At the age of thirty-five, I conceived the idea of a museum to commemorate the war against women. I was recently “out” and on fire with radical feminist theory, which electrifying my brain with new synaptic connections between previously isolated storage files of experiences and observations.
 
In light of the #MeToo movement, I thought I would dig up the proposal for this museum and work it into a blog. Reading through the documents, I have decided to just put them up, as they were written thirty years ago.
 
So… direct from 1988, The Women’s Rape Museum

I am enclosing a proposal for a project I initiated in 1988, which officially died in 1991.  It was for a national Women’s Rape Museum.  The project was inspired by and modeled after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
 
I feel that we women have allowed men to establish the terms of debate on the subject of war, and in allowing them to define “war” in terms of military campaigns between nationalities, we forfeit our own experience. 
 
Andrea Dworkin points out that in the US, only seven women out of a hundred will not experience sexual assault in her lifetime.  Estimates for child sexual abuse for girls run between 30 and 40%.  Women’s art, culture, history, and spiritual traditions are largely censored in most parts of the world.  Certainly our values are not prioritized by governments who are run by men and tokenized women.  We are, in effect, all colonized by the foreign and hostile culture of men.  We are controlled psychologically by images which show women as perpetual victims of sexual terrorism. 

The literature by male veterans about their experiences at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington stimulated my interest in a memorial for women who have been victims of rape.  We are not allowed to define male aggression in political terms.   This is insane!  Women continue to define each act as a behavioral aberration on the part of some deviant male, when the truth is that our legal system does not seriously go after perpetrators, the entire culture teaches rape, and our economy is based on the appropriation of women’s resources.
 
The reactions of individuals and organizations to the Women’s Rape Museum prospectus was instructive, to say the least.  It is as if each woman has hundreds of examples of domination and terrorism in her memory - each hermetically sealed.  When a woman begins to unwrap these experiences and allow her brain to form synapses between them, she becomes terrified of the conclusion:  This is a war. 
 
It is my belief that until women seize the definition of war and begin to confront it in terms of our own experiences with male dominance and sexual aggression, then the more aggressive expressions -i.e. the military campaigns, phallic missiles, mass rapes, etc. - will continue to increase, while women wear buttons, join male-dominated peace organizations, and in general adopt strategies which have proved ineffectual throughout history.
 
And finally, I want to make a point about veterans.  This is another word that men have appropriated.  According to male definitions of war, there are very few women veterans.  When women redefine “war,” most of us will achieve the recognition and status of veterans.  This identity would require a radical restructuring of our experiences, giving meaning to our suffering and establishing a bond, instead of a barrier, to intimacy between women.  The current vocabulary for rape is one of individual shame and confusion.  When the rape victim understands that she is a veteran, she suddenly has access to a rich tradition of activism, authority, and respect within her community

Exhibits with Practical Information:
 
The Myths about Rape:  This would be the first exhibit to greet the visitor to the Memorial.  This exhibit would challenge immediately the myths about who gets raped and who does the raping.
 
If Someone You Know Has Been Raped:  This is a display of “do’s” and “don’t’s” for friends and family of victims.  Well-meaning attempts to make light of the event or to encourage the victim to get on with her life often result in permanent alienation at a time when the victim needs support. 
 
Reporting Rape: the Legal Steps:  This is a fifteen-minute film about the procedures a woman can expect if she chooses to report the rape.  The film will show a hypothetical rape victim from the time she contacts a friend about the rape, through the process of reporting at the police station, the medical examination, and her return home.

Post-Rape Syndrome: Steps to Healing:  This is a table of steps victims go through in healing, along with a first-person narrative of a victim, describing her reactions.  The steps include her need to talk about the incident repeatedly, her panic attacks and possible agoraphobia, changes in her sexual responses, and disruption of her work activities.
 
Women And Weapons:  This is a display case of weapons which women might choose to carry.  The display carries information about the advantages and the drawbacks to the various guns and sprays, and the laws that pertain to obtaining and carrying them.
 
Self-defense Strategies:  This is a live demonstration/workshop offered at set times during the hours the memorial is open.
 

Historical Displays:
 
The History of Rape Laws in The U.S.: (or other host country) - This exhibit would be a wall mural with a time line depicting the changes in rape laws and landmark cases in the Memorial’s host country.
 
Historic Rape Resisters:  This display would have pictures of women who fought back, physically or legally against their abusers.  Visitors could press a button to hear the courageous accounts of women like Joan Little, Phoolan Devi, Inez Garcia , and Dr. Elizabeth Morgan.

The Burning Time:  This would be a display about the genocide of nine million women in Europe during the Middle Ages. The exhibit would show the implements of torture, excerpts from the Malleus Malefactorum, and trial transcripts and narratives of women who were murdered.

Religion and Rape: Representation of rape in the Bible, the Koran, and other religious writings. The priesthood child-rape epidemic.

The Medical Profession and Rape: The history of medical misogyny, and especially the misdiagnosis of PTSD in survivors of rape, especially child rape. The cover-up of incest by theories of "Oedipal" and "Electra" complexes, misdiagnosis of venereal disease in children, and pathologizing of victims.

 Slavery And Rape:  This is an historical display about the rape of enslaved Black women in America.  The display includes first person narratives including Linda Brent’s story of hiding in a garret for seven years to avoid rape by her master.  Rape of enslaved women was a special horror in a system where the rapist had rights of legal ownership of the victim’s children.

War And Rape:  This display will focus on recent and current wars. This display will document the rape of women in Vietnam, the mass rape/suicides of women in Bangladesh, the Japanese "comfort women,” and the rapes of women in Bosnia. Rape as a method of torture. "Ethnic cleansing." Rape in the military and the denial of benefits to survivors of Military Sexual Trauma.

Trafficking and Prostitution: Historical and current. Paid rape.

Pornography: Statistics about the industry. The harm of pornography. The teaching of rape and the propagation of rape culture.
 
The Art of Survivors:  This display would include samples of the work of artists like novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and poet Chrystos.
 
The Culture of Control:  This is a display of articles used for the cultural control of women.  It would include traditional foot-bindings from China, the chador worn by Islamic women, chastity belts from the Middle Ages, high-heeled shoes, boned corsets, and various styles of dress (hoop skirt, hobble, mini-skirt, etc.) that reflect a cultural control of women. This display would also include the implements used to excise the clitorises and infibulate the vaginas of women in Africa.

Resources:
 
Rape Survivors' Library And Resource Center:  This would be a reference library with a reading room for women who want to read about some aspect of sexual aggression towards women.  The librarian could refer visitors to other legal and therapeutic agencies, both in the community and internationally.
 
Counseling Room:  The Women's Rape Memorial would have a trained therapist on staff who could respond to requests for help from visitors who are experiencing emotional distress during their visit to the Memorial.  This therapist would be able to provide references for legal advice or therapy.
 
The Rape Narrative Archive:  Women who visit the Memorial may have the opportunity of writing or telling their story on tape in privacy and leaving it in the archives of the Memorial as a testimony to their own personal courage as a survivor.  They may or may not choose to make the narrative anonymous or to have their story available to other visitors to the Memorial.  Testimonies will be preserved and valued without judgement.  The survivor's story, in her own words, is accepted at the Women's Rape Memorial.

The Ritual Fire: There will be a fire that burns perpetually where rape survivors can bring clothing or other artifacts associated with the violation and throw them into the fire.
 
