. é

2:8:
0.)"
..

 

 

 

 

 

unuIQvIW‘VI"

 
 

 

 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 

. . .
T . ,

u . .
w . . .

m .

.. . A
.

m

C ... »

 

3 Oh}

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

WEAVING A FEMALE SYMBOLIC:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, A METHOD OF SCHOLARSHIP

presented by

MARY PENELOPE GARDNER

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

PhD. degree in American Studies

 

 

 

 

/ Major Professor’s Signature

December 4, 2002

 

Date

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN Box to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

DEClO‘TGQ@4

 

'JAN 0 92@

 

0‘521 “3:.

I
Q

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 cJCIRC/DateDuest-p. 15

 

Weaving a Female Symbolic:
Autobiography, a Method of Scholarship

By

Mary Penelope Gardner

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies

2002

ABSTRACT

WEAVING A FEMALE SYMBOLIC:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, A METHOD OF SCHOLARSHIP

BY

Mary Penelope Gardner

The multiple and fluid nature across time of one woman feminist meaning
making of her own personal experiences is demonstrated through
autobiographical narratives which both trace and generate a continuum of the
achievement of a feminist standpoint. These narratives of selected experiences
woven from memories contextualized, historically, personally and politically,
produce and represent a level of achievement. In this project: autobiographical
representation is the method; personal experiences, mediated through memory
and understandings are the raw materials; and feminist practice as knowledge is
the product. As the writer struggles for and begins the process of an
achievement of a feminist standpoint another personal narrative of the same
experience extends and moves down the continuum. Within theoretical
frameworks of Nancy Hartsock’s feminist standpoint epistemology, Adrienne
Rich’s compulsory heterosexuality and the continuum of lesbian existence, and
feminist autobiography, I not only gain an understanding of the past meanings l
have made but I also produce them.

Beginning in the assumption of a vantage point available to women to
understand their oppression within the social reality of patriarchy, this work

demonstrates for a seeker of feminism a method of using personal experiences

in their struggle for the cumulative achievement of a feminist standpoint. The
political intent of this work is to speak to those who wish to engage in the
struggle.

For further conceptual assistance in this project and to offset the
supposed linearity of time and continuum, I draw on Mary Daly’s theorizing and
metaphors of the surface level of social reality being of the patriarchy. Daly
conceptualizes that in a female symbolic beneath the phallocratic surface is
where women throughout the ages are connected. Therefore the continuum
spirals down deep and deeper beneath the surface and spins a female symbolic.

| enter the continuum of my achievement of a feminist standpoint
temporally in the middle 1960s. Achieving a feminist standpoint is roughly
acquiring a system of interpretation, literacy, a lens of meaning making, and
being. I exit the continuum of this project as an old, white, lesbian, feminist,
scholar, with an achieved lesbian feminist standpoint. Although I exit the
continuum with the end of this project the continuum in my conceptualization

spins further and deeper down below patriarchal thinking. I continue my spin.

Copyright by
MARY PENELOPE GARDNER
2002

To lari sanford gates smith
1 938-1 994

who led the way

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To the Women and men, personally, professionally, and socially, who help
spin the symbolic in which I complete this work; thank you.

To the thinkers immediately in my life and to whom I turn:

Professor Joyce Ladenson, was central to my achievement of a life-long dream
to acquire skills of the intellect. She powered the loom with encouragement,
expertise and trust, as l spun a thin thread of possibility into a full tapestry of
thinking and doing. Professor Marilyn Frye was an early referent for me. Her
patience and confidence guided me to the knowledge that I was already doing
that which I aspired. When she told me early on that I already knew how to think,
I scoffed and kept thinking.

Teri Swezey and I formed a partnership of support and friendship as we
both pursued the completion of our scholarly projects. This partnership endures
and will continue as we move out and beyond the academy. I am fortunate to
have connected with such a grand scholar and friend. We finish together and I
am grateful to her.

Others in the university who have joined with me on this path are my
teachers in front of or from behind the podium. They include Patti Stock, Janet
Swenson, Carol Fenn, Ruth Behar of UM, Michael Steinberg, Debbie Conlin,
Jackie Campbell, Dagny Van Duine, Brent Bilodeau, Anne Tracy, Gretchen

Barbatsis, Maria Bruno, and Rita Gallin.

Of course none of this could have been done without my rich and full life
beyond the university. When my fears were the greatest, when the tears seemed
unending, when the night was the darkest, my life partner, Marilyn Bowen
soothed my fears, wiped my tears, lit my light and trusted in me. Thank you.

To my children, Bridget, Casey, John, Levi, and Vail; my mother, Noel
Parsons; my sisters, Candy McCann and Lari Smith; My grandchildren, Max,
Cade, Austin, and Kendall; my friend Seymour Gardner; my grandmother-Nona
Wright, and my great grandmother, Elizabeth Sanford, I thank you for your loving
and generous presence in my life.

I appreciate many others who spin the web of a female symbolic: The
women artists, workers and proprietors of Goldenrod Music, specifically Terry
Grant and Susan Frazier, the women of the Lesbian Connection, especially
Margy Lesher; all the women of First Fridays and of the Lansing Women's Soft-
ball league—every last one of them including the spectators. To those women in
my life prior to this project and are integral to it, named and unnamed, I am
grateful: Peg Kinsman, Lillian Buchanan, Fran Bohnsack, Mindy McNichoIs, Ann

Harrington, Fran Malone, Shaloma Shawmat Lessner, and Roxcy Bolton.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE.

INTRODUCTION: A VANTAGE POINT ................................................................ 1
The Problem ............................................................................................... 3
Theoretical Frameworks ............................................................................. 5

Women’s Autobiography ................................................................. 5
Memory ........................................................................................... 8
Feminist Standpoint ....................................................................... 1O
Representation .............................................................................. 1 1
Lesbian Feminist Standpoint ......................................................... 15
Mechanics ................................................................................................ 20
Method ..................................................................................................... 21
Literature .................................................................................................. 23
Notes ...................................................................................................... 27

CHAPTER TWO

THE SOURCE .................................................................................................... 30
Matrilineal Threads... 30
The Beginning .......................................................................................... 36

The Gaslight Club .......................................................................... 37
Illegal Abortion: Context ................................................................ 43
Artifact: 1964, Illegal Abortion ........................................................ 48
Reflection/Analysis ........................................................................ 55
Artifact: The Playboy Club ............................................................. 61
Artifact: 1967, Illegal Abortion ....................................................... 67
Reflection/Analysis ........................................................................ 69
Notes ...................................................................................................... 72

CHAPTER THREE

BEGINNING THE SPIN: FEMINIST ACTIVISM .................................................. 73
Historical Personal Context ...................................................................... 73
Consciousness Raising ............................................................................ 76
National Organization For Women (NOW) .............................................. 84
Speak—out: Illegal Abortion ...................................................................... 90
Discussion ................................................................................................ 92
2002 Commentary: Activism Gone Awry .................................................. 93
Notes .................................................................................................... 1 06

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DEPTH OF MY ACHIEVEMENT .............................................................. 108
Today’s Perspective: Illegal Abortion and Oppression ........................... 110
Today’s Perspective: The Girl/Bunny ..................................................... 115
Today’s Perspective: Memory ................................................................ 130
Today’s Perspective: The Category Woman .......................................... 132

viii

Today’s Perspective: Compulsory Heterosexuality ................................ 143

Notes .................................................................................................... 147
CHAPTER FIVE
HAVING LEAPT ................................................................................................ 150
My Mother’s Story, or my fathers ........................................................... 150
Spiraling, Spinning, Semantics ............................................................... 1 55
Abortion .................................................................................................. 164
Reproductive Freedom Ride: 1991, Fargo, ND ..................................... 167
Who I once was, and What’s the Address Anyway? .............................. 171
March 23, 2000 ...................................................................................... 174
Notes .................................................................................................... 178
AFTERWORD: A CHRONOLOGY ................................................................... 180
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 182

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: A VANTAGE POINT
A feminist’s representations of her experiences indicate her achievement of a
feminist standpoint. Her representations and re-representations of the same
experience can be placed on a continuum of her achievement of a lesbian
feminist standpoint. Her research project participates in and contributes to

feminist academic discourse.

The project claims that feminist knowledge is produced by women
understanding how reflective representations of their experiences are relevant to
their achievement of a feminist standpoint. Personal feminist understandings
have a Iiberatory effect for some women.

In a reflexive study of self in relationship to feminism, | place personal
narrative representations of selected experiences on a conceptual continuum of
my achievement of a feminist standpoint.“2 Integral to my achievement is my
changing sexuality. The more identified with women I became politically-socially-
personally, the greater my access to the “education” required for my achieving a
feminist standpoint and the less compulsory my heterosexuality. This study
follows Nancy Hartsock’s theorizing of feminism. She claims it as “...a mode of
analysis, a method of approaching life and politics, rather than a set of political
conclusions about the oppression of women.”3 This study examines the
intersections of epistemology, representation, and memory as they are contained

within and informed by a theoretical framework of women’s autobiography and

the achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint. Through autobiographical
representation of personal experiences woven from memory I come to feminist
knowledge. In this project: autobiographical representation is the method;
personal experiences, mediated through memory and understandings, are the
raw materials; and feminist practice as knowledge is the product.

Epistemology for purposes of this project is the feminist meaning I make
of experiences in my life. Representations are written narratives that express the
evolving meanings I make of my experiences. Issues of representation also
include whom I speak as and for whom I speak for. I speak as a chronologically
old, white, lesbian, feminist woman. It is without intention that I speak for anyone
else. Nor do I imagine my representations are necessarily representations of
other women’s experiences, or of those who may identify with some of who I am.

Remembering is how I recuperate the meanings I have made and make. Issues
of epistemology include how the achievement of a feminist standpoint, a position
of knowledge, both is constituted and constitutes how we represent our
experiences to ourselves and to others.

Because much feminist theorizing often exempts individual women and
their individual experiences, my work places at its center my experiences and the
feminist meanings l have made and make of them in relationship to the degree
of my achievement of a particular feminist standpoint. In this privileging of the
personal I add an individual perspective to bodies of feminist knowledge. I do
not claim to speak for any other oId-white-lesbian-feminist, although some

women, whether old, white, lesbian, or feminist may recognize something of their

own experiences in mine, and be informed. The meanings made of my
experiences change in relationship to the greater access to feminism I achieve.
My work exemplifies feminism’s grounding in women’s experiences, and
retrieves from generalization and abstraction the individual woman and her
individual experiences. The value of this work is its demonstration of a retrieval
of meanings an individual woman makes of her experiences. It provides a model
for other women to do the same. Further, many personal meaning makings of
many personal experiences can be in place so that individual women might
recognize themselves in feminist theorizing to contribute to their own achieving of
a feminist standpoint. By placing my representations of my experiences at the
center of my study, I claim that the personal voice, reflexive and retrospective, in
feminist scholarship is intellectual, Iiberatory, and interesting.
The Problem

With a critical eye on patriarchal discourses and practices in which
experiences are lived, constructed, and interpreted, feminist theorists of women
place women’s experiences at the center of their analysis and articulate
meanings of them. Feminist scholars glean the experiences of women from
anecdotal material, letters, memoir, diaries, poetry, historical documents,
surveys, interviews and myriad other representations of individual women’s lives.
To theorize, theorists generalize and abstract from these representations, and
individual women and their experiences become textually invisible. Both the
researchers and the researched’s specific, local, individual experiences become

part of the collective and generalized, women’s experience. Individual women

become “everywoman.” In this textual disappearance a woman’s own
understandings of her lived experiences and the multiple meanings she makes
and remakes of them are unavailable to researchers and more importantly to
other individual women spinning feminist understandings of their own. 4 Theory
by nature is abstract, general, and collective, not idiosyncratic, personal, and
specific. As a feminist scholar of how one gains access to feminist meaning
making of one’s own experiences, and with a feminist interest in the genre of
autobiography, I tell my stories interpreted and informed by feminist theorists and
their theories and retain my own voice and subjectivities.

Nancy Miller in Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Oth_<-)_r
Autobiographical Acts, speaks of a limited personalism in feminist criticism as a
risk worth taking in order to maintain an edge of surprise in the predictable
margins of organized resistance. My work is not to displace feminist theories
that abstract out individual women and their experiences. My work is to augment
these theories with what Miller speaks of as “limited personalism - at least a
movement of a few more degrees in self-consciousness.”5

Personal criticism, 3 term used in Miller’s book, entails an explicitly
autobiographical performance within the act of criticism.6 A form of personal
criticism Miller distinguishes is cultural criticism articulated through personal
narrative, examples of which offered by Miller include, Joan Nestles’s A
Restricted Country, Audre Lorde’s Sister OutsideL bell hooks’ Talking BackI and
edited volumes like This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and

Gloria Anzuldua. It is most like the work in which I envision myself engaged.

Miller goes on to identify the poetics of personal criticism: confessional,
locational, academic, political, narrative, anecdotal.7 Miller's “...case for personal

writing entails the reclaiming of theory: turning theory back on itself.”8

Theoretical Frameworks: Women’s Autobiography

“Autobiography becomes both the process and the product of assigning
meaning to a series of experiences after they have taken place, by means of
juxtaposition, commentary, omission”, writes autobiographical theorist Sidonie
Smith.9 Within feminist methodology, writing various representations of personal
experiences produces knowledge and is Iiberatory.” In naming, defining, and
writing our experiences, knowledge is produced that is personal and collective. It
contributes to and is feminist discourse.11 As feminism critically centers women
and their experiences, I critically center personal narratives of the meanings in
feminism I have made and make over time of my experiences. The meanings
exemplified in autobiographical writing both constitute and are constituted by the
degree of my achievement of a feminist standpoint. Other women doing the
same thing, articulating and understanding their experiences contextually and
reflexively, results in a body of feminist knowledge and contributes to feminist
discourses.

Autobiography can be understood as a representation of a life. Personal
narratives of my experiences are articulated representations of them. How I
represent my experiences and re-represent them is relative to the degree of my

achievement of a feminist standpoint and my representations and re-

representations can be placed upon a continuum of that achievement. In her
claim of the levels of reality, in Hartsock’s theorizing of a feminist standpoint is
that “the vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and
represents an achievement that requires both science to see beneath the
surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate and education
that can only grow from struggle to change those relations."12 Paradoxically a
personal narrative is not only representative of my achievement it is also an act
of achieving. It is from within my current achievement of a feminist standpoint
that I struggle to articulate my former and current experiences.”

My movement from compulsory heterosexuality to my chosen lesbian
sexuality is concurrent with my achieving of a feminist standpoint. Personal
narratives of my experiences both produce and represent them. The
representation is part of the theory and analysis. These critical articulations
could be similar to representations of other women’s position (within patriarchy)
and can produce a Iiberatory effect for some women. For purposes of this
project, the written representations of my past experiences are from my current
white, old, lesbian, feminist standpoint and are recuperated from memory. As
the personal narratives as artifacts are exemplars of the status/degree of
achievement of a feminist standpoint as well as of movement along the
continuum of lesbian existence they are also epistemological tools. I am both at
the same time representing my feminist standpoint as I am also achieving it. In
my achievement I spin the continuum of both my feminist standpoint and my

lesbian existence.

In an investigation of autobiography at the crossroads of “writing” and
“selfhood,” Shari Benstock argues that “self” and “life” do not come together in
writing: there is no unified self. One definition of autobiography, she suggests, is
that it is an effort to recapture the self. This is a common understanding of
autobiography but it assumes there is a “self” that is “knowable.” This is not so,
writes Benstock. “What begins in a presumption of self-knowledge ends up in
the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction.”14 The
self of today is not the self of yesterday and the self of yesterday cannot be truly
represented by today’s self or even immediately after the experience. Writing is
not a “self.” It does not even represent a self. It is fiction that attempts to make
sense of memories of experience or experiences. And as I write my experiences
to represent accurately an historic, personal and political self, I operate with a

wavering assumption that what I write will also represent my life, my self.

Will my story, one of personal narrative, cast-on stitches of a female
symbolic, Daly-language, be heard from its locations on the margins of academic

discourse, feminist theorizing, and autobiographical patrilineage?

Bettina Aptheker in Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s
Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experiences writes of starting her work
with women’s experience and forming patterns from it.15 Aptheker turns to
Adrienne Rich as a feminist theorist who, in Of Women Born wrote of her

experience of motherhood and transformed it into knowledge.16 In Aptheker, is a

quote from Sheila Rowbotham that informed Aptheker: “In order to create an
alternative an oppressed group must as once shatter the self-reflecting world
which encircles it and at the same time, project its own image onto history. In
order to discover its own identity as distinct from that of the oppressor it has to
become visible to itself”.17 By the same token, in order for her to have her own
voice, she must speak her own experience. In the academy, generally to speak
from personal experience is to speak and often not be heard. To include one’s
personal experiences in academic writing is to have them often dismissed and to
be charged with idiosyncrasy, or have what is written labeled merely anecdotal.

Being in the academy and working within the genre of autobiography my
voice adopts the structures, values and perceptions of the university that
generally devalues and demeans personal experiences. Aptheker calls it the
subjugation of the life of the mind that renders the speaker at a loss of
confidence in her knowledge: in knowing what she knows. It takes away her
ability to give expression to experience. It is as if to colonize the minds of
women. “At the heart of the colonization is a belief in the superiority of men; in
the superiority of male judgment and authority; and the absolute priority given to
achieving male approval and validation.18
Memory

Memory is the raw material from which autobiographically I make feminist
meaning of my past. “Memory," writes Gayle Green, “revises, reorders,
refigures, resignifies; it includes or omits, embellishes or represses, decorates or

drops, according to imperatives of its own.”19 Charla L. Markham Shaw writes,

“the presentation of self takes the form of personal narrative when our memories
take shape through language.”20 Remembering is the means I use to connect
my past with my present. Memory then is both the raw material and the spinner
of my evolving self and the evolving feminist versions I make of my
experiences.21 Memory is not separate from my thinking, from my meaning
making. Memory is an effect of my mind. My mind shapes, orders, and selects
my memory.

Re-membering, “active un-forgetting”,22 is close to the core of feminism
and through strategies of consciousness-raising, speaking out, witnessing, and
personal narratives, feminists assemble representations of women’s lives. In
telling our lives we locate parts of our selves lost in individual as well as
collective memory. Consciousness-raising (CR), the ground on which second
wave feminism rests, is about re-membering. Women, among women, bring to
mind and verbalize memories of past experiences. In applying a feminist critique
alternative versions of women’s experiences are created in the conversations. It
is on this ground that autobiography also achieves a feminist standpoint.

Speaking out publicly about our private experiences is both a political and
a personal strategy. Women, through speaking their experiences at marches, on
courthouse steps, in newspapers and newsletters, gain public support and offer
opportunities for other women to claim their own experiences. Women learn to
value the meaning making of their lives as well as make new meaning in the
telling. It is through re-remembering that we collectively and individually create

feminist meaning making of our individual and collective past.

Crucial to the achievement of a feminist standpoint is its transforrnative
imperative. The nature of a feminist standpoint is to change the social relations
between women and men. In order to bring about change we must remember
our past, both collectively and individually. Women seeking change must
particularly be concerned with the past. It is through autobiography that I create
a record of the meaning making of my past experiences. It is an individual
memory of our collective past upon which l/we can build a feminist standpoint.
By going back individually I allow for a transformed future both for some

individual women and for the collective woman.

Feminist Standpoint

Feminist standpoint, an epistemological tool developed by Nancy
Hartsock, uses Marx’s approach to class domination to provide a framework
useful to feminists in theorizing male supremacy and other forms of domination.
Following Marx’s claim that the point of view of the oppressed class reveals a
less partial and distorted account of social relations, the oppressed class is
therefore in a better position to change them. Hartsock claims a feminist
standpoint, based on the sexual division of labor. Claims of a standpoint are that
material life structures understanding and material life is understood within the
concept of opposing dualities. In a materialist feminist approach based on this
sexual division of labor, in which “women as a sex are institutionally responsible
for producing both goods and human beings...” it is claimed that women’s lives

differ structurally from those of men, and in this difference women have access

10

to and can achieve a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy.
From this Iiberatory access and achievement, women effect change.23
The nature of a standpoint includes a distinct epistemological claim that

“the vision [knowledge] available to the oppressed group must be struggled for
and represents an achievement which requires both science to see beneath the
surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the
education which can only grow from struggle to change those relations."24 It is
the achievement nature of a standpoint that spins the continuum conceptualized
in this work. “To achieve a feminist standpoint one must engage in the
intellectual and political struggle necessary to see nature and social life from the
point of view of that disdained activity which produces women’s social
experiences instead of from the partial and perverse perspective available from
the ‘ruling gender’ experience of men.”25 It is my intellectual, political, and
personal quest to have greater access to feminist theorizing and analysis by

increasing my achievement of a feminist standpoint.

Representation

My motivation is to represent an individual achievement of feminist
standpoint as a useful example of the process so that some women might
themselves take advantage of access available to them as women to engage in
the struggle to achieve a feminist standpoint. Prior to this engagement an
individual woman may not have a useful understanding of herself as other than

an individual. It is that woman that I seek as my audience. Although she may be

11

a member of groups of women, such as a sorority; or she may be a player on a
softball team; or she may be among the group of women who are mothers: she
may still understand herself as an individual with individual agency and not
necessarily understand herself as a member of a collective with less individual
agency. She might not have the understanding, before entering the struggle to
achieve a feminist standpoint that she is who she is, in a male dominated,
patriarchal society, because of her membership in the class woman and its
relationship to the class man. She might not have a consciousness of who she
is in other relations of power either. Following Marxism, she is who she is
because of what she does, what she does is determined by her membership in
the class woman, and is of importance to feminist theorists. I understand this,
accept it, argue for it, and still have a keen interest in the individual woman. Not
because the individual is so interesting and so important but I want to engage
her in the struggle to achieve a feminist standpoint.

“Marxist and socialist feminists alike believe women’s oppression is not
the result of an individual’s intentional actions but is the product of the political,
social, and economic structures within which individuals live."26 Women’s
oppression is not a result of an individual’s actions, but individuals live in and
contribute to the political, social and economic structures that produce their
oppression. They experience it individually as well as collectively. In the eariy
70's, consciousness-raising (CR) groups were often women's first experience of
feminism. Individual women came and spoke together of their experiences.

This speaking and listening gave them and others an opportunity to understand

12

how their experiences were shaped more by the fact that they were women, than
by the fact of their individuality. Iris Young writes that unless we conceptualize
women as a group, which was accomplished in CR, “it is not possible to
conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process.”27
Our experiences as individuals contribute to an understanding of the
collective of women. This is not to say that all women’s experiences are the
same. We are not oppressed/powerless/Iess powerful all the same, but how we
are oppressed is relative to the interplay of our fluid movement between multiple
social locations within the relations of power. Your experience, my experience
and the next woman’s experience do not add up to the generalized women’s
experience. It is useful that hers, mine, and their experience be understood in
the context of them being the experience of Women, not in the context of the
experience being of an individual. But still we cannot ignore the individual
woman. Her experiences are the data, as well as the catalyst for thought.28
What can be known of her experiences may not be as interesting as what can be
known about them as in relationship to her being a' member of the class woman.
Understanding her experiences thus provides an access to an understanding of
gendered relations of power.
The individual woman, as a worker is a member of the working class. She

is also a member of the class woman, and of a racial class; and may also be
simultaneously a member of the class old, or/and lesbian, and of a

neighborhood, and of the class graduate student, and so forth. What defines

these groups is intricately interconnected systems of unequal power relations.

13

Different systems of power make one’s membership in a group or groups a
determinant(s) in her membership in other groups. It is understanding these
relations that is more relevant, and interesting to feminist theorists, yea even
activists, than understanding an individual’s experiences. It is from her
experiences though that we gain an understanding of these power relations.
Some memberships are more determinant than others are. How I am “white” is
more important in terms of my social location than how I am a president of my
neighborhood association. And being white, lesbian, old, a student, are all inter-
related to how I got to be and howl am a neighborhood president. A member's
position in relation to power among groups determines the vantage point from
which she can gain an understanding of the distribution of power. To be in a
less powerful social position, as women are relative to men, as lesbians are
relative to straight women, etc. is to have a certain access to a more complete
understanding of the asymmetry of certain power relations than those in the
more powerful social position. Although feminist standpoint epistemology is
understanding the asymmetry of the power relations of sex, it is also based on
the understanding of the power relations of class. These understandings then
are useful to other groups defined by systems of power. A standpoint is an
oppositional framework from which one has access to views of power relations.
Marxist feminists believe social existence determines consciousness.29
How I came to struggle for a feminist standpoint no doubt began in my woman-
dominated family history. But my desire and intention spun from my self-

conscious gendered experiences, which as I achieved a feminist standpoint I

14

grew to understand as shaped by the historical, political and personal power

relations in which I lived.

Lesbian Feminist Standpoint

Feminists critically analyze the patriarchally defined power relations
between women and men in which the class woman is subordinate to and
oppressed by the class man. Within our patriarchally structured culture the class
man is dominant in power relations over the class woman. Feminists understand
power relations between women and men as being further defined by other
structures of power including racism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, etc.
Feminists seek further understandings of how and in what respects asymmetrical
power structures determine things about us and what we do, and how we do
what we do. These understandings are not only cognitive. We come to feminist
understandings through our practices as women and as feminists. It is in my
practice as a feminist that I am more skilled at being a feminist and achieving a
feminist standpoint, while at the same time I diminish my skill of practicing the
patriarchally constructed heterosexual woman. In the diminishment of my
practice of heterosexuality I became a lesbian. Thus, my achievement of a
feminist standpoint is concurrent with my spinning the continuum of my lesbian
existence.

A tracing of my achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint draws on a
combination of Adrienne Rich’s conceptualizing a continuum of lesbian existence

and Nancy Hartsock's feminist standpoint epistemology. In 1980, Rich’s theory

15

of the continuum of lesbian existence confronts the bias of compulsory
heterosexuality, current in literature generally, but her interest is in the bias
among feminists. This bias prevents feminists from recognizing and studying
heterosexuality as a political institution and a source of male power. Rich
argues, “A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is
long overdue.” 3° Using the concept of the continuum as a tool, Rich theorizes
the continuum of lesbian existence, “to include a range -through each woman’s
life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience.” Rich posits that this
continuum would expand beyond understanding lesbian existence as being only
a desired sexual experience with another woman to also “embrace many forms
of primary intensity between and among women...including the bonding against
male tyranny...” Through each woman's life and throughout history, notes Rich,
she is and women are on the continuum of lesbian existence, and feminist’s
erasure, neglect, and denial of this material reality of women’s lives contributes
to heterosexuality as compulsory.31

Feminist standpoint theory and “the” continuum of lesbian existence are
both tools of knowledge. Both are theorized by feminists whose theorizing roots
emanate from a Marxist point of view. Both ways of knowing are grounded in the
material reality of the knower. In the case of feminist standpoint, the material
reality of being a woman in a patriarchal society provides women access to a
less distorted and less perverse knowledge of male supremacy than that of men.
An understanding of Rich is that the material reality of lesbians is sexuality, and

being a lesbian is a material reality of being women-centered as opposed to the

16

male-centeredness of female heterosexuality. Within patriarchy, the material
reality of lesbian’s sexuality places lesbians in a subordinate position to
heterosexual women, and following Hartsock’s standpoint theory, it gives lesbian
women access to a less distorted and less perverse knowledge of the
compulsory nature of heterosexuality.

Adrienne Rich argues heterosexuality is a powerful patriarchal institution,
in which the presumption is that sexual desire for the opposite sex is innate and
natural. Homosexuality is therefore deviant, unnatural, and perverse. Rich
writes that heterosexuality is made compulsory in its character as a “cluster of
forces within which women have been convinced that marriage, and sexual
orientation toward men are inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive
components in their lives.” 32 Within the cluster of forces is the erasure of lesbian
existence, however Rich claims lesbian existence as a reality and as a source of
knowledge and power available to women.33 Rich conceptualizes lesbian
existence as a continuum. I draw on her conceptualization to illuminate my
lesbian existence, which began with my matriarchal lineage and moves to my
current degree of achievement of an old-white-lesbian-feminist standpoint.
Along this continuum I place personal narrative representations of memories of
various experiences. These narratives at the beginning of the continuum
epitomize my compulsory heterosexuality, and as l spin the continuum of my
lesbian existence and my achieving a feminist standpoint, narratives of the same
experience change.

Lesbian professor of feminist philosophy Marilyn Frye theorized the

17

question about the relationship between being a feminist and being a lesbian, in
“Willful Virgin or Do You Have to be a Lesbian to be a Feminist?” It has been the
lesbian feminists or the feminists who are lesbians who have insisted on the
connection between lesbianism and feminism.34 ln fear of being suspected of
being a lesbian or of approving of lesbianism, and with anger at lesbian feminists
for being active, present and assertive, many white heterosexual feminists, as
well as some lesbians, particularly the closeted ones, denied and defended
against the connection being made?5 Frye posits the connection between
lesbianism and feminism as lodged in the “profoundly political” nature of “sexual
acts, sexual desire, and sexual dread and taboo." She argues further “feminist
politics is as much about the disposition of bodies, the manipulation of desire
and arousal, and the bonds of intimacy and loyalty as it is about gender
stereotypes, economic opportunity and legal rights.” 36

Frye claims the connections:

I believe that all feminist theory and practice eventually conveys one

to this proposition: that a central constitutive dynamic and key

mechanism of the global phenomenon of male domination,

oppression and exploitation of females, is near-universal female

heterosexuality. All of the institutions and practices which constitute

and materialize this domination (and simultaneously organize males’

lives in relation to each other) either manufacture, regulate and

enforce female heterosexuality, or both.3’7

Feminists theorize heterosexuality as both constituting and being
constituted in and by the institutionalized asymmetrical power relations of

patriarchy. Heterosexuality enforces the oppression and subordination of

women and the privilege and dominance of men. Heterosexuality is compulsory

18

in a dominant Euro-American culture and most other cultures. Compulsory
female heterosexuality systematically advantages practicing heterosexuals while
also actively disadvantaging people who are other than heterosexual. Two
examples of these exertions of power include naturalizing heterosexuality and
de-naturalizing alternatives. Heterosexism is the granting of economic, legal,
moral, societal authorization to heterosexuals and withholding economic
benefits, legality, morality, and authenticity. The compulsoriness of
heterosexuality is practiced through normalizing, modeling, promoting, and
hegemonically projecting heterosexual’s assumed universality, and the negative
stereotyping, thereby systematically disadvantaging lesbians, and other non-
heterosexual people. Patriarchy is constituted by the sexual accessibility of
females to males. Feminists understand this and lesbian feminists disrupt,
challenge, and make visible their inaccessibility to male heterosexual desire.
Gaining an awareness of the status quo precedes practice. It is my awareness
of women as subordinate to and oppressed by men and in my struggle to change
this asymmetrical power arrangement that moved women to the center of my
consciousness and desire, which quickly became primary. It was then that I
moved from a white, heterosexual, feminist perspective to one of being lesbian

centered, as a white feminist.38

Mechanics:
For stylistic and clarification purposes, in this project I establish particular

conventions of the use of font styles, justification, and capitalization. Font style

19

indicates changes in voice and time. For commentary, I use Ariel. Commentary
is generally taking place today, in the year 2002. It is in the commentaries that l

contextualize, historisize and discuss.

For representations of past experiences, generally in
narrative form, I use Courier New. Personal narratives are
the raw material; they are the Catalysts for thought; they
represent my current memory of the meaning I made then of an
experience. Whether the then is early in the continuum or

later.

I also use a convention of asides. I indicate them in Italics and they are light

justified.

Following Mary Daly, use capitalization practices to indicate a gesture
toward a female symbolic. Capitalizing words, not generally capitalized in this
work indicates movement to the Background behind the foreground of
masculinist, patriarchal, phallocratic thinking and dominant reality. Not
capitalizing those words that are capitalized in common English usage also

indicates the common capitalization of them emanates from the foreground.

