Once A Fury
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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.
Citation
Main credits
Rhodes, Jacqueline (film producer)
Rhodes, Jacqueline (film director)
Rhodes, Jacqueline (screenwriter)
Rhodes, Jacqueline (editor of moving image work)
Berson, Ginny (on-screen participant)
Biren, Joan E. (on-screen participant)
Brown, Rita Mae (on-screen participant)
Bunch, Charlotte (on-screen participant)
Deevey, Sharon (on-screen participant)
Harris, Helaine (on-screen participant)
Myron, Nancy (on-screen participant)
Reid, Coletta (on-screen participant)
Singer, Natasha (on-screen participant)
Woodul, Jennifer (on-screen participant)
Other credits
Film editors, Peter Johnston, Jacqueline Rhodes; music, John Rhodes.
Distributor subjects
"Lesbian Feminism","Feminist History","1970s Radical Movements","Feminist Print Culture",Separatism,"Collective Living"" The Furies",Keywords
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- [Rita Mae Brown] Everybody hated their gay people. It didn't matter whether they were Black or white, rich or poor, men or women, feminist or non-feminist. Nobody wanted anything to do with gay people. And there were gay women who really powered the early women's movement.
- [Ginny Berson]You have to understand what it was like to be, to grow up in the '50s and '60s and to discover, I don't know if that's the right word, women's liberation. And I say women's liberation because it was, for me, it was a true liberation.
- [Helaine Harris] For myself, I was the youngest member of that group. I was 17 and 18 years old. I grew up in that group. And it was a great group to grow up in. It was a great, for me, extended family.
- [Charlotte Bunch] I learned an enormous amount about class that has stayed with me for life. And I think it also got manipulated for power.
- [Coletta Reid] Between the newspapers and the newsletters, the publishers, the printers, that kind of communications network that was not just to express ourselves as women, but to create a movement of women that would go out and do something and change the world. We were right on. ♪ ♪
- [Narrator] The Furies were a 1970s radical collective that developed a lesbian feminist politic, to correct what they called the zigzag 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 women's movement itself was formed in counterpoint to the male-dominated New Left of the 1960s. 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 Furies were intense. The collective was short-lived. 12 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, also called 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. Soon after I came out in 1984, my lover presented me with a box of Furies newspapers and told me I should read them. It was my introduction to lesbian feminist culture. The newspapers were 12 years old at the time, but still resonated with me. The Furies showed me, a small-town working-class teenager from Montana, how the politics of class and sexuality would always be an important part of me. The Furies would influence me greatly at both 19 years old and decades later. My experience is not unique. The Furies newspaper had a national run and 5,000 subscribers, and the ideology presented there was key to any discussion of lesbian feminist politics in the United States for the next 50 years. Over the last three years, I've traveled around the country to talk to the activists who formed the Furies Collective in the early 1970s. I took my camera and recording equipment from Columbus, Ohio to Manhattan; from Washington D.C. to Santa Fe; to Virginia; and then three times to different parts of California. I interviewed, corresponded with, or talked on the phone with 10 of the original 12 Furies. This documentary has its origins in 19 hours of recorded footage, three long letters, a couple of book chapters, an abundance of email, and several long off the record phone calls. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] We are a collective of 12 lesbians living and working in Washington, D.C. We are rural and urban, from the Southwest, Midwest, South and Northeast. Our ages range from 18 to 28. We are high school dropouts and PhD candidates. We are lower-class, middle and upper-middle class. We are white. Some of us have been lesbians for 12 years, others for 10 months. We are committed to ending all oppressions by attacking their roots, male supremacy.
- [Narrator] In the early 1970s, the soon to be Furies found themselves in Washington, D.C. Some like Joan Biren, Charlotte Bunch, and Sharon Deevie already lived there and were active in D.C. Women's Liberation. Coletta Reid was already working at the feminist news journal Off Our Backs. Lee Schwing also worked at Off Our Backs as an intern. Others came from around the country. Helaine Harris was a teenage runaway from Houston, who had worked in Albuquerque as part of the Southwest Female Rights Union. Ginny Berson worked on the United Farm Workers grape boycott before moving to D.C. to write for the newspaper Hard Times. Jennifer Woodul had come from Vassar after being active in women's liberation actions there, and worked at the National Welfare Rights Organization office in D.C. Tasha Peterson and Susan Hathaway had come from Chicago, where Tasha's father, David Dellinger, a leading activist in the anti-Vietnam war movement was on trial as part of the Chicago Seven. He and six others had been charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Nancy Myron had come from New York City, where she'd worked with a group of women who eventually became the Radicalesbians. Her first typesetting job was the influential and notorious manifesto, The Woman Identified Woman, written by the Radicalesbians. Rita Mae Brown had also come from New York City from an active political past with NOW and the Radicalesbians. She was also a key instigator of the Lavender Menace action at the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. These women were all intensely political and had substantial activist experience before joining together in the Furies Collective.
- [Coletta] Tasha and Susan brought an anti-imperialist politics that we in D.C. Women's Liberation had not followed up on. The women from D.C. Women's Liberation and Off Our Backs brought a women's liberation perspective. Rita brought a "lavender menace," "woman-identified woman" lesbian perspective. There were different understandings. Charlotte had come out of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Sharon had come from the women's health movement and the D.C. Women's Liberation, and started the women's center. So bringing together all of those perspectives and all of those understandings of other oppressions, which were not just women's oppressions, made us be able to have a more inclusive ideology and to understand the interconnections of oppression.
- [Helaine] We eventually decided that we wanted to separate after May Day from that. We went through with that and did that march and did that action. But after that, we started really to separate from the antiwar movement and from the men in that movement. Because we felt like there was not a lot of women leading in those groups. It was mostly white men. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] Lesbians must form our own political movement in order to grow. Changes which will have more than token effects in our lives will be led by women-identified lesbians who'll understand the nature of our oppression and are therefore in a position to end it. What we knew about separatism came from what we had learned from Black separatism and, and sort of the ideology of the Black Panthers and Black power, or from women separating from the women's movement. And so we moved into two houses. The one in California Street and 18th Street where the Chicago Seven had been living. This is all through the first part of 1971. We didn't really start until early '71. And over that summer, we had made the decision to be a real group.
