Living a feminist lifestyle: the intersection of theory and action in a lesbian feminist collective.

In a 1972 memo to the Furies, member Charlotte Bunch articulated her dream for fifty years in the future. Bunch foresaw that "women will have taken power in many regions in the US, [and] are governing and beginning to create a new feminist society." This new society entailed a long-term view of lesbian feminist separatism: "[W]e have built alliances in which we are the dominant power, with some minority groups and with a few male groups (especially gay males). We have minimal, but not warring, relations with some other US regions where minority groups have taken power and where the women are advancing rapidly but not yet in total control." The former United States had become "A Federation of Feminist States," governed by a lesbian feminist party. (1) Building on Bunch's vision, members of the Furies, a lesbian feminist collective based in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s, proceeded to plan how they could eventually bring about this political goal. Their short-term strategy involved creating a collective w here a small number of white lesbian feminists lived and worked together, separated both from heterosexual women and men. As in the proposed Federation of Feminist States, the collective members accepted that they would interact with some men and with women of color in a limited, but not necessarily antagonistic, fashion. So situated, the Furies distanced themselves from what they perceived as a hostile world in order to analyze their experiences as women, question their own principles and assumptions, and subsequently develop a base from which they could mobilize other women for social change.

Bunch and other members of the Furies were experienced activists who shared a commitment to revolutionary social change, as well as an emerging identity as lesbian feminists. The Furies formulated their collective as a place where they could immediately enact their political beliefs and, at the same time, focus on how best to gradually and completely eradicate women's oppression. In order to devise a revolutionary feminist movement that put lesbians at the center, collective members of the Furies designed projects to stimulate their thinking and spread their ideas. They focused their efforts in three interconnected areas: analyzing and transforming individual behavior and everyday relations, particularly within their own collective; publishing theory in their monthly newspaper, The Furies; and developing local educational programs intended to empower women. By concentrating on these projects, the members believed they would inspire a mass movement to end sexism. Occupying a common living space, they reasoned, would enhance their theoretical insights by encouraging them to work through new models of interaction, create a supportive environment for political and personal change, and insulate them from activists who denigrated or ignored lesbianism. The newspaper and educational workshops, in turn, provided forums where the group could discuss and disseminate ideas developed within the collective. The record of their experiences and ideas would create a model for feminists in the 19705 and leave a lasting legacy for activists in the future.

The Furies, existing as a collective from 1971 to 1972, were not the first or the only lesbian feminist group of the time. (2) Radicalesbians, a New York-based group that predated the Furies, became known for its groundbreaking essay, "Woman-Identified Woman," a declaration of the theoretical connections between lesbianism and feminism. Other lesbian feminist groups emerged throughout the decade in rural and urban areas across the country. Yet the Furies differed from. these other initiatives in several ways. Living and working together, collective members sought to exercise feminist politics within a communal household. Unlike most collectives, the members wrote extensively about their living arrangements. For more than a year they produced a newspaper, and the publication became a vehicle for promoting feminist analysis, thereby shaping the direction and emphases of the women's movement. At a time when many feminists opposed the concept of political leadership and sought to create a nonhierarchical movement , the Furies embraced the opportunity to direct the struggle for women's liberation.

Dana Shugar, who analyzed a broad range of lesbian feminist writings from the 1970s, argues that the discourse of separatism "in many ways required women to live and/or work in collectives as the full realization of their political analyses." Shugar notes, however, that such ventures were "repeatedly undercut by ideologies of difference and unity that divided women within the collectives themselves" and ultimately led to their dissolution. (3) Among the Furies, personal differences and political disagreements regarding how to organize a mass movement caused conflict both within the collective and with other women. Dissension disrupted the collective's productivity and, following the pattern noted by Shugar, eventually contributed to its collapse. Nonetheless, the Furies collective was an important incubator for activists and ideas that became significant to the broader feminist movement. Charlotte Bunch, Joan E. Biren, Rita Mae Brown, and other members went on to forge several important feminist initiatives.4 Moreover, the record of activities left by the group offers an important example of feminists' efforts to transform society. Thus, although the Furies collective was not long lived, its influence was extensive.

This article draws on writings by and about the Furies, as well as interviews with former members, to examine the political vision of lesbian feminists and the projects they developed to actualize the social transformations they sought. It aims to complicate the story of Second Wave feminism by taking into account the importance of both theory and practice in the development of lesbian feminism and their impact on the larger movement. (5) Considering the collective on both a theoretical and pragmatic basis, this analysis explores participants' conception of the connections between lesbianism and feminism, the activities they undertook to advance the movement's goals, and the unintended consequences of their ideas and projects. Like other radical feminists, the Furies emphasized the connections between the personal and the political: their own experiences became the basis for their analysis, and they believed they could change the world by creating institutions and models of living that would bring forth a new society. A commitment to prefigurative politics, as this notion has been labeled, depended on the merger of political goals with transformed personal behavior and new forms of interaction. For the Furies, this entailed an intense scrutiny of relationships, daily living, household politics, and emotions.

