise money . As we developed and became
more skilled in business , we realized that there were other options, that feminist credit unions could loan us money, and we took on loans under personal
liability . Along the way there were about five or six women. who made loans
to us at no interest, and that was a help. At that time a loan of $250 was a
lot of money.
D: A loan of $25 wasn't bad.
P: Mind you, we had hardly any food, we weren't even eating much. And
we were getting sick.
D : But we had to get the book out.
G: I believe that's why Persephone is now becoming successful. The fustthree years of a business are the most crucial, and you either make it or notduring those fust three years, and those three years we did whatever weneeded to do to raise Persephone. And we raised her. Now we're at the point
we have to be concerned about a lot of money . Now 5000 copies of a book
isn't a huge enterprise.
P: It's just an automatic first printing.
G: And. $250 isn't a lot of money to us any more. We appreciate $250,
but we know it isn't going to get us to the post office. And we Cl\l1 no longer
function as a volunteer project. We are working more than full time- we work
up to sixteen hours a day , sometimes more than that.
P: I think that a real turning point lor Persephone was September, when
we decided that we would, on a trial basis , salary ourselves and work fulltime. We tried it for a month, and we were successful. We have continued tothis point to be salaried, and the increase in productivity has been enormous.
The whole focus has changed. Now we can visualize projects, things that need
to be done , outreaches that we can do, and get them done , it's not an impossibility. Our vision has expanded greatly, and I think that our growth is expanding also .

c: What are the ways you feel your vision has expanded?
G: When The Wanderground came out, it changed us a lot because we had
published a very hot book. The reviews were wonderful-there were somegood criticisms, but it was a book that the lesbian and feminist communities
wanted and needed. It is one of the most important books that came out inthe 70s. We knew we had a responsibility to it, and it was a book that wewere very proud of publishing. It supported our commitment to lesbian publishing.
D: I think it focused us more on the kinds of things we wanted to publish.
We want to continue to strive toward being innovative, never stagnating, andpublishing books that take our experiences, our realities, and our fantasies,
and give us new thoughts about them.
e: Are you looking particularly for manuscripts that you think the estab·lishment press, the boys, wouldn't take?
G: No . We look for books that provoke women into thinking. We don'tsay, ''We won't publish that because they'd do it," but, ''We want to publishthat because it's important and because by publishing it, we will help thatwork affect women's lives; we will participate in making that work have an
impact." I feel the work we are producing is revolutionary, and that the way
we are going about creating a lesbian business is revolutionary . Every step wetake requires a lot of consideration of ethics and redefining financial concepts .
e: I know that you have a strong commitment , stated in your contract ,that you won't sell rights to the male publishing houses.
G: That's a major issue that I feel every woman in the lesbian and feminist
communities has to deal with-whether we use each other as stepping stones
or whether we see each other as the real thing. And we of course strongly
believe that we are reality ; we are what's happening; and we do not want oursisters to perceive us as an elementary experience before the real thing. Unfortunately, many lesbian and feminist writers have not dealt with those issues.
They have not considered what it means to publish with men , what it means
to hand over their creativity to patriarchal zoo-keepers or tamers.
D: We've made a decision not to do that. Where would we be? What would
we become? And where are the lesbian writers who have been sold that way?
G: The fact is that we have revolutionary intentions . It 's true that wewould not have to worry about whether we could go shoppin/i for food next
week if we sold The Wanderground or the Tarot to any patriarchal press. We
could defmitely sell it; but if we sold it , we would be selling ourselves. Our
intention is to build an autonomous lesbian network in publishing. So what
we're saying to our authors or editors is : this is who we are , right out front,
this is what you're dealing with . And when we all work together , the authors
are making a very important political commitment that goes beyond "fameand fortune."
C: Patriarchal fame and fortune.
D: Yeah, which is patriarchal credibility. In reality , they probably have as
good a chance for fortune with us as they do with any other publishing house.
C: Yes . I know that a lot of women assume that if they 're just publishedby Beacon Press or Viking , if they can just get that manuscript between establishment covers, they will have good distribution , good publicity , and at
83
least a little money to live on. But so often that's not the case .

What, in fact, are the kinds of assurances that you can give prospective
authors?
G: Ninety percent of all books published, whether by small or major houses,
do not seII 5000 copies, and I think it's important to note that three out offour of Persephone's books have sold more than 5000 copies in record time .
Persephone has a commitment when we buy a book to get it out there, tomake women aware, to make everyone aware that the book exists. And thebooks have sold, not because of some kind of sleazy rapport with chain bookstores, but because we have successfully outreached to readers, we have madethem understand that these books are important, these books will affect theirlives in a good way.
A lot of writers say to us, "But you can't give me a $5000 advance." Well ,the truth is that if we had given the author a $5000 advance and 10 percentof the retail price, she would have gotten $7500 for that edition of her book.
In publishing with us, she got no advance , but 50 percent of the royalties.
She got $16,000 from that edition. What we're asking writers to do is to takethe risk with us.
C: You've obviously been successful in promoting the work of your authors.
But I see your promotional events as more than just that. I think of Sally
Gearhart engaging a room of 250 women in dialogue when she came to promote The Wanderground. Or the 500 women who came to participate in Julia
Stanley and Susan Wolfe's celebration of The Coming Out Stories. These areopportunities for lesbians to come together and experience the culture that
we're building together.
G: Yes. Surely the goal is not that every woman could read a lesbian bookor share coming out experiences , but that those experiences, those readings
and sharing experiences, will help strengthen lesbian communities to rise up
and to have a major impact on society by changing it, by taking control.
C: Sinister Wisdom's last issue on writing and publishing came out four
years ago . Since then several of the most promising lesbian feminist presses
have stopped publishing. Do you have any sense of why they failed , or what
you have that is different to make you succeed?
G: Because we are not one of the first lesbian publishing houses, we havethe privilege of studying what happened with previous lesbian publishinghouses. And seeing the mistakes, we can avoid them, we can analyze themand go beyond them.
D: And some of those publishing houses have shared information.
G: Diana Press was very supportive to our process throughout their difficult times. And we can see the mistakes that they made, and see what
hapt
pened to .them because of being overworked, because of the resentment thatnaturally occurs when you're overworked and you don't feel like you're getting the kind of support that you need flom the community, the breakdowns
in communication that occur. That acts as a reminder to us to keep clear andnot to get involved in those traps. We're also able to look at other publishinghouses that are failing or that have failed, and to see at what point they soldout their initial principle and then lost· that drive , that spirit that was involvedin lesbian publishing.
D: Another thing- we really are out front about who we are . We say we 'relesbian publishers.