- [Rita Mae] I said, I think we need to gather our forces and talk to one another, find out where we are and what we can do, at least in a non-hateful setting. So that was kind of the, I would think the germ for it, if I'm using the right words. And I was surprised that other people thought so too.
- [Ginny] And we called ourselves, "Those women." And we called ourselves, "Those women" because that's what the straight women's movement in Washington called us. And they were not happy to see us. So there go those women. Oh, it's those women who wanna do it.
- [Charlotte] So then we began the discussion about calling ourselves the Furies.
- [Reader] The story of the Furies is the story of strong, powerful women, the "angry ones," the avengers of matricide, the protectors of women. Three Greek goddesses, they were described by men as having snakes for hair, bloodshot eyes, and bat's wings. Like lesbians today, they were cursed and feared.
- [Reader] Lesbianism is the basic threat to male supremacy.
- [Reader] The subject of lesbianism is very ordinary. It's the question of male domination that makes everybody angry.
- [Narrator] The 12 activists who were part of "those women" which then became the Furies emerged from various radical movements. They found themselves in D.C. at the same time with the same goals. In the Furies collective, they focused on developing a lesbian feminist ideology that they wanted to turn into action. Part of their strategy was the early adoption of separatism as a necessary means to build a women's movement large enough to create a revolution. Another key part of their strategy was their newspaper, which helped make their lesbian feminist politic more widely known. The Furies started out in Northwest D.C., but soon moved to three houses in Southeast, including one house which had a basement large enough for the collective to work on the newspaper and store back issues. When the collective began, three young girl children lived with and were cared for by the Furies. ♪ ♪
- [Natasha Singer/Tasha Peterson] Misogyny. Men feared women and hated women. And that was, I saw, at the base of everything. And I think that's what we saw.
- [Rita Mae] You have to have a consistent analysis of the economy, your chances to improve your wellbeing, food, clothing, shelter, and education. You've gotta start there. And particularly for women, you've got to address violence against women and why it's tolerated--or even encouraged.
- [Helaine] We were identifying as lesbians. And what did that mean politically? Because that's where we were all were coming from. We were all activists and we started having study groups at that point. We decided to start skills workshops in things like how to fix your car, how to do electric work. Lee Schwing was taking karate and she was leading self-defense classes.
- [Rita Mae] Yeah, I did the first film festival. Had a ball. I think you entertain people into knowledge far better than if you try to preach to them. So I wanted to do these film festivals and you'd see the movie, and then you'd talk about it afterwards. What was the presentation of women or animals or whatever it was. But it had a political subtext. And it went on for a while and I think people enjoyed it. It was just hard to keep doing 'cause you had to rent a theater. You had to pay money because you had to use their equipment. And the films were actually easy to get. That wasn't hard.
- [Sharon Deevey] We just were very excited really about promoting women's issues, promoting lesbian issues. Just trying to make a difference. I mean, we literally talked about seizing state power and I was ... skeptical, I must say. I wrote a list of questions. It's like, what does that actually mean? What does it mean to seize state power? Is that anything I want? I'm not sure.
- [Ginny] Oh, I remember conversations where we would start to talk about, are we gonna have an army? Are we gonna have police? Yeah, we did. We were sure that we were gonna do this.
- [Helaine] What we were gonna do about building roads and sewage? I mean, you know, just crazy. I mean, we really thought we were gonna be doing these things. And then I realized, well, not many women did those things and how are we gonna learn to, like, drive bulldozers? And I don't know, that's where we were.
- [Jenna Woodul] We were on a trip, four of us. And somebody in another part of the room were having some discussion about whether or not they really had what it took to seize state power or something like that. And I was in another room, with somebody else watching the Steelers game. So I'm thinking to myself, hm, probably not.
- [Natasha] We were making a revolution and we knew we were making a revolution. We weren't like, "oh, liberation movement." No, we were making a revolution. We were gonna somehow overthrow the government. That's where my head was at. And that's what we were trying to do with our collective, is try to figure out how we would do that.
- [Nancy Myron] Well, you have to remember the context too. When we were coming out. We were, I remember when I was down in Mississippi, we'd even make jokes. When's this revolution coming? And I'd say, "Oh, what's today, Friday? It's Tuesday, it will be here." Because it was so prevalent and in the language and stuff that we thought. We were young, we were idealistic. And we thought somehow, 'cause we all were prepped on Marx, that we were gonna make a revolution with anti-war, civil rights, feminism.
- [Charlotte] We were gonna be the lesbian vanguard in the revolution. I mean, I look back on some of the notes where we even talk about ourselves as the lesbian vanguard.
- [Nancy] And we were at the time.
- [Rita Mae] The mistakes that we made, we made because we were young and mistakes that are being made now are being made because they're young. But also because they don't understand where the money is going, which is just, we knew where the money was going. I'll give us that. We did. But it was a different day.
- [Ginny] If you had asked, how are we gonna get from here to there? I don't think we knew. But I think it was really important for us to have an idea of where we were going and what it was gonna look like when we got there.
- [Coletta] Once we moved from our lesbian consciousness-raising group to becoming, being part of the Furies, there was no more consciousness-raising. We would have meetings.
- [Rita Mae] I don't know, as I would describe myself as intense, but I wanted to get the job done. I don't care about the emotional stuff. Worry about that after you finish the job. That's why I thought consciousness-raising was just a holy horror in the women's movement, but it actually bound those women. It really worked. Just doesn't work with me.