Method
Conceptualized as spinning as well as traveling along a spiraled
continuum of lesbian existence in conjunction with the achievement of a feminist

standpoint, this is a study of my present self, evolved in relationship to

20

feminism.39 Temporally, the continuum spans over four decades. As the “self”
struggles for and achieves a level of knowledge and has access to a mode of
interpretation, it spins a spiraling continuum of the achievement of a lesbian
feminist standpoint. It is a self that is constituted in the writing of it. It is a self
that is both represented and representing. As examples, I resurrect from
memory individual experiences. In several written representations of the same
experience I query how these representations can be placed in relationship to
the level of my achievement of a particular feminist standpoint. I represent my
experiences in writing as I remember living them in a particular personal, historic,
and political context and howl re-represented them as my achievement of a
feminist standpoint grew. Concurrent with this achievement is a movement from
heterosexuality to a lesbian existence.

Although a concept of a continuum generally suggests coherency,
chronology and linearity, the representations of my experiences indicate a “self”
that is multiple, shifting, overlapping and conflicting. To offset this assumed
linearity l conceptualize the spiraling downward continuum as being spun as I
move along it. This spiral indicates that as I move along the continuum l have
access to that which I have already spun. Further I can re-spin it as I go along.
Much like being on a mountain trail that switches back and forth in order to reach
a destination above or below. On such a path a traveler can see where she has
been and has a vision of where she might be going—or not. The concept of
continuum used in this project also assumes all representations and experiences

are cumulative. Within the achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint, I build

21

on, revise, and/or delete former understandings for new understandings. All that
has gone before is a part of what is. I use my experiences and how I re-member
them, as indicative of who I was personally, politically and historically and to both
represent and re-present and reflect my achievement of a feminist standpoint.
With the presumption that from the gender consciousness of my familial
background I struggled for and achieved a feminist standpoint and struggled for
and achieved a lesbian feminist standpoint, my interest is how my
representations of each experience change relative to my access to a feminist
standpoint. My representations, are not only exemplary of my achievement, they
are also a continuous act of achieving.

It is as a feminist, and upon a feminist framework, rich in the tradition of
self-examination and sharing of the personal, that I apply my research.
Feminism, both politically and philosophically has recognized the personal as
fundamental to our projects. Laurel Richardson in “Writing: A Method of Inquiry”
posits that “writing is a way of knowingna method of discovery and analysis.”40
Therefore to interrogate my experience(s) as to how, why and what knowledge is
produced, I write them.41 Built on the framework of multiple contexts, various
locations and material circumstances, and the fashioning of a feminist
standpoint, these stories represent my re-membered perceptions. They
demonstrate the changing nature of these perspectives and will be interrogated
for the feminist conditions within which perspectives change.

These autobiographical narratives are shaped by my position in graduate

school in an interdisciplinary background that includes Women's Studies with an

22

interest in the historic nature of my narratives; Feminist Philosophy to provide me
more complex understandings of feminist standpoint, compulsory
heterosexuality, and lesbian feminist theory; and in a sub-genre of
autobiography, theory and practice, based in feminism and postmodernism to
provide methodological frameworks which query the referentiality, performance

and representational nature of my writing.

Literature:
one voice of experience. ..

There are many feminisms, and Virginia Olesen writes in “Feminisms and
Models of Qualitative Research” in The Handbook of Qualitative ReseaLch42 that
all “share the outlook that it is important to center and make problematic
women’s diverse situations and institutions and frames that influence those
situations...”43 Olesen further writes that feminists use a variety of styles but
interpreting human actions found in women's reports of experience, their stories,
can be the focus of research. Bonnie Mann in an introduction to Gvn/Ecology
writes of battered women who read Mary Daly in the process of understanding
the meaning of their lives. Mann writes, “when a woman tells her life story, the
vantage point from which she is able to tell it, to understand and explain what
she did, and the depth at which other women are able to hear it, to hear the

meaning of her actions, determine ultimately the meaning of her life.”44

many voices of experience...

23

Lorraine Code, critiques positivist epistemology and its anti-narrative
stance and writes of a storied epistemology. In “Voice and Voicelessness,” an
essay in Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locatjons she argues that
stories provide the multiplicity of voices of which “knowledge(s) and
epistemologies are made...”45 It is this multiplicity of voices that appear as
disappeared in feminist knowledge when the individual woman and her individual
experiences are eschewed. Might bodies of individual women’s feminist
knowledge be likened to a quilt, the AIDS quilt to be specific? A person’s story is
represented in a square. All the squares together make up the quilt. Viewers of
the quilt create an understanding of AIDS and of the people who have lived and
died with AIDS, and make connections to their own lives and even their
anticipated deaths. In the AIDS quilt one gets the sense that the individual and
her or his experience is not diminished through generalization and abstraction.

A non-story...

Autobiography reproduces the patrilineage and ideologies of gender,
Sidonie Smith argues in A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography.46 The ideology of
gender makes a woman’s life script a non-story. Fictionalized thus, women are
autobiographically silenced. They may write their stories privately in letters,
journals, and diaries. But publicly they are culturally silenced.
Autobiographically, the self of women discursively constructed is not a self-
representation of the woman. Her story of a self created in patriarchy is the story
created by men. In order for her story to be heard it must be written in the

language of the reader. The reader is also patriarchally constructed. If in telling

24

her story she challenges these gendered life scripts, she does so on the margins
of the discourse within which it is constructed. On the margins, she is unheard
and “...always removed from the center of power within the culture she
inhabits.”47
In a complex discussion of woman seeking authority to write her story
publicly, Smith writes that the female autobiographer commits herself to a
“patrilineal” contract. Appropriating the speaking posture of the representative
man to gain autobiographical authority, the woman writes her “father’s” story.
Repressing the “mother” in her, she recuperates her self in the symbolic order of
patriarchy.48 In my story of overcoming compulsory heterosexuality, and the
achievement of a feminist standpoint, I wonder if I committed to a patrilineal

contract and am telling my story in the speaking posture of the representative

man? If so, how do I break this contract and restore the “mother?”

Spinning a story...
Mary Daly writes of the necrophilia of patriarchy at the foreground or

surface of our lives and implores that we journey “for the lesbian imagination in
all women" below the surface deep into the life-giving Background, of the
connections of all women's lives, past, present and future.49 Daly insists that we
can and must Dis-cover new time and space, that there is something profoundly
positive beyond what men have done to us. She implores that we move to the
edge of a radical question like “who am I?” as an existential leap into free space.

Where man is not at the center. A free space of remembering. This is not

25

without its struggles, this leap into the unknown.50

Spinning deeply into the Background requires an understanding of the
constraints and restraints of the oppressions of patriarchy, and the injustices of
distributions of power. Like the achievement of a feminist standpoint this
understanding is not just available to us because we are women, the
Background is not just a resistance to or a reforming of the foreground. It
becomes available to those who take the leap and spin out of control. Since the
Background is outside the scope of what we understand as reality, we have to
make what is “real" the illusion and understand what is as illusionary, real.

The journey is for each individual traveler to expand the scope of this
imagination within her. “It is she and she alone,” writes Daly of the joumeyer,
“who can determine how far, and in what way, she will/can travel. She, and she
alone, can Dis-cover the mystery of her own history, and find how it is interwoven
with the lives of other women.”51 In the manner of the “Mother” then I imagine a
Background of connections of women’s stories, of women’s achievements of and

struggles for a feminist standpoint.

 

‘ “Reflexivity is located in treating one’s self as subject for intellectual inquiry, and it encapsulates
the socialized, non-unitary and changing self posited in feminist social thought,” Liz Stanley. “On
Auto/biography in Sociology,” Sociology, Vol 27:1, February 1993, pp. 41-52 (48).

2 Hartsock, Nancy. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for Specifically Feminist
Historical Materialism, in Feminism and Methodology. Sandra Harding, ed. (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1987).

3 Hartsock, Nancy. “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” in Building Feminist
Them: Essays from Quest a Feminist Quarterly. Charlotte Bunch, et al., eds. (New York:
Longman, 1981 ), pp. 32-42 (35).

‘ “I place Black women’s experiences and ideas at the center of analysis,” Patricia Hill Collins:
Black Feminist Thouoht , 2"d edition (New York: Routledge, 2000), xii; “ ‘ Feminist’ for me implies

26

 

assuming a perspective in which women’s experiences, ideas and needs (different and differing
as they may be) are valid in their own right...” Renate Duelli Klein: “How To Do What We Want To
Do: Thoughts about Feminist Methodology,” in Theories of Women’s Studies. Gloria Bowles and
Renate Duelli Klein, eds. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 89; “A feminist method
builds on experience and accepts subjective experiences as valid forms of existence.” Pamala
Moss, “Focus: Feminism as Method,” The Canadian Geomapher, 37:1 1993, pp. 48-61 (48);
“...the importance of the personal is fundamental to feminist philosophy. That is, accounts of the
personal constitute not only a realm for examination and discussion, but also the subject-matter of
feminist theory and thus the basis of feminist political activity,” Liz Stanley and Sue Wise:
“Feminist Research, Feminist Consciousness, and Experiences of Sexism” in Beyond
Methodology: Feminist Schola_rshib§s Lived Reseajm, 1991, Margaret Fonow and Judith A.
Cook, eds, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 265-283, p. 266.

5 Miller, Nancy, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, (New
York: Routledge, 1991 ), p. xiv.

 

6 Miller, p. 1.
7 Miller, p. 3.
8 Miller, p. 5.

9 Smith, Sidonie, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiogrpphy: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-
representation,_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 45.

1° There are many feminisms, “these many voices share the outlook that it is important to center
and make problematic women's diverse situations and the institutions and frames that influence
those situations, and then refer the examination of that problematic to theoretical, policy, or action
frameworks in the interest of realizing social justice for women.” Virginia Olesen, “Feminisms and
Models of Qualitative Research” in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of
Qualitative Research, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 158-174 (158), citing
M. Eichler, “The Relationship Between Sexist, Non-Sexist, Woman-Centered and Feminist
Research,” Studies in Communicatifl, 3, 37-74 (68).

 

'1 Williams, Patricia J ., The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diagy of a Law Professor, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991).

‘2 Hartsock 1987, p. 160.

‘3 Hartsock 1987, p. 159.

1‘ Benstock, Shari, “Authorizing the Autobiographical” in Women, Autobiography. Theory: A
Reader, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,

1998) pp. 145-155 (146).

‘5 Aptheker, Bettina, Epestries of Life: Women’s Work. Women’fionsciousness, and the
Meaning of Daily Experience (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), p. 11.

‘6 Aptheker, p. 17, citing Rich, Adrienne, Of Women Born: Motherhood gs Experience egg
Institution, (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 201-202.

‘7 Rowbotham, Sheila. Women’s Consciousness, Ma_n’s World p.27, in Aptheker, p. 11.

‘8 Aptheker, pp. 135-136.

27

 

‘9 Green, Gayle, “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory,” in The Second Signs Reader:
Feminist Schola_rship. 1983—1996, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Barbara Laslett, eds., (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 184-215 (188).

2° Shaw, Charla L. Markham, “Personal Narrative: Revealing Self and Reflecting Other,” Human
Communication Research, 1997, 24:2, pp. 302-319.

2‘ “...Woolf calls memory a ‘seamstress’ who ‘runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and
thither.” Note 26, Green, p. 192, citing. Woolf, Virginia, Orlando, (New York: Harcourt Brace 81
Co., 1956), p. 78.

 

22 Daly, Mary and Jane Caputo, Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickeg‘ry of the Englm
Language, (Toronto, New York: Women’s Press, Ltd. 1998) p. 92 “Re—membering: Re—calling
the Original intuition of Integrity; healing the dismembered self—the Goddess within women; Re-
calling the primoidial connections/conversations among women, animals, and other elemental
beings. 2. Realizing the power to See and to Spell out connections among apparently disparate
phenomena: Spinning, Creating.”

23 Hartsock, 1987, p. 164.

2‘ Hartsock, 1987, p. 163.

2" Hartsock 1987, pp. 159-160.

26 Tong, Rosemary, “Marxist and Socialist Feminism” in Feminist Thought: A More
Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), p. 95.

27 Young, Iris, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking About Women as a Social Collective,” Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture a_nd Society. 1994, 19:3, pp. 713-738.

28 “We have used our experiences as catalysts for thought, and as some of the implications of our
experiences sink in, we have also asked serious questions of church and state,” Sidney Abbott
and Barbara Love, Sappho Wa_s A Right-On Womgp (New York: Day Book, 1978), p. 14.

29 Tong, p. 95.

3° Rich, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry
and Prose, Barbara Charlesworth Gepi and Alber Gelpi, eds., (New York: WW. Norton & Co.
1993), pp. 203-224 (205-206).

3‘ Rich, p. 217.

32 Rich, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture apd Society. 1980, vol 5:4 pp 631-660.

33 Rich 1980, p. 633.

3‘ Frye, Marilyn, “Willful Virgin or Do You Have To Be A Lesbian To Be A Feminist,” in The Willful
Virgin (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1992) pp 124-137.

35 Abbott and Love, chapters 5 and 6: “Mirage” and “Lesbianism and Feminism.”
3'6 Frye, 1992. pp. 124-125.

3’ Frye, 1992, p. 129.

28

 

3’8 Penelope, Julia, Call Me Lesbian: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Theory. (Freedom, CA: The Crossing
Press, 1992) “The Lesbian Perspective," pp. 39-59.

3" Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metpethics of Radical Feminism, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990)
Throughout Daly’s work she uses, among others, metaphors of spinning, and spiraling, weaving
and spinsters. Further she uses words, in some cases through re-configuring them, to indicate a
Background conceptualization. For instance Re—membering, “as active unforgetting.” l adopt
some of her language in this project

4° Richardson, Laurel, “Writing: A Method of Inquiry" in Handbook of Qualitative Research.
Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications, 1994 pp.
516-529.

‘1 Daly, 1990, “I simply risked leaping into the process of gynocentric writing, which meant that
the work, in a real sense, created itself,” p. xix.

‘2 Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., The Hapdbook of Qualitative Resea_r_cm
Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications, 1994.

‘3 Oleson, p. 158.

4‘ Mann, Bonnie Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, (Boston: Beacon Press,
1990), p. xii.

‘5 Code, Lorraine, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York: Routledge,
1995,p.161.

‘6 Smith, Sidonie, “Woman’s Story and the Engenderings of Self-Representation” in A Poetics of
Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-RepreseLMtions. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.

‘7 Daly,1990 p. 51.

4“ Smith, pp. 52-53.

‘9 A borrowed expression from the journal Sinister Wisdom, Gym/Ecology. P. xivii.

5° Mann, in Daly, 1990, p xxxvi.

5‘ Mann, in Daly, 1990, p. xlvii.

29

CHAPTER TWO
THE SOURCE...
Spinning back to the beginnings. . .In 1941, l the second daughter was bom to
the only daughter, of one of three daughters of a woman who homesteaded in
South Dakota at the end of the 19'" century. The threads lspin into my feminist
standpoint are from life stories of the women in my family.
Matrilineal Threads

The conceptual continuum on which I trace my achievement of a feminist
standpoint springs from my lineage of a woman-centered, white, working class,
heterosexual family structure. It is through the women, the enduring members of
my family that I know my family heritage. I don’t claim it as the only story. I don’t
even claim it as historically accurate. I do claim it as a gendered consciousness,
from which was spun my achievement of a feminist standpoint.

Lisa Marie Hogeland makes a distinction between gender consciousness
and feminist consciousness in an article in Ms. Magazine.1 “Gender
consciousness,” Hogeland writes, “takes two forms: awareness of women’s
vulnerability and celebration of women’s difference.” Planted deep in my
matriarchal lineage as a gender consciousness is the groundwork of my
achievement of a feminist standpoint. In Lesbian Nation, Jill Johnston writes of
this kind of consciousness as female chauvinism.2 Writing about being ill-
prepared for marriage, Johnston claims her women centered life in her early
years gave her an “...uninhibited chauvinism about my identity as female... I had

grown up it seems in a kind of fugitive hothouse of a matriarchy. 3 “Gender

30

consciousness,” or “female chauvinism” arose out of “my matriarchal hothouse”.
My early consciousness was prior to the engagement, the struggle, the science,
needed for it to be a feminist standpoint."4

My gender consciousness or female chauvinism began variously named:
women as victim or women as present - men as absent. This consciousness in
my women-centered life begins in beliefs, biases, and prejudices. Taught
through practice, by example and with spoken and unspoken messages, I
learned early the strength of women as victims of men. As the victim and in a
state of inchoate feminist awareness I acquired a pie-analytic mixed-message
belief in the moral superiority of women. However such a position of gender
consciousness is not a feminist standpoint, as theorized by Hartsock. This state
was a bias, a prejudice even, a mere position of interest, but not a feminist
standpoint.

From Marx’s critique of class, feminists theorizing standpoint epistemology
hold an understanding that women’s and men’s lives are structurally different
from each other and that the lived realities of women’s lives are profoundly
different from those of men. My mom and grandmother, not feminists or
Marxists also held an understanding of the lived realities of their lives as being
profoundly different from those of the men to whom they were related. The lived
realities for my mom and her mother were that they were often in the position of
being the sole support of themselves and their children. The men in their lives,
often the father of these women’s children, enjoyed a freedom to shirk financial

as well as social and personal responsibility for their wives and children. The

31

women held no such privilege and intuitively understood this though not in the
same way as someone knowing it from a feminist standpoint. My mom and my
grandmother understood it as just the way things are between women and men:
as if it were natural. My mom and her mother did not understand it as structural
difference, nor as being historic and subject to change. They did not have an
understanding of themselves as being exploited as women. They didn’t
understand the difference between the material reality of their lives and that of
the men in their lives as being lodged in the division of labor, which makes
women both the producer of children and of labor. The material reality of my
mom and grandmother’s lives was that they were white skinned, heterosexual,
they worked both inside and outside the home to support themselves and their
children, and they survived. The material reality of their lives was that as women
they were structurally closed out of jobs because of being women. As women
my mom and grandmother had access only to jobs that were low paying. In
them they were alienated from their labor and their work contributed more to the
finances of the men they worked for than to their own or their children’s financial
well-being.

My maternal family was farmers. They homesteaded to South Dakota late
in the 19th century. Centered in our family structure, women wove stories and
histories in which the men were marginal. Marriages in my family were
numerous and short-lived. Our children were daughters. My great-grandmother
Libby married four times and had three daughters. Her oldest daughter Nona

was my grandmother, who twice married, had one daughter Oriole, my mother.

32

When Oriole was very young her father and Nona’s husband abandoned them.
He took off and went west never to be heard from again, at least as far as the
family story goes. I never heard differently. Nona raised her only daughter to be
a first generation college graduate. After graduating from college as an English
major and an accomplished harp player, my mother Oriole moved to
Washington, DC, where she met and married my father. They had two
daughters. But while married to my mother, my father fathered another child
outside of his marriage to my mother causing my parents to divorce when l was
a small child. My mom remarried, had another daughter and survived that
husband and her next one.

A woman centered family structure is an act of resistance and marginal to
the prescribed patriarchal condition of a male-centered heterosexual family. My
white, lower middle-class, matrifocal lineage provides me an acquired resistant
understanding of women’s relationship with men. A local understanding that
women were smarter, emotionally and responsibly stronger, and were more
reliable than men was shaped in my experience growing up in a woman-centered
family. Our family’s existence, for all the immediate generations, depended upon
the women who maintained, sustained, and supported it. In the absence of
husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, and sons, our family consisted of mostly
women: aunts, grandmothers, sisters, mothers, and daughters. Our fathers and
husbands were distant even when present. We had few if any sons, our uncles
were shadowy figures of our powerful aunts, and a series of husbands of

cousins, aunts, mothers and grandmothers came and went. Women were the

33

source of our financial, emotional, and material well being. The temporary and
situational dependency to which we would sometimes revert was based more in
manipulation, luck, and exploitation than on needing a man to survive and define
us. And even in light of this, traditional archetypes made their presence known.

What over-rode my practical lived reality was a confused understanding of
the white-knight-on-a-white-horse archetype of my salvation. Our family’s local
and specific archetype of men was, “if one comes along, take him, make him
your own, and get from him what you can while you can get it.” I claim this as my
matriarchal lineage of an acquired bias, gender consciousness or female
chauvinism. I did not achieve it and did not have to work to understand in this
way. I knew it through anecdote, direct experience, and the hegemonic
discourse of the women of my family. One such discourse was the importance
of politics.

All through my life my mother and grandmother impressed upon me the
importance of voting. No wonder, for they each had known a time of being
unable to vote. My grandmother was a young adult and a single parent of a
young daughter in 1920, when in the United States women won their nearly
century long struggle for the right to vote. My grandmother passed on to her
daughter and her daughter’s daughter how much she valued voting. I associate
my active participation in even the most obscure of local elections with my
grandmother’s and mother’s insistence that we all vote. And there was a degree
of personal accountability in voting because I could be assured that I would be

asked by both my mother and her mother at election time about how and when I

34

had voted. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a suffragist who my Grandmother may
have heard speak. Gilman’s travels and speaking engagements took her to Iowa
where my grandmother lived. I can imagine that my grandmother and my
mother, both long engaged in their own financial independence may have been
influenced by Gilman’s work.

I asked my mother what she remembered about my grandmother,
Women’s Suffrage, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She offered that if Gilman
spoke before the Business and Professional Women’s (BPW) group in Sioux
City, Iowa, my grandmother could have been there. My mom didn’t have an
accessible personal memory of women winning the right to vote, she was only
seven years old, but she strongly asserted, affirrning the family injunction, “We
damned well better do it!”

My grandmother worked outside the home for a mortgage broker and was
involved in the BPW. My Mom’s reference to her mother‘s involvement in this
still existing organization creates yet another bridge to my own historical past.
My grandma, as a young woman, left to raise a child alone, saw the value of
being a member of an organization of women, like herself, surviving in a
business arena long before it was commonplace for a woman to do so. As a
businesswoman myself, I also joined many activist businesswomen’s
organizations.

Another vivid memory of how politics was of such value in my family, is of
my returning from school in the 1950s to my mother fiercely ironing and shouting

at the television set, as the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings

35

unfolded a parade of hate and fear. I can picture, in the corner of our living room
the 13" TV screen spewing forth small black and white pictures of small men
hurling suspicions, accusations, and guilt around as if they were preschoolers
tossing bean bags at a school fair. Disgusted with the happenings recorded and
beamed to her into her own living room, my mom kept on aggressively ironing as
she cursed Joe, made crude noises at Roy, and cheered the young Kennedy
boys. These moments of my mom’s political passions are etched deeply into my
personal memory and mark the ethics of my politics and actions to this day.

We were all, at least in what is known as our family genealogy,
heterosexual. We married, remarried and married yet again. All the known
women in my family, through my two sisters and me, had multiple marriages to
men. My account of my achievement of a feminist standpoint, born and nurtured
in my matriarchal family heritage, begins in the early 1960s. Concurrent with my
heterosexual performance of marriage, motherhood, divorce, financial
independence, l conceptualize my achievement of a feminist standpoint as both
being and spinning a continuum. It begins in personal narrative representations
of unformed, unnamed self-centered interpretations of my heterosexual
experiences of abortion, and being a Gaslight Girl and a Playboy Bunny. In a
patriarchal society in which heterosexuality is “a beachhead of male dominance”5
my feminist subjectivity begins in what might be called the hyper-heterosexuality

of early motherhood, illegal abortion, divorce and sexual objectifying.

The Beginning

36

I enter the continuum of my achievement of a feminist standpoint
temporally in the mid 19603. Achieving a feminist standpoint is roughly acquiring
a system of interpretation, literacy, a lens of meaning making, and being. I exit
the continuum of this project as old, white, lesbian, feminist, scholar, with an
achieved lesbian feminist standpoint. Although I exit the continuum with the end
of this project the continuum in my conceptualization spins further and deeper
down below patriarchal thinking. My spinning continues.

The first experience on the continuum of my achievement of a feminist

standpoint was in 1962.

The Gaslight Club

In the 603 most young-white-middle—class women
aspired to being a wife, a mother, a secretary, a teacher,
or an operator at the telephone company. Having lost my
immediate chance for going to college by becoming pregnant
and marrying, and as the divorced mother of three children,
I was desperate for a job. My first option, I thought, was
to become a night telephone operator so I could be at home
during the day to care for my young children. I soon
learned, though, that night jobs at the phone company were
only for the most senior employees. Still working nights
seemed best for me.

But in the meantime I needed money right away. My

soon-to-be—former father—in-law was a prominent physician,

37

so I went to him for financial help. After all, my children
were his grandchildren and it figured he would want the best
for them. While I waited to see him I chatted with a woman
in his waiting room and mentioned I was looking for a job.

I told her I wanted to work nights and of the trouble I had
with the phone company. She suggested I pop next door to
see if I might get a job at the Gaslight Club. I laughed.
The Gaslight Club I knew was a ritzy place and the women who
worked there were very beautiful, very striking, very, very
glamorous and I did not consider myself any of these things.

I had been pregnant for three straight years, with only
a few months in-between a birth and the next pregnancy, and
my self—image did not place me among the striking, beautiful
or glamorous. But when my former father—in-law refused me
money, my self-image no longer governed my actions. I
walked next door to the Gaslight Club.

The Gaslight Club was housed in an unmarked classic
brownstone building with a large imposing locked front door.
I knocked on it as hard as I could, but no one answered.
Just before turning to leave, someone exiting let me into a
warmly, but dimly lit ground floor room that I would come to
know as the “Library." To the right leading to the second
floor was a richly carpeted staircase. I heard voices
coming from the floor above and hesitantly walked up the

stairs. At the top I asked the first person I saw about

38

applying for a job and was told to speak with the colonel,
the manager. He was sitting at the bar smoking a cigarette
and having a drink. I approached him and introduced myself.
I told him I was looking for a job and wanted to be a
“Gaslight Girl.” He asked me a few questions and had me
fill out an application. Amazingly he offered me a job
starting that night! Holy Moly! That night! A Gaslight
Girl! I rushed back to where I was living with my mom and
step-dad to arrange for them, my first night on the job, to
baby-sit my three kids. I did a quick turn—around and
returned to the club early enough to find a costume and to
be on the floor for a 5 PM happy hour.

The Washington Gaslight Club was only blocks from the
White House. Burton Browne a Chicago Advertising Executive
opened four Gaslight Clubs in the late 50s and early 60s of
which the Washington Club was one. Entry was by membership
only available by invitation to selected white male
executives. The Washington Gaslight Club membership
included lawmakers, lobbyists, high-level government
workers, financiers, media and sports celebrities among
others.

In the basement dressing room women donned fancy,
revealing costumes to become Gaslight Girls. In the crowded
narrow room six or eight women were in various stages of

transforming themselves. From a montage of overlapping

39

images reflected in the brightly-lit mirror, they greeted me
without interrupting their routine. The room was awash in
the fumes of spray net, make—up and perfume. Someone handed
me a ratty pair of black net hose to use that night and told
me where to buy some of my own. Another woman showed me
where the old costumes were and suggested which one had
belonged to someone before me who was about my size. Not
wanting to get in the way and having little idea what else I
had to do to transform myself-a mother of three—into what I
was seeing these women become, I closely watched how the
others did it. One woman teased and sprayed her hair until
it held an untold height and then sprayed it again into an
unmoving solid mass. Another pulled on her elastic black
net opera hose and stepped into her high heeled shoes, while
yet another woman helped zip someone else’s costume. These
women walked into the dressing room as mothers, lovers,
daughters, and sometimes wives, and left it as Gaslight
Girls. Anxiously I hastened to join them. Pretending to
know what I was doing, I applied bright blue eye shadow,
light brown eyebrow pencil and ruby red lipstick before
stepping into the shabby abandoned costume of some former
“Girl.” As a Gaslight Girl in training I left the dressing
room, walked up the steps and entered the second floor
Floradora Bar.

“She walked into that club knowing to please was to

40

survive and that her surviving insured the survival of her
kids. She had displeased her in-laws by leaving their son
and turned to another resource, her looks and her
compliance. In the dressing room, she closely observed the
other women becoming Gaslight Girls. They bantered among
themselves first about their lives as women-—who they were
outside of the club--and then about whom they were as
‘girls’. Each had regular customers and much like boasting
boys in a gym locker room they bragged about their regular
customers leaving generous tips. I wondered if and when I
as well would have my own stable of regular big tipping
customers.”
Soon, I knew the ropes and became one of the most
successful Gaslight Girls in the Washington Club. My
picture was used to promote the club. I did garner quite a
stable of customers who regularly sat at my station and left
me generous tips beyond the expected 20%. In the early
19608, I earned weekly cash—tips of about $200.00. Among my
customers were powerful lobbyists, important politicians
including members of congress, celebrities, and highly paid
corporate executives. Gaslight Girls were also the
entertainment of the club. In the Floradora Bar between
serving duties we danced the Twist on a marble tabletop
while the customers held their drinks and watched us from

the bottom up. In the Speakeasy on the top floor, we wore

41

costumes of the 19208 flapper girls and throughout the
night, in a quasi chorus line we sang bawdy songs and danced
the Charleston to a ragtime Dixieland band.

Other ways we promoted the club was to appear as
Gaslight Girls at events particularly directed towards men.
For instance before Christmas, Woodward and Lothrup, an
upscale department store stayed open late one night
exclusively to male shoppers. Gaslight Girls wandered the
store entertaining and encouraging the men to buy
extravagant gifts for other women. Another time, Gaslight
Girls graced a float for the famed Cherry Blossom Parade. I
remember an old timer Gaslight Girl giving me advice about
riding a float. “Bend over,” she said, “you won't look so
fat if you bend over.” In all the media shots of the Cherry
Blossom Parade, there I am dutifully bent over, just as she
suggested.

At the Gaslight Club we received no salary. All of our
income was from tips, and soon I learned to alert my
customers that cash was preferred. At the end of the
evening we claimed our tips and owed a percentage of them to
pay the bartender, the busboys and to reimburse the Gaslight
Club for the costumes we wore. Even though we were not
buying the costumes and they did not belong to us we paid
for them no doubt over and over again with this cut off the

top of our income. Receiving cash tips allowed us, as was

42

the custom, to hide some of what we made. Dutifully we
claimed our cash take as a mere 15% of the tabs, and
pocketed the rest. Our really good customers knew this and
would put the IS% on the charge slips and also leave a cash
tip for us. We of course had no sick leave, no vacation and
no other employee benefits. I worked for the Gaslight Club
for two years during which I met and began dating two men.
Sexually active with both of them, unprotected, I got

pregnant.

Illegal Abortion: Context

In 1963, white middle class women wore hats and gloves downtown to
shop at various department stores. I was in high school in the 508 when a
dominant dream of young white middle class girls was to grow-up and marry a
white male doctor, have two children--one a boy and the other a girl-~and live
happily ever-after keeping house and raising kids.

As a daughter of the 503, I grew up knowing this dream of mine would
come true. I would be a wife and mother but I would also have a job outside the
home. I never thought in terms of a career, but I would have a job. Sara Evans
in Personal Politics referred to woman of the 505 as “remaining enclosed in the
straitjacket of domestic ideology.”6 I had no context in which to envision myself
as a professional. All I could imagine was that throughout my life I would hold
jobs as a means to a specific end, exemplified in my matriarchal heritage in

which my mother and grandmother both held “jobs” to survive.

43

Divorced and no longer a wife, in 1963 l was the sole provider for my
three children when I chose my first of two illegal abortions. The birth control pill
was introduced two years before but was widely unavailable to most women.7 I
knew nothing of the pill, although before my third pregnancy, and as a married
woman, I asked for birth control from my OB/GYN. Being married afforded me
some confidence in asking in a social, political, and personal context of
disapproval about having sex outside of marriage. My doctor was a Roman
Catholic who knew my physician father-in-law was also a Roman Catholic, and
even though he knew I wasn’t he refused me. Ashamed for asking I left without
birth control and wouldn’t ask for it again for years.