The Rape Survivor's Memorial Garden:   This will be a quiet garden area where survivors and their friends and family can come and pay tribute to the courage of the women and children who have been raped.  The garden provides a place for leaving poems, photographs, and flowers.

Something significant happened today. 
 
Today a senator resigned because six women who claimed he had harassed them were believed, and thirty-two senators of his own party—the Democratic party—called on him to resign. Thirteen of these were female and nineteen male.
 
Many folks felt that his offenses were mild considering that the current President has bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and has been accused of all kinds of groping, voyeurism, crude remarks, and assaults. This same week there is a Republican candidate running for the Senate who has been credibly accused by multiple women of child sexual abuse.

But still, the senator resigned.
 
Many people felt it was a shame because he supports feminist causes and because he is an outspoken liberal in a time when conservatives are controlling both House and Senate.
 
But still, the senator resigned.
 
I want to remind people that we are still living in patriarchy. What that means is that, when women are abused, there will always be something more important going on. There will always be a reason why women should set aside our issues and our grievances to work for some greater good or more urgent need. Always. I mean always.

In this country, women had to wait for suffrage until all men could have the vote. In England, the Suffrage Movement was completely derailed when its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst ordered her followers to redirect their zeal in support of recruitment for the frontlines of World War I. Suffrage could wait. It was not the time.
 
Today, between 9 and 33%  of women in the US military report experiencing an attempted or completed rape during military service. Let me emphasize the word “report.” Consider that this year, 58% of victims who reported experienced reprisals or retaliation. Congress has been holding hearings on this for decades, but nothing changes. Why?  Because the military is focused on the “real” enemy, the “real” violence. These women reporting are disrupting chains of command, generating divisions and distractions, and undermining morale in a time of war. Now is never the time or place to accuse a fellow soldier or commanding officer of sexual violence.

I remember watching Ted Kennedy at the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill was being called on to describe in detail Thomas’ harassment of her. Ted Kennedy who had, according to him, been driving a campaign worker to the ferry to get home after a party… only the worker had left her keys and her purse at the party and Kennedy was not driving on the road to the ferry. In any event, he drove off an unlit bridge into a pond.

He got out of the car, but she did not. He waited ten hours to report the incident to authorities. In the meantime, she was struggling to survive, contorting her body to catch the last pockets of oxygen… no doubt waiting for Kennedy to get help and rescue her. Some estimates say she survived more than ten minutes.  What she did not understand was that now was not her turn. The priority was protecting the senator from scandal.
 
And Anita Hill was also told that now was not her turn. There was an African American man up for the Supreme Court. That was the priority, not his descriptions of Long John Dong pornography. 
 
But Anita Hill had not waited her turn, and after the hearing that confirmed her harasser (who referred to the hearing--including her participation--as a “high tech lynching”), there was a very serious effort to have her academic career destroyed. Fortunately, a “We Believe Anita” grassroots campaign was birthed to counter the attacks.

Sexual harassment is, like rape, largely an issue of male aggression against women. Congress is predominantly male.  Not surprisingly, they have made their own rules about the handling of sexual complaints against members and staff, passing laws that exempt them from practices that would apply to other employers. Let’s look more closely at this.

Since 1995 a law has been in place allowing accusers to file lawsuits only if they first agree to go through months of counseling and mediation. Counseling?  For “False Memory Syndrome?”  Or perhaps projection of unresolved daddy issues?  Mediation? As in a case where two parties cannot reach agreement?  What would that look like?  She said he did it; he says he didn’t. In mediation they agree that he may have done it, but has amnesia, or she agrees she experienced it, but it might have been a lucid dream?  Fortunately for We the People, a special congressional office is charged with trying to resolve these cases out of court.
 
And, yes, it appears that even with all this counseling and mediation, settlements do occur… but the members of Congress do not pay them from their own office funds. Unbelievably, confidential payments come out of a special U.S. Treasury fund.
 
Actually, this is not unbelievable at all. Again, these are important men, elected by their constituents, to make the laws that run this country. Aides and interns need to understand that now is not the time.

I remember the protests and the boycotting of the film The Color Purple, because Alice Walker had had the temerity to depict an African American male abusing an African American female. This was so not the time. The New York Times quoted the editor of a Black Chicago paper: ''No, it is not just a movie. It is a statement made out of context used as a pretext to take one more lick at society's rejects.'' 

But I have a personal ax to grind. An arsenal actually. I was sexually abused as a child by a man who was an attorney and then a judge, a man who served on boards, taught in a law school. I was sexually abused by a man who, after his death, had a chair named in his honor at his law school, whose funeral service was packed with hundreds of colleagues, and who was honored with a joint resolution passed by his state legislature, mourning his death. When I named him as a perpetrator, I was not believed and I was discredited and disinherited. It was not the time. He was one of the good guys.
 
When I taught at an elite college, one of my students reported to me that she had been raped by a student on campus. Turns out this was not the first, or even the second report for him. But he was still there. He was an athlete. It was his third time, but, still... it was not the time. Obviously he was a credit to the college. Better she should leave.

My housemate was raped a knifepoint by a man who had stopped his car and begged her for directions. His wife and children sat by him in the courtroom, smiling. He was a middle-class man. My housemate was a hippie student. Not the time. He was a productive member of society, a family man. The issue was her boyfriends.

I was harassed by the head of the theatre department at my university. The year was 1970. Sexual harassment laws were six years away from being on the books. I dropped out for ten years. I never even attempted to report it. I absolutely knew that it was not the time.
 
As a teaching assistant, I had a student react poorly to feminist perspectves of Shakespeare. He sent me a pornographic/slasher paper on “Desdemona, the Cunning Whore of Venice.”  I was terrified. I took it to the professor for the course. He met with the man and then removed all the male students from my class. These young men were protecting their right to an education that reflected their perspective. This was not the time for me to make them sounding boards for my pet theories.
 
Well… I could go on. I have worked  almost exclusively with women for more than thirty years, because I was running out of oxygen waiting for my time.

But here’s the thing:

Today, there was nothing more important that the women who were claiming to have been harassed. And thirty-three senators made that clear.
 
This is huge. I know, I know… there are millions across the country who are wringing their hands that this is not the time to lose a senator with his liberal record. There are millions who are trashing these women and their selfish priorities for not realizing that this was not the time. 
 
I know that. But still…
 
Today, a group of powerful women said, “Nothing is more important and now is the time.” And, miracle of miracles, the harasser stepped down.
 
Nothing will ever change for women as long as we keep believing that our pain is not as important as protecting the so-called good guys.
 

Dr. Bonnie Morris’ eagerly awaited book The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture is out now, and available in paperback. Buy it. It’s (borrowing a riff from Dr. Bon) “pure protein” for the soul… in an age of postmodern and sound-bite carbs. And we need protein, because, sisters, it’s time to build some muscles.
 
Okay. The book. It’s amazing, Amazonian. It does things that are supposedly not possible. Like lesbians. It’s often warm, personal, and personable… and at the same time impeccably researched and documented. She brings “scholarly standards to radical history.”  It’s engaging and accessible, stimulating and inspiring. It’s actually kind of everything.
 
Dr. Morris lays it right out from Page One, stating in her first sentence that she writes “as a woman, lesbian, and feminist; a dinosaur facing extinction in this new queer jungle. I’m writing now to describe what it looks like and feels like to be written out of history.”
 
Bam.

And what a history it was! Lesbian feminists in the late 20th century created a powerful movement, and we did it before the Internet. But as Dr. Bon notes, “By 2000, anything woman-identified had become proof of unthinkable allegiance to a retro gender binary.”
 
