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• 1 2020-12-09T11:38:55-08:00 Change, But Not Enough: Part III 6 Women Artists plain 2021-06-17T14:17:39-07:00 As the stirrings within leftist movements on college campuses led to the formation of new scholarly fields and the claiming of space (like women’s centers), they also produced a proliferation of feminist presses and other cultural institutions. The Feminist Press was founded in 1970. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society was founded in 1975. In 1977 came the first issue of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and the founding of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women-run cooperative artspace. In 1980, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was founded. In 1982 came Aunt Lute Books. The list goes on. The 70s and 80s saw a relative proliferation of publishing houses, magazines, journals, salons, and other texts and spaces by and for writers and artists marginalized, excluded, wanting no admittance into the mainstream. For many, the hope was that these new places and pages would provide shelter to create something elsewhere unwelcome, something different in form and idea. 
  
  As new institutions of learning and culture emerged through political movements of the 60s and 70s, their intellectual and theoretical traditions bore the movements’ strengths and their tensions. People weighed the value of experience, urgency, pragmatism, representation, and power, and arrived at differing, contentious, and group-fracturing conclusions. The BCRW archive bears some witness to these struggles and the limitations that emerged in feminist spaces dominated by white middle- and upper-middle-class women. Although the archives are, like any archive, a partial glimpse into the past, what is observable are the attempts and stumbles to articulate a politics in the flood of experience, feeling, history, and hope. During the first decade, in the 1970s, pamphlets, tape recordings from events, and meeting notes indicated that most of the faculty, students, and participants in panels, workshops, and conferences were white women, a few were lesbians, some were working-class in origin. There were few Black women or women of color. Most conversations (about art anyway) attended to questions of focus and material, affect, politics and propaganda (feminist art as a change agent), and problems with patriarchy and marginalization as women. Some talked about material conditions of art creation, money, space, resources, access to publishing. Very few said a word about race, or applied feminist thinking toward forms of oppression that did not constrain their own experience. Their conversations revolved around a few common questions: Feminism was a mode of thinking and creating, an orientation, but with whom, toward what, and away from what? With what aspects of life, expression, history? Feminism was a challenge, but to what forces of domination? With what boundaries, flexibilities, and rigor could feminism be a unifying principle around which women and people organized themselves? (What they did not ask: Why would one want a unifying principle at all? How could one imagine it possible?) Because the consequences of marginalization were severe, material and interpersonal, matters of actual life chances or exposure to injury, violence, or premature death, Black women and women of color formed their own organizations, like the Combahee River Collective (formed in 1974) and the Third World Women’s Alliance (formed in 1968). 
  
  If by the 1970s, the worlds of literature, art, and higher education had changed from the experiences that Jordan had in the 50s and Walker in the 60s, they had but not enough. 1975 was the year when the Vietnam War officially came to an end, and it was also the year when a fiscal crisis descended on New York City that proved to be disastrous. As Jordan said, “It seems to me merely reasonable... that the mayor of the City of New York should instigate a tax strike against Washington and call upon private employers to follow suit… since the impending default of New York will mean a colossal loss of livelihood, and a loss of service to keep life feasible in the city (human life I mean)...” She was speaking to the people in the room: the private employer that was Barnard College; the students who could (and some did) get up and join the protests (if they weren’t already involved); the teachers with the political commitment and obligation to bring these problems into their classroom so that this generation’s students may find their education more relevant, more useful than she did in solving the problems in their streets. Jordan’s words were charged with a call when she said, 

  Nothing that I learned here prepared me for the tragedy of the death of the Black Boy that produced the Harlem Riot of 1964, nor the atrocious, non-reporting by white media, of what actually happened. Nothing, here, prepared me for the travesty of high-paid, "anti-poverty" planning and research on the lower East Side, research that yielded no new, safe housing to the peoples forced to live there, in continuous jeopardy. 

  The call was a reckoning. 
  
  While Jordan’s talk faced the crisis of representation as “an agent for change, an active member of the hoped-for apocalypse,” Walker looked inward. What were the consequences of this crisis as a writer with her craft? Walker recalled an experience that got to the heart of this problem with an origin story of her short work of fiction, “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.” The fictional story was based on a memory of her mother’s, which her mother repeated to Walker throughout her life. During the Depression, she went into town to apply for government benefits at the local commissary where was denied and humiliated by the white woman in charge. Although this degradation may have wounded her (Walker does not say) she feels triumphant in the end because, she said, she lived to see the white woman grow old, and mentally and physically decline. Walker recounted that after “hearing the story for about the fiftieth time, something else was discernible: the possibilities of the story, for fiction. What, I asked myself, would have happened, if, after the crippled old lady died, it was discovered that someone, my mother perhaps (who would have been mortified at the thought, Christian lady that she is), had voodooed her?” Life was leading to fiction through the what-ifs, what otherwise, and the work of invention. 
  