The historical context in which I had my illegal abortion was the early-
1960s sometimes called a new age of Camelot. President John F. Kennedy
was elected and was perceived to hold ideals of integrity and service to our
country. Kennedy brought to the presidency values of artistry, equality, and
purpose. As a young woman in Washington, DC, I lived in the glow of this age
of “fantasy” and hope. Even with my personal reality being less than ideal, I felt
idealism about my country’s leadership and progress. My idealism continued
even though my experience with men in positions of political leadership was
disillusioning as hypocritically they sought sexual favors from me and other
Gaslight Girls even while espousing honesty, faithfulness, and integrity. In the
‘603 my political innocence had not yet been shattered, although in the near
future, political assassinations, the Vietnam War, familiarity with the power

lobbyists had over my everyday existence, would all begin to take their toll.

44

Although I have always regularly read the newspapers, and had a general
awareness of national politics, none of the important social changes women in
the early and mid-sixties were accomplishing politically entered my awareness as
of relevance to me. I was not yet engaged enough intellectually or politically to
think of myself as a part of the class woman and to understand these things in
relation to me as a woman. I include some of these social changes as
background, not as events that I understood as having meaning to me. It was
years later as a feminist activist that I would begin to understand their
importance.

In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique8 and told the tale
of white middle-class American women who were looking at their lives and
wondering why when fulfilling their feminine destinies they were so unhappy.
Friedan labeled it “the problem with no name.”9 Friedan’s theories later were
critically analyzed as being relevant for only white, heterosexual, middle-class,
married women. In the 60s I had never heard of The Feminine MJstigtg,
although being white made me eligible for the problem, I was un-married and
held a job outside of the home. I had no awareness of the “mystique in which I
was trapped. My unconscious acceptance of the feminine mystique was
financially supporting me and giving me a skewed sense of my independence.

Also, in 1964 women in the leftist and civil rights movements began to chaff
against the sexism of their leadership.10 By this time, John Kennedy’s President’s
Commission on the Status of Women came together and deliberated two years,

bringing “visibility and legitimacy to women’s concerns and consciousness raising

45

among women themselves.”11 From this legitimacy and visibility, the Equal Pay
Act passed the US. Congress requiring employers to pay men and women
equally when they performed equal work. In Washington, DC, three blocks
from the White House on NW 16th Street was a private men’s club that catered
to men on expense accounts: politicians, lobbyists and businessmen soliciting
contracts from national government agencies. This private club hired pretty,
young, white women to serve their heterosexual white male membership drinks,
dinner and entertainment. l was one of these young, white, pretty women.

As they have always, in 1964 women aborted fetuses either by
themselves or with the help of abortionists. Certain women among themselves,
furtively claiming second-hand knowledge of abortionists offered hope to women
who were pregnant and didn’t want to be. For example, a neighbor who was
familiar with my volatile marital situation told me of an abortionist in downtown
Philadelphia, not too far from Washington, DC. where we lived, in case I wanted
or needed one. When I was unmarried and pregnant in 1959, my soon to be
father-in-Iaw upon learning from my mother of my condition, offered to arrange
for me to have an abortion. When Morn told me of his offer, I refused.

Johnny was a rich, university boy. His dad was a doctor.

For a woman to marry a doctor I believed at seventeen was the

achievement of a lifetime. So in the back seat of Johnny’s car, in the parking lot
of a racetrack, we fucked.

Before “going all the way” with Johnny, I remember being on a date with

Hank, a high-school basketball star and an acquaintance of Johnny’s. After a

46

night at the movies and 10 minutes of thwarting his “roaming hands and rushing
fingers,” he threw up his hands in fmstration and said to me as l daintily
straightened my fashionable long skirt, and reananged my blouse with the Peter
Pan collar... “Jay and Johnny both told me you let them touch you, why can’t I?”
Because I didn’t let him have his way with my body, Hank turned on me
and used as a weapon his knowledge of previous events shared with him by his
buddies. After Hank confronted me with denying him his entitled access, I think
it must have been years before lever again said no to a man. I knew then that
who I was and what I did was determined by men’s relationship to each other
and that my life as a woman depended upon my compliance with a man’s right of
sexual access to me.
Did I confront Johnny and Jay for kissing and telling? No. I married Johnny and

named my second daughter after Jay.

My three-year marriage from the beginning was doomed. We were so
young. I was 18 and he 21 when I became pregnant and we subsequently
married. He was the dreamed-for doctor's son, and wanted to follow in his
father’s footsteps. l was just out of high school, starry-eyed, ashamed of being
caught in a pregnancy and of being sexually active. l was grateful that he was
marrying me when other unwed pregnant women were not so lucky. The
problem with being grateful is that often with it comes a sense of obligation.
Since in my family the men always left—this man marrying rne increased my

sense of obligation to him. From my marriage, I birthed three children and

47

survived several batterings at the hands of my husband and the father of my
children. A young high school girlfriend, after the birth of my third child,
concerned with my safety, intervened and rescued me from what was surely a
path to my complete unraveling. She literally took me out of that marriage. On a
visit, seeing me as I was then, she told me I had to leave. She helped me pack
the fewest belongings possible for three children and an adult, and with an infant
in my arms, and two toddlers hanging on my skirt, and she took me to her
parent’s home for safe keeping. I stayed there for two weeks before moving in
with my own parents. As always, I honor Tyanna Barr, my friend who so bravely
and generously saved my life.

In 1963, twenty-two years old, with a job being sexually objectified, and

objectively pregnant, I headed for Memphis.

An Artifact: 1964 Illegal Abortion
Remembered today, 2002, a past spinning begins: I experienced abortion
this way. My body experienced abortion. My body endured. This is the way!
experienced it. Cut and dried, separated from my body, I took my body to where
someone would remove from it the un-wanted living tissue growing inside of me.

I did not want my body supporting the further growth of that tissue.

I got off work at 2 AM and drove to Washington National
Airport and checked into the hotel in the main terminal. My
plane was at 6:30 AM, just four hours away, and I wanted to

sleep before leaving for Memphis, TN to have an abortion.

48

The year was 1963 and I was twenty-two years old, divorced
with three children under the age of four. I did not want
to be pregnant, could not take care of another child, and
abortion was illegal.

It was as if I was living my life atop a conveyer belt.

Sliding along through one troublesome situation to the
next. Whether it was a baby sitter that didn’t show up, and
I had to scurry around to make alternative arrangements; or
a man who had taken me out to dinner and a show, and now
wanted his “payoff.” Unthinking, unfeeling, uninvolved I
occupied my space on the conveyer belt and made do. After
my brief sleep that night, I dressed and headed for the
plane. A non—stop flight, which, like my life, contained no
stops along the way for fear, anger, ambiguity ---just stay
on the belt, and make it to the end.

At Memphis I was met by a man who would drive me to the
abortionist, wait, and return me to the airport to catch the
plane back to Washington, D.C. His services, and those of
the abortionist, were arranged by one of the two men whom I
led to believe provided the sperm for the pregnancy I was
terminating. Of course I don’t remember my driver’s name,
how he was connected to the arranger, or what he looked
like, other than he was white and youngish. I don’t
remember whether we talked to each other as we embarked on

my mission or whether we both sat blessedly quiet. I do

49

remember it was sunny and bright as we left the city and
drove into the Tennessee countryside. Trees and fields
slipped by me as I stared out the window, and the conveyer
belt sped forward. After a while we pulled into a little
town with white wood sided houses, neat lawns, and old
southern trees lining the streets.

Off of the main road we turned right onto an unpaved
side street and slowed down to look for the right address.
It was the last house on the left and we pulled into the
driveway. The house, a white bungalow with a glassed in
porch had a small sign pointing to the back door that said
“Entrance to DR’s Office.” I resolutely left the car and
entered the back door.

And in my resoluteness I was also full of shame. I was

pregnant again. I already had three children. I was
unmarried and sexually involved with two married men: either
one of who could have been the other principal in my
pregnancy. What I was about to do was called murder. I was
making a life and death decision and women were not supposed
to do that. Only legislators, judges, priests, and doctors,
in my experience: all men, were capable of making life and
death decisions. HOw shameful it was for me, to be choosing
my life and my children’s lives over the new life growing
within me.

The screen door closed behind me as I stepped into the

50

neat, sunshiny reception area. I stayed standing and
wondered what would happen next. A man entered from a hall
behind me. He wore a business suit and tie, and in my
memory was much shorter than I. He greeted me in an
impersonal, but professionally courteous manner and motioned
me to follow. No nurse, no receptionist, just the two of us
walking back to the examining room. No names were
exchanged, no records, no manila files to represent
authenticity to my experience. The examining room had a
window and through the curtains streamed sun and light.
Having already birthed three children, I didn’t have to be
told to remove my panties, hike up my skirt, and climb
aboard the table to slip my heels into the metal stirrups.

I lay there and my conveyer belt of a life inched forward as
I dutifully stayed on.

It was going to be over soon, I told myself. I looked
up at the ceiling as he, a stranger to me, looked up my
vagina, before performing the procedure to end my pregnancy.
After a brief examination he injected something into my
vagina. This took a little time. I don’t remember feeling
anything particular, but when he withdrew the syringe, in
relief I let go of my held breath thinking that the worst
was over. He wasn't telling me what he was doing and in my
conveyor belt fashion, I didn’t ask.

He wadded a pile of gauze pads into a giant tampon and

51

began packing it into my vagina. I remember thinking he was
wiping up after the abortion, but he wasn’t. He continued
tucking the tampon all neatly inside of me. When he was
done he said his first words to me since we left the
reception area: “Don’t take this out until you can’t stand
it any more.” Then with an “I’m done," he left the room.
What was I to do then, I wondered, was it over? Could I get
up? I lay there, feeling empty and full at the same time.
Finally removing my heels from the metal stirrups I sat up
and swung my legs around to sit on the edge of the examining
table. As I stood up, I expected to feel different: not
pregnant. Although I felt shaky I didn’t feel the desired
un—pregnant. But securely on the conveyer belt of my life,
I pulled on my panties, straightened my skirt and left the
examining room.

The doctor was standing in the small reception area and
told me goodbye as I left the glassed in back porch. Softly
and sincerely I said thank you and walked out of the door.

I got into the car and as if the conveyer belt was reversed
we backed out of the driveway and returned to the airport.

The plane was on schedule and I got back to Washington
in time to go right to work at The Gaslight Club. At the
club, I headed down the narrow steps to the basement
dressing room. Placing my abortion clothes in my locker I

pulled on long black opera hose, snapped my Merry Widow

52

undergarment around my torso and slipped into a satin,
bejeweled and befeathered abbreviated gay nineties costume
before stepping into my four-inch high heels. After putting
on my face, and teasing my hair to make it bigger and
higher, I climbed back up the stairs and emerged a Gaslight
Girl. That night “she” never thought another thing about
the wad of gauze so securely packed into her vagina.

Like every other night at 2 AM the club closed and I
drove home to my three kids. After a long day and night,
exhausted, I took only a few seconds to look in on my
sleeping children and our live—in babysitter. Everyone
appeared safe and sleeping soundly. I crawled into bed, and
fell instantly to sleep. An hour later I was awakened by
strong harsh, binding cramps in my belly. They seemed to
subside as I adjusted my position so I slid back towards
sleep not thinking again about the pain I had just felt.
But soon the cramps returned and I doubled over.
Unbelievably, I didn’t connect the cramps—until the second
round to the gauze pads, the trip to Memphis, or the
abortion. I was scared and confused as the pains kept
coming, stronger and harder and I made my way to the
bathroom. Slowly I began to make the connection. The
abortion was over, wasn’t it? When he said he was done, it
meant the abortion was over and I was no longer pregnant,

didn’t it? I couldn’t and wouldn't believe it was not so.

53

Sitting on the toilet early that morning I remembered
the doctor telling me to only remove the wad of gauze when I
couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn’t; so slowly I pulled
it from me and dropped it into the bowl. Waves of cramps,
stronger and harder now, gripped my lower torso. I bent
down and clutched my arms tightly wrapped and pressed
against my belly. Even though I had given birth to three
children, I had not experienced birthing. Like women at the
time, I had been heavily sedated and delivered of my babies.
None of what was happening to me, had I experienced before.

When I felt matter pass out of me, matter not liquid, I
finally allowed myself to know what I surely already knew.

I was in the throes of labor and my body was passing the
fetus, which I had chosen to discard. It created the
smallest of splashes as it entered the toilet bowl.

It was over. I was done. The pain subsided and I
stood up. God I was scared. I truly wanted to flush the
toilet without looking. But I had slipped off the conveyor
belt and I was no longer being carried through my
experience. Fallen from the belt of denial, I wallowed
around in reality. I turned to look at what I had expelled
and reluctantly caught a glimpse of the bloody contents of
the bowl. Shame and a profound sadness swept over and
through me as I saw a small kidney-bean shaped and sized

fetus, just like pictures I had seen in the doctors office

54

when I was pregnant with my other children.

The image in my memory is blurry, smeared in with the
bubble-gum pink plastic babies that clinic terrorists foist

upon women entering abortion clinics.

Tears streamed down my face. Gasping and horrified, I
quickly flushed the toilet. I had to get back on the
conveyer belt but still crying and horrified I returned to
my bed.

Morning was truly here now and, as usual, one, two and
then three of my children wandered sleepily in to snuggle
playfully in bed with their mommy. Tenderly I hugged them
and got them to lie quietly for a moment before we started a

new day.

Reflection/Analysis

In my memory, at the time of the abortion I experienced shame, failure,
and criminality. l was defiling my identity as mother by having what would
become my child, what is thought to be by some, “murdered.” To have an
abortion was the antitheses of what was constructed as a good mother,
nurturing, caring, sacrificing, selfless. By being unmarried and pregnant, albeit
with three small children, indicated that l was promiscuous-loose and moreover

pretty stupid for getting pregnant in the first place. The first artifact from my

55

memory reflects my simplistic understanding that l was in trouble. It was my
problem and I would find a way out of it. I had resources and they included the
men I was dating at the time. Their material reality of being upper class, white
males in politically powerful positions, and also being husbands and fathers,
enhanced their value in being able to help me out of my problem. More
importantly perhaps was that they too had strong interest in my not being
pregnant. With my pregnancy I was able to “weave” each of them individually
and unknown to each other, into the web of “my” problem.

I grew up in postwar United States in which women’s sexuality was the
wrong, as opposed to today’s discourse in which the wrong is a woman killing an
unborn child. Therefore my being pregnant then, having an abortion, having
three already born children, was unmistakable evidence that l was sexual. Jodi
L. Jacobson, for Worldwatch writes of the shame of abortion in the 503 as
having little to do with harming the fetus but with the shame that aborting
connoted having been sexual.12

l was not engaging in activities of sexual freedom when I got pregnant. I
felt no freedom in performance of my ambiguous sexual duties to men. On one
hand I was willing, no one forced sexual activity on me. On the other hand I was
ashamed of my promiscuity, lack of emotional attachment to my sexual partners,
andmy feelings of obligation to the men in my experiences. White, heterosexual
men of a class interested in having sex with me spent money and gained my
acquiescence. Feeling obligated for what I believed was their generosity, l

satisfied their sexual interest in me. I sought and profited from my status as a

56

desirable sex object.

There was publicity about abortion in the 60s. I don’t remember any
specifics, but I assume I had read of particular current events about abortion.
One such event I recall, although I don’t remember it being a factor in my
actions, concerned Sherri Finkbine”. In the early 60s, Sherri Finkbine, a
hostess on the popular TV show, Romper Room and mother of four, during her
fifth pregnancy took a drug called Thalidomide. It was Ieamed later that
Thalidomide caused gross fetal deformities. The Finkbine fetus was grossly
deformed, and to protect other women from also inadvertently endangering their
fetuses, Finkbine went public about her plans to have an illegal abortion. In the
wake of the ensuing controversy in this country it became impossible for her to
have an illegal abortion here so she traveled to Sweden and had one there. The
public was made very aware that even with such a compelling reason for a
woman to have an abortion, that here in the United States there were no social,
legal, medical, political avenues open.

My choice to have an abortion was made within the dominant patriarchal
ideology that l endorsed, embraced and was very successfully performing. I had
three beautiful, healthy children, affirming my fertility. l was an icon of white
heterosexual male desire thereby supporting my children and myself. In my
being their sole support I demonstrated my responsible motherly love. And I was
pregnant. I desired not to be pregnant-4t was not a desire to not have children,
but a desire to not be pregnant. There were many complex issues involved in

my relations with men, which resulted in my repeatedly getting pregnant. But, at

57

this juncture in my discussion, suffice to say, the issues were about being
pregnant, not getting pregnant.

To be pregnant had serious personal financial consequences. It was
from cash tips that I supported my children and myself. My income was
dependent on my performance of the role of Gaslight Girl. Since a Gaslight Girl
was a role in a fantasy based in the real performance of service, sexual
desirability and accessibility, being pregnant and having another being at the
physical center of my body, the masculinist fantasy was at best complicated. A
Gaslight Girl being pregnant also was a message of the real life consequences
of poking a woman and the untroubled fantasy of her availability for poking, of
course, was central. In this hyper-heterosexual world of the Gaslight Club, one
doesn’t want evidence of the material reality of women getting pregnant.
Therefore it was impossible for a Gaslight Girl to be visibly pregnant, no matter
how successful, young, white, or beautiful. Another foreseen financial
consequence of my remaining pregnant was, in my job, at capacity of earning, it
would be impossible for me to earn the necessary additional income to raise
another child. I was all I could be at the time. There was no more of me to
provide for another child for which I was responsible.

At first looking at my reproductive history, it could be said that l was a
victim. And with a certain analysis a strong case can be made for that assertion.
In the past I used this victim stance to further a reproductive rights political
agenda, and for what it was worth I would do it again. Politically being a victim

may have its value but personally and theoretically woman as victim is not

58

empowering. The power of being a victim is limited to self-pity and down plays
women’s resistance. Although my past understanding of the autonomous nature
of my decision making of my reproductive choice was false, at the time I was
empowered by that supposition of autonomy. My understanding was that I made
my own choices and in each of them I my decisions served me. I gathered my

resources, exploited them, and took the action open to me.

Feminism is a mode of analysis, a method of approaching life and politics,
rather than a set of political conclusions about the oppression of women.

-- Hartsock, 1991. 35-6. In Hirschmann, 1997)

Feminist standpoint is not a political positioning but is a methodological
and epistemological strategy.14 What I know from my current and past
understandings of my experiences is relative to how well I am able to use a
feminist standpoint as a way of knowing. In 1964, with only a feminine
consciousness and having no achievement yet of a feminist standpoint, my
understandings of illegal abortion were individualistic, self-centered, and
episodic. From a felt sense of self blame I understood my pregnancy as my
problem and using whatever resources I could muster l was responsible for
solving it. Further, my beliefs held that my being pregnant was completely the
result of recent reckless sexual behavior and thoughtless choices. It was my
understanding, that my experience had nothing to do with personal and social

conditioning, politics, or the material realities of my life: woman, white, working

59

class, young, heterosexual and sexually objectified, and a single mother.

Of course I had no idea of material reality, nor of whom I was beyond my
own personal being. But today using feminist standpoint as a method and as a
strategy, and having achieved a skill in its use, I have a more complex
understanding of my past experiences. Following Marx’s account of production,
Hartsock’s theory of feminist standpoint theory makes an epistemological claim
that “material life not only structures but sets limits on the understanding of social
relations.”15 Because the standpoint is feminist, social relations is the relations
of power, governed by the sexual division of labor between the class women and
the class men. Because I had not yet achieved a feminist standpoint, I did not
understand my experience of being pregnant and not wanting to be; how I saw
my resources and used them; and how my passive and detached experience of
the abortion; were all structured by the material realities of my life. My material
life, my position in relation to production or howl earned money, structured my
relationships as a woman with the dominant gender, men. My access to my job
was determined by my race, my sexuality, my age, my conformance with
behavior and appearance standards of attractiveness to white, heterosexual,
high-middle and upper-class men. My success in the job depended upon how
well I performed within the current constructions of women’s relationships with
men. Economic, political, and social structures determined my access to and
ability to earn money. My income was directly related to how pleased my
customers--all men--were with me and the service I provided them. Because I

had not yet begun the struggle needed to achieve a feminist standpoint, I of

60

course did not understand my relations as woman with man in this way. I
understood them as Penny, divorced young woman, promiscuous, foolish,
sexually irresponsible, and morally bereft. My understanding was about me
individually. It was not about me as part of a collective. Only my behavior,
individually, defined my success or failures. My success or lack thereof was
attributable to who and what I was individually, not because of social or political
structures in which I operated. Female bias derived from my matriarchal lineage
formed my belief that I alone was responsible and I viewed my sexual partners
as resources to solve the problem. It never occurred to me that this resource of
mine was also equally invested in my aborting my pregnancy: they both were
married to other women. If they were not invested in my terminating my

pregnancy neither one of them would have been an instrument of my actions.

ArtifactzThe Playboy Club

In 1964 I was twenty-three years old and the single
parent of three small children. I had supported myself for
two years at the Gaslight Club when I heard the Playboy Club
was opening in Baltimore. Having been suspended for two
weeks from the Gaslight Club for dating a member, the
prospect of a new job was intriguing. From the grapevine of
information circulating among the “Gaslight Girls” I learned
the Playboy Club was auditioning young women, under the age
of 24, to be hired as bunnies. From the required garb for

the audition of either a bathing suit or a leotard I chose

61

the latter in order not to audition bare legged. With a
leotard I could wear my familiar fishnet, leg enhancing,
black stockings. The age policy for auditioning was very
strict. One applicant claimed to be almost 24, but was in
fact 26. She was too old and was not allowed in. Also on
the grapevine I had heard that Playboy wanted unspoiled
“girls,” those not already experienced as cocktail
waitresses. I was anxious as an experienced cocktail
waitress and imagined they would think of me as “spoiled.”
Apparently not--I was hired. I immediately quit the
Gaslight Club to begin the three-week training to be a
Bunny. Keith Hefner, the brother of Playboy founder, Hugh
Hefner was the lead trainer of training Bunnies from other
clubs assisting with transforming the 30 new hires into
Playboy Bunnies. Right off they gave us a Bunny manual, a
veritable encyclopedia of Bunny rules, procedures, and
policies and told us that our jobs depended upon us knowing
and following them all precisely. In it were scripts to be
learned, drink categories to be memorized, garnishes to be
connected to various drinks. There were policies for
bunnies to observe both inside and outside the club,
including the infamous gold key policy. A gold key was
issued to important Playboy executives and when a member’s
key was gold I had heard that if he asked, you were supposed

to sleep with him. The manual acknowledged this “rumor” and

62

claimed it untrue. What you did have to do though was to
know a gold key member was very important and to treat them
accordingly. Other inside-the-club procedures included job
descriptions for all the different kinds of bunnies as
defined by the space to which they were assigned. From
studying the Bunny manual we then played, practiced, and
pretended, and did not graduate until it was all second
nature to each of us.

Like studying to be in a play, we learned our parts.
The club was the stage, the members the audience, and the
management the directors. Along with scripts, we had stage
directions, lines, and costumes. The scripts were different
based on which bunny we were assigned to perform, for
instance greeting scripts. Although all of us were to
acknowledge all members all the time, there was a particular
role as the welcoming bunny. She was the first one to greet
a member as he entered the front door. As servers, we had a
script to ask to see the member’s key. “Hi, I am your Bunny
Penny. May I see the member’s key, please?” We had scripts
and an order for asking the member and his guests what they
would like to drink. We were told how to write them down on
the check so we would know how to serve them without
hesitation. There was a particular order in which we would
then ask the bartenders for the drinks, and a particular way

that we placed them on our tray in order to serve them in a

63

particular order.

Not only were we taught these scripts and systems we
were also taught what was desired behavior on the floor and
what was not. It was not OK for a bunny to sit down in the
club, but it was OK to perch. In fact around the club were
places, pointed out in the manual, where a bunny might
without sitting lean against a railing, or back of a couch,
while attractively crossing her legs. Defined perch sites,
softly lit to draw attention to them, were strategically
placed around the club and bunnies were instructed to perch
upon them as decoration.

We learned in the training about the different bunny
roles that we would be asked to perform. For each shift we
were assigned to a particular area of the club, which
determined which bunny we would be for the shift. If we
were assigned to the checkroom, we, of course, were the
checkroom bunnies. Other bunnies were the greeting bunnies,
bunnies who worked in the living room, and bunnies who
worked in the club, upstairs where a member could order
dinner and watch live performances of some mid-rate comedian
or almost-making-it guitar player.

During our training as bunnies, we were taught postures
to assume at different times and situations. The bunny dip
used when we placed anything on the table, such as napkins,

drinks, dinner, etc. The dip was also used to change the

64

ashtrays in the bunny way. Other postures were the bunny
stance and the bunny perch. We were fitted for our bunny
outfits during the training also. They would be ready for
opening night.

These costumes were engineered to accentuate, or create
curves and highlight sexualized parts of a female body. Our
hips, ass, breasts, waist, legs, crotch were enhanced and
highlighted by a protected-from-being—copied design. From
the nipped in waist all lines went up and out to the breasts
and all lines went down to the crotch. At the hips lacing
spread open at the bottom as if our hips were fighting the
containment of the tight fitting costume. The crotch was
narrow requiring that pubic hair be shaved to a strip
assuring none peeked out of the edges. We were encased as
if in a second skin in these costumes inspiring images of
Victorian ladies needing assistance lacing up corsets.
Playboy bunnies assisted one another getting outfits zipped
before going on the floor. But we were not through becoming
a bunny yet. The costumes required cleavage and for that we
needed to lift our breasts, even more than the natural
spillage created by the tightness of the costume. Bunnies
were supplied with a huge cardboard box of bar sponges to
shove under their breasts, lifting them to spill over the
top. As we prepared to be checked out by the Bunny Mother,

we dove into the cardboard box and stuff sponges under our

65

breasts until our nipples were just out of sight. No matter
how buxom a woman might be there was always room for a
sponge or two. I was about average and would use seven or
eight of them. We are talking tightly packed.

A role not performed by the bunnies but integral to our
position was the Bunny Mother. She was an older woman,
maybe even a former bunny. Her office was just outside the
dressing room and before appearing on the floor we were
subject to her scrutiny. She checked for exposed
undesirable hair, under our armpits, on our legs, and of
course in our crotch. It was her job to determine that the
bunny image we projected was complete and ideal.

We were totally constructed as bunnies. We constructed
ourselves as bunnies. We were builders in our construction
as bunnies. We worked hard to perform our subjectivity as a
bunny. I studied the scripts, sweated the “exam” on the
drinks, took the dress rehearsal seriously and did well.
Immediately I was asked to become a bunny trainer for the
next batch of bunnies that were hired. Apparently, it was
expected that there would be a high rate of bunny attrition.
And with that, those of us left worked long hours. Soon we
were required to work, five days a week with two of them
being split shifts extending our ten hours a day to over
twelve hours. A split shift was working lunch from 11:30

AM—2:30 PM, or whenever the members were through with your

66

station. And then working nights, which began at 4 PM for

cocktail hour until 2 AM in the morning.

Artifact: 1967, Illegal abortion

Seymour’s and my relationship of a year or so was at the center of his
bitter divorce proceedings when I got pregnant. Having children of our own was
not yet on the radar screen of our vision of the future. We had five children
between us and it would be some time before legally we could even get married,
much less decide to have a child together. Once again, only a couple of years

since my first abortion—it was still illegal--l let the man make the arrangements.

On the phone the abortionist told me what to do. I
was to come alone, park in a grocery store parking lot and
walk two blocks down a hill. His house was across the
street. The back door next to the garage would be ajar and
I was to walk in and wait until he came downstairs. “Make
sure no one sees you,” he said, and “come alone.”

I followed his directions except that, instead of
opening the door that was only slightly ajar, I closed it.
It locked and I couldn’t get in. Already afraid, I became
almost hysterical trying to figure out what to do. Already
I had messed up when he had been so explicit with his
directions. What if he thought I hadn’t come and left me
exposed in his driveway? I tucked myself close to the stone
wall by the driveway hoping not to be noticed by the

neighbors or anyone walking on the sidewalk.

67

Soon the door opened and a man in his pajamas glared at
me and motioned me to come inside. “I told you to wait for
me in here," gruffly he barked at me. I tried to tell him
how I pulled the door instead of pushing it. He stopped me,
and motioned for me to enter the garage where he pointed to
the workbench. “Climb up, lay down and take off your
panties," he ordered. Dutifully, I did as I was told. Not
waiting for him to tell me, I spread my legs wide. His
tools were ready and after prodding my belly, and feeling
around inside of me, he inserted a speculum. With a spoon
like instrument he scraped and scraped and scraped away at
my insides. Hot belly pain and intense cramping accompanied
each scraping. Paper towels shoved under my buttocks caught
the bloody tissue he pulled from me. He said nothing as he
scraped and told me not to make a sound. I clenched my
teeth, set my jaw, and moved not a muscle. I did not want
to do anything to make him not complete the task. Tears
poured out of my eyes and filled my ears, as I silently
stared at the ceiling. Finally he stopped, looked at the
bloody contents, and felt inside me once again. “That’s
all,” he said, “Put on your pants. Here is a pad. Leave
the way you came; make sure you close the door behind you."
He left and went up-stairs.

I lay there for a few minutes to gather myself

together. When I thought I could, I tentatively swung my

68

legs over the edge of the workbench and pushed myself off to
drop the few inches to the concrete floor. Good, I thought,
I can stand. Quickly I put on my pants, slinked out of the
door, closed it behind me and started back up the hill to my
car. When I got there. I sat alone for some time,
beginning to collect myself back into me. I started the car
and slowly pulled out of the lot. I remember how bright the
sun was and how detached still I felt from reality. It was
like there was no time or space in which I could find
myself. My hands seemed to not really be on the steering
wheel but inches away from it. I felt like the car wasn’t
really connected to the road but was floating inches above
it as I moved towards home. Finally, my sense of being
returned when I got home. I parked the car and went inside
to my children and most likely Seymour. He was a good guy
and I am sure he was there waiting for me.

I am OK I said. Not willing to make any more trouble
than I had already been. I don’t believe we ever talked

about my abortion again.

Reflection/Analysis

Being a couple defined my experience of my second abortion as helpless,
dependent, and powerless. Being single defined my experience of my first
abortion as autonomous, independent, and albeit falsely empowered. In my

second illegal abortion Seymour and l were as if married, making my subjectivity

69

wife-like in a 1976 traditional sense. As wife-like, I was even less an agent in my
experience of this abortion. I was financially dependent upon him, and grateful
for his active role in parenting my three children. When I left to drive across town
to have an abortion, I left Seymour home with my children. He was there when I
returned making his presence much more a factor in my experience than the
other men in my previous experience. Also, since I was dependent upon
Seymour, as if I was his wife, I felt no need to be resourceful as I thought I had
been before. As the girl-friend in my other sexual relationships in which I
previously had an abortion, rather than as the “wife” in this experience of
abortion, I was more able to emotionally detach from what I was doing the first
time than the second, allowing me more control over my behavior. Because this
abortion was in the same town in which we lived I was also physically more
attached this time than being able to physically “leave” where l was who I was,
earlier. Leaving town seems to be a component of my perception of my
independence and power I had the first time, even if false. Also because of a
different procedure being used the second time it was not later that it was over;
the abortion was over when I left the garage in the second experience. In the
second abortion I went home to Seymour, not back to work. I never left my wife
role, as I left my Gaslight Girl role. It was as a wife that I aborted this fetus, it
was as an independent woman, mother of three, manipulator of two, that I first

aborted one.

May 2000: I just talked to Mom for Mother’s Day and alter the appropriate

70

greetings I told herl was working on a personal narrative about my abortion. I
asked her about Dr. Sullivan, (Johnny’s father and my then soon-to-be father-in
law) so long ago speaking with her about my having an abortion. Mom said it
never happened! She said, “the Sullivans never talked with her at all, much less
about abortion.” Certain of my memory and not of my mother’s, I believed she
had forgotten. lprobed a bit more until she acknowledged that she just couldn’t
remember.
Then my mom said that she always believed in abortion. She said, “I had
one, you remember?” Dumbfounded, but not wanting to lose the moment, lsaid,
“No, ldon’t remember.” She then told me it was in NE Washington in the late
‘405, just after the war. She said that afterwards she started bleeding and had to
go to the hospital. I was probably only 4 or 5 years old. She doesn’t remember
anything more about it.
Yet another generation of women having abortions. Mom said she
couldn’t talk about it. One didn ’t. It was money, she said. They just didn’t have
any to have another child. In hearing my mother’s story, I wondered if Grandma
had an abortion; whether Great-Grandma had an abortion.
Matriarchy... all these women... all these strong, independent women.
Mom: “Why are we talking about this on mother’s day?”
Mothers and abortions... Mothers having abortions... Mothers and

daughters and abortions...whew...

