Bonjour! Today we are visiting a place that holds an important role in lesbian-feminist history: an enduring landmark of feminist organizing, a testament to the power of harassing the bigwigs at Harvard University, and the onetime home to a support group called “Dykes and Tykes.” It’s the Cambridge Women’s Center.
The ~herstory~ of the Cambridge Women’s Center begins on International Women’s Day, 1971. A group of women ousted a male professor from a Harvard-owned building on Memorial Drive and began a ten-day long occupation, presenting a list of demands that included affordable housing and childcare for all. During those ten days, occupiers held self-defense classes, dance classes, and meetings. Meanwhile, men protested outside the house and called the cops to bring the situation under control. Though the women were driven from the building under threat of arrest, they raised $5,000 that they used as a down payment on 46 Pleasant Street.
Unlike in my previous post on lesbian interiors, I don’t have much in the way of vintage images to analyze. But The Cambridge Women’s Center is an important lesbian interior nonetheless. It became a central hub for all types of lesbian feminist activities in the Boston area, and there were a lot! Boston was a feminist hub in the seventies and eighties, and, true to the era, that mean the presence of all sorts of feminist organizing efforts, both fruitful and unsuccessful, and lots of different (often conflicting) ideologies.
When I have conversations about my dissertation research, people are often interested (for good reason) in the considerable parallels between struggles between TERFs and their sworn enemies in the 1970s and today. Perhaps parallels is the wrong word - more like continuations. Indeed, these continuities are what drew me to the project in the first place. But there are also some very real differences between the terrain of these struggles in the 70s and now. One difference, which I really don’t think can be overestimated, is between the enmeshment of different ideologies within feminist communities in the 70s and the corresponding atomization today. By this, I mean that in the 70s, there were real, physical community spaces where trans women, their cis friends and allies, cis women who were vehemently opposed to trans inclusion, and (many, many) cis women who didn’t take a stance on this issue shared resources, engaged in community projects, and generally knew each other. These arrangements were NOT necessarily peaceful, nor stable, and they often led to the expulsion of trans women from community spaces. To be clear, I am not saying this was better than today - just different in a way that should shape our analysis. There was a degree of community enmeshment between people with very different viewpoints on trans inclusion in women’s spaces (including differences of opinion between trans people) that would be frankly unthinkable today. Understanding this is key to understanding the events that took place in these spaces, as well as the vibes. This goes beyond the issue of trans inclusion, too. These spaces contained all sorts of opposing viewpoints, from ideological positions to organizing strategies, and the smallness of the feminist scene (let alone the lesbian scene) meant that people were kind of stuck with each other.
The Cambridge Women’s Center is one such space. I am writing in my dissertation about a trans lesbian who was very involved at the Cambridge Women’s Center, and who was subjected to an anti-trans expulsion effort that drove her from the community. I won’t get into details here, but she has told me both about the horrible trauma of being ousted from a place that felt like home, as well as her memories of the time she spent involved there, which she recalls as being incredibly joyous and exciting. Her memories and organizing efforts are an important part of this history, and I am very excited to be able to share some of them in my dissertation and (eventual) book.
The Women’s Center also plays an important role in Black feminist history - this was the meeting place of the Combahee River Collective, the pioneering Black lesbian socialist feminist collective whose 1977 political manifesto is still widely cited and taught. I spoke with Beverly Smith, one of the co-founders of the CRC, and she recalled that their office was on the third floor, in a room with a low ceiling that got very very hot. It wasn’t glamorous, but it did the job. She later used a basement office in the Women’s Center, from which she organized a film festival on Black women in the arts. She remembers the Women’s Center as the beating heart of Boston feminism, bustling with women attending meetings and classes. She also recalls that, when the first battered women’s shelter opened in Boston, the Women’s Center was where women would check in initially before they could be admitted to the shelter.
Smith’s memories capture something important about the Women’s Center, and many other spaces like it from that time. It was simultaneously a place where cutting edge cultural works and political ideas of the time were being created, and a place where direct services were being provided, including to some of the city’s most vulnerable women. Indeed, these were not seen as two separate sorts of projects, but rather as efforts that fed off of one another. Professionalization and nonprofitization have made this sort of scene increasingly unlikely to exist today, although certainly not extinct.
The Cambridge Women’s Center still exists, though it’s moved locations and it plays a different community role now than it did then. Their website has a complete digital archive of past newsletters, going back to 1971, which is an incredible resource for picking up a little of the flavor of feminist (and lesbian-feminist) organizing in the 1970s and 80s. Newsletters from 1978 describe the development of a rape crisis center hotline; a new program called the Women’s School that taught feminist history, women’s health, and various skills; a lesbian liberation group; and a childcare collective. There are articles on forced sterilization, anti-prison organizing efforts, a worker’s strike at a hospital, and a six-page-long interview with a mill worker from North Carolina who was organizing a boycott of a textile manufacturer that had given many workers brown lung. There are partial Spanish translations in some issues. There are, of course, ever-present calls for donations. Scarcity of resources was never far from top of mind.
If you’re interested in this stuff, I highly recommend spending some time with these old newsletters! The page I’ve pasted in above gives a good sample of the flavor - jubilant celebration of a new porch, anxious calls for alternative places for out-of-towners to crash, and abstract musings about the role of sexuality in the feminist movement mingle side by side. A document to the rich, complicated, multi-layered history of a place and the women who created its importance.
On a completely separate note, I have been on a real blondies-baking kick lately, and maybe you should be too. I made these classic browned butter guys with a mix of semi-sweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, toasted walnuts, and dried cherries, and brought them to a Taylor Swift-related gathering with “13” written on top in chocolate chips (maybe I will be courageous enough to write about my embarrassing gay Swiftie-ness on here at some point). Then I made these peanut butter blondies, but I halved the recipe and browned the butter. (Blondies REQUIRE browned butter, IMO.) They are ridiculously good!!! Anyway, I used to think blondies were pointless when you could have brownies instead, but now I am obsessed and I recommend you make either of these recipes, which both have a very high deliciousness-to-effort ratio. <3
very excited to find this newsletter from tv dinner!! i interned at Lesbian Herstory Archives back in 2014 and getting to dive in to their collections and also talk to some of the women who'd been there since the 70s was so incredible. i did a lot of listening to oral history, conference recordings, and radio interview cassettes while digitizing/tagging - best one i found was a set of voicemails of the archive which included audre lorde leaving a message!
i ended up going a different career path than libraries/archives but they're an eternal interest of mine. i also went to mount holyoke college and had a lot of fun doing archival research on the history of student protests and sit-ins, which led to the different cultural studies departments and cultural houses, incl Jeannette Marks LGBTQ house, named for the life partner of college president Mary Woolley in early 1900s. we transcribed some of their letters which are very romantic yet also about like the garden and the UN, and also lots of good photos of their dogs! sorry to ramble but i don't often get a chance post academia on these topics!
Julia! This is SO COOL and I have ENDLESS associations, including Leah DeVun's work and also the Lesbian Herstory Archives. also have you ever heard of the band Lesbians of Ecstasy? Their music is mash-ups and remixes of lesbian classics and they've been performing together since like 2003. They did an album called Sisters in the Struggle where the insert is a feminist newsletter.