This, of course, did not happen to gay men. Why and how did it happen to lesbians? Dr. Bon, influenced early in life by Nancy Drew and Harriet the Spy, invites us to join her in solving this mystery… and she describes her treasure map:

“As cultural capital, the threatened art and music of this recent lesbian past is precious to me.”
 
It should be precious to all of us… not just lesbians, but anyone concerned with the rapidly eroding rights of women. Because, as we are seeing, when they came for the lesbians, it was the prelude for the abasement of all women.
 
Dr. Bon is a professor of women’s studies, and from this vantage point, she has been able to watch the process of erasure. She notes how the terms for identity most popular with her students include “queer, gay, bi, trans, or ally.” What did these have in common? “…they were all either gender-neutral or male-inclusive. These terms embraced masculine possibilities, or relationships with men, in ways that lesbian of course did not.”  In this lineup, “lesbian” is read as separatist, and the ignoring of men is nearly always conflated in patriarchy with hatred of men. This image, of course, is anathema to female activists or progressives.

In the world of Gender Studies and queer theory, lesbian history finds itself homeless. Even studies of girlhood are read as transphobic. In the colorful words of Dr. Bon, “For better or worse, the stereotype of the angry radical lesbian marching with fist raised against the patriarchy has been replaced by the embossed wedding invitation for Megan and Carmen.” As the New York Times trumpeted after the Supreme Court decision affirming same-sex marriage, “Separatism is for losers.”
 
So… that’s where we are. That’s just chapter one. The pundits have drawn an official curtain over three decades of radical, lesbian-feminist social change and a flowering of lesbian and feminist culture unprecedented in the history of the world. But…  Nothing to see here, folks. Let’s move along. Dr. Bon cannily uncovers one of the key mechanisms for our erasure: The lesbian stereotype so aggressively propagated erases our activism.

White-girl music?  The “women’s music” movement had its roots in African American blues, in the protest songs of the 60’s—and earlier, and in appropriation of the male-dominated genre of rock-and-roll. Dr. Bon reminds us of the “Varied Voices of the Black Woman” tour. Diversity? Lesbian feminist festivals and concerts almost without exception offered sliding scale tickets as well as sign language interpretation. Accessibility was a priority right out of the gate.
 
And what about the “women-only” events? What about them…?  Wasn’t anybody noting the men-only offerings of the entire rest of the culture. In the words of lesbian photographer  JEB (Joan E. Biren), “There was nothing in the culture that nourished us.”
 
“… so many women were desperate for positive reflections of lesbian life that just to be at a lesbian-majority event was thrilling; actually enlightening. Joining together to create this temporary  majority at women-only concerts allowed audiences to experience (for the first time) an environment where lesbians were in charge of what was said about lesbian lives.”

The women’s music festivals were all about diversity, community, and family… and, in the pre-Internet days, the political grapevine.  The entire first chapter, “The Soundtrack of Our Awakening” is breath-taking. I felt as if I was leaning over the shoulder of a master archeologist, unearthing cultural treasure after cultural treasure, proving the existence of a time and a place that had become as mythical as Atlantis. Just this chapter alone is worth the price of the book!
 
But wait… there’s more. That’s only the beginning. The second chapter, “By the Time I Got to Wombstock.” This is the chapter about the festivals—the women’s music festivals. As Dr. Bon notes, “Thousands and thousands of lesbians experienced at least one such festival as part of their personal and political awakening in the quarter-century between 1974 and 1999.”
 
I remember so clearly my first festival. It was the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, produced by Robin Tyler. It completely rocked my world. It changed me forever. Later I would attend the West Coast Lesbian Festival, the East Coast Lesbian Festival, Campfest, the Gulf Coast Womyn’s Festival, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I went to “Michfest” for fourteen years, contributing programming to it for nine.

My experience of these festivals is so outside the context of everything to do with the patriarchy that I am at a loss for words in describing it. What I would say for the last quarter century was just “see for yourself.”
 
But Dr. Bon finds the words:

“Were festivals designed to be lesbian erotic vacation spaces? Or were they reflective, goddess-centered spirituality breaks from rampant sexism and homophobia in society? Or training camps for lesbian political nationhood? …Against this backdrop of recovery meetings and nude partying, hopeful diversity and angry processing, the nation’s best all-female stages evolved over time, a music and comedy performance history  that should be central to any reconstructed narrative.”
 
She cites Robert McRuer in his research on gay and lesbian utopian communities:

“The emphasis for many lesbian feminists had shifted from engagement with, or transformation of, the outside world, to removal from that world and the structures of patriarchy and capitalism that sustained it… despite the fact that it was an outdoor event, the spatial orientation at women’s music festivals was inward.”
 
This subject is so charged for me, I am overwhelmed just attempting to review the writing of another author! All I can say is thank the goddess for Dr. Morris. Seriously. She has chronicled assiduously forty years of the jewel in the crown of lesbian feminist culture, and in this chapter, she presents us with a comprehensive history of the roots of the festivals, the lineups of performers, profiles of the largest one, and an in-depth analysis of the controversies surrounding the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

In the second half of this chapter, Dr. Bon opens up to share her own personal journey with the festivals and how she came to transform her passion for this culture into the archiving of it. As a nineteen-year-old college sophomore, she bought her first ticket to the Michigan festival. The year was 1981, and the festival was five years old.
 
She shares with us the tender pages of her journal of the experience, beginning with the eighteen-hour road trip on a privately chartered Greyhound bus. In spite of the all-night party on the bus and being rained out of her tent, her relationship with festival culture was consummated on that trip: “This is my life choice. I have been silent because so much of what I feel has already been expressed so eloquently by others before me in this movement. But I want to capture it all, for it has captured me.” 
 
O, sweet bird of youth… I wish that starry-eyed nineteen-year-old could have known what awaited her… a hundred festivals, thousands of women, hundreds of thousands of words. By 1986, her graduate school training had put her well on her way to being a professional historian. Her note-taking expanded into tape recordings. Eventually, she began to invite women at the festivals to journal along with her.
 
These journals were so much more than “dear diaries.” In Dr. Bon’s own words:
 
“In creating a longitudinal festival journal before women had computers, blogs, Twitter, or Facebook, I ended up with an archive of how self-worth developed in a marginalized community.” 

What she was documenting was a miracle.

Lesbians, she reminds us, were still outlaws in the Eighties. Lesbian moms lost their kids. Lesbian kids lost their homes. Unlike other marginalized populations, we rarely had families who had or backs, much less shared our identities and could transmit the culture.

And we were not gays. We were lesbians, specifically females. On top of the homophobia, we were combating the ubiquitous misogyny that too often considered  rape, battery and harassment to be our fault. But we found each other, we began to share our stories, and then we celebrated ourselves. These celebrations were not just part of a movement toward liberation. They were an embodiment of the liberation itself. Radical beyond description… except that Dr. Bon was doing just that.
 
Why no coverage?  Aside from the obvious biases against women and homosexuals, Dr. Bon offers and additional explanation: AIDS. She notes how the Radical Faerie movement of the 1980’s, a movement among gay men, embraced separatist retreats in nature as part of identity-building. This generation, however, was ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. The heyday of lesbian culture coincided with the plague years for gay men, and, as a result, many of the men who were in sympathy with this culture and who might have been able to provide a supportive context for it for future historians did not survive.
 
Then, there is the rise and fall of the lesbian-owned businesses, especially the women’s bookstores, which were sanctuaries and clearing houses for entire communities of lesbians.