G: We're a lesbian feminIst publishing house, and to pretend that we aren't
would require a lot of energy.
P: I'd like to talk about what public relations means to us because there's
an idea in a lot of people's minds that you create an image of yourself thatis other than who you are. We are who we are, and we become clearer every
day about what Persephone Press is . We transmit that information clearly towomen, and we get back energy. It has nothing to do with creating false images.
C: What about the economic questions of survival-the rising costs of laborand silver and paper?
G: I think that radical businesses are not feeling the effect as much as
mainstream businesses are. Lesbians are not used to having so many privileges.
It's always been a survival struggle for us. Outfront lesbian business haven't
ever been able to go to a bank and say, "I'm an out front lesbian business,give me a loan ." We have always depended on alternative means to get capital.
And while it is true that many of our production costs are going up, dramatically , I feel that we will be able to survive because of the political commitment and the political support that we have from the women we are working
for. Women are not going to decide not to think any longer, not to share ideas
any longer, because of the recession we're· going into. Women are going towant to read even more.
C: I think so too. How does Persephone plan to meet that need?
P: Gloria mentioned that before Persephone started , one of our goals wasto reissue some nineteenth century feminist work that is very radical. We're
excited now about releasing Woman, Church and State by Matilda Joslyn Gage,
which is the original expose of male collaboration against the female sex. It'sa work that's comparable to The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis .
G: Another book we plan to release within the forthcoming year is an anthology , edited by Evelyn Torton Beck , on Jewish lesbiaps and the significanceof the interaction between lesbianism and Judaism. We're hoping to publishwe're still waiting to hear from the editors- an anthology of Third World
lesbians. In the fall we're releasing Deborah Snow's collection of photographsof lesbian sensuality.
D: And we will be releasing a book dealing with death from a lesbian perspective. The writer deals with the death of family-a death caused by cancerand also separation of family, leaving those people even as they're dying tomaintain her lesbian integrity. So it really is a book on death and life andcoming out and confronting the basic fears.
G: We're also looking forward to publishing a book on lesbian mothers by
Susan Wolfe.
D: And also a book on lesbian relationships that will deal with the often
unspoken realities of women lOving women .
G: In accepting these books, it's not a question of will this book sell?
But will it be important , will it have an impact on our community? If it's
thought-provoking, if it's nonoppressive, if it breaks through barriers, filling
gaps that we have-that's the kind of book that Persephone wants to publish.
That's what we're about, we're about helping to foster provocative and innovative 'writings and thought with a lesbian sensibility . With an intention ofrecrea ting the world.
85

TimELY BOOK!

an interview by LEE KINARD

Jo Anne Prather and Yvonne MacManus, founders of Timely Books, haveboth previously worked as editors and between them have approximately 40
years experience in book and magazine publishing. In April 1978 they published reprints of Paula Christian's The Edge of Twilight and This Side ofLove, followed in October by Patte Wheat's By Sanction of the Victim, abook on child abuse. Th.e third in a projected collection of six Paula Christiannovels, Love Is Where You Find It, came out in August 1979. The followinginterview about Timely Books was with Celeste Charles, publicist for the company.
Why did you begin by reprinting old novels rather than publishing original
material?
We felt that the feminist publishers were covering the field effectively inareas of nonfiction , poetry, and contemporary fiction . We noted that very
little was available about what it used to be like for lesbians in the "bad 01'
days ," and we felt that many younger lesbians were deeply interested in learning about lesbian life in the 1950s and 60s. Many older readers remember andidentify with Paula's portrayal of that period. Our younger readers see a lesbian
heritage emerging from her novels , although some balk at the lack of specificsex scenes, at the wearing of bras, and at the word girl, and so forth.
Do you try to do business with lesbian/feminists whenever possible?
Definitely! We'd love to and have made efforts to , but it simply hasn't
worked out thus far. Unfortunately, most lesbian/feminist printers are notequipped to handle the type of production we want. When they can, the covers
have to be farmed out , or the binding, or some other aspect of production.
This forces them to charge prices that are astronomical in comparison to thebi& printing companies, and we just can 't afford the difference.
Has distribution been a problem?
Yes, somewhat. The usual distributors aren't interested in handling ourbooks because we're small and can't promise x-number of books per year. We
were about to sign with WIND when they folded-much to our regret.
After you started Timely, were there any surprises?
Yes! We had a printer in Michigan who did the fust two of Paula's books.
Both books stated in the front and backmatter that they are novels of lesbian
love and romance. The printer accepted the job, and it was delivered to us .
Then, when we sent in the third title for a printing estimate, the company
declined to bid "due to the subject matter"! They informed us they didn't
want to do anything that might offend their employees. We pointed out that'they had done the fust two, but they remained adamant.
Were there other surprises?
We've been tremendously impressed by the honesty of the women we deal
with . Not a single individual has stung us, and only one feminist bookstore
has left us holding the bag. We've been stung by men who have bookstores,
and we've put them all on a prepaid basis .
Women have volunteered to do our addressing , to get xerox copies in quan·tity , to help with keeping the books , to spread the word of our existence , etc.
We feel like we're part of a very large family .

86

It's rumored that Paula Christian repudiated her lesbianism and worked in
porno.
She never repudiated her lesbianism or worked in pornography . That rumor
has caused us grief with sales, and with editors of various publications who
declined to run reviews of Paula's books . I wish our sisters wouldn't believe
things like that without substantiating the things they hear. If they had taken
the trouble to ask us, we could've cleared the air. And I'm grateful to havethe opportunity to do that here .
After the Paula Christian novel series what books do you want to publish?
Our main goal is to survive, and then to succeed. Publishing is a very riskybusiness; we depend on the sale of each book to fmance the publication of
the next. In the fust year practically all of our efforts were spent in letting
women know that we existed. In the future we would like to publish original
material , but that takes much more capital than we presently have.

HELAinE VICTORIA PRE!!
an interview by MAIDA TILCHEN

Helaine Victoria is an unusual women's press. While most lesbian and/or
feminist presses print books and pamphlets, concentrating on words and content, the Helaine Victoria Press has been printing picture postcards, and hasemphasized the process of printing itself They mainly use the old-fashioned
method of printing called letterpress, in which each letter is a sf!parate pieceof type to be individually set by hand. They have produced a large selectionof postcards with photos and illustrations of about 100 women important tofeminist history, plus some posters, notecards, bookplates, and greeting cards,
all with a feminist theme. The women on their cards include Amelia Earhart,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Radclyffe Hall, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Luxembourg, Belle
Sta", Gertrude Stein, George Sand, and Ha"iet Tubman. 'i 'h ey also nave sersof postcards on the topics of women's history, women in the American labor
movement, and women in ecology.
Nancy Taylor Victoria Poore and Jocelyn Helaine Cohen are the owners
and entire staff of Helaine Victoria Press, They started their busines in California
in 1973, and in 1976 moved to a rustic cottage in the backwoods of southern
Indiana. Their printing facilities fill the garage. On their 12-acre rented homestead they have an organic garden, a pond, woods, and a meadow. The not-toonearby town of Martinsville has the notorious reputation of being a conservative
fundamentalist stronghold.
I interviewed Nancy and Jocelyn in December 1979. I went expecting to hear
about the joys of escaping to the land and the ecological value of using an eightyyear old press. Instead, I was surprised by their skepticism about the politicalvalue of living in the country. Their comments on why they prefer the processof letterpress printing clearly ties in with what feminists are saying in almost
every area of culture, that they feel a need to be involved with every aspect ofthe process of their work.
If you're going to any big East Coast or Midwestern feminist conference ormusic festival, you're likely to see Jocelyn and Nancy and their display of postcards, postage stamps with a feminist theme. prints, and pasters, Their catqlog
87

for mail orders can be obtained by writing to Helaine Victoria Press,. 4080 pynasty
Lane, Martinsville, Indiana 46151 . Send a couple of postage stamps if posslble.