71

 

1 Hogeland, Lisa Marie, “Fear of Feminism: Why Young Women Get the Willies,” Ms. Magazine,
Vol 5:3, (Nov-Dec, 1994), pp. 18-21.

2 Johnston, Jill, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).

 

3 Johnston, p.72.

4 Hartsock, Nancy C. M., “The Feminist Standpoint: Toward a Specifically Feminist Historical
Materialism.” In Money. Sex afli Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism,_Nancy C.M.
Hartsock. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985, The Northeastern Series in Feminist
Theory) pp. 231-251. A claim of the positing of levels of reality in which the deeper level includes
and explains the surface or appearance. The vision available to the oppressed group must be
struggled for and represents an achievement that requires both science to see beneath the
surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate and the education that can only
grow from struggle to change those relations,” p. 232.

5 Rich, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture:a_nd Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, Vol 5:4, pp. 631-660,
p. 633.

6 Evans, Sara. Persona_l Politics: The Rootsfiof Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
a_nd the New Left. (New York: Random House, Vintage Books Edition 1980) p. 11.

7 Anderson, David E. Anderson. Abortion a_nd Family Plflnigq. Washington, D.C. : The
Communications Consortium Media Center, 1993. Insert: Newsroom Guide: History at a Glance.

8 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique. ( New York: WW. Norton & Company, 1963).

9 Nossiff, Rosemary. Before Roe: Abortion Policy in the States. (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2001) p. 61.

1° Hartman, Susan M. From Mgrgin to Mainstregfl Amerign Women and Politics Since 1960
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982) p. 33.

” Hartman, pp. 52-53.

‘2 Jacobson, Jodi L. Worldwptch Paper 97: The Globpl Politics of Abortion (Washington D.C.:
The Worldwatch Institute, 1990).

‘3 Nossif, pp. 36-37.

'4 Hirschmann, Nancy J. “Feminist Standpoint as Postmodern Strategey", in Politics and
Feminist Standpoint Theories, Sally J. Kenny, Helen Kinsella, eds. (New York: Haworth Press,
lnc.1997)

‘5 Hartsock, 1985, p. 232.

72

CHAPTER THREE

BEGINNING THE SPIN: FEMINIST ACTIVISM

In the context of leaming of other progressive movements of the
eariy 70’s and hearing for the first time of the Women ’s Liberation
Movement, I aspired to knowing all there was to know about it. I
imagined myself leaping into the Women ’s Liberation Movement as
if! were diving headflrst from the safety and stability of land into the
mysteries of the ocean. I imagined at some point that buoyed by
the movement, I would be carried along in its currents, as well as
make waves. In my imagination I would traverse the movement as
far as I could see and to the yet unseen far beyond. Even at the
time, I knew I was a part of the women’s movement and it would
take me, and I would take it, somewhere and as in the ocean to get

somewhere is to sometimes be carried by it.

Historical Personal Context

It was after my second abortion, after Seymour and I married, after we
had our first child together, that my feminine consciousness opened up to The
Women’s Movement. In the early 70's we, a white heterosexual married couple,
with “your’s”, “mine”, and “our” children, lived in Columbia, Maryland. The Rouse
Company obliterated miles and miles of rural farmland to build a new city
between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, which they marketed as “The
Next America”. In its early 70's beginnings, with only 500 “pioneer” residents, it

was a bedroom community to the neighboring large cities. Being relatively far

from the urban resources of Baltimore and Washington, white, married,

73

heterosexual, young women, mothers of the next, next America, wanted more.
Among these women, a group of the well placed approached the “city fathers”
who held the purse strings and kept literally and figuratively the keys to the
community resources of “The Next America”.1 These corporate city fathers,
predominantly white, heterosexual young men affirmed or denied the
implementation of anyone else’s ideas but their own. The women turned to them
for help in establishing a coffeehouse for the wives and mothers of the “Next
America”. The “city fathers” responded positively to their wives’ request,
provided institutional resources and gave them a key to a barn designated as a
soon-to-be community center. These women, wives and mothers all, asked me
to help. Easily I said yes, although it was not initially out of a desire to provide a
venue for women, but because it was not ever very easy for me to say no. In
saying yes to becoming involved in It’s Open For Women, I began in earnest my
spin along the continuum of my achievement of a feminist standpoint.

It’s Open For Women was a non-profit, volunteer organization, which
presented in a coffee house setting, weekly programs featuring “expert”
speakers on issues or activities of current interest. One such program, early in
the 70's was on Women’s Liberation. Two women activists from Baltimore
spoke about issues, activities, and a history. Having no idea of the importance of
this movement to other women, and me I anticipated it no more enthusiastically
than I did a previous program on organic gardening. But as the women began to
speak, identified as women, to be present to and for us, I in turn identified with

them and yearned to know more and to become one of them.

74

As an active participant and organizer of the coffeehouse, l was poised for
this existential leap, For in my It’s Open for Women roles, I was someone beyond
Seymour’s wife, and/or my children’s mother.2 I was Penny. l was not your
Bunny Penny, nor was I Penny the Gaslight Girl either. I was not an other to
another. I was Penny someone of value doing valued work for It’s Open For
Women. Hearing these women talk about their work as women Iiberationists, I
connected our work in the coffeehouse to what the women’s movement activists
were saying about their work. At that moment of connection of my practice to a
larger movement, my tentative spinning became a twirl, beginning the change in
my consciousness for which I would struggle to “forever”. My work was now
Women’s Liberation Work, and l was a Women’s Libber. Before it was
organizational work, more a personal activity in which I was engaged with other
women.

I began to see how my work was for me as a woman and for women
generally. Maybe what we were doing could apply to all women. Of course what
I related to at the time was all women being white, suburban, middle-class,
heterosexual, married, young women. We were Betty Friedan’s suburban
housewives. We were all someone’s wives. We all had white heterosexual
economic and social privilege as well as heterosexual white male providers.
Without this white, heterosexual privilege of marriage to an economically well off
man-which I had only recently gained through marriage—l and the other women,
would no doubt be downtown working, or doing paid domestic labor in

Columbia—but certainly not attending a coffee-house twice a week to hear

75

someone else’s take on the larger world.

It wasn’t long before I was in a consciousness raising group, and taking on
more roles as an activist. In 1972, I volunteered for the women’s rights division
of the Edmund Muskie campaign for the democratic nomination for president. I
became an active member of the Women’s Political Caucus, and served as the
county co-chair of the successful ERA Maryland campaign adding an Equal

Rights Amendment to the State Constitution.

Consciousness Raising
“Consciousness-raising is the most basic liberation process. Without it
there can be no liberation, but only substitutions of personnel in the same
structures of power and dominance.”
CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING...
(Given to me by Marilyn Frye, from her personal files. Identified by
Frye as a mimeographed handout composed by a MSU group
called Matrix of which she was a member. From the 1970's.)
From Its Open for Women, the tentative twiri of my spin along the
continuum of my achievement of a feminist standpoint increased with my
participation in a feminist conscious-raising (CR) group. My position on the
continuum of lesbian existence moved only slightly as I began to value my
position among women but remained firmly entrenched in compulsory
heterosexuality.

An analysis of feminist standpoint can place it in the consciousness

raising groups of the early 70's. Nancy Hartsock wrote of consciousness raising

76

as a small group of women coming together, most often in someone's home, to
examine and come to preliminary understanding of the connection between
personal experience and the social structures that patriarchally privilege
institutions that define and confine our lives as women. Hartsock further states
CR as “the clearest example of the method basic to feminism.”3 The practice of
meeting in CR groups demonstrates the importance of building an analysis of
patriarchy beginning from our own personal experiences. Following Hartsock,
Iris Young claims that to name women as a specific and distinct social collective
is a difficult achievement.4 In CR groups women begin the work.

Consciousness raising, a term coined by Kathie Sarachild of New York
Radical Women and one of the architects of the process for politicizing women,
learned the practice from its use in the civil rights movement in the south in the
early sixties.5 Alice Echols in Dare to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in American
1967 - 1975 contends that the premise of CR was that among all women there
was a sense of commonality, and that also among women, gender was the
primary definer of women’s experience.6 In this emphasis on commonality,
differences among us generally went unanalyzed, were often dismissed and
ignored.

In my CR group, in “the next america”, we were women in similar material
circumstances, all roughly the same age: I was 31, in the same economic class
as the others. All of us were white, practicing heterosexuals, and married. Most
of us were mothers; and it appeared that all of us were conforming and socially

comfortable. In my CR group we spoke and heard only those things in our

77

immediate gendered experience and preliminarily concluded we were Ieaming

about all women.

There were about eight of us who came to the first
meeting, where we learned what was “Consciousness Raising.”
We sat in a circle in someone’s living room, some in chairs
or on the sofa; others of us sat on the floor. At the
first meeting one of the women, maybe the woman in whose
house we were, introduced the process of consciousness
raising. She told us of some of its conventions.
Generally, she said, the process started with an open-ended
question to focus the discussion. Someone would begin by
answering. We were to speak in the first person, using “I"
statements in our responses. While a woman spoke, others
listened, we were told. Our safety, in CR the introducer
said, was primary. Being safe included being able to tell a
truth, to not be interrupted, to not be judged, and to not
be offered solutions. What was said in a CR setting
remained in that setting. Further she said, hearing is as
much a part of CR as being heard and silence was OK.
Expressions of our feelings and emotions were part of the
truth we were telling and hearing, and could be expressed
safely. I, of course, don’t remember exactly all she said.
I do know though that, for what seemed like the first time
in my life as a woman, my emotions were being honored. We

were instructed to allow them to be expressed whether our

78

own or others. For instance a woman being really sad, or
angry did not require that we rescue her from her feelings,
nor did we have to swallow back that which we were feeling
as we heard what she said or told our own stories of our
experiences. With each CR convention she spoke it was as
if we were being asked to question the familiar and easy for
us as women, and risk doing the unfamiliar and more
difficult. And in our consciously choosing our behavior as
women we would understand better the forces that defined for
us the familiar, strange, difficult, and easy. In looking
back what we were given, which maybe seldom before as women
in our era, race and class had we been given, was the
opportunity to disrupt that which we already were and become
something that we thought we were not. Who we were already
was not at all who we might be.

For me this was true. I was very uncomfortable
anticipating telling my experiences, even hearing others
experiences seemed strange and very risky. I had not prior
to being in this CR group been expected or been offered an
opportunity, to take my experiences seriously by telling
them to others, and having them heard. For me speaking my
experiences was to confess to my guilt. Familiarly and
easily I had always framed my experiences as personal
failures with instances of my faltering in resolve and of my

own stupidity. Always, in that frame, I was terribly

79

contrite and ashamed of my shortcomings, and would wait for
the surface forgiveness from the person hearing my
confession, and for what I was sure was agreement with me.
What would surely follow then would be the implied lesson of
“don’t do it again!”

My discomfort was not just at the idea of my telling
the truth, it was also in hearing other women tell their
truth. How to do that? The woman who was telling us the
specifics of CR, my goddess, had to tell grown—up women how
to tell and hear the truth. Many of us had no experience in
taking ourselves and others of us seriously. All I could
think of was that I had no other way to hear another's story
without interjecting myself into their truth. How could I
just hear what they had to say and not perform the
conventions of mothering, womanness so familiar to me? Did
I have the courage, was I brave enough to not do these
things? Could I even imagine another way? At first it
seemed I did not. Soon though as others more brave, more

willing to take a risk I too spoke up.

How profound; how radical: to hear another woman; to speak as a
woman; to go inside ourself as a woman in order to move outside to being
among women! Other women were hearing us, affinning our experiences with
stories of their own, with empathy, with their attention. Certainly among our

friends and family we had spoken our feelings about our lives, but in these

80

circumstances it was as individuals. The context was personal and we spoke as
individual to individual, as defined role to defined role. In CR the context was
political. It was coming to know how as women—not as individuals-our lives were
structured by male supremacist, misogynist, patriarchal institutions. In that
time, in that place, in those material circumstances, it could be thought of as
taking a flying leap across a chasm to save our very lives. And while leaping we
also truly believed that to do so would end our very lives. And it was true. To be
in a CR group at that time was to risk leaving our lives as we knew them and to
enter into a new existence as women Iiberationists not knowing at all what it
would mean to us as women, to our loved ones, and to our future. The same
group of women met regularly and sometimes not, once a week over a period of
about a year. When the formality of meeting as a CR group ended many of us
continued to meet informally as friends and activists.

Consciousness raising is a political process of building theory from
personal experience for political gain. Concentrating on our commonality we
sought equality with men. As a feminist, starting from my personal life became
my mode and method, politically and theoretically. In CR, I continued my spin
along the spiraling continuum of my achievement of a feminist standpoint.

Although we moved in 1973 from “the next america” to one of “America’s
premier playgrounds for the-very-rich-white-heterosexuaI-young-healthy-strong-
and-beautiful people, Aspen, Colorado, I held firm to my commitment to be
active in the women’s movement. Shortly after settling in I sought out and found

a group of women who met irregularly as the Aspen Women’s Caucus.

81

These women, were also all white, young and heterosexually active but
they were not married, not even partnered as I could tell. They were working
women in support of their playing who came to Aspen for the skiing, and ski they
did. I was the only married woman in our group of women’s rights activists,
although there was several divorced women who had older children. None of us
identified as lesbian and sexuality as a feminist issue was not discussed. Our
activism as the Aspen Women’s Caucus was local and directed toward particular
projects of significance to women in Aspen. One such project was editing out
the sexist language in the Police Department Manual. Another project was
protesting male sexual harassment of women in bars. Health care was an issue
as we critically examined how and where women in Aspen got birth control,
treated sexually transmitted diseases, and had access to abortion.

As participants in the culture of the so called sexually free 703, and for
what we thought was our own edification, in 1975 The Aspen Women’s Caucus
brought Betty Dodson to town to conduct a “Liberating Masturbation” workshop
on self-loving. Like a CR group, it took place in a living room—mine to be
exact—Unlike a typical CR group, there were more women in attendance and
they were unclothed. Also the workshop was a one-time event. Over thirty
white young heterosexual identified women came together to Ieam about self-
loving through masturbation.

As we sat around in a huge circle, naked, we introduced ourselves, said
how we felt about our bodies, and whether we were orgasmic or not. Easily we

answered how we felt about our bodies. No one felt good about her body.

82

Each woman, one after another stated her felt flaw. She was too fat, or too
skinny, or too hippy, or to straight hipped, or too busty, or not busty enough, or
shoulders were too broad, or shoulders were too narrow, or nipples pointed out,
or nipples pointed in, or legs were straight, or legs were muscular. If it weren’t
such a tragedy, it would have been laughable. Knowing whether we were
orgasmic was not as easy to answer. Although some women did know, most
didn’t.

Many of us for the first time Ieamed and spoke a truth about
masturbation, female orgasms, and the idea of sexual pleasure as our own
responsibility. Although self-fulfilling and a step towards a sexual liberation, I
don’t remember anything in the workshop being about women loving women.

Offered for sale at the workshop was a self-published book by Dodson in
which she writes about homosexuality, bi-sexuality, as well as heterosexuality.7
As a feminist Dodson advocates women move toward sexual independence from
men through masturbation and throughout her book makes a case that men's
claim of entitled sexual access to women is a part of the problem. Among the
solutions she offers—ways of self-loveushe doesn’t suggest an alternative
sexuality of women loving other women. Further, throughout her book are
examples of women’s statements of their past sexual experiences with men as
being negative but by becoming masturbatory all became well. In addition,
other “testimonies” from women who had attended previous workshops stated
how they, the women, were able to not rely so much on fantasies of romantic

boy-girl-for-ever-after sexual ideals and were now able to have casual sexual

83

relations with men. Still of course very much granting men sexual access to
women which presumed their entitlement.

In a section of her book titled “going public”, Dodson writes of being
annoyed at a public assumption that all feminists are lesbians, and she seeks a
way to deal with her annoyance. In the text she writes of announcing her plans
for an all female orgy the following Saturday. She states in the very next

I.”8 So as an apologist she

sentence that “nine women showed, all heterosexua
makes sure that the reader knows that women can self love among themselves

and be heterosexual.

National Organization For Women (NOW)

Before my family and I moved from Aspen to Miami, Florida in 1976, the
Aspen Women’s Caucus, in order to connect to a larger political context,
affiliated with The National Organization for Women (NOW) and became Pitkin
County NOW. It is from this connection that in Miami, my spinning along the
spiraling continuum progressed and I sought out Dade County NOW.

For the remainder of the 70s and into the 803 activists in Dade NOW
worked hard to elect women to the state legislature in hopes in part of increasing
our chances of Florida becoming one of the remaining four states needed to
ratify the Equal rights amendment.9 Fifteen states had not yet ratified it. In1977
Dade NOW also joined the national effort to extend the deadline for ratification
and toward this end; National NOW called for an economic boycott against

states that had not ratified. Florida as a tourist destination was one of the states

84

to be boycotted. Dade NOW helped keep this effort current in South Florida. At
the same time our energies were directed to training women to run for office, run
political campaigns for women candidates, and to be public speakers about the
ERA, abortion rights, and other women’s rights issues. It was through the ballot
box that we believed we would change the world.

It was in 1980 that Adrienne Rich, wrote “Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence in which one of two concerns she expressed about the bias of
compulsory heterosexuality, was “the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence
in a broad range of writings, including feminist scholarship.”1O She argues that
“Any theory or cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a
marginal or less ‘natural’ phenomenon, is profoundly weakened thereby,
whatever its other contributions.”11

In the late 603, at its beginnings NOW, a political arm of the second
wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement, held lesbians as marginal to its
goals. Generally within the women’s movement attitudes about lesbians very
much reflected the negative attitudes of the rest of society.12 (See above,
Dodson) Some feminist activists though understood that as women’s rights
activists in support of equality for all women, our work included equality for
lesbian women.13 Equality was the grounds on which lesbians joined NOW and
in the early days if these women could pass for straight they became powerful
leaders in the NOW as early as 1968.

Feminists were subject to Lesbian baiting, by their friends, the press,

husbands and family members. Lesbian and straight women alike were often

85

charged with being lesbian just because they were feminist activists. Lesbian
baiting worked to discredit the movement as well as scare women back into the
home, or away from feminist activism. Closeted lesbians and frightened straight
women panicked. Some left NOW. Others as a threat to them, claimed lesbians
as hurting the movement. Betty Friedan, founder and then-president of NOW,
“expressed fears by calling Lesbians the ‘Iavender menace’.“14 In this “don’t ask,
don’t tell” environment increasingly more and more leaders of NOW were
lesbian. In 1969 author Rita Mae Brown, joined NOW and immediately
announced she was a lesbian.15 Through the efforts of the then New York
chapter president she became newsletter editor and a member of the chapter
board. In these roles Brown became even more outspoken about her
lesbianism. Soon there were efforts, particularly from the national level to
silence her. Friedan, warned her, “You can’t talk about this. It will hurt the
organization politically.”16 Brown, incensed, resigned NOW in 1970, taking with
her two other important women to the chapter. Angrily Brown wrote a letter to
NOW in which she stated, “Lesbianism is the one word which gives the NY
Executive Committee a collective heart attack.17

Soon there were other deflections, firings, and lesbophobic purging within
the chapters and at the national level. But lesbians were public, persistent, and
effective. For example, at 1970 Congress to Unite Women, 20 lesbians took
over the stage, and demanded the microphone. They wore T-shirts proclaiming
themselves as “the lavender menace”. Many of these women were for the first

time out as lesbians before their feminist colleagues in the audience. The

86

audience in recognizing their friends and stage and knowing of their commitment
to NOW and the woman’s movement, thirty more women jumped from their
seats in the audience to join them on stage as “menaces”.18 Getting the
microphone the woman as “the lavender menace”, spoke how they were
oppressed in the movement making it real to their colleagues in the audience.
Society’s attempt to crush the independence of the lesbian was presented as a
paradigm of women’s oppression.

After other dramatic events, including the public claiming by prominent
and beloved feminist leaders Susan Brownmiller, Carolyn Bird and Kate Millett of
their support of lesbianism, National NOW finally in 1971 passed a national
resolution. It stated:

BE IT RESOLVED THAT N.O.W. RECOGNIZES THE DOUBLE

OPPRESSION OF LESBIANS; BE IT RESOLVED THAT A WOMAN’S

RIGHT TO HER OWN PERSON INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO DEFINE

AND EXPRESS HER OWN SEXUALITY AND TO CHOSE HER OWN

LIFE-STYLE AND BE IT RESOLVED THAT N.O.W. ACKNOWLEDGES

THE OPPRESSION OF LESBIANS AS A LEGITIMATE CONCERN OF

FEMINISM.”

Before my time in Dade NOW, there was a local version of these events.
Locally national events were only alluded to by the current women in power,
mostly themselves lesbians. The current chapter leadership had accomplished a
coup of sorts and took control of the chapter from our Miami foremothers who
held anti-lesbian sentiments. The stories of the coup were understood as
secretive, and when questions were asked by newcomers of our current

foremothers, all we received in answer were innuendoes, terse pronouncements,

and the swift dismissal of our questions. All we knew was that our Dade NOW

87

former foremothers were “anti-lesbian and tried to keep out-lesbians out of Dade
NOW!”

In the late 708 and early 803 the liberal feminist politics of which Dade
NOW engaged, we sought equality for “all” women while at the same time as a
political strategy we marginalized lesbianism. lntemally, though, lesbians were
at the heart of our work, politically, socially, and personally. In our campaign for
the ERA we often countered a prominent oppositional argument threatening that
passing the ERA would allow same sex marriages. To which we would respond
dismissively and uncritically to the homophobic charge. It was a political strategy
of those in support of the ERA to not get into side arguments about such as
restrooms, homosexuality, and day care centers, even abortion. It was our
practice to say that these things would not be affected by the ERA and say either
that it was outside the province of the law or that a law would have to treat both
men and women the same. So a law for or against two men marrying would also
have to include two women marrying. Ourjob was to say what the ERA would
do and what it wouldn’t do. I don’t remember publicly in the context of these
arguments using the word lesbian.

Internally though that was not the case. Within state and local chapters of
NOW many of our leaders and followers were lesbians. In Miami, among our
teachers and mentors of our feminist activism were lesbians. Among our activist
colleagues, our friends, our co-activists, our community contacts, were lesbians.
Not only were lesbian women’s presence crucial to our effectiveness as a

chapter and feminist force in the community, lesbians were the content of our

88

public out-reach. On a card with the Dade NOW program schedule for the year
1983-1984 on October 27, 1983 the topic was “‘The Lavender Menace or Why is
Lesbian Rights a Feminist Issue,’ Chris Riddiough presenting.” A list of chapter
task forces on the chapter application form, from which a member could select
one or several of particular interest, included the Lesbian Rights Task force.
During the 19803 in the chapter publication, “The Dade NOW Times”, regularly
were articles highlighting lesbian concerns, regular notices of a lesbian support
group meeting dates, and updates on lesbian and gay rights legislation.

On the continuum of lesbian existence that Rich theorizes as beginning in
compulsory heterosexuality I was no longer in ignorance about lesbians. Having
that awareness, today I claim my heterosexuality then as chosen rather than
compulsory. Which does not say that societal, legal, so called, moral pressures
at the time were any less evident in my life. I was still committed to my
heterosexual orientation and to being married to Seymour. But it was among
my feminist co-activists that I felt most free to be who I was. For instance, I
remember a profound sense of freedom at a rollicking NOW dance. Where I,
and other women—lesbian and straight—danced and shamelessly and playfully
flirted with each other. With great freedom of movement, without the prescribed
lady-like behavior I was so familiar with—I felt momentarily free to be who I was.
There was no fear that because I flirted and played that I would be
misunderstood and would be expected to provide access to my body sexually.
But after the dance was over I returned home to my husband. My marriage, my

family, my life outside of my activism, were still primary and defining my

89

sexuality. Lesbian rights were prominent on our agenda but abortion rights in

the late 80s took center stage.

Speak-out: Illegal Abortion

Speaking-out, an effective strategy of the women’s movement was used
extensively during the 70s and 803 to protect abortion rights.20 Women telling the
gruesome details of their illegal abortions, took a position of being victimized by
those who stood between women and legal abortion, and emphasized how
dangerous for women it was before the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court
Decision.21 They publicly expressed the urgency of keeping the decision intact.

As political activists the speakers told their story to convince others to join
the campaign in protecting women’s right to choose to safely and legally
terminate her pregnancy. Other forms of “speak-outs” included published lists of
prominent women who previously risked their lives by having an illegal abortion.
I remember in the 70s seeing as survivors of illegal abortion Gloria Steinem,
Billie Jean King, and other recognizable women’s names printed in a long
impressive list on the inside back cover of an early Ms. Maga_zige. Other speak-
outs on courthouse steps, in front of clinics and hospitals, on campuses were a

common occurrence, because of its effectiveness as an organizing strategy.

On the Dade County Court House steps in 1985, in Miami,
Florida the sun was shining. Along with other women prepared
to speak to a gathering lunch time crowd, I stood at the top

of those steps. As a political action, to protect women’s

9O

lives, in the manner of consciousness raising women spoke
their experiences of illegal abortion.

I arrived at the courthouse to a crowd of people
carrying signs demanding that abortion is kept safe and
legal and I was glad that there were not yet many opponents.
It was at the top of the wide marble steps in front of the
entrance that we placed the podium. Behind the podium,
supporters, hoping to catch the attention of members of the
media, held high signs and banners proclaiming “Never
Again”, “Keep Abortion Legal” and “Protect Women’s Rights.”
We knew from past experiences that it was the signs that
completed our message when pictures were taken of the women
telling their stories. The audience grew as more and more
people stopped to see what was going on as they were out of

their offices and on the streets getting their lunch.

Eighteen years later, I of course do not remember all that I said, but I
remember the day, the event, and the rhetoric. Words such as “desperation",
“risk”, “fear”, and “butcher” no doubt generously punctuated all that I told of my
experiences. I would have spoken of my desperation, saying how I would have
done anything, risk everything, to not be pregnant again. I would have spoken
about the risk to my own life and heath that I willingly took. I would have justified
my decision to take such desperate measures by telling of my three children and
how at the time I was the sole source of their financial support. I would have

added how I was now happily married and had given birth to my fourth child after

91

having the abortions. After all it wasn’t as if I didn’t want children, I just “couldn’t"
have another one at the time, thereby protecting an image of me being a
righteous victim. In my speaking out for political purposes I would have made
the abortionist, who at the time was my savior, into a “butcher”, who was only
interested in his own financial gain, who had no compassion for the pain I

endured, nor of my desperate situation.

Discussion

The eighties were a time of great activity in the white women’s movement.
We were on the defense against attacks on a woman’s right to choose an
abortion. In July of 1989 in the Webster decision, the Supreme Court mled that
the state of Missouri could ban abortion from public hospitals, could force
physicians to run viability tests on the fetus. “In Roe the court struck down state
restrictions and in Webster it invited state limitations”, wrote Ellen Goodman, in
her July 7th column in the Miami Herald. “Thousands of abortion rights
supporters, many not previously involved in the political process mobilized to
fight against new restrictions”, wrote Kate Michelman, Executive Director of
NARAL. Michelman went on to claim “Webster created a tremendous upsurge in
activity in the political process in this nation”.22 In Florida an anti-choice
governor, Bob Martinez called a special session of the state legislature to
discuss following Missouri’s lead with the blessings of the Supreme Court, further
restricting abortion rights for Florida women. Dade NOW was also affected by

this upsurge of political activity. Many new members and activists joined and

92

could be counted on to protest, write letters, march and generally respond to this
assault on women’s lives. In all this activity, as President of Dade NOW, I
became the spokesperson for our efforts and appeared numerous times in the
media. Many large demonstrations, clinic protection actions and other organized
public events thwarted an attempt by the Florida Legislature to pass restrictive

measures on abortion. Dade NOW was flying high.

2002 Commentary: Activism Gone Awry...

It happened when l was who I was before I became who lam now. It could be
said that it was because of what happened then that lam who lam now. Who I
was then was just more of what I had been and now who I am is someone

different and also the same.

Although I write this particular history of Dade County NOW in the first
person many other women in Miami might add their personal pronoun to my
story. When I say I, me, or my, often in my mind I hear other women speaking in
agreement. We together created and were ensnared in the thorny tentacles of
patriarchal feminism.

The specific time was the summer and fall of 1990 and it happened in
Miami, Florida. When the events of this story occurred, l was a long time
member of the Dade NOW and was its current and ineligible for re-election
president. It was a time of intense political activity of thwarting attempts to
further restrict a woman’s right to choose abortion. The events of this story

began with a victory that led to betrayal, abuse of power, and lost ideals. It was

93

in June of that summer, that Mindy McNichols won a contested election to
succeed me as chapter president. How, you might ask, does McNichols’ victory
have anything to do with the epigram of this essay? In Mindy’s challenge to the
organizational status quo and from her act of courage and defiance, others of us
became courageous, angry and autonomous. In our active support of her we
changed from dependent, passive, followers of a charismatic leader, to
independent, dynamic agents in our own lives.

The classic format of a good story is to have a hero and a villain. The
hero in my story is of course Mindy, and the so-called villain is a woman named
Janet, the aforementioned charismatic chapter board leader. To follow the
classical format further I am the damsel-in-distress, a formerly dependent and
passive follower of Janet, and through my support of Mindy’s candidacy, l was
“saved”. It is this transformation around which my story unfolds.

We were good friends, the three of us. All of the core activists of the
chapter were good friends. In Miami, Florida, during the 80s, we helped create
exciting feminist times. We worked hard together pursuing the liberal democratic
ideal of equal rights for women. Also we had wonderful good times cementing
our commitment to feminism and to each other. All during the 80's we
passionately and untiringly worked to elect women to public office. We traveled
long distances to conferences insuring our state and national organization was
strong and on target. We were effective spokespersons for feminist issues and
appeared on TV, joined panels at public events, led parades of feminists down

busy highways supporting equality and justice for all, and we looked arms to

94

keep abortion clinics open and safe. Throughout, cohesively and united, we
remained dedicated to each other and to the particular meaning we made of
feminist ideals.

Quite generally, the three principals of this story reflect the class, race,
age, sexual orientation and educational experience of most of the membership of
the white women’s movement of the 70s and 80s, and particularly that of our
local chapter. We were the women who twenty years before had read Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine MVStIQlfi and found a place for ourselves in school,
business and the white women's movement. We are among the women who
promoted the idea of the condition of women, sold the concept of women’s
oppression within the confines of patriarchy and capitalism. And I, reflecting
back on these times know, within Dade NOW we also created what we most
feared, a structure of authority and domination based on race, class and
privilege. Our membership reflected it. Our leadership and their loyal followers

practiced it. My story is also a revelation of this paradox.

One of my first priorities upon moving to Miami in 1977
was to become involved with Dade NOW. I came to Miami with
a fulfilling feminist history. I helped start a NOW chapter
in Colorado and led a successful countywide campaign for a
state Equal Rights Amendment in Maryland. Two years
earlier I earned a BA degree in communications with a
concentration on women's issues. Already I knew that I was

a feminist and looked to my involvement in a local feminist

95

organization to provide further opportunity to refine and
practice this identity. Also I wanted to change the world
and understood Dade NOW to hold that same lofty and
idealized goal. From the outset, I attached myself to the
President. Her name was Janet Canterbury. She welcomed me
warmly when I introduced myself to her at my first chapter
action. I willingly offered her my loyalty and friendship.
She accepted them and responded by supporting my leadership
of various chapter duties and responsibilities. Under her
tutelage I served often as chair or co-chair of many actions
and chapter events. Soon I was selected to join the board
and for years held a variety of positions. I loved my work.
I remember remarking to some close friend how I felt most
free and most myself while doing my work in Dade NOW. I
liked who I was as a feminist activist and as a leader and
was effective and well liked. I loved being successful
knowing that my achievements closely related to the success
of the chapter. For years my identity as a feminist was
visible and apparent in all areas of my life and revolved
around my activism within Dade NOW.