And… the  Internet… The difficulty of archiving pre-Internet and the great ease of hijacking narratives in the post-Internet era. Googling these festivals, one is most likely to land on websites dismissing them at transphobic, benighted, and historically  insignificant. In Dr. Bon’s words:

“In the realm of social media and political rhetoric, [women born female] lesbians and trans women were cruelly set against one another in the ongoing battle over the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. This has successfully rewritten recent history to portray lesbian cultural  activists as both privileged and oppressive, burying other realities.” 

Unlike most of those who write on this subject, Dr. Bon was actually there. She was there for nearly forty years.
 
The Disappearing L has a fascinating chapter “Imagining an Eruv,” where Dr. Bon documents the history of Jewish lesbian-feminists in the lesbian culture. She talks about the struggle for a separate “Jewish Tent” at the Michigan Festival, the eventual realization of that dream, and then the permutations of that institution. Drawing parallels between the identities of Jews and lesbians, she compares strategies for preservation of culture.
 
The Disappearing L is so rich in detail and anecdote, so enlightening in analyses, I am at loss to do it justice. This book, and Dr. Bon’s archive, which is at the Schlesinger Library, are treasures.  I feel blessed to have been a part of this time, this culture, and to have walked with so many of these women… and I feel blessed that someone has preserved the record and the artifacts of this “Golden Age.”

From Dr. Bon's website:

A lifetime of teaching women's history.

Q: IS SHE STILL CARRYING THAT NOTEBOOK AROUND?

A: Yes--and still writing in it with a fountain pen.

Q: How many journals has Bon filled by now?

A: One hundred and seventy-nine; they jam the bookshelf my father built for me when I was three. On my table, catching sunlight and moonlight, is a bowl of fountain pens. Come choose your weapon: Sheaffer, Lamy, Watermark.

"My research interests and available guest speeches include women's sports, the women's music movement since the mid-1970s, Jewish women's history, and other female-identified communities across time....

I've traveled the world as a professor and guest speaker. Appearances include both University of Waikato and Victoria University in New Zealand; Reykjavik University in Iceland; the Women's Education, Reserach and Resource Center of University College in Dublin, Ireland; Tel Aviv University in Israel; Queens College in Ontario, Canada; and Anna Daresh Women's College in Madras, India. Bring me in to speak at YOUR next women's history event!"

The Disappearing L can be ordered from the publisher for $22.

And here's an interview I did with Dr. Bon, sponsored by Green Woman Store for their telesummit on the environment in 2015.

I just got back from the National Women’s Music Festival after an eight-year absence, and I just want to tell the world what an amazing event this is! If  you have never been or if you have not been in a while, consider making the trek in 2017.

There was so much going on, I honestly don’t even know where to begin. I’m going to start with the National Women’s Music Festival Orchestra. That’s right. “Orchestra.” These are women of all ages, races, and instruments who come from all over the country to the Festival. They have received the music in advance, they arrive, and they rehearse for three days. On Saturday night they play… and the program…  well, here it is:

• “The Juba Dance” from Symphony in E Minor, 1931, by Florence Beatrice Price, the first African American woman composer to have her work performed by a major symphony orchestra.


• “Festive Huapango” and “Pyramid of the Sun,”  pieces by Alice Gomez, a contemporary composer who was resident composer with the San Antonio Symphony and whose works celebrate her Mexican heritage.


• “Symphony No. 3 in G Minor,” 1847, by Louise Farrenc who was on the faculty of the Paris Conservatory—the only woman in the 19th century to hold a chair of such rank. She also compiled a 23-volume anthology of 17th and 18th century keyboard music. 


• “Initiate,” 2016, a commissioned work by prolific African American composer Mary Watkins, who also performed a solo concert later in the festival. “Initiate” had three movements: “Trepidation,” “Dawning,” and “Conversion.”

And these were all conducted by Nan Washburn, a co-founder and conductor of the legendary Women’s Philharmonic (1980-1990).  She has conducted the Michigan Philharmonic for seventeen seasons. She is one of the world’s leading authorities and advocates for orchestral works by women composers.

And then there was Sharon Katz and The Peace Train. The Festival screened a documentary about the origin of The Peace Train, “When Voices Meet.” Here’s a description: “When Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, South African musician and music therapist Sharon Katz joined with singer and educator Nonhlanhla Wanda to form a 500-voice multiracial youth choir. Railroading across the country aboard The Peace Train, they broke through Apartheid’s barriers and became Mandela’s face of the new nation.”  This was 1993. The film included interviews with some of the children who had been on the Peace Train. They talked about how their worldview and their view of themselves were completely transformed by this experience. The film transformed me.

One of my favorite Festival moments was walking into the Performer Care suite to grab some lunch, and finding myself in the middle of an improvised performance of “Wimoweh,” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) led by Sharon. Blues and rock musicians, folk musicians, volunteers, and my little playwright self were all swept up in a Peace Train moment.
 
There was also a film about Barbara Bordon and a performance by this phenomenal drummer, whose work has taken her to Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe in times of civil strife, and to Siberia for shamanic initiation.
 
In addition to the Festival Orchestra, there is a Festival Drum Chorus led by Wahru, a Festival Folk Orchestra led by Kiya Heartwood, and a Festival Chorus led by Rhiannon.

And then there are the performers: Suede (“Adele meets Diana Krall meets Bette Midler”), Nedra Johnson with the Fat Bottom Girls (4 tuba players, a rhythm section, and Nedra!), SONiA disappear fear (“rock to blues to reggae to folk to Latin to Judaic to pop”), Ubaka Hill (master drummer and teacher), Crys Matthews (“Americana, folk, jazz, blues”) Margie Adam (legendary songwriter and pianist)… and so many more!
 
And comedians like Marga Gomez and Vickie Shaw. And Andrea Gibson, poet and activist. And the Sarah Bush Dance Project. And me, with my one-woman show.

And the workshops…  way, way too many to mention. I taught a technique for interrupting racism. I went to a workshop on croning, and also to Dr. Bonnie Morris’ workshop “Writing About Festival Culture,” and a workshop by Toni Armstrong Jr. on the magazine Hot Wire (1984-1994) that chronicled the rise of second wave “women’s music” and the festival movement that it inspired.
 
The Festival is all about building legacy, nurturing younger women, creating and sustaining a culture by, for, about, and celebrating females. They honor an “Emerging Artist” every year. They give awards. I will never forget receiving the Janine C. Rae Award for the Advancement of Women’s Culture. They recognize women’s achievements in philanthropy, in women’s music, in social change, in technical skills, and more!

And then there is the Marketplace, where women sell everything from tee-shirts to custom coffee blends, from tile mosaics to beaded earrings.
 
The Festival is held at a Marriott hotel outside of Madison, with a variety of motel and hotel options within walking distance. It’s a great venue with a saltwater pool and hot tub, and an affordable breakfast buffet for attendees.
 
It’s not too early to clear your calendar for 2017. July 6-9. Bookmark their website!  I will see you there!

Florynce Kennedy… The first and only time I ever saw her on camera was in the cameo role of "Zella Wylie" in the Lizzie Borden film, Born in Flames. A kind of women’s liberation “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Zella mentors the young female militants who are engaged in overthrowing the patriarchy and taking over the world in this feminist, science fiction classic.  Here’s "Zella," addressing an age-old feminist concern:
 
“All oppressed people have a right to violence. It’s like the right to pee: you’ve gotta have the right place, you’ve gotta have the right time, you’ve gotta have the appropriate situation. And believe me, this is the appropriate situation.”
 