Ida B. Wells-Barn ett

Maida: How did you begin your press?
Nancy : We had met in 1973 at Womanspace, the women 's independent
co-op art gallery in Los Angeles. locey was in art school and I was in public
relations. We were both interested in the women 's movement in general , inwomen 's history , and in women's art and woman artists. We both used postcards a lot because a phone call to the next block in Los Angeles is a longdistance call. We liked postcards and the pictures. Inevitably the thoughtcame up that with all the beautiful reproduction postcards, there was no art
by women , no pictures of women. So then we got into thinking , 'Wouldn't
it be great if we could design and print some?' At fust we were just going toselect our own pictures and go to an outside printer.
locey: We found that we couldn't afford printers. We also found we hadvery little control over what we were doing . Most printers were men , andthey had the attitude that they were doing us a favor. We only used themonce , for a series of eight cards.
M: Did either of you have a background in printing?
N : My dad was a painter and graphic designer , and I have always been in• volved with art. I was always interested in design , and every chance 1 had I
spent time at the printers. I tried to get into printing school when I got outof college , but they weren 't letting women in.
locey was enrolled at the California Institute of Arts, and she had a woman graphics instructor . I stopped by a lot , and the instructor caught onthat we wanted to work on postcards together. She very kindly gave us a key
to the graphics lab , so that" we could use it after midnight. Now we're bothbetter camera people and printers than most , and it came from being left a-lone to just do it, with no instructor .
M : You learned on an offset press, why did you switch to letterpress?
J: It took me a long time to really get into printing. Offset made mystomach hurt a lot. I didn't like the way that offset treats the design, as areal separate element. I'm not a designer so much as I am a painter. Everystep in the offset process seemed to separate the original material further away from the end product. Offset can be a really alienating method - strictlya job , like fixing a car. Usually the designer and the printer and the platemaker are separate people , and they don't know much about what eachother's job is . To have any control over the end product, you can do it allby yourself, which we did. But even then I found the materials I was working with separate from each other. Not everybody feels this way , some women do love offset printing.
M: What are the joys of letterpress?
J: It's real "potchkeying." I'm sort of a perfectionist, and letterpress isperfect for that. It must be perfect , or it looks like it's not. Using a letterpress, I feel less alienated . I feel always connected. For example , a bookstore
in New York wanted bookmarks made. I felt from the start that there wasan original concept, and i followed it all the way through . I never felt that
there was any part of it that I wasn't part of, either setting up, designing, or
printing.
The materials have their own possibilities and limitations . Two people canstart with a paintbox full of colors and come up with completely different
things. The same is true of type.
M: Do you plan the whole design and then set it?
N: Some people do that, but we don 't always. There was a time whenprinters were the designers, and they designed as they went along to fit the
space , the needs of the job, and the colors. On letterpress you can do that
because you can always pull out a letter and change it. With offset, once
you've made the plate , if you need a change you have to make the wholeplate again .
M: What's a feminist press doing near a rural town in Indiana?
J: I was dying of pneumonia in Los Angeles. I'd had it with the city. We
wanted to move to the country and change to letterpress printing. I called
home to Indianapolis and found out my brother wanted to rent a cottage heowned , so I thought I'd like to live there .
N: I came home that evening, and Jocey had written me this long letterof all the reasons to move .
M : Were you opposed to the idea?
N: Not at all. I wasn't exactly thriving on the local atmosphere, and I'ma native rnidwesterner myself, from Chicago. We had two or three days todecide. Luckily, we hadn't bought a letterpress yet. When we got to Indiana ,it took a few months to set up. We found the press by putting an ad in a
printer's journal, and bought it for about $150. At that time it wasn't too
hard to get type, but right now there's an antique craze for large type andthe drawers the type comes in , so it's much harder to get.
M: Where do you fmd all the wonderful photos on your cards?
N: We go to a lot of places, general collections and specialized archives,also some private and personal collections . Eitller we come in with something
we 're looking for, or we run across something. We often start with a theme,

89such as our series on ''Women in the American Labor Movement." For that
we went to the Reuther Archives at Wayne State, which is on labor history.
locey spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
We look mostly at manuscript and photograph collections, things that are
obscure and not published yet.
M: What does it do to your consciousness to look through hundreds ofthousands of photographs of women?
N : I fmd it incredibly moving . I think of the vast numbers of women-awhole procession through history . I fmd it really touching, the sheer impact
of it , the cumulative effect.
M : How do you like the selling aspect of your work? Would you rather
be printing than selling?
J: It's nice to have some variety . At some of these conferences we meetinteresting people , and there are other women who make and sell their own
stuff that we look forward to seeing . We've had a hard time fmding our
niche fo r customers . We 're making postcards, which isn't done much anymore. And when we started , doing women 's history , it wasn't very popular.
So we 've had a really hard time just drumming up interest in what we do.
Bookstores would say that cards should go in a gift store. Gift stores would
say that we were educational and political , and that they wouldn't carry us.
At our first really big academic conference , I was afraid the academics wouldfind us not academic enough . I think if that had happened we would havequit. The amazing thing was that that was our niche . The academics loved
our cards.
M: Do you feel like you 're fulfilling that American dream of moving to
the country and having your own business?
N : We both have this naive conviction that there 's possibly something we
can do to make a difference in the world . We hope by mixing neglected archival materials with the art of letterpress, a feminist perspective , and thepower of the press , some new thoughts , ideas, and feelings will result fromour work.

90

mETII PREll
It's been a long four years since the crazy womyn of Metis Press ran
screaming circles around their second-hand, cantankerous Multilith 1250 anddeclared that they were going to experience "Instant Success! " but Metis
Ernestine (as their press is affectionately known) and the womyn still exist
in the lesbian/feminist heart of Chicago.
Chris Straayer (writer, storyteller, dyke womon) and Chris Johnson (printer,illustrator, lovely lesbian) recently joined by Janet Soule (thinker, writer,
Amazon) are the Metis womyn. Some do think they are crazy, for in addition to their full-time employment to pay the rent, they spend countlesshours in translating their vision to reality.
It's a powerful womondream that has propelled them to a kind of compulsive obsession . .. But let's listen to them explain. They love to talk aboutit.
js: How do you define Metis Press?
cs : Metis is a lesbian/feminist publisher and press. Many places will say''womon's press" when they really aren't doing the printing; they are mainly
pUblishing. We are also an integral part of the feminist movement; we're alink in the feminist literary network. In comparison to the traditional industry where printers, publishers, and bookstores keep their territories marked
off (true to the male-oriented competitive sense of business), we try to overlap. We're aware of what's happening in womonprint and have friends in feminist bookstores who share the common goal of womoncelebration, fusing theseparate roles of the womyn-into-print process and demystifying the publisher.
cj: We encourage women to further invest in their work by sharing control
and even participating in the actual production of their work into print.
cs : That is, we encourage a womyn to control her work as it is published.
We try to act as the editor only in so far as getting the best out of a womon.
We feel that she will benefit from our suggestions, but basically she will be
the main voice, the main politics . Once we understand that our lesbian/feminist stance is sh ared by her, then it is her political voice coming through.
cj: We do production ourselves in cooperation with authors, and we teachself-publishing skills because it relieves the author from being dependent on
big publishers and editors who take over the control- so that if there is atime that no one will publish your book, you can publish yourself and that's
a hell of a lot of power!
cs: Commerical publishers make decisions based on financial repercussions.
We are trying not to put our emphasis there. Instead, we are trying to fmd
ways to allow for books that sell slowly. Having a children's book will perhaps give us income to hold us over while another book is selling slowly.
js: Do you try to influence the actual distribution?
cs: Yes . For instance, A Book of One 's Own: Guide to Self-Publishing is
written to womyn. We're hoping that it will be used by feminists , and thatthe knowledge will go to womyn through the small-press bookstores. But
91

