©2011 Agatha Beins ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves: Locating U.S. Feminism through Feminist Periodicals, 1970- 1983 by Agatha Beins A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Women’s and Gender Studies written under the direction of Nancy Hewitt and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2011 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves: Locating U.S. Feminism through Feminist Periodicals, 1970- 1983 By Agatha Beins Dissertation Director: Nancy Hewitt In 1968 the first feminist periodicals associated with the second wave of U.S. feminism appeared in the United States, and by 1973 over five hundred different feminist newsletters, newspapers, and literary journals had been published. Although these periodicals often had erratic publication schedules and rarely ran more than a few years, their proliferation during this time period shows that publishing was vital to the women’s liberation movement. Not only did periodicals create a space for women to describe experiences, develop theories, debate politics, and exchange ideas, they also connected women through their circulation, producing an imagined community of feminists at local and global scales. Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves: Locating U.S. Feminism through Feminist Periodicals, 1970-1983 examines the U.S. feminist movement through the production and consumption of feminist newsletters and newspapers. Focusing on periodicals published in five cities (New Orleans, Louisiana; Northampton, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Iowa City, Iowa; and Los Angeles, California), this dissertation tracks the circulation of ideas to explore how feminism as a collective identity was produced and reproduced. Based on archival research throughout the country and an analysis of the circulation and repetition of language and images as well as on the effects of modes of periodical production, this dissertation draws from a wide ii range of literatures, including history, sociology, geography, cultural studies, visual studies, and history of the book, as well as from feminist theories about power and identity. I argue that during the 1970s feminist periodicals were vital to the production not just of feminism’s present and presence but also of feminism’s past and future. Periodicals additionally contributed to the discursive and material existence of the women’s liberation movement, allowing feminism’s past, present, and future to be imaginable as well as physically locatable. iii Acknowledgments My dissertation research was a labor of love in many ways. From the first time I picked up a copy of Ain’t I a Woman? at the Lesbian Herstory Archives to the month I spent in New Orleans almost three years later, I have experienced wondrous gifts of people’s time, energy, knowledge, and care. First, thank you to the archivists, volunteers, and student workers made it possible for me to so easily find and read through manuscript and periodical collections. In addition to the Herstory Archives, I am grateful to have spent time at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the DuBois Library archives at the University of Amherst, the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in Los Angeles, the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, the University Archives at California State University, Long Beach, the Iowa Women’s Archives, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe, the Northeastern University archives, the Joseph P. Healy Library archives at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke, the Nadine Vorhoff Library at Tulane, and the New Orleans Public Library. Many thanks, as well to the archivists at the Sallie Bingham Center, the Schlessinger Library, and the Sophia Smith Collection for inviting me to give a research talk and providing lively, engaged feedback. This labor and travel was supported by generous funding from the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, the Schlesinger Library, the Sallie Bingham Center, the Sophia Smith Collection, the Historical Society of Southern California, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. I also received the gift of a year to write my dissertation with an American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship (2009-10). People who opened their homes and hearts to me as I traveled across the country doing archival research made the different cities I visited feel like home. Yashna, first a friend of a iv friend and now a dear love, let me stay in her spare bedroom in Durham. And Steve, an old friend from Tucson, helped me navigate the buses of Los Angeles, brought home avocados, persimmons, pomegranates, and other found fruit, and shared lovely evenings cooking and sitting in the back yard of your apartment in Echo Park. Elizabeth and Elliott let me wander into their house one cool evening, borrow their bikes to shop at Whole Foods, and gave me a new appreciation of New Orleans through their contagious joy and love of the city. Thank you. It would be impossible to extol my dissertation committee in proportion to the guidance, assistance, feedback, great quantity of letters of reference, and general encouragement as I stumbled through this dissertation. Nancy Hewitt, Harriet Davidson, Joanna Regulska, and Trysh Travis are the kinds of scholars I want to emulate and their presence in the academy gives me hope for its future. I’ve also been fortunate to take part in interdisciplinary graduate-faculty seminars through the Institute for Research on Women and the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers, through both of which I was able to experience the best of academic knowledge production. And Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy—thank you for taking a chance on me as co-editor of Women’s Studies for the Future, a decision that undoubtedly increased the amount of labor and energy that was required of you for this project, and for mentoring me in a way that still echoes in my daily practices. Also incomparable is the support and joy I’ve experienced from family and friends. Having grown up with parents who never questioned my ability to do something and somehow never seemed to discourage me from making what may have been questionable decisions let me enter graduate school without a doubt that I’d make it through. Sara and Allison, thanks for making the places I’ve lived filled with love, good food, and booze. Not only unparalleled thinkers and dreamers, the people I’ve been able to work and live with have provoked me to find beauty in the world: Alix, Alison, Alex D., Alex W., Amber, Anahi, Andy, Ben, Caleb, Finn, Jess, Judy, Julie, Laurie, Marton, Steph J., and Temma. This list must also include the women v who were active in the 1970s and whose informal conversations with me both made feminist activism more alive and helped me more carefully craft my dissertation: Aaron, Sondra, Jill, Sherna, Karla, and Mary, thank you. And, Steph C., I already miss you but also know that we have many more conversations and tasty dinners in our future. A version of Chapter 3 appears as the article “Sisterly Solidarity: Politics and Rhetoric of the Direct Address in U.S. Feminism in the 1970s” as part of a special issue on the history of feminisms in 2010 in Women: A Cultural Review (21.3: 293-308). vi Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………...……… ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………..……… iv Table of Contents…………………………………………………………..……. vii List of Archives, Manuscript Collections, and Periodicals ……………...………viii List of Illustrations………………………………………………………….….... xii Introduction……………………………………………………………..………… 1 Chapter 1: Repeating the Movement: Finding Feminism’s Tactics and Strategies …………………..………46 Chapter 2: Spaces of Feminism: Bodies, Practices, and Modes of Production…………………………..72 Chapter 3: Sisterly Solidarity: Politics and Rhetoric of the Direct Address…………………….…….104 Chapter 4: Radical Others: Women of Color and Revolutionary Feminism……………………… 134 Chapter 5: “We Are Being Evicted!!!!!” Versus the Future: Producing a Place for Feminism’s Survival………..…………………171 Conclusion………………………………………………………….………………198 Illustrations ……………………………………………………….………………..205 Bibliography …………………………………………………….…………………249 vii List of Archives, Manuscript Collections, and Periodicals Archives and Manuscript Collections Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA Comision Femenil de Los Angeles Papers CSPG: Center for the Study of Political Graphics (Los Angeles, California) CSULB: California State University, Long Beach Special Collections and University Archives OHC: Oral History Collection: Los Angeles Women’s Movement VOAHA: The Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive Du Bois Library: Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst VWU records (Valley Women’s Union Records, 1974-76) IWA: Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa Aaron Silander papers Dale McCormick papers WRAC records (Women’s Resource and Action Center Records, 1960-2006 and ongoing) LHA: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn NY NCCROW: Newcomb Archives, Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana viii Mary Gehman Collection Phyllis Parun Papers Videotapes