And Florynce would know. She had organized a "pee-in" at Harvard University to protest the lack of women’s bathrooms.

In the 1960's Florynce was everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. Early in the decade, she became the attorney for the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, discovering that their publishers had been collecting royalties without notifying the artists or their estates. Understanding the need to fight media fire with media fire, she contacted Adam Clayton Powell, the highest profile African American member of Congress. It was a shrewd move to politicize the fight, and she won. But it signaled another episode in her progressive disenchantment with the practice of law as a path to social justice. Her life experiences as a Black woman prior to law school had already, in her words, set her up for an “appalling lack of success in accepting, embracing, utilizing or even recognizing such valuable legal techniques as how to walk past a pool of blood and say, ‘what a beautiful shade of red.’”
 
Florynce would step up as legal advisor to Valerie Solanas after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas was insisting on conducting her own defense, and the first order of business was to prove to the courts that her mentee was not crazy. This required a writ of habeas corpus, because Solanas had been taken to a psychiatric hospital.

Florynce decided that the best defense was a good offense, and to that end, she placed the judge and the court on trial for sexism. When the judge attempted to reprimand her for pants in the courtroom, she didn’t miss a beat: “Well, your honor, you are there in a dress. How can you question me?” 
 
She was also an attorney involved with the landmark Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz case, arguing for women’s right to safe abortions. This was the first case where women who had been victimized by illegal abortionists were called to testify. Prior to this, it had only been physicians, and this trial established valuable precedent for the later Roe V. Wade case. Florynce went on to publish a collection of some of this testimony, titling it Abortion Rap.
 
Florynce not only called out the National Organization for Women for their failure to stand with Valerie Solanas in her trial, but she would also call out the Black Power movement for its opposition to abortion rights, at a time when the male leadership was framing it as a genocidal conspiracy against women of color.

And here, let me pause to say something about why so little has been written about a woman who was so aggressively and so outrageously present for nearly every social justice movement, every nationally prominent protest, and every media-circus courtroom trial in a decade of unprecedented historical unrest and reform. Why has it taken over a half-century for a comprehensive biography of her life to be written?
 
Author and tireless researcher Sherie M. Randolph gives us the key to solving this conundrum. In a word: intersectionality. Yeah, that thing that was supposed to have been absent from the 1960's. Well, Flo Kennedy was the Empress of Intersectionality, and, for that, she paid a price.
 
In an era where the media was identifying Women’s Liberation as a white women’s movement, and Black Power as an African American men’s movement, Kennedy was busy calling out the former on their racism and the latter on their sexism. She was dragging feminists from the National Organization for Women to Black Power conferences that specifically banned whites. She was arranging with a Black-owned resort in Atlantic City for housing and meals for the predominantly white protestors at the legendary 1968 Miss America Pageant.

Single-issue organizing was difficult enough, but Florynce wanted everyone to see the connections between the many oppressions and to follow her example in showing up for them all. As a result, historians found it easier to focus on less intersectional--and less controversial leaders. This reductive approach to history has led to the erasure of the anti-racist work of early feminists and the anti-misogynist work in the early Black Freedom Movement... and the erasure of Florynce Kennedy.

In 1973, Florynce became one of the attorneys defending Assata Shakur. Prior to this, she had organized fundraisers and boycotts in support of Angela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and various anti-war protestors. Noting the absence of white feminists in these struggles, she remarked, “As far as black women are concerned, I would certainly be most appalled if they all rushed into the women’s movement. It’s clear that most black people should be involved with the problems of the black liberation struggle.”
 
Interestingly, she also served as a defense attorney for Jerry Ray, the brother of James Earl Ray, convicted for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was before a Senate sub-committee, and Florynce used the occasion to place the government on trial for conspiracy. Jerry had been accused of robbing a bank with his brother, in order to explain the large sums of money that had funded James’ elaborate escape. In the end, the committee decided that James Earl Ray could not have acted alone, but they rejected any theory of government involvement. (“What a beautiful shade of red...?”)

Kennedy supported Shirley Chisholm’s bid for the Presidency, and she went on the campaign trail with her, visiting colleges and universities. At this time, she founded the Feminist Party, envisioning Chisholm as the perfect candidate to bring about a coalition of  both black and white feminists. Two years later, in 1973, she organized the National Black Feminists organization.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Kennedy's biographer, Sherie M. Randolph. She spent fifteen years researching her subject. Florynce had written her own "autobiography," Color Me Flo: My Hard Times and Good Life, but it is less a biography and more a collection of speeches and interviews, with photographs and copies of leaflets. The papers she had donated to the Schlesinger were filled with gaps and omissions. Sherie found that Florynce's sisters had their own collections, but these were also incomplete. It is important to remember that Kennedy had been under FBI surveillance through many of her years of activism, and that, after her death, friends and colleagues had removed and destroyed  papers that they felt might have jeopardized the safety of other activists. Florynce's biographer has performed a Herculean feat in assembling the details of her subject's life and causes.  And now, finally, the errant papers are all at the Schlesinger, along with an extensive collection of video. And there is, at long last, a biography.
 
Florynce Kennedy’s life is a inspiration for the timid activist. She never hesitated to say the thing that was on her mind, no matter how disruptive or how unpopular it was.  She was never afraid to call out her own movements. She was not intimidated by accusations that she was being "divisive," that kiss-of-death word used so effectively to silence in-house dissent.  To her critics, she would say, “Unity in a movement situation is overrated. If you were the Establishment, which would you rather see coming in the door, five hundred mice or one lion?”

Oh, the lion, by all means. Give us the lion.

CG: So…Cindy Dick, I understand that you have the largest collection of vintage women’s sports cards in the world. That’s amazing. I see that you refer to your collection as “Tiny Treasures, Giant Legends.”  How did you come up with that?
 
CD: I first must clarify that I think it’s the largest.  I currently own close to 1,100 original cards between the 1850’s and 1972. The cards also have to be printed around the time the athlete competed.  I tell myself that there has to be a finite limit but even after 23 years of collecting, I keep finding cards I’ve never seen before! I’ve never run across another collector with a similar collection anywhere near this size so I say it with some confidence, but can’t say it unequivocally. 
 
I have two goals for the collection; a book and a museum show so I needed a name for the collection.  After mulling the options over with friends, “Tiny Treasures, Giant Legends” was born a few years ago.  The name encompasses what they represent in four words.  The cards are tiny.  Most are smaller than a credit card. Finding them is like a treasure hunt, and they are also treasures of history.  These were the best athletes of their day.  Many were giant legends in the world of women’s sports. Some were the grandmothers of women’s sports, establishing rules and leagues.  Because of these women, we are blessed to have the opportunities we have today.

CG: When did you start collecting, and what was it that got you started.

 CD: I had some baseball cards as a kid – even had a Hank Aaron card but sold them all before I was 10.  I didn’t do anything with cards for 20 years.  Finding a women’s card was a complete accident.  I was at a yard sale in Virginia around 1993 and this little boy was selling his sports cards.  I glanced at the cards on the table and was shocked to see a woman’s card!  I’ve always loved visual images of women in sports so this caught my attention.  It took me a while to define the collection’s time frame of pre-Title IX (1972) cards but now that’s pretty much all I collect. 
 
CG: Can you remember your first card?

CD: I joke that you never forget your first one.  Manon Rhéaume was the card at the yard sale.  She was a Canadian minor league ice hockey goalie.  She also had the same appeal as Danica Patrick (read, she was pretty) and between those two factors, there were great hopes that she would break into the professional league and become a hockey phenom.  Card companies made many different cards of her.