with lesbian books, we have mainly restricted sales to womon-owned or feminist-oriented bookstores or else to bookstores that have a local reputation forstocking feminist works and where we are reasonably sure that the work will
go into the hands of lesbians. We want feminists and lesbians to communicate
with one another , to own and improve this communication, and therefore todevelop their politics .
But ·sometimes we get worried about what's going to happen . We don't
get any money, we get very little recognition, we get almost no support fromthe local feminist community , no communication, no shoulders to lean on,
we get no applause, and our personal lives suffer. Sometimes, I think that
we are crazy for doing it.
cj : How can we work so hard now when in two years it might be gone?
It's perplexing in a way , but really what else would I do?
cs: When I first became identified as a lesbian/feminist, I was very idealistic!
I believed that I loved all women and that they all loved me and we were going to form a perfect world . Soon I realized that that was not really the picture .
I transferred my idealism to lesbians. I thought I could count on lesbians tocare about certain political issues ; I would work for all the causes of all
lesbians, and they would all be willing to share my cause. Eventually , that
ideology fell through as well. At that point, I trusted only political lesbian/feminists , then only my friends , and finally , it boiled down to me . But I
still feel that idealism , that sisterhood dream . ... Metis Press is my participation in that dream .
cj: Being involved in the feminist literary network allows me to reevaluate
the world 1 grew up with. Feminist books have helped me sort things out,
and I participate in Metis to make even more of those books .
js: Do you think your goals have changed significantly since you first
conceptualized Metis Press?
cj: I think we are much more realistic in terms of production . The firstprinting job we took on was a book that took us an entire year to do.
cs: We have become more specific by limiting our goals . For instance , at
one time we thought we would be a job shop . We decided for several
reasons, though, that that was not a beneficial goal. For Metis , it was
economically unfeasible to start a business at that time . We were learning
our skills as we progressed. More importantly, our reward for work wasemotional , and it was very important not to destroy that by having to deal ,as a budding lesbian press, with off-the-street straight traffic as a job shop.
We felt we would not exist for six more months if that emotional reward
was diminished. Also when we first started , we were unrealistic about how
much energy , money and learning was required to print. With every book
we learn something . We attempt something new in every product and arethen better prepared for the next project. But I had no idea what I was
getting into. I thought that we would just publish books one after anotherNow in fact I think that what we wanted to happen is happening , but at
one-tenth the rate!! The inside picture of a womon's press is struggle andsacrifice . No small feminist press is really making it financially . [t 's a lotof work, and risk taking.
92

Unrealistic expectations within the community isolate a feminist press .
It feel to me like people think that we are an important element andleaders in the feminist community ; however, our communication with thecommunity is almost nil . We are always working!! I think they feel that
we are already appreciated by definition and therefore don't need theircomments or support.
ej: Every few months, I get a phone call or letter from somebody who
has been referred to us asking for a job . They're asking us for a job when
we are volunteers!! But our situation is changing . At one time we had
dreams of books, but had no books. Now , although we are a small press
even in the womyn's publishing industry, our books are on shelves acrossthe country.
js: We should talk about the beginning stages of the press.
es: The first official thing we did was to go to the Womyn in Print
Conference in 1976. We wrote them and said we were a beginning press,
even though we had printed nothing besides some stationery. We were very
pleased to attend that conference. Brainstorming that took place there is stillinfluencing the feminist literary network.
The WIP Conference opened up communication for the fust time between
the womyn in different facets of feminist literature. We started seeing eachother's individual problems , as feminist bookstores, publishers and magazines.
At that time , even though a bookstore was feminist, they still had not worked
through assumptions that society makes about publishers. For example, theywould expect a small womyn's press to provide them and every other bookstore with a review copy! Of course we can't do this without taking away
our complete profit margin!! It was very important that this dialogue be
started , so that they don't expect the same thing from us that they do fromtraditional publishers .
ej: Next time , we need to include the feminist writers because they need
to be educated about feminist publishers . They have the same expectationsof the feminist publishers that they have of the established, moneyed industry
publishers , and that is just totally unrealistic .
After that conference , sometimes womyn from other womyn's presses
would come visit us, which was really flattering but also really embarrassing
because I felt like apologizing . They said , "Don' t apologize. Don't say that
it is just a press in the basement. Say rather that this is your press!!" They
understand; they come from the same place.
es: We can see our growth. Small as it is, it is still something far beyond
the nothing with which we started! We like our books! And we still believein our original goals . After all, we didn't start this press for community
recognition . We started it because one day we looked around and realizedthat there was no shop in all of Chicago that was womon owned and operated .
We wanted to make books touched only by womyn 's hands!
ej: It 's exciting to me that our skills are still increasing. I just printed
17,000 sheets in one day . There was a time when it took us 3 days to print
1,000 sheets! I'm still thrilled every time we get an order , whether it 's fromanother country or from an individual in some small midwest town. It 's that93

occasional order from Cherry Grove, USA, that isolated womon out there waiting, reaching for one of our books
Metis offerings to date:
Wild Womyn Don't Get the Blues by .Barbara Emrys
Stories that cut to the bare bone of Worn on's survival. $3.00
Shedevils by Barbara Sheen
Biting, provocative stories that require a decision from you. $3 .50
The Secret Witch by Linda Stem Johnson
Strong womynchildren in action. $4 .00,8-12 yrs.
A Book of One's Own: Guide to Self-Publishing by Chris Straayer and Chris Johnson
Comprehensive guide to owning and printing your own words. $4.00
Hurtin' and Healin' and Talkin' It Over by Chris Straayer
Stories to captivate, haunt, and remind you. $5.00
The Rock and Me Immediately by Chris Straayer
Put on your pajamas and galoshes and discover the Rock. $5.00
For tough kids. 8-12 yrs.
Available to womyn's bookstores or from:
Metis Press
P.O. Box 25187
Chicago, IL 60625
Please include 75 cents postage.

94

The Aprons of Metis Press

nAIAD PAE/I
The Naiad Press is a lesbian feminist press which has previously publishednine lesbian novels, as well as two Renee Vivien books in translation ; a volume of book reviews from the famed grandmother of lesbian publications,
The Ladder; and a comprehensive 96-page bibliography, The Lesbian in Literature, an updated and expanded version of which is now in preparation .
Their books scheduled for 1980 release are :Ann Allen Shockley, The Black and the White of It, paperback, $5 .95, now

available. Stories of black and white lesbians by the author of Loving Her
and ''The Black Lesbian in Literature ."Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century Germany: An Anthology, translated
and with a substantive introduction by Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Erikson, paperback, $5.95. Never before published in English, these essays andexcerpts from novels fill in a large chapter in the history of lesbian andfeminist activism and literature .
Pat Califia, Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality, with photographs by
Tee Corinne , paperback, $6.95 . A detailed lesbian sex manual.
Mail orders are welcomed . Send to The Naiad Press, 7800 Westside Drive,
Weatherby Lake , Missouri 64152 ; include 15% postage.