But as I entered into active involvement with Dade NOW
I was reluctant to exert my power and authority. I have
always been impressed with those attributes and aspired to
own them. But it seemed as though there was always more to

learn before I would be ready to practice them myself. As

96

a female growing up in the fifties, who had gotten pregnant,
married, and divorced way too young, I placed my power and
authority in the hands of men. I had excellent skills in
subordination, even to a point of using it as a position of
power, and was afraid to try a new manner of behavior even
with women. I ask the question, now as I write this story,
how is it that Janet, the titular head of Dade NOW grew up
at the same time as I, albeit in different class
circumstances, and yet was a genius at exerting her power
and authority? She was as adverse to subordination as I was
to exerting power.

Our hero Mindy McNichols came to the chapter a few
years after I did. She was a recent graduate of Duke
University Law School and was an associate in one of the
most active and prestigious law firms in the city. Her
mentor was Janet’s best friend, Patricia Ireland, a chapter
star who would later become a long-term national president
of NOW. Mindy had a wonderful hard working enthusiasm, was
a good thinker and patiently explained to all that asked the
complex legalities of our issues.

Mindy grew up in Wisconsin as one of twelve children
and was a scrapper. This seemed to protect her from the
growing dependency on Janet that many of the rest of us
held. Still Mindy carved for herself a niche in the chapter

and served at both the state and local level as legislative

97

vice president. So when she chose to run as a candidate for
chapter president there was no question that she was
deserving and qualified. It was not about her
qualifications that the conflict began, though. The
conflict was because Mindy chose to run even though Janet
had already selected “the next president”. I was the
current president and had served my allotted two terms.
Before this, seldom had anyone challenged Janet’s selection
and remained in Dade NOW to tell about it. Mindy’s choice
was a sure sign of her lack of dependency on Janet.
Although she is cast as the villain, I liked Janet.
She was a big, loving woman, with a wonderfully attractive
Texas accent and a personality as large as her body and the
state from which she hailed. I loved hearing Janet laugh:
it was infectious and could get us all quickly into a state
of hilarity. Her interest in me, and others upon whom she
drew to assume chapter leadership, seemed genuine and warm.
As Dean of Students at the University of Miami School of
Medicine, Janet held a comfortable position of power outside
of Dade NOW. We as chapter members relished being invited
to her office on campus for a chatty brown bag lunch and an
hour’s worth of gossip. When I was invited, she inquired
about my fledgling business and often gave me a name of
someone to contact at the university for future business.

She knew my kids and made some extended complimentary remark

98

about one or all of them. Of course I gushed and was so
grateful and basked in her personal attention. How
dependent I was on her acknowledgment of things and me mine.
I recognize now how duplicitous was her attention and her
astuteness in knowing which hooks to set into whom. Her
warmth, good nature and friendliness were forms of
discipline keeping me dependent upon her and therefore in
her good graces. My deep commitment to feminism, to NOW,
and to my identity as a feminist, seemed tied to Janet's
good graces.

In Janet’s counsel we were identified as valuable,
worthy, and of interest. During the course of casual
lunches in her office she also let those in her presence
know what happened to those who did not tow her line.
Humorously and off—handedly in these one—on-one exchanges
she identified who was in line and who was not. It was made
clear that to not be in line meant you not only would not be
invited back, but you also became the enemy.

Dade County NOW in 1990 was one of the largest and most
active chapters of a twenty-three year old national feminist
organization. We were a chapter that offered many of its
members a variety of leadership opportunities. My
feminist, activist home for thirteen years, Dade NOW
provided me with many Opportunities to lead. But when

Mindy ran for president, it became like a war zone. Women

99

who were previously personally and politically aligned
instantly became bitter enemies. A division was created
between those in support of Mindy and those in support of
the other candidate. Secret meetings, personal attacks,
harassing, were some of the behaviors practiced with, to and
between the opposing camps who only weeks before were our
colleagues and good friends. We stopped talking to each
other. We were suspicious, untrusting, angry, and
vindictive. No longer was the chapter a safe place for me
or for anyone else who supported Mindy’s candidacy

First Janet accused me of inappropriately taking sides
as the sitting president. Since I hadn’t been public with
my support of Mindy, somehow I thought I could defend
myself. Then Janet proceeded in vilifying Mindy. She told
me that if Mindy became president, the chapter would end up
in the toilet. “I have devoted too much time and energy into
this chapter to watch it destroyed by Mindy’s presidency.
Mindy” she sputtered, “is emotionally unstable, crazy,
destructive and her presidency will polarize chapter
membership, pitting the long time activists against the
newly enrolled members, and the straight women against the
lesbians.”

My personal, political and public identities were
tightly entwined around my participation in Dade NOW.

Memories of once favored women in the chapter who

100

disappeared from chapter activities trickled through to my
consciousness. It was as if I too would now disappear
because for years I had relied on Janet for the truth of my
feminist existence. It was easier to let her define what
was true, than for me to know it for myself. All I had to
do was go along to get along. And now that I had betrayed
her by going against what she had expected of me, I feared I
too would disappear.

Mindy won the election in a landslide. Janet and her
Sidekicks were furious. Although elated with the outcome, I
knew there would be repercussions. Along with my anxiety
about them, the feminist idealist in me believed that Mindy
would be allowed her year in office, protected by the
mandate of the members who had voted for her. But in a
hierarchical arrangement of power, such as was in place in
Dade NOW, the membership didn’t stand a chance. Through use
of her power, which resembled so closely the patriarchal,
patronage system of an “old boys network”, Janet doled out
privileges, favor and dependency. As the powerful person
she was, she turned around several members of the newly
formed board to side with her against Mindy. These feminist
women, swayed no doubt as I had been by Janet’s power and
leadership skills voted down every initiative offered by
Mindy or by any of the other board members aligned with her.

Women, new to the chapter and recently elected to the

101

board, who were in support of Mindy’s presidency, could not
stomach the hostility, and resigned. In attempts to
maintain some semblance of presidential control, Mindy moved
the bank account nearer to her home. Although this was a
common procedure for a new president, in the interest of her
convenience, Mindy's enemies used it as ammunition against
her. They accused her of operating outside of her
authority. The battle escalated. Hastily, hostile members
called secret board meetings held at Janet’s house. At
these meetings, selectively following Roberts Rules of
Order, they decided to bring Mindy to an internal trial.
Mindy refused to participate. This further infuriated Janet
and she exerted more pressure on me and others to desert
Mindy, much like abandoning a sinking ship and leaving the
captain to drown. Mindy was going to be brought down, she
said, and if we would defect, we could be saved. I didn’t,
nor did the others.

The “trial” was held and supported the charges of mis-
conduct levied against Mindy. Women chosen and pressured
by Janet and obligated in some way to her, recommended Mindy
be removed from office. A general membership meeting was
held to implement the recommendation, and with a packed
house of new members from the medical school securely in
Janet's pocket, we knew as soon as we arrived that the vote

would go against us.

102

At that point, before subjecting the membership to a
vote, we agreed to a compromise. Mindy stepped down as
president, became the vice—president, and still believing in
the power of “Sisterhood” we somehow hoped that all of the
hostility was over. We acquiesced and believed that now
after a bit of awkwardness; all that happened, all the hurt,
loss and pain, would be dismissed, forgotten, and together
we would heal our wounds. Together again, we would return
to securing and fighting for our rights.

At the next board meeting though, hopes for
reconciliation were dashed. The acting president, a
mouthpiece of Janet’s closed out any voting positions on the
board all to all who supported Mindy. After several of
these meetings, those of us who had long found our home in
Dade NOW never again attended another one. We left the
chapter. Thirty of us became charter members of a new
Feminist organization in Dade County called the Feminist
Alternative. Many activists who over the years had
disappeared from Dade NOW found a new home in the FA. We
published a newspaper with a mailing list of 2000 and became
a strong feminist voice in Dade County and Florida. We
initiated actions and co-sponsored with other women’s
organizations, conferences, demonstrations, elections and

actions.

103

I, and others in support of Mindy, who were
contacted and attacked by Janet, did not fold,
disappear, or acquiesce, because Mindy did not.
She inspired us to stand up to Janet, and we did
at great personal, political and emotional costs.
Mindy lost her job at a prestigious law firm
because her attention was on the battle and not on
her job. Our close friend and long time co-
activist lost a well—waged campaign for the
Florida Legislature by less than 100 votes,
leading us to believe if her supporters and the
Dade NOW chapter had not been embroiled in this
internal battle she would have had a better chance

garnering the so few needed votes for her victory.

Today Mindy, an out lesbian, is the Legislative Aide to

Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson and helps write laws
that affect women and men of Dade County. She and her
partner of twelve years have two children. Janet is still
the Dean of Students at the University of Miami School of
Medicine. As far as I know, she still is a power broker of
Dade NOW, Florida NOW and National NOW, all of which have
diminished considerably from public View and perceived
effectiveness. Among other things I am a now a partnered

lesbian and a soon-to-be graduated doctoral student and own

104

my home in Lansing, Michigan. I have a voice that is
throwing off fifty plus years of practiced subordination to

others more articulate and authoritative than I.

105

 

' Carol Cathcart, Mimi McKinney, Joyce Brown were the women who conceived of and worked to
implement their idea of a coffee house for women. The name of the coffee house would be “It’s
Open For Women.

2 Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism( Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
Following Daly, I metephorically use Leaping, Spinning, Spiraling down beneath the surface of
phallocratic thinking. From Daly, “ I simply risked leaping into the process...” in New Intergalactic
Introduction, p. xix. “It was the task of Weaving connections in such ways that I was in fact
Spinning the integrity of my own be-ing and knowing, experiencing vertigo, and moving into
uncharted Realms” . p. xxi.. “ ....outercourse, for this is a Voyage of Spiraling Paths Moving Out
from the state of bondage. It is a continual expansion of thinking, imagining, acting, be-ing. I now
see the Spiraling Paths of my Outercoursing....They are Acts of Leaping through portals into the
Background.” p. xxii.

3 Hartsock, Nancy. “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective” in Building Feminist
Theory: Essays from Quest, Longman, New York and London, 1981, p.35.

‘ Young, Iris. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking About Women as a Social Collective” Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1994. Vol. 19, 3 713-738,
p.71 8.

’ Echols, Alice. _D_aring to be de: Radical Feminism In Amerig, 1967-1975. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 84-85.

6 Echols, p. 90.

7 Dodson, Betty. Liberptino Masturbation: A Meditation on Self-love. (New York: Bodysex
Designs, 1974) p. 55.

8 Dodson, p. 21.

9 American Bar Association. “ERA: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Pamphlet. Undated but by
content, printed and distributed between 1978 and 1982. The ERA, (text above in the title) first
introduced to the United States Congress in 1923 is a proposed addition to the US. Constitution
that finally passed both houses of Congress in 1972. In order for it to have been added to the
constitution it required ratification by 3/4 of the states legislatures. “The ERA would require
government to abide by the principle that all men and all women are entitled to equal opportunity
to participate in the nation’s political social and economic life”. Inside, front cover. Even with a
four year extension granted by the US Congress in 1978 it never was ratified by the last three
needed states.

'0 Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Signs: Joumal of
Women in Culture and Society1980, vol 5, no.4. The University of Chicago Press. pp.631-660.

“ Rich, p. 632.

'2 Abbott, Sidney and Barbara Love. Sappho was a Right-On Woman. Briercliff Manor, New
York:Stein and Day/Publishers, 1972, Day Book Edition, 1978.

106

 

'3 Abbott, p. 108.
'4 Abbott, p. 110.

'5 Brown, Rita Mae. Author of many books. The one of the most enduring popularity, published in
1973 is Rubyfruit Junqle (New York: Daughters Publishing, Inc., 1973).

‘6 Abbott, p. 111.

”Abbott, p. 112.

'8 Abbott, p. 114.

'9 Abbott, p. 131.

2° Hartmann, Susan M. From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politica Since 1960.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. “Working Women United, a grass-roots group in Ithaca, New
York, held a speak-out on sexual harrassment in 1975.... “ p.113.

2' A 1973 United States Supreme Court decision, named Roe v. Wade is based on a women's
right to privacy, protected women lives by giving them the freedom from interference by the state
to choose to terminate a pregnancy. It affirmed that a woman’s right of privacy included her
deciding for herself whether, when, and under which circumstances she would bear a child. Roe
v. Wade made it solely a decision between the woman and her physician in which the state had
no business and could not interfere.

22 Balz, Dan and Ruth Marcus. “In Year since Webster, Abortion Defies Predictions". The
Washington Post. July 1, 1990, p. A1, A6.

107

CHAPTER FOUR
THE DEPTH OF MY ACHIEVEMENT

Todaynfall of the year 2002-—being a lesbian, being a student, being old,
are markers of the depth of my achievement of a feminist standpoint. Because
feminist standpoint, as theorized by Nancy Hartsock, includes the claim that
women occupy a privileged vantage point to what can be known about male
supremacy, I argue that as a lesbian feminist I occupy a privileged vantage point
that offers me an opportunity to also achieve a less perverse and distorted view
of compulsory heterosexuality. In addition, I have constantly sought deeper and
richer understandings of feminisms for over thirty years bringing me to the point
of this project as a graduating student in a Ph.D. program. Following Hartsock’s
claim that “women’s lives differ systematically and structurally from those of
men,” my life as a lesbian-- as not a heterosexual-is structured differently from
that of a heterosexual woman.1 It is from my achievement of a lesbian, old, white
feminist standpoint that I come to different understandings of my experiences of
abortion, being an icon of white male heterosexual desire, and being a white
feminist political activist.

My long list of experiences previously identified as possible
objects/subjects of my research dwindled to abortion, sexual objectifying. and
feminist activism. My understandings of them changed over time. An illegal

abortion, without a feminist consciousness, is experienced as shameful, a

108

criminal act, a secret. As a feminist activist, this same experience was
“courageously” shouted out from the courthouse steps as an act victimization, in
which women's lives are discarded, unvalued, and placed at extreme risk. In
today’s perspective as a feminist scholar, thirty-five years later, this experience
can be constructed as an act of resistance to the dominant, patriarchal
imperatives of womanhood.

From my lesbian feminist standpoint I have access to my past
understandings of these experiences as heterosexist, classed, raced, aged,
contextual and historic. My experience told today from memories of yesterday
demonstrates how I a white, middle-class, young, single, heterosexual, mother,
professional sex object, in our nation’s capital, coped with an unwanted
pregnancy. How I experienced the illegal abortion, as outside of the dominant
discourses which would have me not seek an abortion. Then as a feminist
activist, and moving from my individuated experience to understanding my
experience as being shaped by being a part of the collective woman, I
represented my experience of abortion as being that of all women faced with an
unwanted pregnancy. I spoke my story as exemplary, as demonstrative, as
descriptive, and as representative, without acknowledging the structural
differences and interlocking oppressions between women of different races,
classes, ages, and sexuality.2 l consciously understood that l was speaking for
the women, no matter their location in the structures of our society, who could

not, did not, would not, tell their stories.

109

Now I am a scholar. I have been trained to problematize, to enrich, to
connect and critique the context in which women live their lives. I have many
more ways of telling my stories than as an individual or as a political activist. If I
look at my experiences of abortion for instance, as chronological, linear, I can tell
it one way. If I turn it ever so slightly it can be told entirely differently. An
example is my first abortion. Even if I still told it fairly chronologically, but
changed the viewpoint to being from the context of my job as a Gaslight
Girl/object of heterosexual male desire, the paradigm of working for tips and the
common connection between the two men in my story as current customers of
mine, it is a different story that I can tell. Today as a student, having achieved a
depth of a lesbian feminist standpoint, have access to telling my stories many
different ways. I am able to reinterpret them within many more analytical
frameworks than I was able to either prior to my entering the continuum of my

achievement or as I did to make a political point.

Today’s Perspective: Illegal Abortion and Oppression3

Oppression: root of the word is press. To press something,
force is applied to mold it, shape it, and distort it. Barriers are

created to restrict and immobilize it.4

Marilyn Frye, in “Oppression" uses the analogy of a cage to represent the
systematically constructed network of oppression that confines, molds, and

constructs all women. The cage representing oppression consists of many

110

interlocking, overlapping and complexly organized webs of meaning and
understanding. Within its complexity it is placing an understanding of abortion
into this cage-like organization of oppression that I use to weave today’s
perspective of my experiences, or of women’s experiences of abortion. It is from
my achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint, that I see more
comprehensively how abortion is defined by a system, which subordinates
women’s sexuality to the definitions and desires of men.

Using the cage as representative of the network of forces that oppress
women, shows that by only focusing on one barrier and not seeing oppression as
a network of forces in place to confine her, a woman might think she was free if
only she could remove the one barrier on which she is focussed. But in her
narrow focus she is not seeing that her escape is impossible because of the
entire network of forces preventing her from freedom. No one element of the
network, or a wire in a cage, keeps her oppressed. How all elements are
connected and related to each other is what creates the cage-like structure of
oppression.

In the narratives written from memory to represent my initial understanding
of my experiences of abortion, I thought of abortion as the solution to the
outcome of my own stupid behavior. Even though the solution was illegal,
dangerous, and as some would say, immoral, it was a solution available to me
and one I chose to rectify an undesired personal situation. In the narratives that

represented my early entry into an achievement of a feminist standpoint, as a

111

feminist activist, I still saw abortion as a resolution to an individualized situation,
but as a resolution that should be insured by the government for all women as a
basic right. Today my perspective of abortion is that it is part of the sexual
difference of women’s lives. A difference used to subordinate, dominate, and
oppress her. Women have had abortions, or not, across time. Only women have
abortions and my vision is that women separate, as best as possible from
oppressive institutions, such as heterosexist mores, laws, and structures.

Abortion as a choice for women desiring it in our western culture, and most
other cultures, is mediated through religion, government, medicine: all male
dominated, conceived of patriarchally, maintained and enforced to make
compulsory women’s heterosexuality, and their subordination and continued
oppression in a masculinist, phallocratic, heterosexist reality. From the depth of
my achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint I have a broader access to
Frye’s conceptualization and can re-understand those experiences as
determined by the cage of oppression in which I am confined.

As a feminist abortion rights activist, I understood and made meaning of
the denial of access to legal abortion as the problem. To insure women’s access
to safe abortion through the law, women’s lives would be saved. So I was still
seeing abortion as a solution. Further, I embraced the feminist political
understanding required of me that I only see abortion as if it were a stand-alone
barrier to the liberation of all women. Within the cage of oppression this

requirement meant that I only see one wire in the cage and from that microscopic

112

view I could not see, nor did I represent the complete network of barriers to our
freedom from oppression. In this microscopic examination we believed that the
removal of legal barriers to abortion would amount to women’s freedom from
sexual oppression. All women would be free once we were granted permission
by legal and moral powers to have an abortion. This belief is mistaken,
simplistic, and of course untrue. For one thing, someone else granting me
permission to have an abortion is someone else desiring it and defining it for me.
And in the case of legal, medical and moral power, it is in the hands of the
phallocracy.

Further by holding this belief and fighting for either abortion’s illegality or
legality, the caged/oppressed woman has owned the system that oppresses her!
In the complexities of the intenivoven forces in which she is oppressed, the
encaged constitutes and maintains her own confinement. She becomes a
component of that which oppresses her and others of the class woman. By
looking at only one wire in the cage—abortion-- the rest of the cage of
oppression is obscured. Since the state, in cahoots with the medical system,
legitimized it, quasi removing one barrier to overcoming women’s oppression, we
thought we had gotten something. We did not understand yet the full
complexities of all the forces in place that deny women reproductive freedom or
the ability to define their own reproductive destinies based on their own desires.
Other systems in the cage of oppression come into play. Doctors, hospitals,

professional care givers, systematically invoked religion, religions invoked the

113

“right to life” as superceding women’s right to an abortion thereby valuing the life
of the fetus over that of the woman. Legislatures and Congress jumped on the
bandwagon and began systematically to restrict access to abortion. They put
into place, financial restrictions. Only women who had money could have one.
No public assistance funds could pay for an abortion. Age restrictions in the form
of the requirement of a parent’s consent were instituted. Access was further
restricted when hospitals and medical schools pulled abortion practices from their
offered training and services. With fewer and fewer practitioners, access was
confined to mostly urban areas, and geography became an issue of expense,
time, and safety. Soon late abortions were attacked through language and laws
by calling them “partial birth abortions”, and by discussions of the viability of the
fetus. It made no difference to those with the power to oppress, that safe, legal
abortions saved women’s lives. Her life was valueless. Her body was thought
an incubator to preserve the life of the fetus. All of these interlocking and
intenivoven institutions, systems of repression, and others (partially) constitute

the oppression of women.

And there I was on the court house steps positing protection

by the state would protect all women.

We live in a reality of patriarchy. We know that biologically procreation

takes place in a woman’s body, and under the theory of the compulsory nature of

114

heterosexuality she is pregnant, less as a result of her wishes and desires than
as an outcome (not unexpected) of coerced heterosexual intercourse. Even
though in our present historic and political situation, certain pregnant women
privileged by race, class, age, location, can carry her pregnancy to term or
terminate it, the web of oppression to which she is confined, insures that she is
really only able to do what is desired by the patriarchy for her to do. The progeny
(descendants of the father) must be protected or not. Any option she chooses
will be male defined and desired. With institutional, structural, and personal
barriers woven in place to prevent her from having an abortion, motherhood is
forced upon her. Conversely, barriers are in place for some women, based on
her lack of privilege—or that of the men closest to her in her life-in relationship of
race, class, age, location, prevent her from carrying a pregnancy to term and
abortion is forced upon her. In western patriarchy, abortion is male defined
variously as murder, as a capricious act by women, as the result of irresponsible
female sexual behavior, all contributing barriers to women exercising control over

their own bodies.

Today’s Perspective: The Girl/Bunny

Feminist standpoint is an epistemology. Achieving a feminist standpoint is
an achievement of a consciousness that allows an understanding of “phallocratic
social relations and ideology” within which women in our society live their lives.5 It

is from our lives as women that we occupy a vantage point to achieving an

115

understanding, less perverse and distorted, of the relationships of power
between women and men. It is in my struggle to achieve a feminist standpoint
that I understand the nature of power in the Playboy Club as disciplinary. It is
with a feminist standpoint that I read Michel Foucault, Sandra Bartkey, and

Susan Bordo.

“But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations
have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it,
force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs”.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.6

“bunny n, pl bunnies 1 : RABBIT esp a young rabbit 2: a desirable

young woman7

Sandra Bartky in Femininitv and Domination uses the Playboy Bunny as
one of three examples of women being sexually objectified.8 Adrienne Rich in
her article “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, exemplifies
“bunnies” as one of the ways women are required to dress for male sexual
titillation and are used as objects of male transactions.9 Catherine MacKinnon in
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State refers to Playboy’s “Playmate of the
Month” in the context of pornography defining what a group is, “including when it
raises individual qualities to sexual stereotypes”.10 Playmates, women who are
photographed nude to appear in the centerfold of Playboy Magazine, were often

Playboy Bunnies.

116

What is the power of the Playboy Bunny that feminist theorists continue to
invoke its image long after the Playboy Club, and the Playboy Bunny have
ceased to exist? I was a Playboy Bunny over thirty years ago, prior to my
beginning the struggle to achieve a feminist standpoint. In my experience as a
Bunny, I was as Bartky, Rich, and MacKinnon assert, sexually objectified,
costumed to sexually titillate, and thought of by some people as being
pornographic. Being a Bunny was the performance of a subjectivity that included
practices and qualities of my gender as constructed at that time. In my role of
Bunny acts of subservience, projection of glamour and the making of
accommodations were rewarded with money. Unlike my roles of mother and
wife, subjectivities that required the same practices and qualities, as a Bunny, I
was paid for these gendered behaviors. Any woman with the required material
characteristics and able to perform the required behaviors could have also been
hired. It was not my particular ability to perform the subjectivity Bunny that
landed me the job; I landed it because of my membership in the group Woman
and my conformance with its phallocratic subjectivity.

Michel Foucault’s concept of modern disciplinary power,11 altered in
consideration of feminist criticism, and in light of an achieved feminist standpoint,
provides a framework of understanding the Playboy Club of the middle 19605.
Disciplinary practices are used to produce the “docile body” of femininity is
Sandra Bartky’s analysis “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of

Patriarchal Power.” Foucault and Bartky’s work illuminates the relations of

117

power evident in the Playboy Club and in the construction of the subjectivity of
Playboy Bunny. The performance of the subjectivity of Bunny is exemplary of the
objectification of women through dehumanization, deconstruction, and
reconstruction. As Bunnies, women were dehumanized through naming. As
Bunny, the identity Woman or any other identities Women claim outside of being
a Bunny, within the club were deconstructed through their irrelevance to the
construction of Bunnies. Our bodies were reconstructed with disciplinary
practices enforced through costuming, surveillance, and specific standards of
weight, age, and appearance.

Michel Foucault, in “The Eye of Power” writes of Jeremy Bentham’s self-
proclaimed “discovery” of the Panopticon”, an architectural design of a model
prison featuring a central observation point. This design ensured that the
prisoners always were subject to observation, and always were within range of
the guard’s gaze. This concept of architecture and the gaze is identified by
Bartky as the essence of Foucault’s idea of the disciplining of society.“ The
Playboy Club exemplifies this concept as well. In our training to be Bunnies,
couched in terms of performance and being on stage, we learned that there was
always a chance that we were being observed, and we were to operate as if we
were constantly subjected to the gaze of the subject male. Further, we were held
to the strict and rigid standards of behavior and appearance of the ideal Bunny.

Architecturally the Panopticon was designed for disciplining observation,

so too was the Playboy Club designed in such a way that there were few

118

obstructed views of the Bunnies as they served the customers. The
customers/members, in the time period of my experience, were all males,
although female guests were allowed entry if in the company of a member. All
the men who frequented the Playboy Club were white, seemingly heterosexual,
and fairly affluent.

On the main floor of the club was a greeting area, set off from the adjacent
“Living Room” and bar area. At the bar itself, were chairs instead of stools. The
bar was table high with bartenders, who were Bunnies standing in a well set
slightly below the surface of the floor in order for a bartender’s upper torso to be
closer to the eye level of their customers. Other seating was of a modern design
that featured low backs and arms, and deep soft cushions putting the person
seated, very low to the ground. Bunnies providing table service were also
viewed at torso level and in close relationship with the viewer. Drinks were
served, ashtrays, replaced, and orders taken on low cocktail tables or at small
tables strategically placed against the wall: none of which impeded the sight of
anyone else. The low height of the tables also required that Bunnies contort their
bodies in such a way as to not have their breasts literally spill out of their
costumes or expose any more of their already exposed back-side. Bunnies
moved around the club, always visible, always in service. With no broken sight
lines there were not areas of the club, open to the public, where a Bunny was not
in view, where she might catch a smoke, or adjust her hose. Soft subdued

indirect lighting shone throughout the club, which eliminated any dark corners or

119

shadowy spaces in which a Bunny might find space out of the gaze. Bunnies
exited “back stage”; out of view of the members, to handle any wants, desires, or
needs. Not that satisfying their needs was encouraged or provided for.
Designed into the Bunny costume was assurances that the Bunny was never out
of the gaze. The costume was skin-tight and closed up the back requiring
assistance both getting in or out of it.

Bartky quotes Foucault, who writing of this constant visibility and its effects
said: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power.”14 As Bunnies, women knew they
were always visible, in fact they were admonished that they were visible even as
they approached the club to come to work. Bunnies were told to arrive for work
with make-up applied, and to not have curlers in our hair.

While on the floor we were also subject to an additional form of
observation. There was the Photo Bunny. Her job was to sell Polaroid pictures
of a member or his guests with a Bunny of their choice. Thus producing a
permanent record of a Bunnies performance to be viewed and done with as
someone else chose. Following Foucault’s concept of power as circulatory, this
constant visibility within the club also subjected the members and their guests.
The power that defined young women as Bunnies and also sexual objects,
extended far beyond the walls of the club, and conformed to and constructed
asymmetrical power relations between men and women. Members of the club,

at the club and beyond perhaps too were held within the gaze that required of

120

them a performance of a manly manner: jokingly speaking sexual innuendo’s,
exhibiting lust for the Bunnies, having lots of fun, and spending lots of money. I
am not suggesting that the circulation of power, from the Bunnies, to the
members, to the management of the club, and beyond was symmetrical. I am
suggesting the disciplinary power that resided in the club, and outside, also
dictated the performance of others, as well as the Bunnies.

In 1963, Gloria Steinem, concealing her journalistic interest, became a
Bunny under an assumed identity for a writing assignment. From her experience
she wrote, “I Was A Playboy Bunny:” first published in Show Magazine.
Steinem’s article, reprinted in her Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
written in diary format is descriptive and as such does not conflict in content with
my early narrative of my experience as a Bunny.15 However, her subjectivity as
a Bunny was mediated through that of being an undercover journalist. I argue
that as an observer of other young women performing as Bunnies, Steinem was
an accomplice to the disciplinary powers of the Playboy Club. She became a
part of the disciplinary gaze as described as the “eye of power" by Foucault.

The Playboy Club was relatively inexpensive to join and served to both
popularize and legitimize elitist desires of some men who wanted the exclusivity
of a private club and also wanted the sexual titillation of the strip joints. The
popularity of the Playboy Clubs could be attributed to Playboy Enterprises” overt
promotion of male sexual desires, and the projected receptivity of young

“attractive" women to those desires. This promotional message was in contrast

121

to the traditional downtown private men’s clubs which eschewed any overt
displays of sexuality, and often were stuffy, boring and further, excluded women.
Unlike the traditional private clubs, the Playboy Club featured scantily clad
“attractive” young women as service help. Playboy clubs were usually in an
urban setting and were convenient to a business clientele often on an expense
account

Foucault writes of space in the home, which prior to the mid-19th century
had been undifferentiated until it became specified and functional. He uses the
example of the working class family being “fixed” by spaces in the home
assigned a specific function, such as the kitchen for cooking, the dining room for
eating, and the bedroom for procreating. Foucault identifies this as a prescription
of a form of morality for the family.16 Interestingly in the Playboy Club, space
was also assigned for specific function. First, the physical club was often
referred to as the “Bunny Hutch.” A hutch is a pen or coop for animals and thus
the club could be understood as a place where attractive young women,
subjected as Bunnies lived and were captive to the advances of men. Secondly,
rooms or floors were named for the different functions that took place there. The
“Living Room” was for lounging and conversing with guests, drinking, and seeing
and being seen. “The Bar", with a big mirror in which the patron could easily see
all that went on behind him, was a place to drink and watch what other’s were
doing. And upstairs was “The Playroom.” It is in "The Playroom” that

entertainers performed on the stage and members were served dinner during the

122

show. Following Foucault, it could be said that the women who performed the
subjectivity of Bunny were also fixed by the assigned spaces of the club. Where
fixed determines behaviors, identities, and boundaries. There were specific
Bunny performances for each space in which you worked a shift. In addition, a
certain morality was prescribed by the assigning of these spaces to spaces that
corresponded with assigned and named rooms in a home. Even though the
room in the club, where one was served lunch and dinner was not called the
dining room, its name the Playroom was the same name as a new, in the 603
room in the home called either the recreation room, similar to playroom; or the
family room. Particulany in the case of the family room, food often accompanied
watching television that was a component of activities that took place there.
Hefner’s assigning spaces within the Playboy Club with names of spaces within
the home could be understood as an attempt to provide legitimacy and sense of
security to male voyeuristic desires. The Playboy club therefore prescribed a
particular morality, which was masculinist, sexist, and exploitive of women.