CG: So why women’s sports cards?

CD: I love images.  A picture is so powerful, and with trading cards, the magic is that you can hold your hero in your hand.  And they are neat because they have infiltrated the world of men’s sports cards.  I focus on cards and not stamps, posters, postcards, etc. because trading cards were meant to be collected and traded.  Most cards were made to be sturdier than the other forms mentioned because they were created as a collectible.  I like the older ones because they are rare and hard to find (unlike contemporary cards today) and I enjoy the challenge of finding them.  And, financially, it also keeps me focused.  These trading cards are also artistically beautiful.  I started by only buying cards that used photographs because that showed that the athlete actually was competing. But then I grew to love the lithographs, drawings, caricatures, hand painted cards…all the different styles that were used in the vintage cards. 
 
CG: And if I can get a little personal here… what about you?  What’s your sports history…? Should we have a card for you?

CD:   Lol!  No. I had Olympic aspirations but my talent wasn’t at the same level as my dreams.  I ran track in HS and played college volleyball.  Today, I am an avid cyclist and I swim.

CG:What’s the history of the marketing of these? And were the women’s cards marketed the same as the men’s?
 
CD: Trading cards were initially known as “tobacco cards” in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.  When cigarette packs were first made, they were floppy so the manufacturers inserted a blank piece of cardboard to keep them stiff.  Marketers quickly realized that blank space was marketing space so every topic under the sun is pictured on tobacco cards.  Athletes were one of the subjects and became one of the more popular ones to collect.  These are, therefore, the predecessors of the sports cards we know today.  When women were on tobacco cards, they are mostly seen as movie stars or as ‘beauties’.  Seeing women as athletes flies against the ladylike image that society pushed on women back then.    
 
While most of my cards are tobacco cards, some were distributed with chewing gum, chocolate, shoe polish, margarine, and even a piano!  What puzzles me is that it was not fashionable for women to smoke before the 1920’s.  So I have to wonder, who were they marketing to by adding female athletes?  I’ve asked some card aficionados why manufacturers would include female athletes and the answer is always, “Because they were a novelty.” 
 
The neat thing about the cards back then is that the images do not sexualize the women.  They are athletes.  Today, there is a lot of discussion and research about how women are portrayed in the media so it’s refreshing to see that the majority of these images portray the women for what they were – athletes.

CG: And about collecting…  You began to collect several years before the internet. How did you collect in the early days, and how did that change with the internet?
 
CD:  In the 1990’s I started by asking sports card dealers at shows and stores if they had women’s cards.  Dealers sell what sells so once they knew I was interested they started holding them for me.  They would sometimes even give them to me for free because to them, they didn’t have value.  At card shows, upon asking, I’d often get that blank, puzzled look as if I just asked them something that they had never heard before.

Sometimes they would have a card or two, and sometimes I was even told, “I have coaches wives” or “I have cheerleaders.” This was before eBay became a household name, the WNBA was still a dream, and before women’s soccer exploded.  One by one, I learned of sets where women’s cards were inserted into a men’s sets because women were rarely sold as a set of their own.  After a little while, and armed with knowledge, I'd ask the seller if he had women’s cards. If he said “no” I’d ask if he had ‘x, y, and z’ sets.  He’d pull out the boxes of cards and I’d leave with a stack of women’s cards. I started to get a good collection of contemporary cards…and then I came across my first vintage card and that one card changed my focus. 
 
The Internet opened the world of collecting and at the same time, that accessibility also closed many bricks and mortar card stores. The cards in my collection were printed in 25 countries around the world.  The main challenge with buying over the Internet is trusting that it’s an original card and not a reproduction, while praying it doesn’t get lost in the mail!  

CG: The “baseball cards” of my youth, about men, of course, were pretty much all sports statistics.  But I understand that this is not true about your cards. What are some of the most memorable “factoids” that you have gleaned from your cards?
 
CD:  Yes, I love the stories and language used on the backs of these cards.  My uncle translated the German cards, and he kept coming across the phrase “Olympia of Grace” in German.  We looked it up and discovered there was a women’s only Olympics hosted in 1931 in Italy!  I had NEVER heard of this before.  It was not sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee and Americans did not compete in it, but it did have an impact on the Olympics thereafter.  Italy was a fascist country then and the games were allowed because of the belief that “strong women made strong babies,” so it was acceptable for women to be athletes, as long as they didn’t forget their main purpose in life; being a mother. 
 
With the swimming cards I noticed that the images never showed the athletes wearing goggles so I asked former Olympian and world record holder, Misty Hyman, and she said that goggles weren’t used until the 1960’s.  When I look back at records and distances swam, understanding this gave the times context; knowing that the swimmers could only swim as long as their eyes could withstand the chlorine or salt water. 
 
I learned that women boxed in the 1880’s thanks to the card of Hattie Stewart. Her card is significant because the illustration shows her as both bare-fisted and wearing gloves.  The card is from 1888 and that’s the time of transition between when women boxed bare-fisted, and sometimes even bare-breasted, to the rules boxing recognizes today. 
 
I’ve learned about more stories than I can mention here.  These cards are a perfect way for me to do my own history research with each card I find.  They’ve made learning about history fun!

CG: Talk about the women of color cards in your collection… Who was the earliest one?

CD:  This is an important point.  I like to say that it’s important to acknowledge the women portrayed on these cards, and it’s equally important to acknowledge the ones that weren’t.  Sports, as a microcosm of society, were beholden to the racist beliefs of the times; therefore the collection is mostly of white women.  Financially, it was a luxury to be able to compete, travel, and tour, but the biggest barrier was to be allowed to compete – many women of color were not selected, even if they were of equal or better ability than their competition, when trying out for teams.  
 
My oldest card portrays Kinue Hitomi, a Japanese runner from the 1928 Olympics.  She was the first female medalist from Japan, but she medaled in a sport that she didn’t even train for!  She was a sprinter (100m) and a field specialist.  1928 was the first time the 800m run was offered to women (two laps around a track) and the officials asked who would like to join the race.  She did and she came in second place, earning a Silver medal.  Two side stories – the 800m run did not return to the Olympics for women until 1960 and sadly, Hitomi died two years after her Olympic debut. 
 
African American women from the US don’t appear on cards until 1960.  Wilma Rudolph has several cards, and I have one rare card that was printed in Greece of American Earlene Brown, a Bronze medalist who broke the 50-foot barrier in shot put.   Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a card of Alice Coachman; the first African American to win a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics in high jump.  There have been cards made of her jump decades after the fact.   

CD:  Babe was a force to be reckoned with!  As you know, she endured awful comments from the press because her sheer athletic ability, and her boyish appearance challenged what it meant to be female. But she had some admirers too. She pushed the barriers of women in sports and inspired countless young girls to be like her.   Ironically, Babe’s card is one of the first vintage cards I heard of.  She was my inspiration as a young girl, so, as an adult, I had to have that card.  Because it is part of an American set (Goudey Sport Kings, 1933), and because all the other athletes, except for Babe and Helene Madison (swimmer) are men, the card is expensive if it’s in good condition. I finally won it in an auction and it's one of my most treasured cards.  I have many cards of Babe from different countries: U.S., Germany, Italy, and Holland.   I’ve never seen a card of her playing golf that was printed in the time that she played (she was one of the 13 co-founders of the LPGA in 1950 and she died in 1956).