OUT & OUT BOOKI(An interview with Jane Creighton, Joan Larkin, and Ellen Shapiro of
Out & Out Books, will appear in an upcoming issue of sW.j

ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD
prose by Joanna RussCERES IN AN OPEN FIELD
poems by Jane Creighton
xerox prints by Martha Gever$3.50 ea. plus 65¢ mailing cost
(N.Y. residents add 8% sales tax)
Write for a free catalog
of lesbian/feminist books from

OUT & OUT BOOKS
476 2nd Street, Box S
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215
95

The Story of

The LEAPinG LEfBIAn
cartoons by Halabringina people toJtthe.r in the workplatt . . .

introducing new dykes 10 the community . ..

production work ..•subsaiplion increase

tryin& to leU them

ALTE.RnATIVE.S TO PRinT
On the Other Hand
by a Friend (with Kim Schive and Nancy Becker)"I had a subscription to Gay Community News. I won't renew it probably .
Why? Because reading it is too hard for me. I look at GCN. 'What does thatmean?' 'What does that mean?' And I throw it away." Nancy, who is speaking
to me through an interpreter, is a bright woman and an educated one. She has
earned a Master's degree and she teaches at Northeastern University. Still, she
fmds GCN largely unintelligible. How can this be? Though she grew up in an
English-speaking family, Nancy is not a native speaker of English. For Nancy
was born deaf. And her native language is American Sign Language (ASL). ASL
is a language distinct from English in modality-being visual/spatial rather than
auditory/spoken-and distinct in grammar, syntax and linguistic structure.
Put yourself in Nancy's situation and try to imagine coming out as a lesbianand learning about feminism. For years you've been sent to oral schools where
the emphasis has been on learning to speak and lipread, on learning to perform
as if you were a hearing person (an impossibility, because you are not hearing).
Secretly (because it was forbidden) you learned sign language from the deaf
kids who had deaf parents. And ASL became your native language.
What you know of the world is limited to what you can see of it. You don't
know there's a women's movement. How is it possible to come out as a lesbianwhen you know only what you can see and, from all you can see, there is nosuch thing? It would be as easy to come out as a unicorn. But suppose, somehoweven if there is no such thing-you did decide you were a unicorn , who would
you tell? The deaf community is extremely conservative, being limited to what
they can see, and in that community you don't know who you can talk to andwho you can trust. Besides, you think you are nuts , having feelings that no one
ever had .
And the matter of becoming a feminist. You don't listen to the yKiio, readMs. magazine, overhear women 's conversations- you can't- so you/(fon't haveany ground for becoming a feminist. Besides that, you've been unaware of an
oppression closer to home: your oppression as a deaf person . And before you
can understand that you are oppressed as a woman, you have to understandthat you are oppressed as a deaf person.
But say you begin to get a feminist consciousness. Where do you go for apolitical ed ucation? You can 't read theory; even the newspaper is difficult foryou. And unlike hearing women , you don't have access to CR groups or workgroups or to discussions with women who may be more politically sophisticated .
Kim , who has not always been deaf,* explains how difficult it is for a woman
born deaf to gain a political understanding of feminism. "It would be like putting an English-speaking person into a sound-proof booth and asking her tn
learn to read, write, and speak Japanese, and then telling her she had tn learn'npolitical theory through a book written in Japanese."According to Kim, the vast majority of women born deaf never becomecompletely bi-lingual. For them English will always be a second language, andthey will always be "print-handicapped." If hearing women are to broaden the
movement to include deaf women , we must:
1) open our meetings, starting with CR . This means that groups must lookat attitudes toward the handicapped and decide to make meetings accessible,
engage and pay interpreters for the deaf. It means also being patient, understanding that there won't be an immediate response. We can't have an interpreter once and be satisfied that we have done our part. We have to invite, publicize , ask deaf feminists to get other deaf women to the meetings. We also haveto be willing to deal with the ambivalence of deaf women toward hearing
women - that while deaf women want and need to be included, they are angry(and rightfully) to be there by the hearing women's "charity" and always on
the others' terms .
2) learn sign language. Not as a lark, but as a serious responsibility. Thismeans that we don't ask our deaf friends to teach us (unless one is offeringa class and we pay her). This means that we don't get tired and give up aftera few weeks . As Kim says: "It's easier for you to learn sign language than fora deaf person to learn to hear."3) see to it that after deaf women have been involved in CR discussions
and feminist work projects for a few years, feminist lectures are interpreted
for the deaf as a matter of course.
Nancy adds. "Remember that deaf lesbian women will need a lot of timeto learn about feminism and a lot of support from you. In return, deaf women
will support you to understand about deafness, to learn sign language and tolocate interpreters."*Therefore she is a minority in both the deaf and the hearing community, andtotally at home in neither , having to seek support for her deafness in the deaf
community and support for her feminism in the hearing community (and always dealing with hearing women on unequal terms) .

98

DIFFERENT AND EQUAL
by Kathy Hagen

Slowly over the years I began to ask myself if I was a lesbian. I felt vast
discomfort when considering such a possibility . I knew I'd be a fool to explore such an idea. After all , I had enough problems being different as ablind person . I thought maybe I should read about it. Then I learned how
devastating it is to have no privacy. There were no books or magazines
readily available in the mid-1970 's about feminism at all , let alone
lesbianism--particularly to someone who was afraid to ask about such
literature or to admit that she was considering the possibility of being alesbian. I found it hard to find lesbians at all because I was not privy tothe print notices and brochures used to advertise their meeting. When I
did drag myself into a women's bookstore to buy books , I had to ask
whatever clerk was available what books she thought were good , and takeher judgment on buying a good book to read. However, when I got thebook home, I didn't have the nerve to ask anyone to read it to me anyway.
This was the state of affairs I was in when I move to Minneapolis. In
Minneapolis , however, I was lucky enought to meet another blind woman
who considered herself to be going through the same process of coming
out. She was in a women's studies program at the University of Minnesota
and had managed through that program to get some feminist and lesbian
literature taped. I began to read avidly. We also began and have continued
over the past two years to pool our resources to get things brailled andtaped. We have started a newsletter to inform other blind women about
what is available. We have found other blind lesbians across the country , andwe have met Kady Van Deurs, a lesbian author and a one-woman dynamo,
who has taken it upon herself to help us find resources for getting more books
recorded .
Our newsletter is entitled the Women ~ issues Newsletter. It is issued
quarterly , and a yearly subscription costs $2.50. It is available in print ,large print, and in braille. In this newsletter we cover issues which blind
women have fewer chances to read about than do sighted women becauseof the lack of literature on feminist issues in braille or recorded format. We
publish articles written by other blind women. Some samples of articles wehave included are : 1) an article written by a blind woman who was raped
about how she coped afterwards ; 2) an article written by a blind woman
about the tremendous discrimination she received in the hospital when shebore her daughter ; 3) an article from a blind lesbian about her coming out
process ; 4) an interview with a woman who has taught self defense classes
to blind women. We also recommend books which we have read and feel99

would be helpful to others if these books are recorded or brailled. We also
include scathing reviews of some of the literature the Library of Congress
makes readily available to us--literature which portrays disabled women
either very negatively or, at the very least, ineffectually. Anyone wishingto subscribe or to contribute articles should write to either: Kathy Hagen,2701 Harriet Ave. S., Apt. 102, Minneapolis, MN 55408 or Marj Schneider,
1615 S. 4th St., Apt. 2506, Minneapolis, MN 55454.

CATALOGUE FOR WOMEN WHO ARE BLIND
by Kady van Deurs & Eileen Pagan
We have just fmished a catalog called WOMANBOOKS FOR WOMEN
WHO ARE BLIND AND/OR PHYSICALLY CHALLENGED. We made thiscatalog because women who are blind told us they could not find the books
they need in existing catalogs. They said they could not find feminist books
and lesbian books in format for the blind. We ran a list of 7,000 books (theholdings of WOMANBOOKS Bookstore in NYC) against 25,000 titles at
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at the
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C . and against 45,000 titles at Recording
for the Blind, NYC.
At the Library of Congress there are 80 million books for those of us
with sight. There are only 25 thousand for those of us who are blind. Of
these, only a few hundred might help women become aware of (and thus
begin to break free of) our 5 thousand years of slavery.
In our catalog, books are arranged by 37 subjects--subjects like feminism,
lesbian, rape, abortion--<:ategories that do not appear in existing catalogs from
Recording for the Blind and National Library Service. Books from both RFB
and NLS are gathered together in one catalog to make it easier for women whoare blind. There is an author index, too. We have read the catalog onto 7
tracks. A beep system indicates subjects and also letters of the alphabet in
the author index.
Women who need the catalog can get it by sending $3 or two high quality
90-minute cassettes to: Gay and Lesbian Blind, Suite 502, 110 East 23 Street,
New York, New York 10010. Sighted women can help by sending dollars ortapes to make the catalog available to women who cannot afford $3.