In 1964, the Playboy Club was a part of aggregate of components of an
empire. Hugh Hefner was the sovereign of what I think of as the “Playboy
Empire.” Other components included The Playboy Magazine, which promoted
the Playboy Philosophy, Playboy Merchandise, and the Playboy Clubs. The
“Playboy Empire” even had a mansion or castle in which was housed Hugh
Hefner, as well as the corporate headquarters of Playboy Enterprises. The then

Playboy trademark, a black shadowy profile of a coded-male rabbit, the

123

magazine, and the mansion, are all current today, although the Bunny is no
longer a physical reality of the “Playboy Empire.” The young, attractive, female
body, subjected as Bunny-now a powerful symbol—remains the center of
Hefner’s profit making enterprise and continues to serve feminists as an example
of women being objectified, exploited as sexual stereotypes, and used as objects
in male transactions. The material woman has been taken out of it. There are
no longer positions available to be a Playboy Bunny. In the past young women
served a purpose of the Playboy Club to create a subjectivity of receptive
sexuality. That material subjectivity, as well as the space to perform it, outlived
their usefulness, to Hugh Heftner and his empire. The Playboy Bunny is still,
though, symbolic of the white heterosexual male’s desire for a passive, receptive,
young, attractive woman. My reality at the time and until my achievement of a
feminist standpoint problematized my experience, was that I was grateful for the
glamour of the job, was as yet unable to see myself as a member of a group and
subject to political, social and personalized institutions, therefore saw the
success of my performance only as a meal ticket. I did not see it as destructive
or demeaning to women. Nor was it in my understanding that being a Playboy
Bunny or Gaslight Girl was exploitive of women’s bodies, sexualities, or
subjectivities. This was my reality of being a Girl/Bunny, and from my
experience, the reality of the other women who were Bunnies during the mid-60s.
It is from an epistemology of the material reality of women in a patriarchal,

phallocratic society, that I now possess a particular understanding of women’s

124

experiences from the vantage point as theorized in Hartsock’s feminist
standpoint.

In “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Power,” Sandra Bartky
writes of a counter movement to the then current conceptions of political liberty.
Foucault identified this counter movement, as being the emergence of a new and
unprecedented discipline directed against the body to increase its utility. Bartky
quotes Foucault: “The new discipline invades the body and seeks to regulate its
very forces and operations, the economy and efficiency of its movements.”
Altering Foucault’s words to accommodate a feminist analysis, the human
(female) body entered a machinery of power (the Playboy empire). Foucault
concludes that this discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, or “docile
bodies.”17 Bartky critiques Foucault’s omission of the engendering of this
discipline and that the “docile body" of women, produced by disciplines as
feminine, is left out of his analysis.

Bartky considers three categories of disciplinary practices that produce the
body as recognizably feminine. These three categories can be applied to the
construction of the Playboy Bunny. In the first of these categories, bodies are
produced of a certain size and general configuration. The discipline constructed
feminine body of the Bunny, in the mid-sixties, conformed to the Euro-American
standards of size, shape, and color. I would add age to this disciplinary practice.
Clearly to be a Bunny was strictly confined to the very young adult female. The

production of body as feminine is not an old body, unless it is marked and

125

recognized as suitably grandmotherly. The second category includes those
disciplinary practices that require from the body a specific repertoire of gestures,
postures, and movements. As already described, to be a Bunny was taught as a
regime of performance. The third category identified by Bartky is also significant
to the production of the body as Bunny. These practices include the display of
the body as an ornamented surface. The female body is not good enough as it
is as and therefore must be ornamented with make-up, and encased in garments
that produce the appearance of a specific shape and size. The Bunny costume
was an ornament, as well as a tool of reconstruction of the body and provided
supposed enhancements and visual excitement. Along with this category, the
body feminine, as well as the body-bunny, is used as an ornament to enhance
the surroundings, much like a stylish lamp, or piece of art. In the Playboy Club,
Bunnies were ornaments and were used as accessories to the club.18 The
“Bunny perches" strategically placed around the club, were for just such display
of the club’s most cherished and sought after ornaments. Bunnies also, while not
in particular service, served the club’s atmosphere by leaning against a chair or
sofa back, railing, or stool.

The Playboy Club employed gendered disciplinary methods that
attempted to produce a “docile body” subjectivity Bunny. Restricting
requirements of becoming a Bunny, rigorous training, ongoing surveillance,
constant observation, and long work hours required of the job, constructed young

women’s bodies as “docile” within the subjectivity of Bunny. It has only been

126

recently that l have altered my position that as a young woman I willingly
subjected my body to the discipline of the Playboy Club to perform the
subjectivity of Bunny. I further claimed, at an earlier time in my study, that
outside of the subjectivity of Bunny that my body was not docile because of the
active embodied role that I performed in my other subjectivities. I do not now
stand by that belief. In the current depth of my achievement of a feminist
standpoint, I know that as women in a patriarchal, phallocratic society, that our
bodies are always constructed as docile and to be otherwise is, as if it were an
aberration, such as women body builders, or athletic super stars like Martina
Navratilova. It is as an old woman, in which my body is supposedly subjected as
diseased, deteriorated, and infertile, that the docile body of femininity is now
supposedly the docile body of an old woman. It is from the struggle to achieve a
feminist standpoint that I resist such a subjectivity.

Bartky’s analysis of Foucault’s theory, the production of “docile bodies”
requires uninterrupted coercion, such as experienced by the student confined to
her desk, or a Bunny confined to the club. The subject Bunny never left the club.
The subjectivity of the Bunny was confined there. Women entered the club and
became Bunnies. Women took on the subjectivity as they donned figure forming
costumes, placed perky ears atop well coifed hair, and pinned on bunny cuff-
links, collar and bow-tie, and affixed our fluffy white tail.

This phenomenon is what Bartky terms “body—object relations." Like the

examples Bartky uses, the student at her desk, the soldier and her weapon, the

127

women who performed the subject Bunny were enclosed in “costumes”, and in
the club. In training to become Bunnies, women were taught particular gestures
and movements required of the subject Bunny. She was an articulation of
body/object relations.19 Taking this argument further I posit that this body-object
articulation of a woman/bunny, woman-bunny/club is multiple and even more
complex. The body is that of a female, the object is that of an objectified animal.
The rabbit as bunny, conjures up ideas of a cute, fluffy, “docile” animal bearing
gifts of candy eggs, and colorful jellybeans. But the objectified rabbit also
conjures up another image, that of unrestrained sex, exemplified in the myths of
rabbits multiplying without effort, with the implications that rabbits are always
available for sex and wanting it. The construction of the Playboy Bunny was the
marketing of a projected heterosexual male fantasy of unobstructed access to
objects of their sexual desire.

These disciplinary practices, in Bartky’s analysis, comprise the process of
the construction of the feminine body-subject. The training, the design of the
club, the costumes, the male ownership, management, and membership, were all
disciplinary practices that produced a practiced and subjected body, a body on
which an inferior status was inscribed. The image of the Playboy Bunny, which
long after they have ceased to exist, endures and leaves doubt in the minds of
most women that their bodies measure up to an idealized, unobtainable, sexual
attractiveness. The Bunny as a feminine body-subject is like images that adorn

Playboy Magazine that are "airbrushed”, positioned and located in such as way

128

as to be unattainable to a woman outside of that construction. The disciplinary
construction of the Bunny, in the mid-sixties, was as a collective Bunny, which
served to erase individuality and personality through scripting, and uniqueness of
appearance through selection, costuming and standardized cosmetics, much like
women in the collective Woman.

Moya Lloyd in “Feminist Mapping of Foucauldian Politics” discusses
Susan Bordo’s analysis of the anorectic who, Bordo writes, in addition to being
read as victim of oppressive cultural norms, also acknowledges the anorexia’s
actions as transgressive.20 Bordo writes “ it is not unequivocally the case that its
practitioners see themselves as victims.21 Prior to the time of the second wave at
a feminist consciousness, both mine and that of the other women who were
Bunnies, generally we did not see ourselves as victims. We certainly had no
ideas of our subjectivity, subjugation or exploitation, but we did resist. And I
claim a transgressive component of the construction of Bunnies also. We
resisted through expressing our personalities, breaking rules, establishing
relations with other Bunnies, members, and guests outside of the construction of
ourselves as Bunnies. We tampered with the scripts, modified our postures, and
stole food off plates!

The transgressive nature of our construction as Bunnies can be
understood in the historical context of the times. We were just coming off the 503
In which the age of domesticity, June Cleaver and “Life with Father” were cultural

imperatives. The “Playboy Magazine , The Playboy Philosophy”, and the

129

Playboy Clubs were bringing to the surface and into the mainstream of our
culture submerged sexual desires of the patriarchy. What had been confined to
the burlesque shows in seedy parts of town, was manifested in a quasi-socially
acceptable highly publicized private club. Those of us who willingly self-
constructed as Bunnies transgressed the normalized roles for middle-class,
Euro-American, white skinned, young, women of the time. Further many of us
were single mothers. It was not a normalized identity of motherhood to be single,
to be a Bunny, nor was it part of the construction of Bunny that we be mothers.
The disciplinary powers that construct the subjectivity of Bunny reside
within patriarchy. Hugh Hefner, the Playboy Empire, The Playboy Bunny are all
constructions of the institution of patriarchy. The power has always been in
patriarchy and is there today. The Playboy Bunny of the Mid-sixties was one of a
long string of phallocratically constructed subjectivities of the feminine that are
evident today. These subjectivities can be deconstructed by reconstructing them
from an achieved feminist standpoint as women re-member, write, speak, weave,

who we are.

Today’s Perspective: Memory

Memory is the source of my research. It is memory that provides me the
material to construct, reconstruct, perform, and create representations of my
experiences as a woman. Using a metaphor of writers mining a quarry of

memory, Gayle Greene in “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory” writes:

130

“Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for
forgetting dooms us to repetition; and it is of particular importance to feminists.”22
In a search for a current self I dig deep into my past and narrate from memory my
experiences. From Greene, “Memory is our means of connecting past and
present and constructing a self and versions of experience we can live with.”23
Of course this assumes there is a self who is searching. The self who is
constructing a self, or in the conceptualization I prefer as less masculinist, is
weaving a self. This weaver is a student. She is old and white. She is a lesbian
and is a feminist. Who I am now determines the self for whom I am searching
and conversely the self for whom I am searching also determines the self doing
the searching. The method for my search is writing. And it of course is not in
search of self but in weaving a self or selves. One such self that I write is a self
that completes a requirement of receiving an academic degree. With this degree
some will think I am a knowledgeable self.

The self I am writing, through memory is of course feminist. It is a self
who consciously sought a feminist standpoint, although the self, prior to my being
a student, whom I write, did not yet know of such a framework for her knowledge.
The self in a quest for a feminist standpoint, had children and abortions, had
husbands, was a young woman, performed or performs the subjectivities of being
Playboy Bunny, a white liberal feminist political activist, a partnered lesbian,

feminist separatist, a queer activist, an old woman. My practice of feminism

preceded my study of it.

131

Today’s Perspective: The Category Woman

As white, in a racially white dominated society, as woman in a male
dominated society, as heterosexual in a heterosexual dominated society, I knew
exactly what was a woman. I knew it from my women dominated family heritage.
I knew it from my life as a woman. I knew it as a feminist activist. But as a
feminist scholar I don’t know it as clearly. Issues of social constructionism,
biological determinism, subjectivity, politics, sex, and gender, all complicated my
simple understanding that women were not men and visa versa.

Feminism is based on the concept of woman. But contemporary feminist
theorists have problematized the category woman. Where difference as women
gets mixed up with differences among women; and being a particular sex is
medicalized in gender selection, at birth in the surgical “correction” of ambiguous
genitalia, with surgically and hormonally changing the sex of a person; where sex
is questioned if someone doesn’t exhibit the assigned markers of their biological
sex; when people don’t perform the roles as defined according to sex; I too could
then access feminist questioning of what was a woman.

At first I believed that there was a natural/real category women. In a
consciousness-raising group in the 70s, in a moment of an understanding I
grasped a simplistic understanding of women as a social/political category.
Identifying myself as a woman, I also knew I was in a class, a collectivity, a
group, known as women, and we all shared certain commonalties of being a

woman. I was in the camp of the “Same.” I also knew that I know what I know

132

as a woman who is also a feminist. We were a class, as de Beauvoir defines it,
as other.24 In this camp the category woman does not exist without the category
man. By definition women inter-relate with men from a subordinate position. It is
what makes her a woman. Within the political arena, many of us as feminist
activists fought for the rights of the natural and social category woman, as other

than man.

The National Organization for Women was founded in the late 605 to bring
women into full equality with men. Although conceived in the concept of the
sameness of all women, lesbians were initially not included. To the founders of
NOW, with Lesbian women only their difference mattered. Their sameness didn't
matter. Perhaps in a category of women that is defined as being other than men,

a collective of women who are not in primary relationship with men, just didn’t fit.

NOW ‘5 structure is in a very traditional manner hierarchical: governed
from the top. Officers are elected, and the national board is geographically
representative. In other words, members in regional chapters elect
representatives to the national board. Chapter officers are also elected.

Elections insure sameness.

Women have also been defined by essentialist and biological determinists

who say it is anatomy and biology that makes them women. In this conception,

133

one is born a woman. Biologically, and anatomically she has the capacity to bear
a child. All people who are born with this common biological capacity are defined
as female. As soon as a child is born it is determined by someone, usually of
the medical establishment, through examination of the infant’s genitals whether it
is a female or a male. And the complexities become apparent. All this defining,
determining, witnessing, altering, and is in a context: a context that has a rich
history of cultural, societal, personal, political beliefs and practices. All of which,
and more, will sexualize, personalize, socialize, empower, subject, politicize, and
inculturate, the child as its determined “sex” deems.

To determine solely on one’s anatomy, what is a woman is reductive and
simplistic. The social, personal, material, and political forces which shape
people’s lives is profound, and categorizing women by their anatomy ignores how
these affect what is a woman. But the owners and their advisors of the Michigan

Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) decided to use being woman as a birthright.

Having not been a part of the decision making process of the MWMF’s

defining women as being born women, I can only imagine what it was. The
MWMF, a womyn-only event, has determined that only womyn-bom-womyn are
welcome to attend this week long, quarter of century old, annual event in mral
Michigan. Understanding this flat provides an opportunity to think through the
question of what is a womyn.

Although it appears that this biological determination made at birth

134

defines what is a woman, lposit that it is in acknowledgment of the difference in
how womyn’s lives proceed, in the “unfriendly" environment in which she grows
and lives as a woman, that was uppermost in the minds and hearts of the womyn
of the MWMF when they authoritatively determined (for themselves) who was

and who wasn't a womyn and therefore welcome at the womyn-only festival.

The determination of femaleness is in effect a determination that one with
a vagina is not a male. A major component of the many social, personal,
material, and political forces that effect one’s life is based on women being not
men. 80 women is a negative category, in the philosophical sense, which places
women in a position of being an other. Marilyn Frye, a feminist and a
philosopher, offers a way to begin to extricate women from being defined by what
she is.
not.25 In the traditional logic of categories, it is only possible to follow the model of
Al-A (A/not A). She disagrees with this logic as being useful in categorizing
women and states unequivocally that it is “a political function of community and
politics as vital to construct a positive category of Women....26 The problem of
defining women can be solved by defining the structure of the category in which
she “belongs.” Frye explains the philosophical equation that defines negative
categories: Al-A. Although this structure appears to be dualistic, it is not. It
does not construct two things. Paradoxically, it is dichotomous but not dualistic.

The equation means that when one is not an A, one could be anything. To not

135

be something is indistinguishable from everything else that is also not
something.27 In support of her argument, Frye further explains, that in the social
or physical world, away from the abstract realm of set theory, structure, not
attributes establishes something discrete, and different from something else.
Structure is a set of relations, and relations can differentiate one woman from
another. It is important therefore that women are conceptualized within a
positive category of Women, thereby giving her subject status. Both A and B
would be subjects, as well as D, E, F, and so forth.
In Dade NOW (see Chapter 3, this project) the projected desire of plurality
was not built into its stmcture. We were not A’s and we wanted to be as if A’s. In
order to achieve equality we needed to appear as one, not several. NOW’S
structure was conceived on maintaining the status quo in order to insure
commonality among us. Dade NOW’s member-activists and leaders during the
803 and early 90$ shared commonalities of race, class and age. Any differences
detected among us were who we were sexually. . .either lesbian or not lesbian.
We sought commonalities among other women. When we wanted our
membership to reflect that all women spoke as one and we currently reflected
that only white women spoke for all, we went to other racial communities with
messages of all women are oppressed the same, although we didn’t use the
word oppression as I remember. Basically we said, your problems are our
problems, join us and we together will solve all problems for all women. You join

us, together we will be strong. Become us and eschew “your” differences.

136

Basically we needed them for a purpose, and they did not need us because they

were doing fine without us.

The political strategy of this categorical logic is that to create a positive (as
in logic, not as in good, vs. bad) category of women it must be actively and
socially constructed as concrete and historically real, not as an abstract idea. In
other words as Frye writes, the category is defined by intemal relations and
differences. Built in will be the “—-deliberately, creatively elaborated, and
articulating, differences among women in, by, and as a means to constructing a
sociality, a symbolic order, a web of meaning of and among women.”28 In Sexual
Difference, The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, also noting the “fragile
concept of woman,” seeks to create a symbolic order for women by writing a
genealogy “at once discovered, invented, and constructed through feminist
practices of reference and address.”29 This genealogy effectively mediates a
woman’s relation to the symbolic, allowing her self-definition as a female being,
or female gendered speaking subject.30 In doing so they “write” a theory of
social-symbolic practice. It is a partial, political project in which, among other
things, is shown the effectiveness of the concept of a female genealogy.31 The
writing of which becomes the theory.

Like Frye states, the women in the Milan Book Collective as described in
Sexual Difference “ ...actively and socially construct(ing) a concrete and

historically real positive category women--deliberately, creatively, elaborating

137

articulating the differences among women in, by, and as a means to constructing
a sociality, a symbolic order, a web of meanings of and among women.”32 A
transforming moment occurred for the Collective in this process when the group,
quite by accident, acknowledged their differences among themselves. Their
differences became evident in something as concrete as choosing books by
women writers to understand what was being a woman. Some women wanted,
what are thought of as classic women’s books, others wanted something like
romance novels. In these differences in desire based on experience, differences
in power among them as members of the collective, became evident. Some
one of them noticed in seeking women writers as symbolic mothers, as guides,
that “the mothers (symbolic) are not the writers ; they are really here among us,
because we are not all equal here.”33 By having named the disparity among
them they knew a truth and no longer were confined to the ideal of equality.
They wrote: “Because of an ideal of equality which neither grew out of our history
nor corresponded to our interests, we had forced ourselves to imagine what did
not exist and had forbidden ourselves to take advantage of what did.”34 The
constraint of practicing as if all differences made no difference according to an
ideal of neutrality was now lifted.

It is this neutrality that Frye anticipates as an objection to her theorizing of
a positive category of women. The positive category of women will also turn out
to be neutral, that is universal in the dimensions of race and culture. Again, in

Sexual Difference, the way difference did not become neutralized or

138

universalized was by actively and consciously being difference. They structured
their differences into their practice, or “category." When reading the books
selected as The Writings of Women, built into the process of selection, is the
acknowledgement of the disparities and levels of entrustment among the
selectors. As Frye claims, the positive category, again not subject to the
restrictions of the structure A/not-A sort, would be constituted by “self-reliant
structures of differentiation and relation."35 The Milan Women’s Bookstore
Collective became the members’ differences built into the structure of it.

Another objection that Frye imagines, is that a category of women
structured in AB mode would become unitary, such as there would be only one
subjectivity woman.36 Frye, again says no. By its very form, A:B implies multiple
subjects and the relationships between and among multiple subjectivities can be
understood more easily. Where the dichotomous Al-A categories have been
problematic in understanding women’s multiple subjectivities while at the same
time maintaining a category women.

80 the womyn of the MWMF are A, in the conceptualizing of womyn as a
positive category, and the women of the son—of-trans camp are B, both subjects,
both autonomous, both with an authoritative voice, at least in theory.” But I
suspect the son-of- trans folk are operating under the A/-A belief, and they
assume the MWMF womyn are also. In effect the son-of—trans folk are operating
as if they have been categorized, by the MWMF, as not A’s. In that negative

categorizing, the not A’s (son-of-trans women) resist. They claim no differences.

139

They, as -A seek inclusion into the A category on the basis that they are also A’s,

and should therefore be admitted and welcome into womyn-only space.

In the conceptualizing of the MWMF of the positive category of womyn,

the B’s (the son-of-trans women) deny their differences from A’s. The B’s posit
they are equal to A’s. They would leave behind their past masculine being in the
social arrangement of patriarchy as if their world and lives had not been affected
by it. As if their subjectivities had not been constituted in anyway by the

privilege, no matter how obscure, of their maleness in a male dominated society.

In what I call the “NOW debacle” in which members of the Dade Chapter

split into two factions and then sought domination one over the other, structure
defined our relations. The organizational structure provided power for those with
a history of winning over, of material wealth, of strong personality, of strength of
purpose, although the purposes were not necessarily for the good of its
members. The structure/organization demanded one adhere, conform to what
already was. The two camps both thought that what they were doing was for the
good of the organization, but each thought their way was the only way to achieve
that good. In the camp to which I belonged, we supported opening up,
expanding, and welcoming new members into the chapter. The camp to which I
did not belong was protective of what we had built and saw openness, and

expansion, as an increasing risk to it, if by dilution of their power, if nothing else.

140

Sameness was a necessity to that camp. It was the latter camp that by virtue of
history and structure that dominated. Even though we had the numbers to “win”
the election, the structure insured we would not prevail in changing anything.
Our relations, built into the structure in which we were engaged, relied upon

patriarchal practices of power over, patronage, hierarchy and expulsion.

The MWMF is a social group. As a social group, the organizers, in
determining what is a womyn, are behaving as if they know what is a womyn,
and in that determination, we can imagine that they envision what is best for the
womyn who attend the festival. Further as a social group the MWMF is highly
organized, it has an historic structure of womyn only space. In addition, each of
the women attending, identifies herself as a woman, albeit in many and sundry
ways. There is no passive identity here. The MWMF is case of a structural
relation to material objects as they are produced and organized by prior history.
Where the structural relation is how “Women” and “men” are related in the
institutional systems, and to these institutional systems, which comprise the
society in which we live; and where the material objects, in this case, are all the
multi faceted, complexities of overlapping sets of structures and objects of
gender, as they are produced and organized by prior history.

Cressida Heyes argues for conceptualizing women based on “similarities,

relationships, and a whole series of them at that.”38 To conceptualize women in

this way, much like Wittgenstein’s “family of resemblances”, there are no

141

definitive characteristics that all women share, but women are connected by a
network of overlapping similarities: some biological and some socially
constructed. “But,” writes Heyes, “ no characteristic is necessary to make an
individual a woman, and none is sufficient.”

E van though Heyes specifically makes a case that male to female
transgendered women are women, she too, based on the concepts she poses in
this article would stand with the women inside the MWMF. Boundaries are fluid,

she writes, but can be drawn for specific political purposes. 39 It could be said
that for MWMF the specific political purposes of definition, naming, maintenance,

and security, of women-only space, it is women-bom-women that are welcome.

Within NOW of my experience the structure of social relations of the
patriarchy was the structure in which we related one to another. The system we
adopted, because it was all we knew, did in no way consider our sexual
difference as women and our differences among women. We adopted a
structure in which we were destined to destroy each other. Woven into our
structure was no validation of our difference, our social relations, or our
experience as women within a patriarchy. Just as laws, social mores,
government, history, personal relations, business does not validate the sexual
difference of women, the structure in which Dade NOW operated, did not
recognize our difference in the universe, of being women. A structure growing

out of a female symbolic would have included our difference. It would have been

142

woven from our experience as women. It would have included woman as a
reference point, not man. “Rules” and “regulations” of exchange, instead of as
patronage, manipulation, secretive, would be in place.

This Woman as reference is in Women’s Studies; in communities of
women; in First Fridays in Lansing, Michigan; in rituals of celebration and sorrow
by, for, and of women; in the publishing of the Lesbian Connection; in the
distribution, appreciation, and purchase of women’s music; in the distribution,
appreciation and purchase of women’s art; in attending and supporting The
Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival; in women’s soft-ball, volleyball, golf,
gymnastics, etc; in feministly reading women’s writing; in following in the
footsteps of our fore-goddesses, our fore-mothers, our fore-sisters; and of
entrusting ourselves to our own symbolic, leaping into the otherworld,-outside of
the patriarchy, for recognition, authorization, language, and of our sexual

difference as women.

Today’s Perspective: Compulsory Heterosexuality

Adrienne Rich describes her concept of the lesbian continuum, as
including “a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-
identified experience... “"0 My life today as an old, white, lesbian, feminist,
scholar and political activist, is freer than ever from the compulsoriness of
heterosexuality. As a former heterosexual woman my lesbian existence

comprises, as Rich writes, the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a

143

compulsory sexuality. As a feminist activist it could be understood that my
heterosexuality was chosen. Through access to knowledge of a lesbian
existence, through activism, which was for and about women, I knew then, I was
making a choice. Then there came a time when I moved the center of my life to
women and away from men.

My life is representative of the continuum of lesbian existence and Rich's
theorizing of compulsory heterosexuality. In my first marriage, of total
accessibility to my husband even to being accessible to his open hand smacked
against my face and to being out of control of my reproductive capacity resulting
in birthing three children in less than three years; to the double edged sword of
gaining independence as a Gaslight Girl and Playboy Bunny which positioned me
as a sexual object and accessible to a material fulfillment of many men's
heterosexual fantasies; to marrying again and becoming a full time wife and
mother giving my husband access to my life long gratitude to him for marrying
me and my three children. Finally as a feminist beginning to envision limiting
men’s access to me, I left that marriage and my sexual identification as a
heterosexual woman. More and more I have been able to limit men’s access to
me to as close to reciprocal arrangements as possible. One, of course is never
really free from a phallocratic society’s pressures to conform to heterosexuality,
but certainly as a lesbian I am more distant from its pull.

My search of self has delved deep into my achievement of a lesbian

feminist standpoint. I have looked among my experiences to demonstrate the

144

feminist meanings to be made of them. I have explored how as my achievement
deepened, richer and more complex feminist meanings became more and more
accessible. The deeper the achievement of my lesbian feminist standpoint, the
more I know about who I am, and upon which I am grounded. For an analysis of
this knowledge Naomi Scheman draws on the theorizing of The Qitsider Witflifl
by Patricia Hill Collins.”1 Scheman, in Egenderings summarizes Collins’ claims :
“...the perspective of the ‘outsider within’ as one of clarity and creativity,
grounded in the critical achievement of self-knowledge, including knowledge of
where one stands in relation to the structures of privilege and domination that
constitute one’s marginality.”42

The achievement, Scheman argues, requires a politics of one’s identity in
a marginalized and oppressed group and “the conscious chosen identification
with that group” in order to gain the benefit of the vantage point to knowledge
available to those claiming an outsider within status. It is my identification as a
lesbian that grants me a privileged vantage point to feminist knowledge about
compulsory heterosexuality as an outsider within.

Today I am a feminist lesbian political activist for the lesbian, bisexual,
gay, and transgendered (LBGT) community of Michigan. Since coming out as a
lesbian my subjectivity as a feminist is now as a lesbian. It is as a lesbian
feminist that I am a member of the women’s community in my hometown, in my
University community, and in my personal connections. It is as a lesbian feminist

that I perform my job for Michigan Equality, a statewide political organization

145

dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender
identity. In the university I held an assistantship in the office of LBGT affairs, as
well as serving as a board member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgender
Faculty Staff Association. I am out in all roles I perform as a student, a woman, a
member of my family, and a citizen of this country. My subjectivity as a feminist
is continuous, beginning barely negligible in the feminine consciousness of my
woman-centered heritage, growing to a rich, thick, nubbly, textured and multi-
cultured and multi-stranded rope of practice, understanding, achieved and

achieving feminist standpoint.

146

 

1 Hartsock, 1985. p. 231.

2 Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black
Feminist Thought” in Social Problems Vol 33, 6, pp. 514-532, (The Society for the Study of Social
Problems, 1986). As one of three key themes of Black Feminist Thought, Collins claims the
linking of oppressions has been made by Black feminists as far back as the 1800's and that
“Black women’s absence from organized feminist movements...(is due to the Black feminist’s)
commitment to addressing interlocking oppressions, yet (they) have been excluded from arenas
that would have allowed them actively to do so.”

p. 520.

3 Frye, Marilyn. “Oppression” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. (Freedom,
CA: The Crossing Press, 1983) pp. 1-16.

‘ Frye,1983, p. 2.
5 Hartsock, Nancy C. “The Kinship Abstraction in Feminist Theory” in the Appendixes of Money,

Sax 511g Power. Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. The Northeastern Series in Feminist
Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), p. 267.

6 Epigraph: Susan Bordo: Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture,
from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).

7 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictiona_ry,Tenth Edition (1998), s.v. “bunny.”

a Bartky, Sandra. “On Psychological Oppression,”Femininmr and Domination: Studies in the
Phenomenology of Opgression (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 26.

9 Adrienne Rich. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society 5:4, 1980, p. 639.

1° MacKinnon, Catherine A. Toward a FerLinjst Theory of the SEQ (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 209.

1' Foucault, Michel. “The Eye of Power", in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other
Writings 1972-1977, Colon Gordon, Editor. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) pp. 146-165.

'2 Foucault, Power/Knowledge. p 148.

'3 Bartky, Sandra. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power" Femininity
and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.
64.

1’ Bartky, Sandra. p. 65. Michel Foucault, Discipline a_nd Punish (New York: Vintage books,
1979), p 138.

'5 Gloria Steinem. “ I Was a Playboy Bunny" in Outrageous Atis and Everyday Rebellions. (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), pp. 29-67, postscript 1983, pp. 67-69. “’I Was a Playboy

147

 

Bunny originally appeared as a two-part article, ‘A Bunny’s Tale’ Show magazine, 1963.” Credits
page, Outrageous Acts .....

‘6 Foucaun,p.149.
‘7 Foucault, p. 63.
‘8 Foucault, p. 65.
‘9 Foucault, p. 64.

2° Lloyd, Moya. “Power/Politics” in Feminist lnttflpmtions of Michel Foucault, Susan J. Hekman,
Editor. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) pp. 241-264 p.250.

2‘ Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body,” in Up Against Foucault,
p.192.p

22 Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory" in The Second Signs Reader:
Feminist Scholarship 1983-1986, Joeres Ruth-Ellen B. and Barbara Laslett, eds. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1996). Originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, 1991 vol 16, p. 2.

23 Greene, p.187.

2‘ Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books a Division of Random
House, 1974) Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley.

25 Frye, Marilyn. “The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1996. Vol 21, 4, pp. 991-1010.

2" Frye, 1996, p. 998.
2’ Frye, 1996, p. 998.
2’ Frye, 1996, p. 1002.

29 Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

3° de Lauretis, Teresa. “The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy: an
Introductory Essay” in Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practce. The Milan
Women’s Bookstore Collective. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) pp. 2-21.

3‘ Milan, p.4.

32 Frye, 1996, p. 1002.

33 Milan, p. 110.

3" Milan, p. 111.

35 Frye, 1996, p. 1004.

148

 

3" Frye, 1996, p. 1005

37 For several years transgendered women and supporters of them being welcomed into the
Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, established a camp across the road from the main entrance
into the festival. The camp is named “The Son of Trans Camp.”

3” Heyes, C.J. “Back to the Rough Ground! Wittgenstein, Essentialism, and Feminist Methods.
Feminist Interpretations of Wittenstein, Naomi Scheman, ed. (State College, PA: Penn State
University Press, 1999).

39 Heyes, p. 12.

4° Rich, Arienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, vol 5, 4 (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1980) pp. 631-660.
p. 648.

‘1 Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of
Black Feminist Thought. ”Social Problems ,33, 6 (Society for the Study of Social Problems, 1986).

‘2 Scheman, Naomi. Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege. (New
York: Routledge, 1993) p. 241.