Notwithstanding their conjoined significance as forces for social change, theory and action sometimes inadvertently worked in conflicting ways and toward contradictory ends, for the Furies as they did for other radical groups. In particular, the women's decision to work within a small, separatist collective where they promoted a narrow set of prescribed behaviors led to burnout and myopia that hampered the group's achievements and made it impossible to mobilize feminists on a large scale. Certain aspects of their politics, such as the priority granted to theory, generated criticism from other women activists and opened the collective members to charges of elitism. Thus, the collective's long-term goal of creating a mass movement was undermined by the complications of trying to connect personal and political lives, by making theory and action conform. Ultimately, a history of the Furies demonstrates how lesbian feminism was driven forward by energies and experiments that also limited the movement's influence a nd undermined its impact. Thus, the Furies' example illuminates both the successes and failures of radical feminists during the early 1970s. It also casts light on the achievements and shortcomings of radical movements more generally in this period.

Starting early in the 1960s, U.S. women began to organize a political movement to improve their economic, political, and social status and the opportunities available to them. This movement, referred to by scholars as liberal feminism, focused around a conception of women's "rights"; through organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW, founded in 1966), and with the benefit of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, feminists challenged discriminatory laws and practices, particularly those related to the workplace and reproduction. By the late 1960s, the ideological bases of feminism broadened to incorporate new constituencies with diverse ideological and political visions. Socialist. feminists and participants in New Left groups brought a criticism of capitalism and an analysis of the interconnections between gender and class. African American, Native American, Asian, and Chicana women, many working within mixed-sex racial liberation movements, critiqued sexism within their movements and criticized whi te feminists' lack of attention to racial oppression and difference. Lesbian participants in the gay liberation movement also organized within both mixed-sex and women's groups, and they drew on many of the ideas of the civil rights movement. Other lesbians came from cultural and political institutions that had formed a kind of underground gay network. Women from these various paths entered feminist debates and formed groups that promoted diverse agendas, challenging the ideas of liberal feminists and each other. (6)

The Furies emerged as part of the more radical branch of the movement that developed after 1968. Reflecting participants' prior background in civil rights and New Left movements, radical feminists did not focus solely on legal, economic, and political rights; instead, they sought transformation on a personal level as well as broader changes in the country's political and economic structures. At the same time, radical feminists identified male supremacy and capitalism as the root causes of women's oppression and viewed women as a "sex class." Believing that sex-based oppression united women, and that other "isms"--racism and classism-derived from male supremacy, radical feminists sought to "smash the patriarchy." Whereas earlier feminists built national organizations, many headquartered in the nation's capital, radical feminists worked on a local level to create women's liberation organizations in cities and towns across the country. Although concerned with race as well as gender issues, most radical feminist groups remained predominantly white; the class affiliations of members were more varied and, indeed, became one source of tension within many groups. In Washington, the women's liberation movement became an umbrella structure under which radical feminists from all backgrounds worked on projects such as a daycare center and the publication of the newspaper off our backs, participated in consciousness-raising (CR) groups, and undertook political protest. (7) These projects were typically set up in a nonhierarchical fashion and, unlike NOW, excluded men. Radical feminism thereby transformed the movement's theory and praxis and brought waves of new women to the struggle.

By 1970, feminists who had been movement activists for nearly a decade strove to build and sustain their organizations as they faced an influx of participants who lacked previous political experience. At the same time, feminists confronted internal challenges. The fact of women's differences from each other challenged the notion of a common oppression. Concerns over racial differences had plagued the predominantly white movement from the beginning, but in 1970, the split that developed over issues of sexuality seemed even more devastating to many self-proclaimed feminists. In one often-repeated story, Rita Mae Brown claimed that Betty Friedan maneuvered her out of a New York City chapter of NOW after Brown came out as lesbian. According to Brown and later historians, this incident marked the beginning of identity-based organizing by lesbians in the feminist movement. Brown's ouster served as the impetus for a protest by a group of lesbians at the Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970, when Brown and othe r members of Radicalesbians distributed their essay, "Woman-Identified Woman," articulating an ideological foundation for lesbian feminism. (8)

Scholars have used the history of lesbian feminist groups in the 1970s, like the Furies collective, primarily to mark the evolution of Second Wave feminism from a movement focused on legal rights and political transformation to one that increasingly emphasized culture. Historian Alice Echols has associated the emergence of lesbian feminism with a shift away from radicalism by highlighting changes in lifestyle rather than politics. With the rise of lesbian feminism, Echols argued, "the focus shifted from building a mass movement to sustaining an alternative woman's culture and community." Subsequently, she claimed, cultural feminism became the movement's dominant ideology: "Cultural feminism with its insistence upon women's essential sameness to each other and their fundamental difference …