I am a blind woman interested in beginning to collect our history as blind women.
Through interviewing and corresponding with women, I hope to gather enough material
to put together a book. If you are interested in participating, or if you know anyone who
would be, please write or call: Kathy Hagen, 2701 ' Harriet Ave. S., Apt. 102, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55408. (612) 825"()605 .

100

Preserving Our Words and PicturessThis is part two of Beth Hodge interview with Joan Nestle and Deborah
Edel of the Lesbiiln Herstory Archives. Part one appeared in SW 11(Fall 1979}.
Beth: Being a media person, I'm struck by Barbara Smith's observation
about the materials of an art form, what she sees Black women's quilting
and lesbian publishing to have in common . Will you tell that story again?
Joan: Both because of our personal interest and because we recognized
it as a major event , when the First Annual Third World Lesbian Writers'
Conference was being organized by women of this area, we called and offered to tape and photograph; and they said yes, because they wouldn't haveenough free womanpower to do it.
Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel were facilitating a discussion on Black
lesbian feminist literary criticism . Barbara made the point that you can tellwhat access a people has to survival tools by the materials they use in an art
form . She'd gone to see a qUilt exhibit in which there were works of white
women and Black women. In all the reviews no one remarked upon the difference in the material the two groups of women had access to. She said theBlack women's quilting was done with very different quality of material , andthe backing was plain brown wrapping paper because they couldn't get sturdier materials.
Then Barbara came that weekend to the Archives. She pointed out something we had not seen. She was looking around the room and she said, "Yousee how we have to use staples for most of our publications, and so many ofour materials are mimeographed," that how things were being produced was acomment on how we used what material we had, to do what we had to do.
She also thought the Archives was wonderful. She had a complete understanding of what it means to do something grassroots. Which is the vision behind the Archives.
B: Will you talk about your determination to keep the Archives a grassroots operation, independent and uncompromised?
Deborah: Women say to us. 'Are you gomg to apply for big governmental
grants?' No. It's been important that we take our time to build up trust, knowing that the money will come when we need it and when we can handle it, andthat we spend our time now building a base that isn't dependent on governmental funds, but is built on what women can give of their own lives. We always
need money, but we want it to come from women who believe in our work.
J: Something we need to free for ourselves- and this is a controversial issue is the hold of academic institutions over cultural collections . We must not be
tempted to take money from them , not be tempted to install the collection on101

a university, even if it's a woman's university. We must not be fooled into forgetting that these institutions, which seem to be devoted to learning, are partof the military industrial complex that makes the world impossible for mostpeople, as well as for lesbians.
We've been called parochial in an article that I wrote a response to. Whenever a people say that they want their own land, they're called parochial by
the group that moved them out of geography in the rust place. Everything issuspect that we do not do ourselves . Any offers from the patriarchy are suspect.
I know that this is a purist vision, but you can't preserve a culture and tum
it over to be protected, or to be cared for, by the heads and hands of those
who ruled us out of culture in the first place.
B: What is your vision of the Lesbian Herstory Archives?
J: Our concept is a living grassroots Archives that is open to all its people ,the Lesbian people, that creates culture and supports the people's struggles while
it preserves their memories .
We cherish the stories and the materials of all women at all stages of theirlives , from all political persuasions. One of our principles is giving access without
judgment. Personally , all of us on the Archives collective have strong and varied
political positions, but the Archives is a healing place- there is no "right line ,"all women are welcome. No woman is refused and no woman's work is refused.
And that suits us very well.
B: You wanted to talk about the Archives being for the women whose names
are not famous?
J: Yes. For example, a woman who is ill started by writing to us about theArchives. She asked us if we'd be interested in her poetry, and we've been exchanging letters ever since. Her letters have become her gift to the Archives. What
the Archives has meant to her is a place to send her unpublished poetry, a wayof sharing her work.
I think that's the sacred purpose of the Archives, to get the hidden voices ,the voices that live every day but don't have access to being published.
We get letters from women living in isolation who say, 'I'm just a lesbian woman . Is it really me that you care about?' And the wonderful joy it is to be able
to say, 'Yes!' It's such a relief to be able to say yes, and I think it's a relief to thewhole community.
B: Do you want to talk about your commItment to representing all women?
J: Part of the Archives vision is the destruction of myths. One of our special
commitments is making sure that within the lesbian community all our faces
are visible, all our bodies are visible, all words are visible . Also multilanguageswe want the collection to be not just in English, because we speak all languages. We have a wonderful collection of love poetry in Spanish from a woman
who was very active in Pa Fuera. We also have materials in French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Dutch, and Norwegian.
We want to promote research in Black lesbian history. The first lesbian woman
I knew was a Black woman. We know ther's a huge rich tradition of culturalgroups, organizations , sisterhoods, where Black lesbian women spent much of theirtime and from which they got great strength. The work of lifting the layers ofprivacy can best be done by third world women , but it is not their responsibility
alone. The Archives is a collective of Black and white women , and it is our task

102

to make sure all women feel comfortable with and a part of the Archives collection and process.
B: How are you getting work from disabled lesbians?
J : We heard that a group of disabled lesbians were speaking. For personalreasons we've become sensitized to some of the issues of illness and disability,
and we realized it was very important for the Archives to have a tape of theirspeech.
We asked Gwen and Lyn, who are two blind lesbian women, their permission
to tape and they were very happy to give it. And that got us onto many othertopics and we learned what they couldn't take for granted and the ways we
could all work together to make life a little more easy, like reading mail , goingto events together , just being available.
I'm aware of how hard we have to work to be inclusive of all our experiencesin our Archives . If a woman is disabled and cannot use a typewriter or cannot
use a tape , we have to fmd ways for her to record her life. We have to makesure that we don't duplicate the invisibilities of the other society . The building that someday will house the Archives must be accessible to disabled women ;and it must have special equipment fo r disabled women , such as braille labelingand good audio equipment. And we will have an interpreter for the deaf.
B: What about older lesbians?
J: When we speak and I look around at the audiences , or we go to women's
centers , I see grey-haired women- women in their fifties and sixties . I know theincredible stories they have to tell and the struggles they have had to go through.
If the women who read this interview who never thought of their lives as absolutely
necessary to our movement - to the lesbian feminist movement, the women's
movement, the gay movement - if they would just know that the Archives isreaching out to them . Get in touch with us , or make a tape , or take a photograph. Just increase our knowledge and awareness.
I want the Archives to give us back our generational connections, to deepen
our understanding of how we survived , and the courage of each generation .
Whenever we speak we calIon all women who hear us to send something to
the Archives. We do the outreach that we can personally . But if every woman
takes it upon herself- as an act of caring-to become part of the Archives , thenby defmition we will end the silences. Because we are all of all peoples.
B: Who are the members of the Archives collective?
J: Deborah Edel, Georgia Brooks , Judith Schwarz, Valerie Itnyre , and myself.
Mabel Hampton is our guiding spirit. Other women like Arissa Reed , Carol, andour lesbian lawyer are close and working friends of the Archives.
B: What are the responsibilities of each collective member?
D: The first thing to remember is that we all have full-time jobs besides theArchives ...which is another full-time job .. .we all work on everything and arelearning all the skills involved , though we may rotate responsibilities at different
times . Every Tuesday evening we have a collective meeting to share the week's
happenings and plan the coming weeks. Every day we give tours, help womenfind the information they need , me materials , pick up the mail , answer letters,
and keep the room in order. Then there are projects like developing specialinterest bibliographies, working on the next newsletter, cataloguing our holdings.
organizing Archives even ts. and developing slide shows . Besides th at. we arecultural missionaries , which means we do slide shows , publish a newsletter andbibliographies, and obsessively speak about th e Archives.
103

