Voices of Feminism Oral History Project: Allison, Dorothy
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Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton, MA DOROTHY ALLISON Interviewed by KELLY ANDERSON November 18 and 19, 2007 Guerneville, CA This interview was made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation. © Dorothy Allison 2008 Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Narrator Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working class story teller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian College on a National Merit Scholarship and in 1979 studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research. An award winning editor for Quest, Conditions, and Outlook—early feminist and lesbian & gay journals, Allison's chapbook of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, was published with Long Haul Press in 1983. Her short story collection, Trash (1988) was published by Firebrand Books. Trash won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison says that the early feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change." However, she admits, she would never have begun to publish her stories "if she hadn't gotten over her prejudices, and started talking to her mother and sisters again." Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, (1992) a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a bestseller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Cavedweller (1998) also became a national bestseller, a NY Times Notable book of the year, a finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. A novel, She Who, Is forthcoming. Interviewer Kelly Anderson (b.1969) is an educator, historian, and community activist. She has an M.A. in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College and is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Abstract Because Dorothy Allison has written extensively about her childhood and early family life, this oral history focuses on Allison’s political activism and involvement with feminism, beginning in Tallahassee, FL in the 1970s. She recounts “finding the movement” at Florida State University through the Women’s Center and her parallel life in the bars, among butch- femme dykes, and her struggle to integrate the worlds of middle-class politics and working class erotics. Allison describes her myriad connections to the women’s movement—from being a founder of Herstore, a feminist bookstore, to Quest, to the anti-violence movement, to Conditions, and the Lesbian Sex Mafia. Throughout, she offers an uncompromising Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College assessment of feminism’s triumphs and failures, particularly through the lenses of class and sexuality. Restrictions Dorothy Allison retains copyright to this interview. Format Interview recorded on mini DV using Sony Digital Camcorder DSR-PDX10. Five 60-minute tapes. Transcript Transcribed by Susan Kurka. Audited for accuracy and edited for clarity by Sheila Flaherty- Jones. Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms Video Recording Bibliography: Allison, Dorothy. Interview by Kelly Anderson. Video recording, November 18 and 19, 2007. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Dorothy Allison, interview by Kelly Anderson, video recording, November 19, 2007, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2. Transcript Bibliography: Allison, Dorothy. Interview by Kelly Anderson. Transcript of video recording, November 18 and 19, 2007. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Dorothy Allison, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, November 19, 2007, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, pp. 23-24. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Dorothy Allison, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 1 of 4 Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA Transcript of interview conducted November 18 and 19, 2007, with: DOROTHY ALLISON by: KELLY ANDERSON Guerneville, California ALLISON: You go to these little colleges, and it’s always the little boy techies. They get so nervous about touching lesbians. ANDERSON: And they want you to put on your own mike. ALLISON: Well, they’re smart, because I’ll teach them. That’s the virtue of having been a waitress. Very few things are too humiliating. Okay. Is that on right or – ANDERSON: Yeah. You just don’t want it touching – ALLISON: It’s right in the cleavage. ANDERSON: Your shirt’s going to ruffle against it. ALLISON: All right, so move the hair. ANDERSON: There you go. This is Kelly Anderson with Dorothy Allison, at her home in Guerneville, on November 18th, and we’re doing an oral history for the Voices of Feminism Project, the Sophia Smith Collection. ALLISON: Am I in focus? ANDERSON: Yes. I think you look good. ALLISON: Thank you. ANDERSON: You look great. I think you look great. ALLISON: Is my gray hair glinting in the light, my silver? ANDERSON: I see none. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Dorothy Allison, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 2 of 5 ALLISON: What a pity. I worked damn hard to (inaudible). ANDERSON: (laughs) So, as I said before we turned on the camera, the purpose of doing this interview for the Voices of Feminism Project is to add your story into the women’s movement record. ALLISON: Yeah, it’s tricky. ANDERSON: It’s really tricky, and I know you have — that your history is there. ALLISON: Yeah. ANDERSON: And also your writing and in terms of — And when you said, “Feminism saved my life.” ALLISON: Yeah. Over and over again. ANDERSON: One of the things that I like best that you said — and again, that’s kind of where I wanted to start — “Though rarely acknowledged, women like me remade this world.” ALLISON: Yeah. ANDERSON: And so I’m going to do this interview so we can rewrite the women’s movement from a different perspective. ALLISON: Or just save it from being erased, which is the thing that constantly happens. ANDERSON: Yeah. So let’s start with how you found the women’s movement, and what your awareness of it was. Do you want to start with college? ALLISON: I think I became dimly aware of the women’s — and it is dimly aware — of the women’s movement in college the last — not freshman — junior and senior year. I believe there was a CR [consciousness-raising] group, and I vaguely remember going to check it out, and essentially panicking, because I was a lesbian and it was — oh my God, it was 1970. ANDERSON: You went to college [Florida Presbyterian College] in ’67. ALLISON: ’67. ANDERSON: So you weren’t aware of any women’s events? ALLISON: Only the stuff that appears in the magazines and newspapers — Life, Look, and all that shit. But I was active in the antiwar movement and marching. And we had a very active anti-Vietnam War movement in Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Dorothy Allison, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 3 of 6 Florida. At one point we were, like, marching on highways and long lines, and that was fun. One of the things that I remember noticing is what happens what you have an antiwar demonstration. I mean, here you have all these young women and we’re all — it’s Florida, and we’re all in halter tops and shorts, and the TV cameras are doing good coverage of girls in halter tops and shorts chanting against the war. And the sexism of their selection was so profound and so annoying. I remember seeing signs and posters about that. And going to a meeting and panicking because of the lesbian issue. I had already had an incident the year before, some stuff that had happened with my family, and I had had one of those moments in which I — it was like somebody grabbed me and shook me and said, “You are not actually like all the other people here. You think you are. You have the scholarship, you’re a good student, you’re doing really well. But at any moment they could toss you out.” Because I had come close to being tossed out because I got hysterical at some meeting. ANDERSON: What kind of meeting? Do you remember? ALLISON: Oh, it was the counseling department. My sister had called me. My little sister was — Trouble was happening, and she was out of the house and called me. And I, for a moment, foolishly thought, I can ask these people for help. Which is stupid and I should have known better. Instead, their response was this wave — As soon as I began to hint at the full dimensions of what the problem was — which is, essentially, that my stepfather was after my little sister — they panicked. The mental health people there really didn’t know how to deal with it.