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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971
1971-06-04 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 8
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Female culture to me means lesbian culture, and until recently it has beeninvisible to most and silent. It has always existed, but never talked of. Lesbian culture exists in the Girl Scouts, camps, 4-H, dorms, lesbian subgroups, gay bars, and women's collectives. it has been the intuition of gayness without words passing, underground parties, the culture of stolen kisses in bathrooms and locked doors. It has been a common experience, the quiet which brings us together. It has been the cherished memories of first embraces,mem- ories carefully hidden and never written of in letters that could be intercepted. It has been fear, fear that leads to self-hatred and lies, fear of parents, of hus-bands, of discovery, of policemen, fear that is flagrantly forgotten sometimes when we get together. It has been the careful probing conversations that talk all around our gayness until we are sure enough to kiss. Since Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation, since the women's living collective, since new women, who haven't been hiding all their lives have joined the gay community. Lesbian Culture has come above ground some and broadened. Now I talk about it as women's culture and conceive of it as less silent-- more open. Now it's women's narties where we dance. It's feeling free about showing affection to other women while with-in the protecting boundaries of the community. It's almost always greeting each other with a hug. It's watching Carrie and Alice drive up to Eagle's super market sitting close to each other like heterosexual couples do and slapping your knee laughing be-cause they're so brave. Or it's Linda kissing Connie in the middle of John's grocery store. It's building up an oral herstory of incidents that are passed around the community, told with great care and pleasure. Like the time JD kissed Ellen in the parking lot of the Welfare Offices at 5:00 when everyone was getting off work. It's being able to mess around with Pat when I met her on the street, saying " Hi little cutie, you come here often?" And she answers some neat feny thing and we go on and on not caring who hears, but I usu-ally break up and start laughing. [3 photos] Falling to put Feminism in a class perspective or how a female culture is developing and growing. In writing about the female subculture that I think we have created in the collectives that I liveand work in, I first would like toexplain how that discussion is limited by not being able to see clearly at all how class fits in with that subculture. We prefaced the articles about collective living a couple of is - sues ago by saying that we thought the articles sounded more marx-ist than feminist because we dealt so heavily with the economics of the collective and not the sub-culture that had grown. Recently we've been talking more about class as the paper reflects, but this comment that indeed our collective articles were very different than the articles about the COPS Commune in Berkeley that we all read in Liberation, Autumn, 1970. She said that the things we dealt with in our articles were very different than the things that the male who wrote that article saw as important and dealt with alot. In a previous issue of AIAW we had four articles about a living collective written by members of a women's living collective here in Iowa City. Three of the articles dealt mainly with the economics of the collective and how many of our problems revolved around this. The fourth article dealt with the outside influences in the collective. Granted we had very Female Culture/ Lesbian Nation Female Culture/ Lesbian Nation Female Culture/ Lesbian Nation Female Culture/ Les
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Female culture to me means lesbian culture, and until recently it has beeninvisible to most and silent. It has always existed, but never talked of. Lesbian culture exists in the Girl Scouts, camps, 4-H, dorms, lesbian subgroups, gay bars, and women's collectives. it has been the intuition of gayness without words passing, underground parties, the culture of stolen kisses in bathrooms and locked doors. It has been a common experience, the quiet which brings us together. It has been the cherished memories of first embraces,mem- ories carefully hidden and never written of in letters that could be intercepted. It has been fear, fear that leads to self-hatred and lies, fear of parents, of hus-bands, of discovery, of policemen, fear that is flagrantly forgotten sometimes when we get together. It has been the careful probing conversations that talk all around our gayness until we are sure enough to kiss. Since Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation, since the women's living collective, since new women, who haven't been hiding all their lives have joined the gay community. Lesbian Culture has come above ground some and broadened. Now I talk about it as women's culture and conceive of it as less silent-- more open. Now it's women's narties where we dance. It's feeling free about showing affection to other women while with-in the protecting boundaries of the community. It's almost always greeting each other with a hug. It's watching Carrie and Alice drive up to Eagle's super market sitting close to each other like heterosexual couples do and slapping your knee laughing be-cause they're so brave. Or it's Linda kissing Connie in the middle of John's grocery store. It's building up an oral herstory of incidents that are passed around the community, told with great care and pleasure. Like the time JD kissed Ellen in the parking lot of the Welfare Offices at 5:00 when everyone was getting off work. It's being able to mess around with Pat when I met her on the street, saying " Hi little cutie, you come here often?" And she answers some neat feny thing and we go on and on not caring who hears, but I usu-ally break up and start laughing. [3 photos] Falling to put Feminism in a class perspective or how a female culture is developing and growing. In writing about the female subculture that I think we have created in the collectives that I liveand work in, I first would like toexplain how that discussion is limited by not being able to see clearly at all how class fits in with that subculture. We prefaced the articles about collective living a couple of is - sues ago by saying that we thought the articles sounded more marx-ist than feminist because we dealt so heavily with the economics of the collective and not the sub-culture that had grown. Recently we've been talking more about class as the paper reflects, but this comment that indeed our collective articles were very different than the articles about the COPS Commune in Berkeley that we all read in Liberation, Autumn, 1970. She said that the things we dealt with in our articles were very different than the things that the male who wrote that article saw as important and dealt with alot. In a previous issue of AIAW we had four articles about a living collective written by members of a women's living collective here in Iowa City. Three of the articles dealt mainly with the economics of the collective and how many of our problems revolved around this. The fourth article dealt with the outside influences in the collective. Granted we had very Female Culture/ Lesbian Nation Female Culture/ Lesbian Nation Female Culture/ Lesbian Nation Female Culture/ Les
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