B: Do you ever feel invisible in your role as archivist?
D: Yes, I have talked sometimes about the loneliness of the long-distancearchivist and the ambivalence that I experience. I think you've expressed it
more, Joan, and I think you feel it even more strongly because you're awriter. It's this feeling of 'here we are, doing the collecting,' the collecting andthe preserving and the day·to-day stuff, and there's no time for me to readmuch of what's going on. But it is because of the Archives that women are
doing this incredibly fascinating research. They're spending five weeks at thislibrary and three weeks at that library, taking the time to dig into women's
lives. They are writing up their research, and they're publishing their articles.
There's a visibility to what they're doing, but there isn't for us.
J: There is a loneliness to being the cherisher of everyone else's voice. We
have our own voices that sometimes we want to express.
Part of the problem is that this is the first time that something like thishas been done. Regional archives are being set up more and more, but we haveno community yet of other women that we can sit around with and just complain or share problems .
B: What kinds of grassroots archiving and researching projects are going on
now?
J: There 's the New Alexandria Lesbian Library in Chicago [now in Huntington, Mass.] that has done library and archival work for a long time for the
midwest area. There's the Circle of Lesbian Indexers who've taken on theincredible task of indexing many of our lesbian journals. JR Roberts and Clare
Potter are two of the indexers. JR is also working on a bibliography of black
lesbians. In Buffalo Liz Kennedy , Madeline Davis , and Avra Michelson are
conducting an oral history project, researching the lesbian community there
back to the 1920s. Also there's the Lesbian and Gay History Project in San
Francisco , and the beginning of a regional archives in Tennessee.
Matrices , the lesbian research newsletter, is another important part of the
network, and a way of breaking down the isolation, the competition overideas, and a way of breaking down academic control.
B: What question does the Archives get asked most frequently?
J: I think most asked-for is information about lesbians in other cultures.
Which is a response to the feeling of 'you see, it's an American or western
decadent phenomenon.' And we know that's not true. We see the Archives aspolitical activism, to destroy myths, to give us the data-both for our psychological stamina and for cultural warfare.
B : Are you ever afraid of something happening to the Archives- say a firebeing set?
D: Yes , we're worried about safety. But we feel there's a certain security
to having the Archives in our house because it's set in a big apartment bUilding.
I know that if it were a house alone, unguarded at night, it would be much
more vulnerable to fire bombing. But here it would be much harder , since people
are coming and going from the building and from our apartment at all hoursof the day and night.
B: Has anything ever disappeared from the Archives?
D: Sometimes women misfile things, and we have a moment of panic when
we can't find something. But nothing has ever been taken , either from thecollection or from our house.
104J: We're not paranoid in any way about our own community . But the F.B.I.both Deb and I have been involved in radical politics for almost our whole
adult lives. We haven't written asking for our F.B.I. folders, but I wouldn't be
surprised if they were there. It doesn't upset me because I just proceed as if wewere at war with the society. They're not going to stop me from doing what
I'm doing, through fear of surveillance.
I'm concerned with paranoia in another way, that the F .B.I. has gotten its
message across so well to our community. If women are petrified of ·having
photographs taken, of making tapes, if we don't document what we are doing ,they are achieving the same purpose. Either way, by destroying our materials
or by terrorizing us so that we don't preserve materials. And since one of thegreatest burdens of oppression for the lesbian woman in the past has beeninvisibility-this lack of fullness of history, of 'who-I-was' besides Sappho andGertrude Stein- we must take the risk of being known. I think we are losing
more by running in terror than we would by documenting our conferences
and our groups.
D: I also think it's a myth to believe that somehow you can remain invulnerable to F .B.I . surveillance. With social security numbers on Centrex andeverything centralized, we just have to see ourselves as at war, and proceedfrom there. And do what we can when women ask us to protect their names
or not put their papers in . To respect whatever confidentiality women ask for.
B: Do you have a closing message?
J: If all the women who hear us or read about us just take it to heart andsay , "I have a right to be in that collection," so many of our old problems
will disappear. Because there isn't any rule of access to the Archives, and there
isn't any selection policy. As many voices as speak will be here. We want toturn cultural deprivation into cultural celebration.
I do think the Archives summarizes a lot of the sinister wisdom that we'vecollected as a people. That is really its root. There's a kind of root wit, there's
a mother wit involved in it, there's a cunning.
With all our interest in reclaiming our language, I looked up archives in asmall W~bster's dictionary. For the root of the word, it gave arche, 'beginning,''power.' And I thought, 'I often see the Archives as an archway, a beginning,
as a·.portal.' The beginning and then the next word is power, which is exactly
how we ·see the Archives. It means our power of control over our beginnings
and our· continuing. So there's a wonderful three visions of the arch~ay , thebeginning, and power.

You may reach the Lesbian Herstory Archives at P.O. Box 1258, New York, NY
10001,212-874-7232 or 873-9443.

105

RESPONSEIn March 1975, when I completed the introductory notes to the second
edition of my bibliography, The Lesbian in Literature, I dedicated in a sense
the entire work to a character from one of Joanna Russ's stories, the now
very famous story ''When It Changed." In that dedication I made explicitly
clear my opinion of the quality of her work and its importance to all womenin this movement. That opinion has not altered.
As a publisher (Naiad Press, Inc.) I am precluded from replying to her
vicious attack in the form of a review on one of our latest novels, Retreat:
As It Was!, by Donna J. Young , which appeared in Sinister Wisdom no. 12,with the exception of one statement which verges on libel. I quote: "Retreat
was written out of sheer starvation, published ditto (unless we're to believethat Naiad is Simply being opportunistic) . . . "Naiad Press, Inc. has been publishing Lesbian feminist material since 1974
and has published thirteen titles through the end of 1979. Our original position was to be a Lesbian feminist publisher of fiction only . We have varied
from that slightly, in that we have published some literature-related nonfiction
and two works of poetry in our series of works by Renee Vivien (whom weare attempting to rescue from literary oblivion). We have not varied from ourrigid and intentional position of publishing only Lesbian/feminist material.
Having been one of the two women primarily responsible for selecting our
published material, my one real sorrow is that about two years ago I was unable in good conscience to publish the book of short stories that I feel is themost important work (in terms sheerly of good writing) to come out of thewomen's movement, Out Somewhere and Back Again: The Kansas Stories
by Nancy Stockwell. Despite its brilliance, her talent, her skills, to say nothingof my personal fondness for her, I could not in good conscience publish abook of short stories of which only one was specifically Lesbian and twoothers could be so interpreted. As a good opportunist, I would surely havepublished them.
A few months ago, Joanna Russ wrote to me and asked me to consider
publishing one of her works of children's fiction. I pleasantly declined, explaining that we were simply not covering that area. Do I need to add thateven a deaf, blind, and dumb opportunist would snatch at the chance topublish her work if publishing for aggrandizement were one's goal.
-Barbara Grier(note : On September I, 1980, Naiad Press will be bringing out two new books, Lesbian
Feminism in Turno{}f-the-Century Germany: An Anthology, translated and with an introduction by Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson ; and Sapphisfry : The Book of Lesbian
SexualifY by Pat Califia. In May, Naiad published Ann Allen Shockley's The Black andWhite of If.)