- [Ginny] To the extent that we did consciousness-raising at all, it was really about class, but it wasn't really consciousness-raising in the way of, you know, everybody's sharing and--No, it was political. It was--everything then was getting ready to, was developing our politics so that we could... And once we understood, once we really understood what we meant by lesbian feminism, then everything was focused on developing ourselves as a collective, developing ourselves individually and getting the word out and finding our allies and making, you know, movement building, which we didn't really know how to do. But yeah, we didn't do consciousness-raising. There's a certain way that we just kind of assumed that we, our consciousness was raised.
- [Coletta] I remember when Kara was like, you know, a year and a half old or something. And we saw some birds sitting up on the electrical wire up there and she goes, "Oh, look, the birds are having a meeting." I'm like, "Oh my God." That's what we did all the time was have these meetings and in the meeting, we would have a topic and we would try to come up with what was our position on this topic and what did we think? And we would argue it through and talk about it.
- [Reader] I believe the class and race struggle is and must be part of the fight against sexism. This is an absolute truth for lesbians. It is not in our self-interest to promote oppression based on class and race. We are despised by all sects, to continue among ourselves destructive divisions of class/race invented by rich white capitalist men is to commit political suicide.
- [Ginny] Many of us had a lot of respect for the Panthers and saw them as the vanguard of... or *a* vanguard of a part of the movement. And we saw ourselves as the vanguard of the women's movement. And that ultimately the vanguards were going to hook up and lead the revolution. They were an important force. We were aware of what they were doing. And we had, before the Furies started, when we were doing the 18th Street Collective, our commune, we had done some work with the Panthers. What we were doing that was unusual was that we were looking at systems. We were looking at systems of oppression. We weren't looking at, we weren't interested in a laundry list of demands. We were talking about revolution, and we understood that there were entire systems at play. And I think we understood that we didn't understand a lot about race, that we didn't have a lot of interaction about, with people of color, with Black people in particular in D.C. That that was something that was, that we needed to do something about. And we didn't know how, and we didn't. And that was just the truth of it.
- [Coletta] The fact that we did not have a good racial consciousness, and the fact that we didn't address the issue, and the fact that we didn't try to be more inclusive and reach out, is something that I'm sure every one of us regrets. It is a glaring omission.
- [Charlotte] There were plenty of women of color in the '70s saying a lot of this stuff, but their place in history is almost invisible. And it needs to be brought back, just as the Furies and all of this stuff that that... And "radical feminism" isn't the right term, because it was radical, but it wasn't what people call radical feminism now, isn't the right term. It was a mixture of radical feminism and socialist feminism and lesbian feminism and women of color critique. And there was a radical edge of feminism. I call it the women's liberation movement strand, but there's no one word that captures it all. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] Feminist lesbianism, as the most basic threat to male supremacy, picks up part of the women's liberation analysis of sexism and gives it force and direction.
- [Ginny] When we would have meetings at our house, our house being with Rita, Jennifer, and me, 12th Street, when we would have collective meetings, we always had cookies, and we would hide the cookies because Lee Schwing, poor Lee, would always come over and eat our cookies. And we had to make that political. We had to make that be about class, that Lee was very privileged. And so of course she would eat our cookies, instead of just saying, "Lee wanted a cookie, And we didn't want her eating our cookies, 'cause we had limited amount of money to buy cookies and we wanted to keep our cookies for ourselves." So in a certain way, that making everything political was a way of, it was a way of not making ourselves look at the contradictions that we didn't wanna look at in the ways that we were living. Because we had an idea that we were doing everything really, really, really, really, I don't wanna say perfectly, but really close. And that everything that we did was in keeping with our values and our ideology, our politics.
- [Coletta] I found that the trying to create an ideology, a very erotic activity. And to do it with other women who were so smart and so thoughtful and willing to argue with each other, and willing to push, to come to ideas that we'd never considered before. That was a highly energizing experience.
- [Reader] Of course, none of us will ever be able to totally rid ourselves of the shit we've been fed all our lives but for me, one of the biggest steps was becoming a lesbian and joining with other lesbians to begin forming an analysis and a strategy. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] The revolution means change ... Women changing themselves...women changing the world. There is no middle ground and no individual solution. If you, or I, choose not to change, we choose against a women's revolution and against ourselves.
- [Ginny] There were ideas about nuclear family, and our analysis of the nuclear family and the way that it isolated women from each other, made them dependent on men. And when your life is defined as, you take care of the children, you take care of the house, you take care of your husband, that's your life. And if you have a job, it's supplemental. All of that was, we wanted none of that. And that's part of, I think, what influenced our decision around the children, but it definitely influenced our decision about how we wanted to live.
- [Helaine] Also, we were still sharing everything. And so childcare was part of that. And some people in the group really did not wanna do that. So it became an issue in the group of whether the children should be in the group.
- [Ginny] Some of what we were doing was rejecting everything that we were supposed to do. And part of what we were supposed to do as women was take care of, give birth to, and then take care of children. And so we were like, no. And some of the women had already had children. Okay. So part of it was that kind of rejection of the, we were rejecting everything that was a typical female role. No, we are not doing that. I mean, a lot of us had chosen not to have children for whatever reason, but we had made that choice. And so is raising children collectively now gonna be part of what we do? And how do we do that and give our attention to our political work, which is the most important thing? Part of it was, we were the vanguard of the revolution for God's sake. We were gonna be going underground. We were gonna be picking up weapons. We were gonna be running around the country. We were gonna be apparently running cells all over the country. How are we gonna raise children?
- [Rita Mae] I was very careful not to say what I thought. I didn't lie. I just withheld. And I truly believed children did not belong in this environment, because I felt violence was just around the corner and we couldn't protect them. And I really felt because we were the vanguard and we were, we were very vulnerable. And there was no one in that collective that could have remotely defended themselves, except maybe, you know, Lee, and me, 'cause I'll pick up a two-by-four.