149

CHAPTER FIVE
HAVING LEAPT
“She who has chosen her Self, who defines her Self, by choice, neither in relation

to children, nor to men, who is self identified, is a Spinster, a whirling dervish,
spinning in new time and space.”1

My Mother’s Story, or My Father’s*

*Is the origin of the meanings I make of my life, my experiences, female or

male? Are they from a female source or not?2

In the first chapter I pondered whether my autobiographical writing is in
the manner of my Mother's story or of my father’s story (“a non-storY’pp. 24-25).
Sidonie Smith raises the question based on autobiography being an androcentric
genre, perpetuating and constituting a patrilineage and its ideologies of gender.3
Traditionally in the genre autobiography, women are culturally silenced and
denied authority to write as the subject of her own life: “most critically the
authority to name herself and her own desires." Smith writes of Elizabeth W.
Bruss calling the “autobiographical act’: “an interpretation of life that invests the
past and the ‘self’ with coherence and meaning that may not have been evident
before the act of writing itself.”5 Any coherence of meaning is made in a
cognitive context of women’s subjectivity defined by men as not-men, and as
object to men. Have I defied the authority, have I overcome the androcentricity
of the genre? Does the autobiographical nature of this academic project
perpetuate and constitute patrilineage or have I subverted it and written my

Mother’s story?

150

The genre demands a public story of a public life.6 In choosing to write her
life a woman must leave behind her subjective cultural silence and enter a public
male dominated and male defined arena. 1 do such a thing in writing
autobiographically in the academic arena. I tell my story publicly of experiences
positioned as gendered and of a class, woman. I have spoken my experiences
in the past as a political/public act and today write them for an audience to
achieve public institutional affirmation. My writing is not private, is not for my
private, personal use, and although I write my personal experiences, I write them
publicly, politically, with a professional intention.

As a woman writing autobiographically, I can only tell my stories in the
language of the male symbolic if I want them to be read and valued within a male
symbolic, it is after all that which I seek in pursuing an advanced academic
degree. Smith writes that a woman can only tell her story in a way that “will
resonate with privileged cultural fictions of male selfhood...(thus) committing
herself to a ‘patrilineal’ contract.”7

The prevailing ideology of male selfhood is individualism. No matter what
he faces he overcomes. No matter what barriers are in place he progresses.
This is the father’s story. It sounds like mine: no matter the power of the
patriarchy; no matter the barriers of oppression; I progress in an achievement of
a lesbian feminist standpoint.

All meaning I make of my life is gendered female, where female is

constructed as not male, and is male defined and desired. Smith, in describing

the situation, that Frye would call a double bind and Daly a reversal, claims that

151

in order for a woman to write her experiences she must write them in them in, for
purposes of this project, the “fore-ground,” othenrvise they will not be understood
in a phallocracy.3 Her representations of her experiences must speak of
progression, of success, of overcoming, of becoming. This is of course exactly
what I have written. Therefore, in this respect, I tell my father's story. To write it
differently is to write as other than men and tell my Mother’s story of
subordination, domestication, and victimization. In doing that, I of course also
perpetuate patrilinearity by reifying patriarchal female subjectivities. Either way,
there are negative consequences for the woman autobiographer. Either way,
she can not tell her stories as the subject, as the originator.

How would I then write autobiographically in the symbolic of My Mother?
To write my father’s story I have to deny my sexual difference, but I don’t. But in
the manner of my father, I do establish my individuality apart from other feminist
academics; apart from what other women may or may not achieve as a feminist
standpoint. I do not write of my domesticity. I do not write of birthing, I write of
aborting. I don’t write as a businesswoman, I write as a feminist activist and
highlight my leadership, as well as my victimization. Otherwise, I do not write of
my disempowerment as a woman in a patriarchal society except as a way station
to my becoming all powerful. I write as if “free” from the constraints of
compulsory heterosexuality, and free from the materiality of my life as an old
white woman in a patriarchal, white and youth valuing culture. It is as I spin deep

into the Background that I become “powerful” and eschew the powerlessness of

152

my subjectivity as a woman in a man’s world. I write as an old academic, white,
lesbian, feminist woman.9

I do claim sexual difference and in that respect my stories are told in the
manner of My Mother. But the experiences I write are engendered in a male
symbolic: abortion, sex object, betrayal, woman-as-victim. On the other hand, I
tell them relationally in My Mother’s way, and represent my achievements in
context. It is in communities of women; in relationships with and of women; from
a self-consciously white feminist perspective about women, that I write
autobiographically. My path, though individual, is traversed collectively and
relationally, and with an accumulated consciousness of experiences as gendered
female. It is whom I am in relationship that I name myself. I achieve, but I
achieve in the interest of a woman’s symbolic, I pursue to help create change, 1
reference a female symbolic and come to imagine one, which I constitute and in
which I am constituted.

Sidonie Smith analyzes women’s autobiographical writings in search of
“her Mother’s ” story.10 In her analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Wo_maa
flarri_o_r ,11 Smith claims Kingston captures powerfully the relationship of gender
to genre. Her work, Smith writes, exemplifies the potential for works from
the marginalized to challenge the ideology of individualism and with it the
ideology of gender.”12 It is in Kingston’s recognizing the inextricable relationship
between an individual’s “sense of self' and the community’s stories of self-hood,
Smith argues, in which she “self-consciously reads herself into existence through

the stories her culture tells about women.”13 Variously thought of as a novel and

153

as an autobiography, The Woman Warrior consists of five narratives based on
stories told of women in her family that Kingston’s Mother has told her. In
textual conversation with her Mother, described by Smith as dialogic
engagement, Kingston “struggles to constitute the voice of her own subjectivity”
through re-telling in the present her Mother's ancient stories. An example is the
one of her Aunt who because of shame surrounding her pregnancy killed herself

I.14 Kingston re-tells it from her Aunt’s perspective and

by jumping in a wel
“seeks to name the formerly unnamed.” Kingston represents her as a willful
woman who “enacts in her own body” thereby subverting tradition, the patrilineal
line, and “to fool the pain-dealing gods.”15

1 use this small part of a thorough analysis of Kingston by Smith to inform
my answer to whether I write my Mother's story or my father’s. It is an academic
self for which I struggle. I turn to stories of my past to constitute a voice of my
sought for subjectivity. It is in a dialogic engagement with the foremothers of
feminist thinking and practice that I struggle for a lesbian feminist standpoint, and
for an academic, feminist, lesbian, old, white, woman, subjectivity. In the
present, I use what my feminist foremothers write to re-tell my past, to write my
current feminist academic subjectivity. Smith writes of Kingston that in her
uncovering the layers of the dynamics and consequences of her Mother’s
interpretations of women’s lives, Kingston re-makes her matrilineal ancestors’
lives through her own interpretations and passes them on for posterity.

In a similar fashion I also seek to uncover the gendered dynamics and

consequences of my memories of previous and current interpretations of “a”

154

woman’s life experiences. It is as a woman that I came to feminism. It is from
my vantage point as a woman in a patriarchal society that I sought and achieved
a lesbian feminist standpoint. It is a womanly subjectivity constituted, as deeply
as my struggle allows, beneath the surface of patriarchy. Through my heritage of,
interest in, and commitment to women I have become that which I seek.

Woman, Women, Sexual Difference therefore are at the center of this project,
they are the subjects of the work. In as much as the content constitutes a
symbolic, as much as the writers subjectivities constitute a symbolic, as much as
intent constitutes a symbolic, as much as consciousness of forces operating for
and against a particular symbolic, constitutes it, I write My Mother’s story.

The stories, I write are from memory kept alive by an interest in feminism,
by political activism, by the act of speaking my experiences in a gendered
discourse. It is from my sexual difference that I make meaning of them through
a lens critical of patriarchy while at the same time of it. | accumulated
achievement of a feminist standpoint, and came to imagine a female symbolic. I

tell my stories that they not be forgotten.

Spiraling, Spinning, Semantics

Achieve a feminist standpoint, writes Nancy Hartsock. Adrienne Rich
conceptualizes a continuum of lesbian existence and claims it as a source of
feminist knowledge and power; she exposes heterosexuality as compulsory and
as a manifestation of male supremacy. Mary Daly compels, commands, and

sparks women to take an existential leap to freedom. To leap, she says,

155

creatively further into the Background and forsakes the patriarchal foreground of
our past and current existence. She wants us to spin to beneath the male-
centered foreground and take up residence in the Self-centered Background
below the surface; to journey deeper and deeper into the Otherworld, our
homeland, the homeland of the Other.16
As previously noted, I have adopted for this project Mary Daly’s practice of
capitalizing words or not according to meaning rather than standard
usage. I capitalize words to indicate that they emanate from the
Background, where women, past, present and future are connected. I
ignore patriarchal conventions of capitalization of words that emanate from
the foreground. For example foreground in this context is not capitalized
and Background is. Other is from the Background. Not capitalized other is

from the foreground. Othenrvorldness is from the Background.

It is from an achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint that I have
access to an understanding of a female symbolic and that I am even able to
imagine something in the Background beyond patriarchy.17 The Background is
where all women, past, present and future, are connected. It is where women
Re-Memember Selves, where women tell the truth about Selves, women who
have leapt existentially into free space, outside the context of deception. Daly
insists that we can and must Dis-cover new time and space, that there is
something profoundly positive beyond what men have done to us. She moves

melus “to the edge of the radical question, ‘Who am l?”’, and into the free space

156

where man is not at the center.18 To forget, to not Re—Member is to only survive
in the non-free space. Where who i am in the foreground is no longer who I am.
Who I am begins in the woman-centered Background. It is in the male-made
mazes of foreground that we are confronted and killed as women. It is in this
space, this Otherworld towards being outside of the influence of the foreground,
that I am competent to write a dissertation.

In the Background, connected to all women, I am. Daly says in the
foreground what we think of as illusion is real and what we think as real is the
illusion. For instance when in the foreground i absolutely know i am incapable of
writing my dissertation it is real—i can’t! In the foreground, my ineptness is what i
know and believe. I must pretend, to act as if, i am capable. My competence is
an illusion. An old woman, non-career academic, surviving by being inept,
cannot write a dissertation. In an existential leap into free space—“Mary, Mary,
Into the nothingness of the Othenlvorld, I leap!”--l dis-illusion my competency and
make illusory my ineptness. I understand it is only an illusion when i am certain i
will fail to accomplish this task. The power of my certainty dissipates and the
power of the reality of my competence takes shape.

My project has been a metapatriarchal journey back to reality. Although
not truly outside of the foreground, l symbolically locate myself Back to an
Othenivorldness: Other, than the male supremist, necrophilic, patriarchal world
that is the illusion in my work, to the Othenlvorldness of reality.19 My project
springs from, takes up residence in, and constitutes, for me and others, a

Iifegiving, Biophilic Background. Daly and others have been my guides. From

157

this place of achieving a feminist standpoint I have Dis-covered some of my past
experiences and transformed the previously unknown of them into uncountable
ways of knowing. I Re-member and enter and create a space that is Other than
patriarchy. To do that I struggle.

In a study of a Self evolved in relation to feminism, the Self struggled for
and achieved multiple levels of knowledge. The Self in search of itself gained
access to many modes of feminist interpretation and spun down, down, down
below the surface of patriarchy. Paradoxically in the search for self, the Self was
created. In the writing, in the analysis, in the re-Membering; I named, I struggled,
I achieved, I became, l referenced, I reflected, I originated, I structured, I
entrusted, l articulated, a Self in my nascent female symbolic.

The female symbolic in which this project constitutes and exists reflects a
level beneath the surface of phallocratic thinking. At that distance the structure
of this project is defined in the academy. The project conforms to, and desirably
pushes, standards that will confer upon me a title. The title will have some
meaning outside the academy, and in a female symbolic the title will place rne
among those educationally privileged. And in that privilege it is a responsibility to
understand what it entails in terms of difference. The title though is not what it is
that I take from the academy that serves me more deeply into a female symbolic.
It is the process I performed in quasi-subverting the academic structure by
personalizing, politicizing, criticizing, intellectualizing, emotionalizing, and

symbolizing an academic project, which spins me deeper into the Background.

158

My desire for the academic title preceded the leap. Although it was as a
feminist that I had the desire, it was spun closer to the surface level of the
phallocracy. My desire can be scrutinized for classist, elitist, heterosexist,
divisive, assimilationist, privileged, patriarchal, meanings. At the level of the
foreground I thought I needed a mantle of intelligence. Having a “terminal”
degree was such a mantle. Although a feminist in a woman centered life, I still
understood feminism as hierarchical, and desired to move higher on the ladder of
success. I wanted to be a “better” feminist and to me a better feminist was one
who could persuasively intellectualize and articulate original ideas, plus had a
moniker to prove it. And although my desire held all the trappings of from
whence it was spun—the foreground--my beginning level of achievement of a
feminist standpoint guided me to women and a few men in the academy to reflect
the best of all that I wanted to be. For thoughtful and sincere guidance, it was to
them that I entrusted my desire and the project that would fulfill that desire.

For an understanding of what I experienced, Mary Daly writes as:“... the task of
Weaving connections in such ways that I was in fact Spinning the integrity of my
own being and knowing, experiencing vertigo, and moving into uncharted
Realms.”20
In a manner of the female symbolic, my academic path is woman-
centered and it is as a feminist I journeyed. As a woman I studied women. It is
to women I turned for feminist knowledge about women. In the manner of the

female symbolic, my search for self is subversive to the academy. It is personal.

It is self-serving, idiosyncratic, and merely subjective. It is from a particular place

159

of achievement of a lesbian feminist standpoint that I seek the approval of the
university. At a deeper level in a female symbolic, bestowing of a mantle of
knowledge would come from a woman referent, rather than a patriarchal
institution.

Leaping from high in a confined foreground of patriarchy, the continuum of
this project began its spiral in compulsory heterosexuality. A male-centered world
in which in patriarchal reversal, I am allowed to understand my family’s lineage
as matriarchal: a family of strong surviving women—abandoned by men. The
continuum boring beneath the foreground represents my spinning into
Othenlvorldness, while simultaneously marking my achieving of a lesbian feminist
standpoint.

Background requires an understanding of the constraints and restraints of
the oppressions of patriarchy, the injustices of distributions of power, similar to
the achievement of a feminist standpoint. Background is not just available
because we resist the foreground nor is a feminist standpoint just available to us
as women in a patriarchal society. The Background is achieved by those who
take the leap and spin out of control. To be a Spinster is to take an active role, it
is to Dis-cover, re-search, all part of an achievement.

In Outercourse Mary Daly writes of those of us who have “Moved for some
Time,” “Who have ‘been around’ and can Re-Call earlier Moments, and who can
bear the memories and knowledge of destruction.” We, old feminists are the
Memory Bearers.21 Our challenge is to “Spin and Weave the broken connections

in our Knowing, Sensing and Feeling, becoming Alive again in our relationships

160

to our Selves and to each Other.”22 To meet this Challenge, Daly writes that it
requires “Time-Travel—Re-membering our Future and our Past.” In bearing our
memories we create rich memories of the future. Daly explains “Memory of the
Future as “an action which affects/effect the F uture.”23 For those that come after
rely on the Memory Bearers.

At the beginning of the spiraling continuum are my representations of my
memories of embodied, sexualized events exemplary of a time and space of a
beginner spinner of Otherworldness. First, my spin is but a shy rotation, barely
discernable as that of a spin; a slight turn understood as movement; a hint of
consciousness of my power as powerless in the patriarchal world of my being.
As a “powerless” white divorced mother of three, I break the law. I break with
societal and moral imperatives that I give birth to that which I conceive: instead I
de-ceive. Connected with all women, I abort my pregnancy. As women have
done in the past, and in the present, and will in the future, have, do and will not, I
survive. Daly calls Real surviving an extremist act.“ To best survive as Other
women have done, I exploit my impregnators. It is as a Spinster into
Othenrvorldness that l spin my tale this way.

This spiral indicates that as I move along the continuum l have access to
the path I have already traveled. On this path I see where I have been and have
a vision of where I might be going--or not. In my memory of my beginning
spinning, before Re-Membering, I am disconnected from all women, and my de-
ceiving was shameful, a result of my immorality and promiscuity, and my own

ineptness in preventing pregnancy. In the unbroken male-centered foreground of

161

my time and space, I was alone and ignorant of my connectedness to other
women.

In this, as a beginner spinner, are other of my embodied experiences. In
my whiteness, in my youthfulness, in my heterosexuality, in my tallness, in my
Ieanness, I conformed to a dominant standard of sexual attractiveness and
performed as an icon of white privileged male-heterosexual desire. Through my
successful performance as a gaslight girl and as a playboy bunny, I exploited my
conformity and gained financial support from many men, rather than the
prescribed support from only one man of white, heterosexual, young women.

In this arrangement of multiple dependency, patriarchy appears as less
constraining than if I were dependent upon only one man. My relative
independence of this time became evident when several years later I married
and replaced my felt reality of independence for the reality of dependence. Being
financially dependent upon one man was more constraining than being financially
dependent upon many men. In exploiting my conformity to extract financial
support from many men, each individual man’s entitlement to my services was
short lived, limited, and could be renewable. In marriage, the contractual
arrangement with one man is “forever”, unlimited, and continuous. These
experiences are at the start of the spiraling continuum of my spinning deep into
an Otherworld. After all in this world we are other, and as other we have access
to proceeding to an Othenlvorld of our own.

And in the ways of spiraling and movement up and down along a

continuum, when I married for a second time and became financially dependent

162

and grateful to my husband for taking on this “great obligation” to support me and
my three children, I retreated upwards on the continuum of my achievement of a
feminist standpoint. In performances of a traditional wife and mother, made
perfect by lessons learned from the historic, political, and personal context in
which I existed, I took up residence in and ceased resisting the phallocratic
prescriptions for white, middle-class women of the time.

When where I was in my performance of these prescriptions became
untenable for me I looked at other women’s resistance, saw possibility, and I
followed the resistors into the women’s movement. From there it was only a
matter of time that I began to, in a simplistic and reductionist manner, distinguish
the heterosexual women’s involvement from that of the lesbian women. I saw
that as heterosexuals our primary relationships were not women and therefore
not necessarily of the movement. Our primary relationships and the material
reality of our lives were still centered around men and at home—distanced from it.
When something at home was not pressing we could proceed to perform our
political work. Lesbian women’s involvement reflected the women centeredness
of their lives. Many would stay late into the night, long after those of us in
relationship with men had gone home. I envied them — what I thought of as their
freedom- to make decisions unfettered by guilt, expectations, and heterosexual
roles. This envy led me to relate more closely to the lesbian women in my life
and beyond. First one and then another lesbian woman became the objects of
my sexual desire. It was scary to me because who I was as a heterosexual

woman was still more powerful than who I was as a lesbian woman. Who I was

163

as a lesbian woman had not yet taken shape beyond desire. I behaved for a
while as if I could be both. One secret from the other, one extra to the other, one
forbidden, the other being destroyed by the forbidden nature of the first. The one
was discarded for the other. I became a lesbian. My subjectivity as a
heterosexual woman withered and disappeared.

It is in a Self-defined, Self-serving, female symbolic that I have other

understandings of my experiences.

Abortion

In the aftermath of an emotional discussion with my daughter! wrote this
letter to the fetuses I aborted. The writing of the letter was a practice of coming
to voice in my work in psychotherapy. 2000
dear who might have been,

Your soul is free from me. You are not I and I am not
you.

I release your soul to find another person who will
provide you with what you need to grow and develop. I am
free from you and you are free from me. Your soul touched
mine in a certain way and perhaps my freeing you from me
also has touched yours. When your soul came into my life I
had nothing for you except to release you. What I had to
give, which was so little, was already in service to other

souls. I am sorry I did not know what I should have found

out in order for me in our separation to have served us

164

better. I mourn our loss of opportunity to be entwined for
a longer while. I am sad that I have never said goodbye.

In an imagined conversation with you, you thank me for
releasing you to another life. You are grateful for my
knowing that I could not take care of you, and for taking
the necessary actions to set you free. I imagine you
saying to me, “do not be troubled that our separation
seemed so ignoble and demeaning. I had already separated
from the fetus when first I knew that you could not take
care of me.” You tell me, “ you did the right thing, and
be proud that you did not hang on to something you could
not serve and could not serve you”. And in this imagined

conversation, we part in dignity, respect, and love.

Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner, in “Telling and Performing Personal
Stories" wrote of their experience of Ellis aborting what might have been a child
of their’s.25 In reading their narratives I was struck by the similarity to mine of a
ritual that she performed at the time of her abortion. Ellis, before having an
abortion, in a healing guided imagery performed with a friend, spoke of the fetus
as a soul. During this ritual Ellis first embraced what would have been her child
and then grieved its loss to her.26 It is this ritual and healing that in an
achievement of a feminist standpoint that I was able to undertake for myself. In
the letter I wrote symbolically to an aborted issue of my body, from a feminist

subjectivity of being a mental health client seeking an academic voice, and as an

165

abortion rights activist. Other aspects of the context of this writing are that my
male therapist was anti-choice, was a graduate of Calvin College, which for me
marked him as a fundamentalist christian. l was nervous that what I was writing
subverted the cause to which I was so wholeheartedly in support. I imagined the
therapist gloating and saying “I told you so”, although he had never expressed
judgement about our political, spiritual, sexual, age, and/or gender differences.
My nervousness was from the foreground, where it mattered that others defined
my experiences for me differently than I did myself. In the Background from
which I wrote this letter, it soothed, named, defined, and constituted another
experience of an experience.

Narratives express the values of the narrator’s, who also construct,

formulate, and remake these values. A personal narrative, then,

can be viewed as an ‘experience of the experience” intended to

inquire about its possible meanings and values in a way that rides

the active currents of lived experience without fixing them once and

for all. Understanding is not embedded in the experience as much

as it is achieved through an ongoing and continuous experiencing

of the experience.27

Both Ellis and l separately, both of us pro-choice, conceived of, wrote
about, and narrated similar experiences. I associate this connection to an
imagination of a female symbolic, which values ritual, feelings, ambiguity, and
entrustment.

As a reader of Ellis, I identified with her as a woman who also has aborted
a fetus, grieved a loss, and written about it. But it is not empathy and

identification that are necessarily the most desired response from the reader,

writes Ellis. It is that “readers are put in the position of experiencing an

166

experience that can reveal to them not only how it was for us but how it could be,
or once was for them. The are made aware of similarities and differences
between their worlds and ours. It becomes possible for them to see others in
themselves or themselves in the other among other possibilities.”28 This is part
of why I write my experiences.

What does it mean to have first hand experience of that which another is
writing? For some references to the history of abortion, I referred to Contested
was by Faye Ginsberg.29 Her study is based on the struggle between two
opposing abortion activist groups in Fargo, North Dakota. In 1991, while
participating in a cross-country political action, The Reproductive Freedom Ride,
I visited the Fargo Women’s Health Clinic which was at the center of the struggle
of which Ginsburg writes.

I was in the Fargo Women’s Health Clinic, in the City, in the discourse, as
described in the book. I read into Ginsburg’s account my memories of the
physical location that she describes. While reading I augmented her text with my
memory. I sought out those things that matched or not that which has endured in

my memory.

Reproductive Freedem Ride, 1991: Fargo ND.

The clinic is a modest two-story wood framed house in
a common enough neighborhood in one of the most mid-western
of American towns. Surrounding the walkway to the entrance
is a 10—12 foot high chain link fence, with rows of barbed

wire strung across the top. Along the sides and over the

167

top is royal blue canopy providing protective covering
overhead and down the sides: a tunnel of safety for women
seeking health care. In it they are protected from sight,
from being bombarded with prayers, plastic babies, pictures
of torn apart fetus’, and “rescue” from their own
decisions.

Imagine, protective covering for patients of a health
clinic! How astounding! It was not a bank robber’s den
with a fence and canopy to protect bank robbers from being
identified, by law enforcement officers. It wasn’t a house
of ill repute to protect customers from being recognized by
a witnessing public. It was a woman’s health clinic, for
goddess’ sake. A place of business serving women in need
of services. Women making decisions about their own lives
having to hide, enter a fortress, take personal and
physical risk to even show up for medical care. And it was
not law enforcement agencies who protected the rights of
the clinic or of their patients. It was clinic staff,
owners and volunteer private citizen zealots for women's
rights, who protected the women patients and their access
to health care.

The providers of women’s reproductive services were
perhaps at even greater risk than were their patients. We

were shown on our visit where stink bombs had been tossed

168

by someone who had manipulated their way in. We saw locks
that had been replaced over and over again because someone
injected them with crazy glue. The clinic workers and
health care providers told us of the explosives that broke
windows, the threats of murder made against them. In a
litany of abuses they had survived, they spoke of guns,
assassinations, stalking, loss of privacy, surveillance,
intimidation, security breaches, images on wanted posters,
that were all part of the arsenal of destruction used
against them for providing health care services to their

patients.

In my memory, and while reading and writing of this
experience, I cried then and over a decade later as I
return to that place in my memory, I cry again. As I

revise this piece, once again I cry. It is not a sadness
lodged in my memory, it is a current and continuing
sadness. The situation is sad now, as it was in my past. It
is as a memory—bearer that I write the sadness. It is a
Future Memory that my experience creates. In my telling I
preserve for the future the situation of women’s bodies as
sites of violent and killing contest. Religion, laws,
tradition, culture, sexism, misogyny, heterosexism,
medicine, war, patriotism, economics are entitlements of

others to rights over women’s bodies, a woman’s body.

169

While on this bicycle trip across the country, I was also then a memory
bearer and spoke of a past partially of my imagination, partially from hope,
partially residing in history. In my speaking I spoke of all of us collectively
imagining reproductive freedom for all women in which abortion was totally of
feminist women’s design and definition. We would wrest back abortion from
patriarchal institutions of law, religion, and medicine.

With consideration of our wholeness safety and access would be primary.
How can we make abortion accessible and safe for all women who choose to
terminate an unwanted pregnancy? A partial answer perhaps can be ferreted out
from our herstory. Back to “witches”, midwives, activists, mostly women who
offered health care to other women and took women’s lives, living, and life,
seriously and of value. Today there are feminist women scientists, chemists,
biologists, witches, physicians, feminist theorists, housewives, mothers, and
between us all, I don’t doubt for a moment that we have all the answers. We can
develop, invent, and discover, methods, potions, practices that return our health
care back to us.

Perhaps in the beginning our efforts will be underground. Or in Daly’s
words, deep into the Background. I want an instrument-maybe even crafted by
hand. Safe. Easily used. A procedure. A herb. Safe. Accessible. Private.

Much like a so called myth, or urban legend, that says that the technology
exists to make a tire for our automobiles that would never wear out, and that

there is a fuel that is so highly efficient that gas stations would go out of

170

business, and there would be no need for war to protect our access to oil. These
products, the “myth” goes on to say, are kept from developing to protect
capitalism, capitalists, profits, and the rich. Like the “myth" that I believe is true,
there is technology for women to control their own reproductive processes, and
there is the will to do so. The knowledge and expertise already exists to control

our bodies ourselves.

“BECKY BELL b.1971 -d.1988llndiana PL-106”

That is the text on a stainless steel bracelet that, as a political action I
wear every day of my life and have since 1989. Indiana Public Law 106 requires
women under 18 years of age to have parental consent to have an abortion.
Becky Bell was not ready to share with her parents that she was sexually active,
so she sought and had an illegal abortion. She died at seventeen years of age,

as a result of that decision.

Who I once was and What ‘s the Address, anyway?
November 2000

I have just returned from Baltimore, where thirty-six years ago I was a
Playboy Bunny. In an attempt to weave from a lesbian feminist standpoint
memories of my past I locate among my files a yellowed newspaper article. It is
from The Baltimore Sun, dated July 17, 1964 and was written by a young female

reporter on assignment to cover the opening of the Playboy Club. The article

171

pinpoints the month and year that the club opened but does not reach into the
future of when it closed. I search the article for the club’s street address.

It was on Light Street I thought, and Cathy Kelly, a friend and long time
Baltimore resident confirmed it when she came to pick me up at my Baltimore
hotel for a lunchtime visit. Off we headed towards Light Street. “There,” she
said and pointed to a vacant, boarded-up building next to one in which on the
ground floor there was a bar. I stared and stared at the two old seamy looking
buildings as if by concentrating and focusing history would appear before my
eyes. Somehow like someone who has narrowly escaped death speaking of
having their whole life appear in an instant before them, I wanted to stare at the
buildings and see history magically appear before my eyes. I wanted the
buildings to reflect that 30 years ago within them was housed The Playboy Club.
I wanted a ghost of the glamour of the Playboy Club to shine through. I wanted
to hear a hint of jazz music wafting from the windows and for blurry images of
Playboy Bunnies floating from floor to floor to appear on the walls of the
deteriorating buildings. But I heard nothing but the sounds of today, saw nothing
but the bricks on the building, and no ghosts of times past gave evidence of what
once was.

When what I wanted did not appear, I walked across the street to the bar.
The bartender told me he didn’t know what was there before Shaffers, a bar that
had been there a long time but after the Playboy Club might have been there.
We left the bar and crossed the street to stare at the buildings once again. I

quipped that the man behind the bar was probably not even born when the

172

Playboy Club opened in Baltimore Maryland in 1964. We left Light Street. I
went back the next day with my camera, thinking if I had a picture to stare at long
enough, I would see something not apparent in person. Quickly, and self
consciously, from across the street, I snapped a couple of shots of the two
buildings.

The next night I ate dinner with old friends from when, a few years after I
worked at the Playboy Club, I lived in Columbia, Maryland. “No, it was up a block
or two” they said in unison, when I pointed to the buildings that Cathy and I had
investigated earlier that day.

What is this memory process? I was in the city, I was even on the street,
even on the same side of the street, within the possible two blocks where it used
to be. I think and act as if it is imperative that I know the exact building. After
thirty-six years the building probably bears no resemblance to the building of my
experience. In a downtown area that has been massively reconstructed, how
would finding the right building be of any help to my remembering? Somehow, I
believe that for my memories to be useful I have identify the exact building but I
am also skeptical. In the past I have stood in front of The Gaslight Club where I
worked for two years, and no new memories were elicited by my being there.
My need for the exact building seems to be connected to my fantasy that it will
have something to tell me that I don’t already know.

I think of my memory as a record of past events etched on my mind. I
think of it as layers upon layer of events, emotions, thoughts layered

chronologically one on top on another. A compost heap comes to mind. Layers

173

of layers of material each affecting the generation and decomposing of previous
and future layers. In remembering I must disrupt the layers of material. I do that
through questioning. I think of remembering as like a wind that blows the top
layers of currency aside to expose a past buried among the layers.
Remembering starts from questioning. It starts with a trigger of some sort which
is somehow connected to a past event. Layers are not so easily moved aside

though as my trip to Baltimore demonstrates.

March 23, 2000
Lansing, MI

Mary Daly was in town for my 59th birthday. After her
talk at the MSU Union some of us went out for drinks and
something to eat. There were ten of us including Mary Daly
and her Lawyer, Gretchen.

Two giants, who are two present, past and future
Foremothers, who are two leaders, two sisters, two
positively revolting hags, sat at the corner of our table.
I was seated at the opposite end and faced them full on.
One whom I knew so well, and one who I knew of so well:
Marilyn Frye and Mary Daly. Frye and Daly, two present day
warriors, shared a table, a moment, a celebration. Maybe I
can begin to put to words these moments.

I stared in Amaze—ment at the two crones, cronies,

positively revolting hags. Mary Daly slightly gagging on

174

too spicy-hot salsa, and Marilyn Frye commenting on the
margueritas as being a spring drink. I am pleasured to my
core.

Frye and Daly are both distinctly their own Be-ings.
Frye so familiar, her tone, her mannerisms, her postures,
her hands. She punctuates her words, always precise, pithy
and sure. She is saying that she is shy and gentle. And
those who know her well know it is so. Those that don’t
might scoff. Daly is smaller in appearance than one might
expect. Someone who has such big ideas, I think, become
larger in our perceptions of them. She is quieter of
voice. Much like the previous misperception, I am
surprised at her soft voice. Her garb is familiar to me.
Very much like I remember her wearing many years ago when I
first saw her in Miami.