CG: So… getting the word out about these “Tiny Treasures…”  What are your plans? I see that the Phoenix Art Museum is doing a display of men’s cards. Are you trying to get these into museums?  What about touring into schools?  Internet presence?

I would love to see these in a museum show!  In 2012, the MET hosted an exhibit called “A Sport for Every Girl” but their collection showed mostly cards of illustrations of women playing sports, or women that were dressed as baseball players but were actually the gals that rolled the cigarettes.  Using the MET’s credibility as justification for a show, about a year ago I sent the Phoenix Art Museum a proposal.  The significant difference of my collection is that most of my cards are of actual athletes.  PAM declined.  About a month ago, PAM opened the “Ultimate Baseball Collection” which is a premier collection from the Arizona Diamondbacks.  It was disappointing to see that the women weren’t considered but it was their business decision. 
 
I have been approached by the Women’s Museum of California for an upcoming show about women in sports.  I would love to see this collection in the National Women History Museum in Washington, D.C. as well.  I don’t expect a museum to show all 1,100 cards but it would send an impressive visual message to see so many women being athletes and loving sports since the 1850’s!  I’ve also been asked to give some talks locally by the people that watched the Ignite Phoenix presentation. 
 
CG: What can we do to support your work?

As a follow-up to the Ignite Phoenix video, I created a video to help show that there is interest for a collection of this nature.  It’s hard to sell someone something that they don’t know exists…but if there’s interest, well, many voices are always stronger than one.  Also, I’m looking for a publisher that would be interested in this type of history/collectible/women’s sports book if any of your readers can suggest a good fit.  Most sports books are about men and all trading card books are of men so it’s hard to identify a publisher that would understand the importance of these cards.  If you enjoy vintage women’s sports items, please visit the On Her Mark  website. The funds allow us to do what we do and honor women’s sports history, one great story at a time.     

Viola Davis has just become the first woman of color to win an Emmy Award as the "best actress in a drama series." This is a historic moment,  and so is the text of  her courageous speech, confronting the massive discrimination against women of color in TV and in films.

In her speech she delivered these lines, attributing them to Harriet Tubman:

"I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can't seem to get there no how. I can't seem to get over that line."

What's the big deal? The big deal is this:  The quotation in Davis' speech has Tubman referring to "beautiful, white women" stretching out their arms to help her. I do not believe that Tubman would have ever characterized white women that way.

In the Boston paper, she refers to "ladies all drest in white" who not only stretch out their arms, but pull her across the line. Tubman's ancestors were Ashanti, and white is a sacred color in African tradition. I believe that she was referring to her ancestors, to African women, as her guardians and her saviors. I believe that this vision was so significant, she made a point of talking about it in an interview. I believe she was explaining the secret of her phenomenal success in leading escaping captives out of the South, over and over, never losing a single "passenger." She was teaching us something about a radical spirituality entailing a practice of worship that was not only Afro-centric, but also gynocentric. She relied spiritually on entities who looked like her and who understood her struggle intimately. They promised her that they would see her succeed. 



[I have written a play about Tubman's militant spirituality, Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist: ]

“Arthur’s performance [as Tubman] was so powerful and raw that the audience literally could not stop cheering and clapping at the end.” --Our Weekly.Com, Los Angeles.

"... unyielding spiritual poetry that is uplifting and lyrically profound." -- LexGo.com, Lexington, KY.

"... the distillation and the lyric intensity of poetry."-- Portland Phoenix.

"The script has the distillation and the lyric intensity of poetry. Harriet’s rejoinders to the therapist jump between sullen, enraged, and reelingly comedic..." -- Megan Grumbling, The Portland Phoenix, ME.

This week the newly discovered painting by Artemisia Gentileschi sold for approximately 1.2 million dollars, three times its presale estimate.  Worth every penny, I say. But before I talk about this painting, I want to take a look at another one of Artemisia's paintings that has only in recent decades been attributed to her.

"Danaë" was acquired by the St. Louis Art Museum in 1986, and at the time was considered to be the work of her father, Orazio Gentileschi. Art historians have taken differing positions, but the work is now considered to have been painted by Artemisia. One of the strongest arguments has been its stylistic similarities to her "Cleopatra."

Anyway... I have my own reasons for believing that "Danaë" is hers. For starts, her father painted a version that has never been in dispute. And here it is:

Notice the cupid, notice the arm reaching up for the gold, notice the pornographic drape, notice the separation of the legs... and especially notice the look of wonder and delight on the face. Okay... now hold that thought.

The story of Danaë is this: A princess of Argo, her father locked her a tower (or a cave) when he heard it prophesied that her offspring would murder him someday. But Zeus, the lecherous father of the gods famous for raping mortals, came to her in her tower (or cave) as a shower of gold and impregnated her. She gave birth to Perseus who did, indeed, murder his grandfather.

With its overtones of both rape and prostitution, the subject of Danaë has been treated by many painters, including Klimt, Rembrandt, and especially Titian --- who liked it so much he executed a whole series.

The point being that all of these painters envisioned a passive, sleeping, or avaricious Danaë.... all of them except Artemisia. She appears to have understood that non-consensual penetration is rape. Her depiction of Danaë is one of a woman undergoing an ordeal over which she has no control. Her expression is grim as she watches the shower of gold between her narrowed eyes. Her legs are crossed and her right hand is in a fist, with coins protruding between the clenched fingers. Some have interpreted her hand as grasping at the coins. I don't see it that way. The coins appear to be forcing their way between her fingers, a metaphor for the penetration of her vulva.

There is no cupid, and the maidservant appears to be oblivious to the suffering of her mistress. She is collecting the gold, failing to understand it as the incarnation of a rapist. It is interesting that in the more pornographic, rapist-identified works, the maidservant is featured as an old woman and an intentional panderer.

Artemisia was raped as a teenager. Here's the Wikipedia account: "Orazio hired [a colleague named Tassi] to tutor his daughter privately. During this tutelage, Tassi raped Artemisia... After the initial rape, Artemisia continued to have sexual relations with Tassi, with the expectation that they were going to be married and with the hope to restore her dignity and her future. Tassi reneged on his promise to marry Artemisia. Nine months after the rape, after he learned that Artemisia and Tassi were not going to be married, Orazio pressed charges against Tassi.[3] Orazio also claimed that Tassi stole a painting of Judith from the Gentileschi household. The major issue of this trial was the fact that Tassi had taken Artemisia's virginity. If Artemisia had not been a virgin before Tassi raped her, the Gentileschis would not have been able to press charges... During the trial, Artemisia was subjected to a gynecological examination and being tortured using thumbscrews to verify her testimony. At the end of the trial Tassi was sentenced to imprisonment for one year, although he never served the time."

Footnote to Wikipedia's account: After the rape, the rapist offered to marry Artemisia if she continued to allow his assaults. Young, motherless, terrified and aware that she had been "ruined," she acquiesced. This compounded the trauma.

Still a child, Artemisia learned first-hand about the sexual commodification of women. Her rapist certainly treated her like an object, but what about her father forcing her into a trial that was publicly humiliating for the devaluation of what he considered his property? Artemisia's mother was deceased, and she found herself a pawn in a game about men.

I love the anger, the cynicism, the tension, the resistance in her Danaë. I love the feminism in all of her work... and this brings me to this most recent discovery, "The Magdalene in Ecstasy."

Again, let's take a look at the more traditional treatments of the Magdalene (the prostitute who became a follower of Jesus in the New Testament). Here is Titian... again.