- [Natasha] What finally happened is, they said that there's a school in New York that raises children. This is radical times. A school for only children. The parents weren't there, because they were gonna raise these children to be non-sexist, non-imperialist, non-racist. And they were gonna give the children empowerment to not be controlled by parents. And so it was, that's where they wanted us to send our children. I took my daughter to visit her father before I took her to the school. And he just said--he kidnapped her. He said, "Don't come and get her. She's not going to that school. She's staying with me." So that's where she stayed. But I'm telling you for years afterwards, I had such guilt, terrible guilt about thinking that I would send my child to this school. Terrible guilt. So it wasn't ever a good decision for me. It was a bad decision.
- [Sharon] The question came up, is it possible to make the revolution by making the Furies newspaper and still have the responsibility of the children? And the decision was made somewhere in the group that that was not possible. So my actual memory of the house that's now on the historic register is when Joan and I were called to a meeting. Well, the sequence of it was, we were told that the children were not a priority and that we had to make other arrangements. So the two children that were with their mothers were sent to their fathers, but Joan and I had Cassidy, whose was unrelated to us in any way. So Joan and I've had some discussion about our memories of how it happened, but basically my perspective is that, we called Cassidy's mother and asked her to come get her. And she did.
- [Ginny] And Joan in particular did not wanna let go of Cassidy. She thought it was a big mistake. And she argued with Rita all the time. And there was already a power struggle going on with them.
- [Rita Mae] I just shut up and let it go on. And then at some point I just said, "well, I think we're probably better off without them," which of course means I'm anti-child, but I'm not.
- [Coletta] And the fact that Rita Mae felt so strongly that children were taking away from our time and energy that we should be putting towards making the revolution was not a view that I held. And I was not happy about that decision, but the decision was made as a group. I'm sure that many other people that you've talked to have said the same thing, but I think it was a terrible mistake. And I look back on it and I'm appalled at how we could have thought that what we were doing was so important that we couldn't support the next female generation.
- [Sharon] So that's one of the more difficult days of my life. Joan was actually very comforting to me, because she talked about crabs in a barrel and all kinds of imagery that somehow made us both feel a little bit better, but it also strained our relationship, the loss of a child. And that's sort haunted me for a long time. I mean, I had really enjoyed being a sort of mother for about a year, and, what's the next question?
- [Helaine] I don't know. It was a sad time. And what had been an exciting sort of great time of becoming physically stronger, like doing karate, of being around exciting people who, talking about all kinds of things, just it got, I don't know. You started to turn inward, and the people you worked with were your enemies. No focus on really who was the enemy. And I think that's probably what ended it. ♪ ♪
- [Sharon] Part of the agreement in leaving the collective is that Joan and I were sworn to secrecy, because she and I were well known in the community. We had run a women's liberation course where we had a little slideshow called, Watch Out, Girly, Women's Liberation is Gonna Get Your Mama. And we showed this repeatedly to anybody who would come to the Institute for Policy Studies. So we were known as the sort of friendly radicals. We agreed to maintain the secrecy about being expelled from the collective. And my reasons for that is, I believed in what the collective was doing. I did understand the perspective that middle-class women are oppressive to working-class women, in the way that whites can oppress Blacks, men can oppress women. So, I got the theory of it. But it was a painful time.
- [Helaine] So I actually think if this had been a group that reached out more, that broadened itself, and wasn't a sort of so much of a top down sort of organization, I think that maybe it would've gone on a little bit longer. I don't know.
- [Jenna] Why would I go along with those decisions? Why did I go along with the decision about the kids? Why did I go along with the decision about Sharon and Joan? 'cause I was just like... I was not standing up for--I didn't have clarity at all. I just did not have clarity and I let things go by and I hated that. And then, as I started to notice, when I felt that leadership was being self-serving, then I had done with it. I was just done with it. ♪ ♪
- [Natasha] I remember it being very painful and there were hard feelings.
- [Ginny] We did not talk about ... emotions. We didn't.
- [Reader] We are a group of women whose political commitment to each other is primary. That means we have agreed upon our political goal-- making a woman's revolution-- and committed ourselves to doing it with each other. We have realized that we cannot let our feelings about each other separate us or absorb our energy. Our emotional responses to each other-- both romantic and hostile-- must be worked out in that context.
- [Coletta] Four of us, Tasha, Nancy, Rita, and myself, came from working-class backgrounds. So that was one-third of the 12 of us. That meant that it was a major issue.
- [Natasha] I was an alcoholic, I was depressed. I had really low, low self-confidence. And see, I don't remember the order of things, but I remember being really angry at the middle-class women who had been in consciousness raising groups. And they would say things like we, we, we, and I was saying I wasn't worried about who did the fucking dishes. I was trying to survive. I was almost dead. I was almost killed. My life was survival. It wasn't like who did what. So I was kind of off about all that stuff. So class was starting to come into it.
- [Rita Mae]But all the things I wanted to do were very labor-intensive, but were geared towards poor women. I really don't care about white middle-class women. They're okay, and they were gonna be okay. They were already going to law school. They were already going to med school. By this time Bella was getting elected, and so there was a path for them. I'm glad they took it. I'm not saying they shouldn't have taken it, but I'm thinking about the supermarket checkout clerk whose husband is, if she even got married, whose man left her with three kids. And nobody's thinking about her. So could we do this? Could we do that? Blah, blah, blah. And gradually they came around and they did try to do a lot. And I thought the martial arts was really important, because women get pushed around a lot, and if you hurt people, they tend to back off.
- [Helaine] Mostly we were focused on doing this work we were doing and farming this new way of thinking. And the people who had more money put in more money. And you were expected to put in more money if you were middle-class and all of that. But everybody put in something.
- [Ginny] So it was a very important political decision to live together, to share our resources, to be conscious about what we bought and how we spent our money, to not spend a lot of money. We didn't have a lot of money and we didn't spend a lot of money. And so part of it was a rejection of the ways we had been brought up. And part of it was beginning to explore what could a different world look like? What would it feel like? ♪ ♪
- [Reader] If women do not make a commitment to each other, which includes sexual love, we deny ourselves the love and value traditionally given to men. We accept our second class status. When women do give primary energies to other women, then it is possible to concentrate fully on building a movement for our liberation.