Also present in this moment, which adds to its
momentousness, is to Marilyn’s right Carolyn Shafer. Bone,
is an artist, thinker, teacher, business—woman, designer,
avenger, and a project partner of Frye’s. Immediately next
to Shafer is Annie Courtney, who changes seats with her
partner Crista Lebens, to put Crista eye-to-eye with Daly.
Annie, integral to the women’s community, is a producer.
She makes things happen. She organizes, delegates,

implements, and creates action, celebrations, and

175

ritualistic delights. Crista, a student of Frye and Daly,
has just written a dissertation and is but a flap of her
wings away from changing her student status to that of
professor. She is a teacher, a drummer, also an avenger, a
friend and colleague. Jules sits next to Annie. Jules is
an artist, a healer, and laughing witch. She creates fun,
distributes amulets, tokens, markers to would—be witches,
friends, and fellow travelers. Jen is diagonally across
the table from Frye and Daly. Also a feminist philosophy
student, and in a table full of lesbian hags is distinct of
age and sexuality. She is present and I positively mark
her presence. I am next to Jen. I am a student of Frye,
and hence of Daly. I am Be-ing my—Self, bawdy, loud,
drinking hearty, celebrating broadly, and in a state of
intense enjoyment.

I look to the end of the table and see the tableau, of
Frye and Daly in sharp focus with the rest of us in a blur,
reflecting and reflected in and from their Courage, and
enCouragement. All around me are colleagues, mentors,
friends, fellow travelers entwined by location, interest,

by these bags at the end of the table. To my right is my

partner, love, friend, Marilyn Bowen. A warehouse magician
of Goldenrod music. A solid, smart, loving, laughing
friend. Around the corner from Bowen is Gretchen, the

176

lawyer. Kind, enthusiastic, committed, aware-a gift to all
of us, this Gretchen, on the front—lines of protecting us
through legally protecting Mary Daly’s rights.

Coming full circle, Mary Daly sits to Gretchen's
right. Mary Daly’s eyes advertise like a blinking three
story neon sign, her mischievousness, her cognitively
serious playfulness, her dead serious playfulness. She is
old, wizened, soft and hard just like me. Invincible and
vulnerable at the same time, just like me. She is a
cognitive Courageous visionary, a biophilac who mourns the
loss of even a part of anyone of us stolen by the
necrophilacal patriarchy. Softly spoken, powerful words
and actions, are her tools of transformation. Lurking
behind her positively beauteous smile is the dead
seriousness of all of us fighting for our lives and for

life--period.

And so at the end, I begin .....

177

 

' Daly, Gyn/Ecology pp. 3-4.

2 The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic
Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 111.

 

3 Smith, in Poetics. p. 44.
" Smith, p. 26.

5 Bruss, Elizabeth W. Autobiographical Acts; The Chanoinq Situajon of a Genre (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 33-92. cited in Smith, p, 45.

6 Smith, p. 52.
7 Smith, p. 52.

8 Double bind: “Situations experienced by oppressed people in which options are reduced to a
very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation.” Frye, Marilyn.
“Oppression" in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Faminist Theory (Trumansburg, NY: The
Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 1-16 (2); “A fundamental mechanism ....in the world maintenance of
patriarchy..." Mythologizing/Iying through inversion. For Instance, instead of saying it is within
nature that man resides, the myth or lie perpetuated in patriarchy is that man controls nature, or
that It is a sign of progress that man does. Daly, Mary and Jane Caputi. Websters’ Firat New
Intergalactic Wickedarv of the lingflsh Language (Toronto, New York: Women’s Press, Ltd.
1998), p. 93. There are also instances of double reversals of which Daly writes in other of her
works. In Gyn/Ecology (1990, p. 90) Daly uses the term “double-think” an example is women are
revered for their self-lessness, and while at the same time they are ridiculed and debased as
weak and helpless. If she should show strength of purpose in ways that can be perceived as
selfing, she is selfish, uncaring, and unwomanly. Much like Frye’s Double-bind in which her
options are few and any of them invoke negative consequences.

9 MacDonald, Barbara and Cynthia Rich. Look Main the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism
(San Franciso: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1983). Many have taken exception to my use of the word old.
They suggest, aging, or older, as more palatable terms for what I mean. I choose though to follow
Barbara MacDonald and the axiom of OLOC, Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, who claim the
word old. They further only acknowledge old when a woman reaches the age of 60. At that age I
proudly claimed my status as old. To do otherwise is agist and perpetuates agism. To not use
the word old continues its mystification. Or to use old before the age of 60, also denigrates its
meaning. For instance, a young woman colleague of mine, said she was old at thirty.

1° Smith analyzes autobiographies of Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, Mrs. Charlotte
Charke, Harriett Martineau, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

1’ Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosta. (New
York: Random House, 1977) pp. 151-173.

‘2 Smith, p. 150.
'3 Smith, p. 151.
1‘ Kingston, “No Name Woman," pp. 1-19, cited in Smith.

15 Smith, pp. 153-155.

178

 

’6 Daly and Caputo, p. xvii.

’7 I am not suggesting that the only way to an understanding is through the achievement of a
lesbian feminist standpoint, It is the way I came to my understanding. Relevant to other paths to
developing an understanding of Daly’s work, Bonnie Mann in the Appendix to the New
IntergalacticIntroduction by Daly in the 1990 Edition of Gyn/Ecology discusses the use of Daly’s
Gyn/Ecology in her work with battered women. She writes that with varied levels of education
among the women with whom she works, that portions, rather than the whole book, were used to
“...open a passage to the Background..." p. xxxv. Having these women read Daly, Mann writes,
“was a way to confront, finally “the confusion that is evoked in all women as a result of sensing
simultaneously both the invincible reality of Female Process itself and its erasure/fragmentation in
the foreground’” Mann, p. xxxv ,Daly, p. 322. These women, could also be said to be in the
process of achieving a feminist standpoint. They have stepped into the background by leaving
abusive relationships. They are engaging in the struggle and the act of being educated to create
change, and it could be said they are achieving a feminist standpoint.

‘8 Mann, Bonnie. “GynlEcology in the Lives of Women in the Real World” Appendix to the New
Intergalactic Introduction, in Daly, Gyn/Ecology, pp. Xxxiv-xliii

‘9 Daly, 1990, p. 4.
2° Daly, 1990 p. xxi.

2‘ Daly, Mary. gtgercourse: The Be-Da_zzling Voyage, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
1992), p. 10.

22 Daly, 1992, p. 9.

23 Daly, 1992, p. 7.

2‘ Daly, 1990, p.17.

25 Ellis, Carolyn and Arthur P. Bockner. “Telling and Performing Personal Stories: the Constraints
of Choice in Abortion" in Investigating Subiectivitv: Researfch on Lived Experieilg, Carolyn Ellis
and Michael G. Flaherty eds. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), pp. 79-101.

2" Ellis and Bochner, p. 88.

27 Ellis and Bochner, p. 98.

2” Ellis and Bochner, p. 98.

29 Ginsburg, Faye D. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Communig.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

179

AFTERWORD

A CHRONOLOGY

After having known and dated him for two years, I was two months pregnant
when John and I married in the fall of 1959. Johnny was born May of 1960, 11
months later Bridget was born. In August 1962, Casey was born. My friend
Tyanna helped me leave John that fall. I found work at the Gaslight Club soon
after. John was arrested for participating in a bank robbery, pled guilty and
received a life sentence within the year after I left him. I divorced him in 1963. I
obtained my first abortion in 1963. In 1965, while temporarily working at the
Gilded Cage Bar in the Shorum Hotel, in Washington, DC, I met Seymour.
Within two months Seymour left his wife and moved in with me. | auditioned
soon thereafter for a position at The Playboy Club just opening in Baltimore,
Maryland. I got the job, worked there two months, quit in the fall of 1965. Had a
second abortion in 1966. Married Seymour that summer. Vail was born January
of 1969 after which, with my husband’s permission, I had my tubes tied. Moved
to Columbia, Maryland in 1970 and helped start It’s Open for Women.
Participated in a CR group. In 1972 Volunteered in the Muskie for President
campaign, Helped lead the county campaign for the Maryland ERA, and Howard
County Women’s Political Caucus. Moved to Aspen Co. 1973. Completed work
for a BA degree in communications in a University Without Walls Program,
Loretto Heights College, Denver, CO., 1976. Moved to Sarasota FL, then to
Miami in 1977. Joined Dade County NOW shortly thereafter. Spoke out on the

Courthouse steps, 1985. Helped run two Fran Bohnsack Campaigns for the

180

State Legislature1988 and 1990. Started my own business. President of Dade
NOW. Had sexual relations with a woman. Participated in the Reproductive
Freedom Ride, a cross-country political action, 1991. Hurricane Andrew swept
through Miami and in its wake Seymour and l temporarily found common ground.
Engaged in another love relationship with a woman and traveled on a women’s
studies trip to Russia in the fall 1993. Met Joyce Ladenson, applied to MSU, was
accepted, and left my marriage, my business, my family, my home, and Miami,
for Lansing, MI December of 1993. Began school January of 1994. Completed
my Master’s Degree in 1996 and began work on a Doctorate degree. Partnered
with Marilyn Bowen in 1997. This spring, 2002 I began a part time job with
Michigan Equality which will become full time upon my completion of an

academic degree.

181

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott , S. and B. L.(1978). Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. New York, Stein
and Day.

Alcoff, L.(1988). Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity
Crisis in Feminist Theory. ggns: Journal of Women in Cultpre and
Society 13 (3): 405-436.

Allison, D.(1995). Two or Three Things I Know for SILQ. New York, Dutton Press.

American Bar Association. ERA: Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Pamphlet. Undated but by content, printed and distributed between 1978
and 1982.

Anderson, David E. (1993) Abortion and Family Planning, Washington, D.C. :
The Communications Consortium Media Center, Insert: Newsroom Guide:
History at a Glance

Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands: La FronMLthe New Mestiza. San Francisco,
CA, Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company

. (1990). Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspactive_s
_pv Feminists of Color. San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books: 335-402.

 

Aptheker, B. (1989). Epestries of Life. Amherst, The University of
Massachusetts Press.

Balz, D and Marcus, R. In Year since Webster, Abortion Defies
Predictions. The Washington Post. July 1, 1990,

Bartky, S.(1990) On Psychological Oppression,Femininitv and Domination:
Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression New York: Routledge

. (1990) Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal
Power” Femininitv and Domipation: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression New York: Routledge 61-86

 

Bateson,M. C.(1990). Composing_a Life. New York, Penguin Books.

.1994). Peripheral VisionszLearning Along the Way. New York, Harper
Collins.

Beauvoir, S. d.(1952). Introduction: The Second Sex. The Second Sex. New
York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc: xv-xxix.

182

Behar, R.(1990). Rage and Redemption: Reading the Life Story of a Mexican
Marketing Woman. Feminist Studies 16(2): 223-258.

.(1996). The Vflerable Opserver: Anthropology That Breaks Your
Heart. Boston, Beacon Press.

.(1997). An Untellable Story: White Girl and Black Ma_mmv After the
Cuban Revolution. Women's Studies Conference, MSU, East Lansing.

Behar, R. a. D. A. G., Ed.(1995). Women Writinwlttia. Berkeley, CA,
University of California.

Belenky, M. F ., B. M. Clinchy, et al.(1986). Women's Ways of Knowing The
geveltmment of Self, Voicegnd Mind. New York, NY, Basic Books, Inc.

Bell-Scott, P.(1998). Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women's Lives. New York,
Henry Holt and Company.

Benstock, S., Ed.(1988). The Private Self: Thaonr and Practice of Women's
Autobiographical Writinga. Chapel Hill, NC,University of North Carolina
Press.

. (1988). Authorizing the Autobiographical. The Private Self: Theory anp
Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writinga. S. Benstock. Chapel Hill,
University of North Carolina Press.

Bergland, B. (1994). Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject.
Autobiography and Post modernism. L. G. Kathleen Ashley, Gerald
Peters. Boston, University of Massachusetts Press: 130-166.

Bordo, Susan. (1993) Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization
of Culture, from Unbeflple Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the
Body. Berkeley: University of California Press

 

Brodzki, B. a. C. S.(1988). Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography.
Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

Bulkin, E., M. B. Pratt, et al. (1984). Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist
Perspectives on Anti-Semitfim and Racism. Ithaca, NY, Firebrand Books.

Burnham, M.(1998). I Lied All the TimeTrickster Discourse and Ethnographic
Authority in Crashing Thunder. American Indian Quarterly 22(4): 469-484.

Buss, H. M. (1995). Bios in Women's Autobiography. Autobiography Studies

183

10(1): 114-125.
Cahill, 8., Ed. (1994). WritingWomen's Lives. New York, HarperPerennial.

Card, C. (1998).Radicallesbianfeminist Theory. Hypatia: A Journal of Femin_js_t
Philosophy 13(1): 206-213.

Chicago, J. (1977). Through The Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist.
Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Code, L. (1995). Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York,
Routledge.

Collins, P. H. (1991). Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological
Significance of Black Feminist Thought. (En)GenderingKnowledga. J. a.
E. M.-D. Hartman, University of Tennessee Press: 41-65.

. (1991). _Black Feminist Thopght: KnowledgeLConscimLsmess, and the
Politics of Empowerment. New York, Routledge.

Conway, J. K. (1990). The Roag from Cooiirt. New York, Vintage Books.

Copper, B. (1988). Over the Hill: Reflections on Ageism Between Worpep.
Freedom, CA, The Crossing Press.

Cuomo, C. J.. (1998). “Thoughts on Lesbian Difference.” Hypatia: A Journal of
Feminist Philosomy 13(1): 199-205.

Daly, M. (1978). Gyn Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminsm. Boston,
Beacon.

. (1984). Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist PhilosoLhy. Boston, Beacon
Press.

. (1992) Qgterc_oprse: The Be-Da__zzling Voyaga San Francisco,
HarperSanFranscico

Davis, A. Y. (1974-1988). Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York,
International Publishers.

de Lauretis, T. (1990). Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical
Consciousness. Feminist Studies 16(1): 115-150.

. (1990). Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory. Conflicta in Feminism.
M. H. a. E. F. Keller. New York, Routledge: 255-270.

184

Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. The Handbook of Qualitative
Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994)

Dodson, Betty. (1974) Liberating Masturbation: A Medfltion on Self-love. New
York: Bodysex Designs

Dyck, I. (1993). “Ethnography: A Feminist Method?” The Canadian Geographer
37(1): 52-57.

Echols, Alice. Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism In Ameriaaa1967-1975.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)

Editor (1993). Editorial Introduction: Special Issue, Biography and
Autobiography in Sociology. Sociology 27(1): 1-4.

Evans, Sara. Personal Politica: The Root; of Women’s Liberation in m Civil
Rights Movementatd the New Left. New York: Random House, 1980
Vintage Books Edition.

Faderman, L.(1981). Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and
Love Between Women From the Resnaissance to the Present. New York,
William Morrow and Company, Inc.

 

. (1991). Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth-Century America. New York, Penguin.

Fine, M. (1994). Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative
Research. Handbook of Qualitative Research. N. K. a. Y. S. L. Denizen.
Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications: 70-82.

FioI-Matta, L. (1996). Writing the Self in a Changing World. Women's Studies
Quarterly(3-4): 100-112.

Fonow, M. M. and J. A. Cook, Eds. (1991). Beyoral Methodology; Feminist
Scholarship as Lived Research. Bloomington,lN, Indiana University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1980)The Eye of Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selectad
Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977. Colon Gordon, Editor. New York:
Pantheon Books. 146-165

Frankenberg, R. (1993) White Women, Race Matters: tha Social Construction of
Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press: 137-243.

185

Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in
Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press:
1-54, 144-160.

Freischman, S. (1998).Gender, the Personal, and the Voice of Scholarship: A
Viewpoint. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23(41): 975-
1016.

F riedan, B. (1963). The Femiryipe Mystigaa. New York, W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc.

Friedman, S. S. (1988). Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.
The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Writinga. S. Benstock.
Chapel Hill, University of NC. Press: 34—62.

. (1998). Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of
Encounter. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

Frye, M. (1978). “Some Reflections on Separatism and Power.” Sinister Wisdom
6(summer).

. (1981). Who Wants a Piece of the Pie. Building Feminist Theory:
_Essays from Quest: A Feminist Quarteriy. New York, Longman: 94-100.

. (1983). The Politics of RealityzEssays in Feminist Theory. Freedom,
CA, The Crossing Press.

. (1992). Willful Virgianssays in Feminism. Freedom, CA, The Crossing
Press.

. (1996).The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive
Category of Women. Signs 21(4): 991-1010.

. (1996). Getting it Right. The Second Sigma Reader: Feminigt
Scholarship 1983-1996. R.-E. B. J. a. B. Laslett. Chicago, The University
of Chicago Press. Signs: 1992, vol 17, 4: 313-325.

Gallop, J., Marianne Hirsch, and Nancy Miller (1990). Criticizing Feminist
Criticism. Conflicgs in Feminism. M. H. a. E. F. Keller. New York,
Routledge: 349-369.

Gilmore, L. (1994). Autobimphics: A Feminist Theory of Women‘s Self-
Representation. Ithica, Cornell University Press.

186

. (1994).Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical
Authority. Mobigggphv and Postmodernism. K. Ashley, Leigh Gilmore,
Gerald Peters. Boston, The University of Massachusetts Press: 54-78.

. (1994). The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography,
and Genre. Autobiography and Postmodernism. K. Ashley, Leigh Gilmore,
Gerald Peters. Boston, University of Massachusetts Press: 3-18.

Ginsberg, F. (1989). Dissonance and Harmony: The Symbolic Function of
Abortion in Activists' Life Stories. Integeting Woman's Lives: Feminist

Theopj and Personal Narratives: 59-84.

. (1989) Contested Lives: The Aportion Debate in an American
Commdnity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gordon, C., Ed. (1977). Power/KnowledQ: Selectad lntarviews & cherWritigga
1972-1 977 by Michael Foucault. New York, Pantheon Books.

Grealy, L. (1994). Autobipgraphy of a Face. New York, Houghton Mifflin
Company.

Green, Gayle. (1996) Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory. In IE
Second Signs Readar: Feminist Scholarship, 1983-1996. Ruth-Ellen B.
Joeres and Barbara Laslett, eds. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 184-215

Gunn, J. V. (1992). Autobiography: Towapd A Poatics of Experiencg.
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hallam, J. and A. Marshall (1993). Layers of Difference: The Significance of a
Self-Reflecive Research Practice Making Connections. C. L. a. V. W. Mary
Kennedy. London, Taylor & Frances: 64-77.

Hammersley, M. (1990).What's Wrong With Ethnography? The Myth of
Theoretical Description. Sociology 24(4): 597-615.

Harding, S. (1987). Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method
Conclusion: Epistemological Questions. Feminism anflllethodology. S.
Harding. Bloomington, Indiana University Press: 1-14,181-190.

Harrison, B. a. E. S. L. (1993). A Note on Ethical Issues in the Use of
Autobiography in Sociological Research. Sociology 27(1): 101-109.

Hartman, Susan M.(1982) From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and
Politics Since 1960 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

187

Hartsock, N. C. M. (1985). The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for
a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism Money,§ex and Power:
Toward_a Feminist Historical Materialism Boston, Northeastern University
Press: 231-251.

. (1996). Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist
Theory. Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. S. Hekman. University
Park, Pennsylvania State University Press: 39-55.

.(1981) Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective in Building
Feminist Theory: Essays from Quest a Feminist Quarterly, Charlotte
Bunch, et al, eds. New York: Longman, 1981. 32-42

Heilbrun, C. G. (1988). Writing_a Woman's Life. New York, Ballantine Books.

. (1997). The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. New York, The Dial
Press.

Hekman, S. J., Ed. (1996). Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. Re-
Reading the Canon. University Park, The Pennsyvania State University
Press.

Heyes, C. J. (1999). Back to the Rough Ground! Wittgenstein, Essentialism, and
Feminist Methods. Feminist lntemretations of Wittgenstein. N. Scheman.
State College, Penn State University Press.

Hirschmann, Nancy J. “Feminist Standpoint as Postmodern Strategey, in Politics
gig Feminist Standpoint Theories, Sally J. Kenny, Helen Kinsella, eds.
(New York:Haworth Press, Inc. 1997).

Hoagland, S. L. (1988). Leabian mics: Toward a New Value. Palo Alto, CA,
Institute of Lesbian Studies.

Hoffman, E. (1989). Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York,
Penguin Books.

Hogeland, Lisa Marie (1994), Fear of Feminism: Why Young Women Get the
Willies, Ms Magazine, Vol 5, 3, 18-21.

hooks, b. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, South End
Press.

. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom.
New York, Routledge.

188

. (1995). “Third World Diva Girls: Politics of Feminist Solidarity”. Ipa
Wmn-Centered Economy: Ideals, Reality, and the Smace in Between.
L. E. a. M. Stocker. Chicago, Third Side Press: 265-280.

Hurston, Z. N. (1942). _D_ust Tracks on A Road. New York, Harper Perennial.

Jacobson, Jodi L. (1990) Worldwatch Paper 97: The Glopal Politics of A_bortion
Washington D.C.: The Worldwatch Institute

Jelinek, R. V., Ed. (1980). Women's Autobiographies: Essaygs in Criticism.
Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

. (1986). The Tradition of Women's Autobioggaphy: From Antigditv to
the Present. Boston, Twayne Publishers.

Johnston, J.(1973). Lesbian Nation, The Feminist Soldtion. New York, Simon and
Schuster.

Jones, 8. J.(1997). Reflexivity and Feminist Practice: Ethical Dilemmas in
Negotiating Meaning. Feminism and Psychology 7(3): 348-353.

Juffer, J.(1998). At Home With Pornography: Woman, Sex, fld Everyday Life.
New York, New York University Press.

Kadar, M., Ed.(1992). Essays on llfe Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice.
Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Kaplan, A. (1993). French Lessons: A Memoir. Chicago, The University of
Chicago Press.

Karr, M. (1995). The Liars Club. New York, Penguin Books.

Keating, A. (1996). Women Reading Women Writing:Self-lnvention in Pat_il_a
_G_unn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua and Mm Lorda. Philadephia, Temple
University Press.

Kennedy, E. L. a. M. D. D. (1993). Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: the History
o_fa Lesbian Comunity. New York, Penguin.

Kingston, M. H. (1977). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a_Girlhood Among
Ghosts. New York, Random House, Inc.

Kirsch, G. E. (1999). Ethical Dilemmyaa in Feminist Research: The Politics of

Location, Interpretationaagd Publigation. Albany, State University of New
York, Press.

189

Koedt, A., Ellen Levine, Anita Rapone, Ed. (1973). Radical Feminism. New York,
Quadrangle Books.

League, W. s. E. A. (1976). Starting a Consciousness-Raising Group. Woman's
Almanac. K. P. a. R. A. Kuhn. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Company:
133-134.

Lloyd, Moya Lloyd. (1996)PowerlPolitics. Feminist Interpretations of Michel
Foucault, Susan J. Hekman, Editor. University Park: The Pennsylvania
State University Press

Long, J. (1999). TellinaWomen's Qves: Spbiectharnator/ReaderlT ext. New
York, New York University Press.

Lorde, A. (1994). Zami: A Naw Spellingof My Nadia. Freedom, CA, The
Crossing Press.

Lorraine, T. E. (1990). Gender, Identity, agd the Prodtgtion of Meaning. Boulder,
CO, Westview Press.

Lugones, M. (1994). Purity, Impurity, and Separation. Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and society 19(2): 458.

Macdonald, B. and C. Rich (1983). Look Ma In the Eye: Old Womgen Aging and
Ageism. Minneapolis, MN, Spinsters Ink.
Mairs, N. (1994). Voice Lessons: On Becoming_a (Woman) Writer. Boston,

Beacon Press.

Martin, B. (1988). Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault. Feminism and Foucault. L.
Q. Irene Diamond. Boston, Northeastern University Press: 3-19.

. (1996). Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s).
Femininitv Played Straight. New York, Routledge: 137-161.

Matrix (1970's). Consciousness-Raising.

MacKinnon, Catherine A. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the Sta_ta
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (1998)

190

Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, T. (1990). Sexual _Difference: A Theory of
Social-Symbolic Practice. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

Miller, N. K. (1991). Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other
Autobiographical Acts. New York, Routledge.

Mohanty, M. J. A. a. C. T. (1997). Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies,
Movements. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic;
Futures. M. J. A. a. C. T. Mohanty. New York, Routledge: xiii-xlii.

Mohanty, C. T. (1997). Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of
Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity.
Genealogies, Legacies. Movements. M. J. A. a. C. T. Mohanty. New York,
Routledge.

Moraga, Cherri, G. A. eds. (1981) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press

Morrison, T., Ed. (1992). Raci-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita
Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Constlgdction of Socjaj Reality. New York,

Random House, Inc.

 

Munt, S. R. (1998). Heroicpesire: Lespian Identity and Cultural Space. New
York, New York University Press.

Mykholovskiy, E. (1997). Reconsidering "Table Talk": Critical Thoughts in the
Relationship Between Sociology, Autobiography, and Self-Indulgence.
Reflexivity and Voice. R. Hertz. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications:
229-251.

Nestle, Joan.(1987) A Restricteggdntry. Ithaca,NY: Firebrand Books

Neuman, S. (1992). Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of
Difference. Essay on Ler Writing. M. Kadar. Toronto, Univ. of Toronto
Press: 213-230.

Neuman, S. (1994). An Appearance Walking in a Forest the Sexes Burn
Autobiography and the Construction of the Female Body. Autobiography
and Poatmodernis_m. K. Ashley, Leigh Gilmore , Gerald Peters. Boston,
Univ. of Mass. Press: 293-216.

Nicholson, L. J., Ed. (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. Thinking Gender. New
York, Routledge.

Nin, A. (1966). The Diary of Anais Nin: Voldme One. New York, The Swallow
Press and Harcourt Brace & World, Inc.

191

Nossiff, Rosemary. Before Roe: Aportion Policy in the States. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001) 61

Nye, A. (1998). It's Not Philosophy. Hypatia 13(2): 106-115.

Olesen, V. Feminisms and Models of Qualitative Research in Denzin, Norman K
and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. PP158-174.

Penelope, Julia (1992)The Lesbian Perspective. Call Me Lesbian: Lestlan Lives.
Lesbian Theory. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press 39-59.

Perreault, J. (1995). Writing Selves: @ntemporary Feminist Autobiography.
Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.

Personal Narrative Group, T., Ed. (1989). lnte[preting Women'§_Lives: Feminis_t
Theory ml Personal Narratives. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

PMLA (1996). Our Views on the Place of the Personal in Scholarship. PMLA:
Publication of the Mcalem Language Association of America 111(5): 1063-
1 169.

Rakow, L. F., Ed. (1992). Women Making Meaning: Naw Feminist Directions in
Commdnication. New York, Routledge.

Redstockings, Of the Women’s Liberation Movement. (1978). Feminist
Revolution. New York, Random House, Inc.

 

Reed-Danahay, D. E. (1997). Auto/Ethnography: Rewritingthe $3le the
Social. Oxford, Berg.

Rich, A.(1980).Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5(4): 631-660.

. (1986). Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.
New York, W.W. Norton & Co.

Rich, C. (1989). Desert Years: Undreaming the American Dreaan, San
Francisco,CA, Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company.

Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A Method of Inquiry. Handbook of Qualitiative

Research. N. K. D. a. Y. 8. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks,CA, Sage
Publications: 516-529.

192

Rodriguez, B. (1999). Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Perflhood, amd the
American Woman Writer of Color. New York, Oxford University Press.

Rosaldo, M. Z. a. L. L., Ed. (1974). Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford,
Standford University Press.

Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston,
Beacon Press.

Sarton, M.(1968). Plant Dreaming Deep. New York,NY: Norton.
.(1973). As We Are Now. New York, NY: Norton.

Sawicki, J. (1988). Identity Politics and Sexual Freedom: Foucault and Feminism
Feminism & Foucault. L. Q. Irene Diamond. Boston, Northeastern
University Press: 177-191.

Scheman.N.(1993).Qthg_sz__Constrt£tions of K_n_c_>wledge, Apthority,an_d
P_riv_ilaga. New York, Routledge

Scott, J. W. (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. m
American Historical Review 91(5): 1053-1075.

. (1990).Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: or, the Uses of
Postructuralist Theory for Feminism. Conflicts in Feminism. M. H. a. E. F.
Keller. New York, Routledge: 134-148.

Scott-Maxwell, F. (1968). The Measure of My Day_s_. New York, NY, Penguin.

Shaw, C. L. M. (1997). Personal Narrative: Revealing Self and Reflecting
Other. Human Communication Research 24(2): 302-319.

Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of Class and Gender. Thousand Oaks, Ca, Sage.

Smith, S. (1987). A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginalipr and the
Fictions of aelf Representation. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

. (1994). ldentity's Body. Autobiography and Postmodernism. K. Ashley,
Leigh Gilmore, Gerald Peters. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

266-292.

. (1995). Perforrnativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance. alas
Auto/Bioggphy Studi_es 10(1): 17-33.

193

Smith, S. S. a. J. W., Ed.(1998). Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader.
Madison,The University of Wisconsin Press.

. (2001). Reading Autobiography: A Gtflle for Interpreting Life
Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

 

Snitlow, A. (1990). A Gender Diary. Conflicts in Feminism. M. and E. F. K.
Hirsch. New York, Routledge: 9-.

Stanley, L. (1990). Doing Ethnography, Writing Ethnography: A Comment on
Hammersley. Sociology 24(4): 617-627.

. (1993). On Auto/Biography in Sociology. Sociology 27(1): 41-52.

. (1993). The Knowing Because Experiencing Subject: Narratives,
Lives, and Autobiography. Women's Studies Int. Foru_rp 16(3): 205-215.

Stanley, L. and Wise,S (1991) Feminist Research, Feminist Consciousness, and
Experiences of Sexism. geyontLMethmlagy Feminist Scholarship as
Lived Research. J. C. Mary Margaret Fonow, Indiana University Press:
265-283.

Steedman, C. K. S. (1986). Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two
Lives. New Brunswick,NJ, Rutgers University Press.

Steinem, G. (1994). Moviaq_Beyond Words. New York, NY, Simon & Schuster.

. (1983) I Was a Playboy Bunny in Outrageous Acts and Evegyday
Rebellions. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston)29-69.

Stoltenberg, J. (1990). Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New
York, Penguin.

Stone-Mediatore, S. (1998). Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of
Experience. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 13(2): 116-133.

Suleiman, S. R. (1994). Risking Who Ona is: Encoupters witthonterpporv Art
and Literature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Thomas, L. a. E. W. (1999). Writing From Experience: The Place of the
Personal in French Feminist Writing. Feminist Review 61(spring): 27-48.

Tong, RosemariePutnam (1998 ) Feminist thought : a More Comprehensive
lntroddction Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1998.

194

Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press.

Walker, A. (1984). In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose.
New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Wasserfall, R. R. (1997). Reflexivity, Feminism, and Difference. Reflexivitv and
Voice. R. Hertz. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications: 150-168.

Watson, S. S. J., Ed. (1998). Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader.
Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.

Weddington, S. (1992). A_Question of Choice. New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Welty, E.(1983). One Writer's Befllnings. New York, Warner Books, Inc.

Wilkins, R. (1993).Taking it Personally: A Note on Emotion and Autobiography.
Sociology 27(1): 93-100.

Williams, P. J.(1991).The A_Ichemy of Race and Rights: flay of a Law
Egiesaar. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Unviversity Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations. London, Basil Blackwell &
Mott, Ltd: 31-47.

Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beaupr are Used Against
Women. New York, NY, Doubleday.

Wolf, M. (1992). A Thrice Toldfile: Feminism, Postmodernism & Ethnographic
Responsipilipr. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Woolf, V. (1953). A Writer's Diapr. New York,Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Woolf, Virginia. Oriando (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1956) 78. Note 26,
Gayle Green

Young, I. M. (1994). Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social
Collective. SIGNS:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19(3): 713-
738.

Zinsser, W., Ed. (1987). Inventigq the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company.

195