  However, Walker felt troubled by a problem of evidence. She felt she needed to know more about voodoo beyond the few stories and anecdotes she had from members of her family. She needed this knowledge to create a story with the density and truth that allows fiction to exist, full of its own life. Yet when she went to research, the archives were places of unlivable violence, brutally inhospitable to the characters of her story. Authored by white men, dripping with anti-Black misogyny, the texts were gateways into a violent imagination. Walker kept searching for another way. For a long time she searched, discouraged, until she came upon a footnote of a writer by the name of Zora Neale Hurston, a Black anthropologist and novelist  (and Barnard alum, class of 1928), who had done years of ethnographic research on voodoo and obeah in New Orleans, Jamaica, and Haiti, creating the archive that Walker had hoped she would find. The meticulous attention that spotted the footnote led Walker to Hurston’s ethnographic work, Of Mules and Men, on Black diasporic religion, including a large section on voodoo. Prior to this, Walker had never heard of Hurston, and Hurston became a model and a guide for Walker (see Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora”). “Had [Hurston’s work] been lost,” Walker said, “my mother’s story would have had no historical underpinning, none I could trust...” Surely a writer as rigorous and dedicated as Walker would have found a way no matter what, but how might it have been had she not come upon her guide? 

• 1 2021-05-04T10:56:04-07:00 1980s: Lesbian Sexuality 5 Queer and Trans Politics plain 2021-06-17T14:22:57-07:00 While lesbians were more or less absent from conversations around women’s issues in the early 1970s, growing lesbian activism and visibility within the women’s movement meant that lesbians were able to enjoy some attention in BCRW’s programming in the 1980s. In her talk at the 1987 Scholar and Feminist Conference, writer Ginny Vida paid homage to lesbian activist milestones. One of these was the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970, where lesbians confronted feminist organizers and declared their right to participate openly in the feminist movement. At the time, mainstream feminist political groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) hoped to make their politics appeal to men. Seeing lesbians as a threat to the women’s movement’s image and respectability, well-known feminist and founder of NOW Betty Friedan pejoratively referred to lesbians as “the lavendar menace.” Lesbians were not considered part of the movement or invited to be on the panel at NOW’s Second Conference to Unite Women. In response, a group of lesbians decided they would interrupt the event to make themselves heard. 
  
  At the Second Congress to Unite Women, the group, who Vida referred to as “Rita Mae Brown and her cronies,” inconspicuously attended the conference wearing sweatshirts. As part of their action, they killed the lights during the conference, stood up from their seats and unzipped their sweatshirts. When the lights came back on, the audience saw women amongst them, standing up with pink shirts that read, “Lavender Menace,” on them. Meanwhile, some women from the group marched down the aisle of chairs, carrying signs that read, “Take a lesbian to lunch this week” and “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.” They took over the mic and began to speak on lesbian issues, such as their experiences of being institutionalized for being lesbian, and tried to push against stereotypes to appeal to the feminists in the women’s movement. Ginny Vida saw the interruption of the Second Crongress to Unite Women as a hallmark moment which marked the beginnings of lesbian visibility within the women’s movement.
  
  As lesbians became more accepted and eventually incorporated into the mainstreams of feminist politics, lesbian issues became a topic of focus at BCRW during the 1980’s. Joan Nestle and other members of the Lesbian Herstory Archives spoke on reclaiming lesbian herstory at the Scholar and Feminist Conference in 1980. After acknowledging the implicit homophobia in the conference organizers’ treatment of her and the other representatives from the LHA, she names the other manifestations of homophobia that they face. She argued that the straight world has appropriated lesbians and lesbian identity, and that because of this, lesbians have no history and are condemned to lose their memory. She pointed out how lesbian herstory was considerred valueless by straight society. While universities pay a fortune for one letter by James Joyce, “We find our culture on sale for five cents,” she said. Not only are lesbians resigned to cultural and historic undesirability and erasure, she argued, but they are defined and overwritten by the sexologists and straight authorities who endlessly pathologize their existence. Other talks held at BCRW in this time included Lisa Duggan’s workshop, “The Social Enforcement of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Resistance in the 1920s” and “Lesbian Rights and the Struggle for Reproductive Freedom” in 1981, “Lesbianism and the Social Function of Taboo” in 1979, and “Lesbian Mothers ‘Choosing Children’” in 1986. These events marked a shift in BCRW’s feminist engagement with the topic of sex and sexuality to explicitly include and focus on lesbian experience and sexuality.