- [Reader] Women can choose to not be heterosexual, to not support the power system that oppresses them. Lesbianism then becomes a political choice, which every woman is capable of making. It is a choice for women and against oppression.
- [Coletta] I'm one of those women who came out in the women's movement, because when I was going every day to work at Off Our Backs, and I was reading all... One of my jobs was to read all the newspapers and newsletters that came in and to summarize them and put them on the page. Working with other women, trying to think about our own oppression was emotionally satisfying to me in a way that nothing in my life had been. My political lesbianism started when I said to myself, as I'm trying to learn about feminism, as I'm saying to myself, "Well, if women are equal and women are the most interesting people I'm around, and I'm most emotionally satisfied when I'm working with women, why can't women be the ones I love? Why can't they be the ones I have sex with? Why am I saying, 'Oh, it's only men.'" ♪ ♪
- [Sharon] Separatism, I found to be extremely helpful in the beginning stages, which is, get the men out of the room and women talked differently to each other. I thought that was really important. I thought we developed speaking skills and practical skills when we were separatists. I thought just there was a lot of growth. I mean, it's hard to remember how beaten down women could be back then, but there was a lot of growth with the separatism.
- [Natasha] Women need to learn their own voice, because they have so many voices in their head. Their parents, their husbands, their whatever, the male structure. They need to learn their own voice. So yeah, lesbian separatism at the time made sense.
- [Charlotte] We can create the thinking of separatists. And I think being separate did help us come up with the ideas, just as many groups become separatist or self-identified in order to come up with the analysis and the understanding of their particular experience. Whether it's women of color, disabled women, all kinds of particularities. There is a period of needing to analyze with people who have something in common. Where do you fit in the picture?
- We were forming this ideology of what it meant to really be a separatist and what it would mean to be, how important it was to be a lesbian in that and to love women, and to take that love and nurturing away from men completely. To only focus on ourselves and focus on where we want it to go.
- You know, first the women's movement separated from men. And that seemed really important to me because, to develop an understanding, I think you have to turn and look at each other. And often men in that environment were a distraction or were wanting to argue about it, or whatever. And so we turned away and we turned inward, and that feels crucial to me. The Furies took the next step and said, okay, we feel like that the women's movement because of the dominance of heterosexuality, doesn't see clearly what needs to happen and what kind of ideology is important. And as lesbians, we are going to separate ourselves from the women's movement, which we saw as a heterosexual women's movement. And we're going to develop an ideology. ♪ They agree, it's a pleasure to be a lesbian ♪ ♪ Lesbian ♪ ♪ Lesbian, no man's land ♪ ♪ Lesbian, lesbian ♪ ♪ Any woman can be a lesbian ♪
- And not only any woman can be, but any woman should be. That to be with a man, for a woman be with a man, was to basically be with your oppressor. That there's no way that any man cannot be... Have male privilege and be complicit in this system of male supremacy, which I think is actually true. That part of it, just as I think that white people have white privilege and no matter... And we're complicit and we benefit from it, even as we try not to. Even as we are conscious about what we're doing and all of that stuff. We still have it. I walk down the street and I am seen as a white person. Nobody says, "Oh, there's a white person who is really trying to deal with her privilege. And so she's not really white." No, the same with men. There are advantages to being a man and disadvantages to being a woman, and they're embedded in the system.
- We were like, not only you can choose, but you should choose, because this is the time where you should be devoting yourself only to women. And so we definitely had that idea.
- But then we were becoming lesbians and it was all making sense, because we were radical. And of course I was really pissed off at the male left. I was disgusted with them, the way the whole thing went in Chicago, just disgusted with a male left. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] ... if all women were lesbians male supremacy would have the impossible task of maintaining itself in a vacuum. Men know what a threat we are to their power so they heap the worst abuse upon the lesbian in order to keep women from becoming lesbians.
- I think it was a very important stance to take. I think it was necessary and positive actually to say, this is something that everybody can choose and that you ought to look at why you're not choosing it. And you ought to look at, we all ought to look at, is my attraction to men because I'm really attracted to men, or is it because that's what I've been taught to feel? And my potential attraction to women is something I've been taught is an illness and a disease that should be cut out.
- What is interesting is the way in which when we were in the Furies, we turned that idea of political lesbianism sort of on its head and said, lesbians are a unique window into understanding the patriarchy and being able to fight it, because they live without men. They are not dependent upon men. They don't need to have an individual relationship with a man. They are independent. And so they see the world in a way that when you're heterosexual, it's hard to see.
- [Reader] Sexism is the root of all other oppressions, and lesbian and woman oppression will not end by smashing capitalism, racism and imperialism. Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.
- There was an explosion of eroticism. It was like we were enamored of each other, and we loved being together as a group. And we loved the other women as a group, and the group. We thought each other was infinitely interesting. And because of that, many of us were lovers with more than one person in the group, although we were pretty much serial monogamists. But sometimes we had one-night stands. Sometimes we had more open relationships. We didn't have relationships with women outside of the group, but we were, we were open to each other. And we loved being around each other and we loved doing things together. And I feel like there was a connection between our sexuality and our creativity. When you look at Nancy Myron's drawings and pen and ink work that she did during that time, and her writing short stories, and Helaine's writing short stories, and we were bursting with creativity, and we were bursting with sexuality .
- The most incredible thing that came out of that whole time for me, was Woman-Identified Woman. I kept that with me for the rest of my life. I became a heterosexual again, but I was a woman-identified woman. I was never gonna be identified by anybody else. I was my own person. And that was such a liberation for me. That was a strength and a skill I carried with me for the rest of my life.