Titian's Magdalenes are fairly representative. The hands covering the breasts, the look of fearful contrition. Because the patriarchal trope for the prostituted woman is that of the evil temptress, she who ruins young men and seduces older men away from their families. She is the sex fiend, the fallen woman, the sinner.

And, of course, the truth is that most prostituted women are victims... victims of poverty, of child sexual abuse that has conditioned them to the role of commodity. The Magdalene is more sinned against than sinning.

Artemisia gives us a Magdalene whose arms are hugging her knees, not her breasts... who seems to be rocking back in some moment of private communion with a sense of her self-worth, her dignity. It is a woman who is comforting herself in the knowledge that it is the world that is at fault, not herself.

I appreciate this painting, and I appreciate the painful journey to the interior of herself that Artemisia must have taken in order to retrieve such empowering imagery in the face of patriarchal judgement and contempt.

--------

And...  Yes, I have a play that celebrates the art and the resistance of Artemisia. It's called Artemisia and Hildegard. And you can access it on Kindle, iBooks, Nook, and you can also order the paperback from any bookstore. It's sold individually and also in my award-winning collection, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays.

“…truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.”—Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor.”

I recently revisited the Matilda Joslyn Gage House in Fayetteville, New York. It was something of a pilgrimage, as I consider her one of my spiritual foremothers. In fact, I took her last name as my own.

The visit brought to mind a quotation by the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, on the subject of truth. She spoke of it as an “increasing complexity.” Historically, I have preferred my truth monochrome, monothematic—because I find comfort in certitude. It’s a near relation to rectitude, and rectitude purchases indemnity. But I digress.

Matilda Gage was a Suffrage worker. She was part of a triumvirate, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were the leaders and the strategists of the movement. They hung out together. They were comrades-in-arms and best friends... until they weren’t. And that moment came in 1890, when Gage discovered that Anthony had gone behind her back  to recruit Stanton in brokering a deal to merge the National Women's Suffrage Association with a rival Suffrage organization made up of conservative, Christian women. Gage woke up to find herself ousted from the organization she had helped lead for twenty years... and well on her way to being written out of history.

This was why I had chosen to be her namesake, actually: Because Gage had refused to compromise her principles in the name of expediency. She would not compromise in her opposition to a “white-women-only” Suffrage campaign, nor would she compromise on her opposition to the Church. In fact, she had written an entire book, Woman, Church and State, unmasking the misogyny of Christian history, supporting her thesis that the exploitation of women was not some oversight or side effect of Christianity, but was it’s entire raison d’être. In other words, Christianity could not be redeemed.

I loved Gage’s radical vision. I loved her refusal to compromise, even when it cost her so dearly.

But, standing in the Gage House nearly three decades after taking her name, I found myself revisiting my own history as well as hers. And her history was that of a married, middle- class woman with four children and a husband who supported her. Gage did not have to earn her living, nor did she have to worry about how she would survive in old age.

My history, since coming out, had been that of a low-income, single lesbian who supported herself largely through touring around the country and giving lectures and performances. Standing in the Gage House, I realized with a jolt that my life experience had more in common with that of Susan B. Anthony—a single, working-class lesbian who supported herself with public speaking—than with Matilda Gage.

And this realization caused me to revisit that historic betrayal of 1890.

Susan B. Anthony had co-founded the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President. That movement has been mocked as a bunch of tee-totaling Miss Grundies attempting, with hysterical fervor, to police the harmless dissipation of others. In fact, it was a movement of battered women, of activists against domestic violence. It was a movement of survivors of sexual abuse and especially of incest. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman could not own property, could not inherit, could not own her own wages, could not own her own children. Wife-beating and marital rape were legal, and any woman attempting to seek relief through the courts would face an all-male jury. The woman who married an alcoholic was in for a lifetime of terror and abuse, and so were her children. Outlawing liquor appeared to be the quickest way to seek relief legislatively from this nightmare, and the Church was more inclined to support temperance than women’s enfranchisement.

Anthony’s roots were in this movement of survivors. The personal stories of suffering that she encountered would be familiar to any rape crisis or shelter worker. The needs were immediate: shelter, food, protection, medical attention, social services for the children.

Anthony had moved away from the temperance movement to the movement for Suffrage, but those roots and those experiences continued to inform her activism. Standing in the Gage House, which is in a lovely middle-class neighbhood of large houses with landscaped yards, I began to experience the increasing complexity of that so-called betrayal.

Gage’s uncompromising stance, pristine in its radicalism, could have  delayed Suffrage by decades--or even centuries, depending on how deeply the Church was alienated. How would that position read to a woman like Anthony? Might it not look like a function of class privilege? Gage, with her feminist and middle-class husband, might be willing to die before seeing her goals realized, but for women in desperate circumstances, delay could be fatal.  Even limited power, limited Suffrage, would be a foot in the door, a toehold… a something for so many women who had nothing. And these conservative Christian women had resources, lots of them. Was it easier for a woman who was not needing to support herself to turn down that money on principle than for a woman  scraping out a living on the lecture circuit? A woman for whom marriage could never be an option?

I remembered the words of Florynce Kennedy: “'Nothing but the best for the oppressed' translates to ‘nothing for the oppressed.’” And I remembered the words of another legendary activist, Bernice Reagon Johnson: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.”

And Anthony was lesbian. Let us never forget that. She did not love men, did not want men. She desired women. She understood that her tribe could never experience security or domesticity in our relationships until women had equal access to education and to jobs. In 1890, she was seventy, in an era before Medicare and Social Security. She was also often desperately lonely in her touring work. One of her lovers had been Anna Dickinson, who  also supported herself as a public speaker. How much could Stanton with her seven children and Gage with her four understand about their lives? And, it is important to remember that the temperance movement leader was Frances Willard, also a lesbian.

Was it Gage who betrayed Anthony in her refusal to compromise, holding their Suffrage organization hostage to a radical vision that was so far ahead of its time? It was easy for Gage to explore spiritualism and other metaphysical systems, when she was not dependent upon the Church as a support system that could provide community, emergency health care, and financial relief, as well as ideological support for the purity and sanctity of womanhood--a lifeline to women struggling with the contempt and violence of their spouses. How relevant would the historical violations of the Church be to these women who had nowhere to turn but the Church?  Was it realistic to expect them to catch up to doctrines of radical feminism in their lifetimes?

I left the Gage House overwhelmed. It was difficult to resist the temptation to think I had been wrong. Right and wrong have no place in “increasing complexity.” The world has need of radical and visionary thinkers, as well as for the pragmatic, on-the-ground, coalition-building, compromise-making activists. There will always be a tension between the two positions, and that tension can provide a healthy check against the excesses to which each is liable. 

The Gage House stood as a bulwark of rectitude for me in my younger days, when I was in the process of reinventing myself. Today my appreciation of it has increased in complexity. Today it is an invitation to go deeper, to challenge everything--even to examine  my beloved foremother through the lens of  working-class, lesbian activism.

Take a tour of the Matilda Gage House website. This essay, narrowly focused on a specific facet from my own experience, does not in any way do justice to this remarkable woman, who did "walk her talk" in so many radical ways. Her home was on the Underground Railroad, and, because of her coalition work with Native women in her area,  she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation. Her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, would author the beloved Oz books, with their gender-bending heroines. Her crusade for separation of Church and State is especially relevant today. Sally Roesch Wagner is the visionary and pragmatic Executive Director of the Gage Foundation, and, I am privileged to say, a friend and colleague.