106

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Nancy V. Becker is a workaholic, loves people who appreciate themselves, and adoresanyone who offers her raw chocolate chip cookies.
Linda J. Brown, writer, photographer, graphic artist, lives and works in New York City.
EUy Bulkin, writer and editor, is active in DARE (Dykes against Racism Everywhere) andshe facilitates anti·racism workshops for white women.
Michelle Cliff is a writer and editor living in western Massachusetts.
Michele Connelly is presently fighting fires in New Mexico.
Anita Cornwell : My work has appeared in Hera , Wicca , Women : A Journal of Liberation,
Negro Digest, Lesbians Speak Out, and The Ladder, among others.
Tia Cross is a Lesbian Feminist photographer who has produced slide shows which chronicle
the hers tory of lesbian photographers.
Harriet Desmoines copy-edits and typesets for a living.
Frances Doughty, activist and writer, lives in Brooklyn, New York .
Ruth Farmer is a writer of poetry and short stories living in Brooklyn .
Susan Fleischmann is a Boston-based freelance photographer whose work appears frequently
in the Gay Community News.
Barbara Grier is editor of Naiad Press, the largest feminist press in the United States.
Kathy Hagen: "My message to blind women and any reader of Sinister Wisdom: the mostimportant thing is to learn to accept and love yourself, and ignore society's attempts toannihilate anyone who is different."
Hala's cartoons have frequently appeared in The Leaping Lesbian, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Ran Hall : "Lesbian writing and publishing is the most important part of my life."
Beth Hodges teaches women's writing workshops in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Jerusha is hebrew for in her i stance.
Melanie Kaye 's book of poems, We Speak in Code, is due momentarily from Motheroot
Publications, and she and Michaele are working on a book about women and violence.
Kaymarion: "Take the mystique out of publishing and share pictures." She lives in Northhampton with a tabby Banana cat.
Lee Kinard lives, works, and tries to write in Orlando , Florida.

Irena Klepfisz, a founder and editor of Conditions, has self-published a collection of her
poems, periods of stress.
Felice Newman: "Cleis Press is anxious to receive prose manuscripts from lesbians."
Suzanne Reylea is a wri ter .. cri tic, and teacher.
Cynthia Rich is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
JR Roberts is self-publishing a Black lesbian bibliography.
Kim Schive is infamous in Boston for her nice teeth, good credit rating, great tzimmes, andthe chandelier in her bedroom.
Janet Soule is a lesbian dreamer who spends her time thinking, writing, and studying.
Chris South , an editor of Feminary, describes herself as a " die-hard Southerner."
Maida Tilchen has moved to Boston where she is promotions manager for Gay Community
News.
Irene Zahava is a librarian and free-lance reviewer who lives in a farmhouse in upstate New
York.
107

DYKE

DIANICWICCANEWSLETTER

for BIOPHILIC HAGS of MAGICKLESBIAN/SPINSTER/DIANIC/SEPARATIST WITCHESSURVIVORS , ONLY!
Focus on Lesbian Moon Goddess , complete-inHERSELF/OURSELVES .
creating , spinning , transforming our own cosmos.
Tenets , Rituals , Herbalism , Magicks , Spells, Psychic development exercises, reclaiming our language ,letters/sharings , articles , stories, contacts , etc.
Published quarterly . $6 .00 yearly.
Amethyst/Artemis, Box 486, Berkeley, CA 94704

Want to read a Really Good
Lesbian Love Story?

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108

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
yo.u 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.

NOTIFY US OF YOUR CHANGE OF ADDRESSCPEMINA~YA

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Emphasizing the Lesbian Visionpublished 3 times a year
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109

SW 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 S (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 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 , poet ry , 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 dy ke, 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 fme 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.
Issue 11 (Fall 1979): Inside the Lesbian Herstory Archives; fantasy and true
story ; Susan Yarbrough on lesbian celibacy ; Andree Collard on victimization;
Joyce Trebilcot, "Conceiving Women"; responses ; reviews; poetry . 104 pp. $2.50.

(Add 60 cents postage for every 1-2 copies ordered)110

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Evelyn Torton Beck is seeking material for an anthology on Jewish Lesbians to be
published by Persephone Press for use in Women's Studies classes. Essays of a historical,
analytic, and theoretical nature are especially needed ; poetry, fiction, photographs, andother art forms are also welcome. Send abstracts, queries, and/or completed materials to
Evelyn Torton Beck, c/o Women's Studies Program, University of Wisconsin , 209 North
Brooks St., Madison, Wis. 53706, or call (608) 2634703 . (If you leave a number, yourcall will be returned.)

Broomstick is a national feminist magazine by, for, and about women over forty. We
print articles by midlife women discussing our experiences from a feminist political perspective. We also feature articles about events, books, organizations, and periodicals of
relevance to women over forty.
PRICES : Individual yearly subscription: $7.50, U.S .; $10, Canada; $15, overseas.
Institutions : $15. Women's and alternative bookstores: discounts of 40 percent and more;write for details. A sample issue will be sent for fifty cents in stamps or coins.
Broomstick, San Francisco Women's Centers, 3543 -1 8th Street, San Francisco Calif.
94110.
'
Addresses Not Given in Text:

Feminary , P.O. Box 954 , Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514.
Leaping Lesbian, Box 7715, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48107 .
Spinsters, Ink, RD 1, Argyle, NY 12809.
Timely Books, P.O. Box 2674B, New Milford, Connecticut 06776 .

FRO NT I E R S AJournal of Women Studies
For the past four years FRONTIE RS has been a unique joumal 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 writers 'concerns? How do they express them? And how is the women's movement
being ripped off?
Future issues: Equal Opportunity Addiction: Chemical Dependency Among
Women, and Lesbian History.
Subscriptions are $9 (3 issues) a year; $1510r Institutions Single copIes are $3.25. Wore FRONTIERS.
Women Studies Program. University 01 Colorado. Boulder. Colorado 80309

IIISPECIAL ISSUE-SW 15
LESBIANS AND PORNOGRAPHY. Guest edited by Sarah Hoagland &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 in terest, 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
DEADLINE: September 1, 1980

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 of1977 : 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 gifts 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
Lincoln, Ne. 68503
I would like to subscribe to Sinister Wisdom.
_____ Enclosed is $7.50 for one year (4 issues), beginning with issue_____ Enclosed is $13.00 for 8 issues, beginning with issue

14.

14.

NAME _______ ______________________________________ _~ADDRESS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ZIP - - - - - - - - - - - Enclosed is ________ ~ Please send SW to my friend.
NAME ______________________ _ ________________________ _ADDRESS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -____ _ ________ _ ____ ____ _ ___ _ __ _ _ _ _ ____ ZIP _______ _ _ ___ _We are very happy to announce that next year the new editors andpublishers of Sinister Wisdom will be Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich .
Adrienne and Michelle will begin reading manuscripts on January 1,
1981. In the meantime we have selected enough prose , and Leigh Star
has accepted enough poetry , to fill up the last issues to be edited by
the three of us and C. Colette , numbers 14 and 16 . Julia Penelope andSarah Hoagland, however, still need manuscripts for their issue, SW 15 ,on lesbian views of pornography and violence . We ask you please to
wait until January fust to send more poetry, prose , or artwork to
Sinister Wisdom unless it is meant for issue 15.
It is now four days before this issue goes to press , and there 's notime or room for all the things we'd like to say ; but we do hope you
will be as pleased as we are that Sinister Wisdom will continue andgrow stronger , and we ask your patience during these long and complicated adoption proceedings. We'll be publishing more on this change ,including the reasons we've been very much wanting it , in upcoming
issues .
-Catherine and Ha"iet$3

edited by Beth I,odge,s