- The Woman-Identified Woman, I would think would be the real point of the compass. And it's, I still think it's an extraordinary piece of thought-- that women are not identifying with women, they're identifying with their oppressor. And anybody who's systematically oppressed, you may not have to identify with your oppressor, but you do have to understand wherever you fall on that scale. And I don't care if it's race or sex or whatever, you know more about them than they know about you, or you wouldn't be surviving.
- And that there is something wonderful and empowering and thrilling and important about putting women first and centering women in your lives, and not giving your energy to men. And that's an important statement. ♪ ♪
- It was a very, you know, no one, people didn't own a lot of these houses. These houses weren't renovated. Also college kids lived in this neighborhood. There were hippie communes in this neighborhood.
- When my mother came to visit, her one comment was, "You're gonna end up in the morgue." I did not feel particularly afraid, although I did have several crime experiences. Car theft and purse snatchings and that kind of thing. Southeast was--where the Furies house is-- was really interesting, because it was just a short walk from the Capitol. And in one block, well, all of D.C. was like that. In one block, you could go from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, just in a block or two.
- Not a particularly safe neighborhood. We would be harassed a lot. And--because we were out, I mean. So we would, I remembered once when I, later, when I walked like in the afternoon with Lee Schwing to get something from a grocery store at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania, some guys followed us all the way. I think we had held hands or something, which was like a radical thing then. And these guys followed us all the way home and Lee confronted them and we said, "Lay off." And then they chased us home and tried to beat in down the door. And of course, we didn't wanna call the police, because you didn't get a lot of support. I don't know. ♪ ♪
- Yeah, we always had the FBI. I mean, I had the FBI after me. I mean, they were, what do you call, tapping my phone when I was growing up.
- I do know that the FBI had an apartment across from us, because the FBI, we could see where their house, the phones were tapped. There were always FBI guys on the street. We were very careful about talking on the phone. We took our phones apart at times.
- Somebody from the FBI came to the 11th Street house, knocked on the door and said, "You girls know anything about the bombing at the Capitol?" Which I thought was so silly, because if you did have anything to do with the bombing in the Capitol, we'd go like, "Oh, you got us." No, we didn't have anything to do with the bombing in the Capitol.
- The FBI knocked on my door when the Capitol was bombed. What do I know? They were threatening to take my daughter away from me if I didn't tell them.
- They always had us marked for, like, knowing more than we were even involved in. I mean, we were doing what we were doing. We were doing a lesbian feminist newspaper, as it said right across the masthead. But no doubt, in those days that made no sense to them whatsoever. So they figured it was a front for something else.
- [Narrator] The Furies saw themselves as the vanguard of the women's liberation movement, and they needed more people to join them in order to make a women's revolution across the country. The collective decided that one way to get the word out, was to write, publish and distribute a newspaper. They titled their newspaper The Furies and published nine issues over the course of 18 months. The first five issues were published before the collective itself disbanded. By 1973, The Furies newspaper was distributed nationally and had thousands of readers.
- The idea of the newspaper actually came from doing the special issue of Motive magazine. And that came from my history with the Methodist Church, because I had been in this Methodist student movement kind of radical movement. And they had offered us the chance to do a special issue on the lesbian and gay movement. So of course we, the women split from the men and said, "we'll make it two issues. You have to do yours and we'll do ours." And I had that assignment as I was in the midst of developing The Furies. So Coletta and Joan and Rita Mae and I took on the task of writing that, and that was already in the works in that same summer that we were really having the Furies. So in working on putting that collection together, I think we all began to say, we should do a newspaper. We should do something ongoing.
- Yes, the newspaper was part of the movement-building. The newspaper was part of, come on folks, get it together. Here's where we need to be.
- Writing was action that we didn't see that we were putting out a newspaper, because we just liked newspapers. We were writing things to get to encourage people to, what was the right word, to *incite.* We were trying to incite other women and lesbians to take action, and we saw our writing as part of that action. So we were creating a political movement. We were taking a political action by writing.
- I think the significance of the Furies as a phenomenon is precisely because we did write. And there were a lot of lesbian feminist groups emerging in the US around that time in the different cities, but most of them didn't write or didn't write and produce anything in a big way.
- So it was very important for us to create this body of work that said, this is what our lives really are. And this is how we're oppressed. And here are ways that we want to, become freer people to have our own identity.
- I mean, the great thing about the Furies is it was really politically, intellectually stimulating. We were willing to kind of talk about any idea. We kind of had an, kind of really, sometimes a little too criticism, self-criticism, sometimes a little too harsh, but we were really trying to figure out class, race, gender, all this stuff.
- There's a certain way that we understood intersectionality, although we certainly had no... Kimberlé Crenshaw hadn't invented or said the word yet, but the ways that we talked about gender and class and sexuality, at least, and acknowledged race, that race played a part of it. We didn't have very much analysis of that. So we had that, we had almost a whole worldview. We had a political theory basically, and it was very systems-based. So it was not just looking at a piece. It was really seeing a whole system and how the whole system worked and how the aspects of it, class, economics worked. I mean, we wrote a lot about capitalism and how sexuality played with that and how misogyny played with that. And we put it together. And we put it together articulately and well. And I don't know that anybody else was doing that. Other women were writing and other lesbians were writing stuff, but they did not have the same kind of analysis, or--it wasn't quite holistic because we didn't have a good analysis of race-- but it was as holistic as we could be. And it was well-written, it was intelligent.
- I think it was helpful, even though it's not my personality, that we were willing to go to the farthest extreme of the logic of the thought. So when I remember writing "Lesbians in Revolt," which has sort of become the article that all the feminist theory books include from this period. And I just... We talked about what I was gonna write, and then I just took every idea to its logical extreme. And I think the significance of the theories is that it really exposed what heterosexism or compulsory heterosexuality, or heteronormativity, I mean, we now have all these new words for it that have evolved was all about. I think it was because we put so much emphasis on writing. It was kind of, and because it was pretty blunt and kind of in your face. And it wasn't academic. It was just like making people think about these ideas. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] The lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women's innate need for men. Lesbians literally do not need men.
