Main content

Once A Fury

ONCE A FURY profiles members of The Furies, a 1970s radical collective that developed a lesbian-feminist politic to correct what they called the "zig-zag and haphazard" thinking of the straight women's movement. The collective was thus formed in resistant counterpoint to the larger women’s movement, much as that larger womenʼs movement itself was formed in counterpoint to the male-dominated New Left of the 1960s. That is, just as activists in the women’s movement experienced sexism in the New Left, lesbian activists experienced homophobia in the women’s movement. Such activists formed collectives like the Furies.

The collective was intense and short-lived: twelve women began the group, worked together, and then broke up in under two years. In that short time, they wrote and published a widely read newspaper (The Furies) that advanced their ideology and still seems relevant half a century later. The newspaper lives on in libraries, in private collections, in archives, and on the web.