- [Reader] We call our paper The Furies, because we are also angry. We are angry because we are being oppressed by male supremacy. We have been fucked over all our lives by a system which is based on the domination of men over women, which defines male as good and female as only as good as the man you are with.
- The paper, if you look at it, really is a conglomeration of that anti-imperialist thought, feminist thought and kind of beginning of the gay movement, that's what that newspaper is.
- Nancy actually knew how to print, and was a graphic artist, an illustrator, and was good at layout and design. So she was a great asset. And Sharon, I don't even remember where she went or how she knew. Maybe she went to the college in, the community college in D.C. But Tasha and Susan and I had all been at Off Our Backs. So we all had that experience. And I had been at Off Our Backs by the time we started the Furies for two years. So the thing that happened with the Furies when Tasha and Susan became involved, they brought a hippie, leftist, yippie kind of understanding and influence to the newspaper. So when it got to designing The Furies, we designed it ourselves and it has a much more homemade sort of funky look to it. The layout and pasteup didn't strictly follow design rules. So the feel of it was very different.
- When I thought about how did we learn this? I don't know, we just did Motive. I don't know exactly which one of us knew how to use the glue and the paste, but we all just sort of did it.
- Well, that wasn't my department. And I don't know how they did it, but they were good. I mean, I never criticized anything and I didn't attempt to tell them how to do it. I knew the other people knew better than I did. And I thought they did a good job under a lot of pressure.
- A lot of these women had worked at Off Our Backs. And so they had already knew how to lay out a newspaper and stuff. I had not done that, but I learned to do it and I liked to do it. It was fun to do the layout and we would be down in the basement. And it was kind of fun. There was a lot of times that were fun. I don't wanna give the impression that we were all just sitting around discussing Mao every day, you know? We also had fun and I loved that, and I loved being involved with them and having them teach me how to do things, and we're working on the articles and the illustrations and all that kind of stuff. That was very nice. Yeah.
- There was one part that Nancy and I did, which is we could not find a publisher in Washington for the first issue. Nancy and I got in a van of some sort that was a nightmare to drive. And we drove the first issue down to Atlanta to a women's publishing place there. Stayed a few days in a women's collective, lesbian collective in Atlanta, and then drove back. So that's one part I remember quite vividly.
- I think we naively thought we were gonna do it in the basement of 11th Street. 'cause I had worked on printing in New York and in Washington, but it just wasn't gonna be. So I can't remember the details, but we went out in search of a printing firm that would do it for us and we were turned down. And finally we found, because we would send them the blueprint and stuff of, you know, it was clear that it was a lesbian publication. And in 1972, there weren't, you know...
- We had problems finding a printer. I don't know where the first one was done. It might've been done at a women's press, but I know that after I think the first issue, they were printed at the Army Times Press. We could not find a printer. I remember looking and looking for a printer and everybody, I mean a lesbian newspaper. They thought it was porn. And it was porn to them. And so the Army Times really didn't care. And later I met the editor of the Army Times during that period and told her this story and she thought it was really funny . But that's how it would go to the press, it would come back. We would then have to, we would... The mailing list was kept on index cards and then typed on labels that were mimeograph labels, if anybody remembers that, or labels with a carbon sheet. And so you could use labels maybe twice, then you had to type in and then you'd have to, it was just... Computers have done a lot for us. So it was very tedious. And then we would have to put the labels on, bundle the papers and do 'em in zip code order.
- We would sit in a room as the Furies, and we had sort of a--what's the right word?-- Template, for what every issue would include. And so every issue would have hopefully some kind of biography about a woman in the past, a lesbian in the past. We had some major article about our principles and we repeated them over and over again. If you read it from one issue to the next, it sounds sort of repetitious, but that's how ideas stay and get stuck. And then we would have something about class and maybe more than one thing. We would usually, sometimes we would have something about the collective and how it worked and what we thought other women should be doing in terms of creating their own collectives, and how we would go about sharing money or coming up with projects or whatever.
- I think that Charlotte, Coletta, Rita, and Ginny were more of the editorial board. But everybody sat together and talked about what we wanted to have in the paper, and who was gonna write what. People edited each other's work and people worked together on different projects.
- Well, I think it was to get people thinking and some were very literal by my standards and I was editing. So I tried not to mess with anybody's work, because for some people, writing is very hard. And you don't wanna cut 'em off. You want 'em to do whatever you can do. And mine, I think were also clearly problem-oriented.
- The purpose of it was not to write about the news. It was to write our political thought and to put that out, and to keep putting it out and to influence people and to get people to join us. But a lot, we just really operated kind of by consensus and in a collective way, where we would just talk about, what do we wanna say? What needs to be said? Did you see the article by so-and-so? Shouldn't we respond to that? Or this is what's going on in the D.C. women's liberation movement. Shouldn't we respond to that? Or I had this idea about whatever. A lot of it came out of our living. Like here's something that we're dealing with. We wouldn't write about it as though we were dealing with it because we wouldn't want people to know that we had ... problems.
- I do see that we changed our personal narratives to fit our ideology, but to fit the ideology that we were developing. So you can't take everything that's said in the Furies as a truthful rendering of what happened in our lives.
- One of the reasons I don't know too much about it, is I really was set down from the Furies in the beginning. So my article was submitted, and there is a big chunk of it that I did not write originally that was included. Some of them were militant. It was made more militant in order to be more powerful. So it was my personal story and it was made more militant. And for a long time, I flinched badly every time I read that section. Really, by the time of the end of the first issue, I was no longer part of the process.
- That was our heart, the newspaper. I mean, you could say it's our brain. It's all the politics we had, but I believe that was really who we were at the time. And then all the different personalities and class stuff and ego stuff and everything, which is what destroys all human organizations. The same thing destroyed us.
- [Reader] Lesbian collectives must develop an identity that comes from political work and direction, that is not dependent on how those in the collective feel about each other at the time. Collectives have broken up-- not over disagreements about political strategy-- but because someone is on the outs with someone else. Lesbian communities have become polarized-- not over ideology-- but over whose side you were on in the melee.
- I think people tried, maybe they tried a little too hard. People tried to be too pure in the beginning. It was the first, and you know, you're gonna make all the first mistakes too, but I gave everybody credit for all of that.
- Well, the only thing I would say is, in the demise of the collective, I think we were all feeling the limitations of it. And we were also not able to deal with the power struggles within. And I do think that some of what Rita Mae talks about as leadership, was a real issue, but some of it was just power struggles between very strong women who hadn't figured out yet how to be strong and also work together. And some decided they didn't want to work in groups and went off and did their writing or whatever. And others of us learned from that about some of what we had to do and in order to make that happen. So I think there were, without question-- We were really trying to break away from and find a new path from these communal ideals, and yet we were still trapped by them. So it was a crazy time. ♪ ♪
- Oh, it was. I was the first one thrown out. I'm sure there were others after me, but by that time I was long gone. Because they said I was a "star."
- I don't know if we ever said the words, "You're out," or if Rita understood that she was out. But it was very clear that she was, that we were not, I mean, that things were not okay. There were just so many things that were not okay.
- [Reader] How are we going to deal with the problems of women retreating because it gets too hard or too complicated; getting bogged down in group and/or self-examination; undermining each other rather than building each other's strengths; dividing into smaller and smaller subgroups without anything to hold us together; becoming purist and self-righteous about our "high consciousness?"
- We disbanded the collective. Essentially, we did not accept her terms of the collective, and that's what she calls being thrown out. But it was also a process of within that same process, all of us deciding that it was time to end the collective, because, and I think it's important. And I do value that I learned through the collective the dangers of such an insular kind of activity that's full of such self-importance, but very limited in its connection to other people. And so, in a sense, I also... We all wanted to disband. I think we were at a point where everyone was feeling, either they'd already been thrown out, or they were already feeling that the good of what we were was gone, and that the conflicts I think Rita Mae was creating in order to be free of it. Whether she calls it being kicked out or not, on one level she's right. It was freedom for all of us at that point.
- I look back at the whole women's movement, and the central issue that keeps presenting itself to me, was there was no accountability. When you have people leading, but are not elected, there is no accountability. And that's true today too. And I don't know how you change that.
- It really lasted, it was such a short time. It felt like years in some ways. And it had that kind of an impact on me in a sense, it just was very heavy for some reason, but, and it was made an impact far beyond that in the women's movement, which just shows you what putting ideas down and running through them for people and introducing these concepts to people, what that can do.
- Part of what I took out of the Furies was a much deeper understanding of the power of identity politics, and the importance of giving it space and giving it legitimacy, but not being stuck there. And to learn how to hear the different entry points and the different nuances that produces is all critical to political progress and movement, but you can't stay stuck in any identity and make a movement for change. ♪ ♪
- [Reader] We know that we must take control of our daily survival and create work situations where we are not totally dependent on the man. We will no longer be wasting our time at shit jobs we don't care about. We will be in control of our time, products we produce, and the learning of new skills. These institutions will kindle our energies and give us space to research, talk, and have insights in developing our ideology and strategy. This should help create another step towards a feminist society.
- While we were in the Furies, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do. And we all stayed in producing something that we thought would help with the movement. We were also very, had a very strong belief in women's institutions. That women should create their own institutions that could economically support women and could make inroads into the economy.
- [Narrator] Discussions of power, leadership, and the role of personal relationships for women activists, loom large for many feminist groups. The Furies were no exception. And while the former Furies remember things differently, they do agree that they had struggled with issues of leadership and class privilege and whether the lesbian vanguard should be raising children. Any one of these struggles or some combination ended the collective. At the same time, when the collective disbanded, its members moved on to establish women's institutions that were themselves a next stage of women's revolution. In that way, the breakup of the Furies can be seen as a step toward the revolutionary goals written about in their newspaper. It's not an overstatement to say that the work of the Furies shaped lesbian culture in the US for decades. Former members of the collective founded some of the major women's institutions over the next 20 years and beyond. Later feminists and queer activists developed and expanded the ideology of lesbian feminism, even as they challenged it to be more intersectional. And nearly 50 years after the collective, many of the former Furies themselves continue writing, making photographs, teaching and organizing. As was the case for many others, I formed my own political and cultural commitments in the long, and sometimes hidden shadow of the Furies. I spent time studying The Furies newspaper; reading Rita Mae Brown's books, Rubyfruit Jungle and Plain Brown Wrapper; hearing Charlotte Bunch speak at my university; admiring JEB's photographs and films; and listening to music from the Olivia catalog with my friends and lovers. For me, the personal and political blended in that self-work, echoing the Furies' belief that revolution begins at home. Looking back on the Furies collective with the activists themselves, I've recognized that working theory into practice is difficult to do consistently and well. A revolutionary home is elusive. In 2016, several sites of importance to US LGBTQ history were entered into the National Register of Historic Places. Among them was one of the Furies collective houses. The house on 11th Street Southeast, where the newspaper had been produced, was the first lesbian site added to the registry.
- When the Furies were living and working in this house, nobody would even have come close to imagining such a thing as this would happen. And it is somewhat ironic, as those of you who saw the FBI report on the wall inside understand, we were under surveillance, that we were trying to overthrow the government. We were not trying to be recognized. However, we did think we were doing something historic. So the fact that the building is being recognized as a site of historic importance would not surprise and did not surprise people. It was the fact of who was doing the recognition. We thought, you know, we were the revolutionary vanguard. So of course, we were gonna change history. However, that's up to other people to decide whether we did or not. ♪ ♪
- [Ginny] I think we did what we came together to do. And I mean, we didn't end up leading the revolution or overthrowing the patriarchy, but tomorrow's another day.