“The young warrior”— Gayle Two Eagles

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The recognition of Native women from the past is central to the work of Indigenous feminists. Poet Gayle Two Eagles ties the promise of future generations of Native women to the influence of Native women ancestors within their communities, which has been historically underappreciated. In her poem “The young warrior,” Two Eagles begins with the image of a young warrior who “sees the world through brand-new eyes,” and embodies such promise that the Lakota people can “be proud again” (108). Accompanying the image of a young warrior is the representation of a woman warrior, who fights alongside all warriors as equals, because she too is “proud and strong” (108).

The first half of Gayle Two Eagle’s poem “The young warrior.”

But the woman warrior’s charge is to be fierce in the face of the injustices aimed against her, to combat the traditions “as told by men, / Written in history books by white men” (108). She stands in “Quiet defiance to the men who say, ‘respect your brother’s vision,’ / she mutters, ‘respect your sister’s vision too’” (108). Two Eagles asserts that this vision that Native women carry is not honored within their own communities. The woman warrior is not included in the warrior histories of her people, despite the fact that “She was with you at Wounded Knee, / She was with you at Sioux Falls, / Custer, / And Sturgis, / And has always remembered you, / Her Indian people, / In her prayers.” By including the presence of the Native woman in well-known battles and massacres of Native people, Two Eagles rewrites history through poetry, a powerful practice among Indigenous feminist poets.

The second half of “The young warrior.”

Two Eagles continues to harness the power of truth-telling within a community as she speaks to the extreme violence against Native women, who “were beaten by the men they love, / Or their husbands” (109). By highlighting the dangers Native women face even in their own homes, Two Eagles demonstrates their inherent strength and resilience. She returns to the image of the Native woman warrior, who “gave strength to women who were raped, / As has the Sacred Mother Earth.” Here she makes an important connection between the violation of Indigenous women and that of the land. Both women and land have been violated, but “Sacred Mother Earth” has also been a source of fortitude. Two Eagles invokes a vital characteristic of Indigenous feminism, which is the support cultivated in gathering spaces where Native women voice truths in the language of stories and honor women of the past who survived for their sake. This collective ritual is intrinsically tied to traditions of honoring Mother Earth and the role she plays in sustaining communities as a central part of Indigenous identity and thereby Indigenous feminism.

Tintype of Native youth from the collection of Joy Harjo, included in A Gathering of Spirit. 

Indigenous identity has been threatened for centuries, but the resistance to discrimination within Native American communities has not always centered Native feminism. Two Eagles turns our attention to the future of Native people and how indigeneity must be centered around women: “The new eyes that once were in awe at what the world had to offer, / Looks down at this new girl child, / The Lakota woman warrior knows her daughter also has a vision” (109). Two Eagles uplifts future generations of young Indigenous women warriors who will make change, gather strength from the earth, and share that strength among each other. She empowers Native women by asserting that Native future relies upon respecting the woman warrior, for she holds the power to foster change, gather the collective, share truths, and make her people proud.

 

Sources:

Brant, Beth. Sinister Wisdom: A Gathering of Spirit, no. 22/23, Iowa City Women’s Press, 1983.

Harjo, Joy. Untitled Tintypes. Sinister Wisdom: A Gathering of Spirit, no. 22/23, p. 143.

Two Eagles, Gayle. “The young warrior,” Sinister Wisdom: A Gathering of Spirit, no. 22/23, pp. 108-109.

 

“From the Salt Lake City Airport-82” — Joy Harjo

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Muscogee (Creek) Nation poet Joy Harjo is a renowned “fire-tender.” She was named the twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019 and is widely recognized for her ability to express the Native experience, female expression and liberation, and the power of the earth in her poetry (Zongker). Her poem “From the Salt Lake City Airport-82,” originally published in A Gathering of Wisdom, integrates decolonization and womanhood, two essential themes of Indigenous feminism.

Throughout the poem, Harjo invokes the being-ness of the natural world and ties the history of the land to the history of Indigenous people: “The Wasatch Mountains plead / to be remembered. / in the East. / They watched wagon trails / wear down men, allowed them / to cross their bellies / thinking these white skins / could learn to love this land / as much as them, and the darker ones / already here” (145). Harjo speaks to how the earth itself has witnessed the simultaneous destruction of it’s own body and those of Native Americans carried out by white settlers.

The first two stanzas of Joy Harjo’s poem “From the Salt Lake City Airport — 82.”

White colonialism extracts life from the earth and also seeks to erase Native culture in its mission to develop and civilize. As a result, Harjo points out that white, patriarchal society is divorced from the land and life itself: “They build a city of separation. / Grew children / and named them names of men, / another language / not the land” (145). The inherent culture in white society is not of the land or the feminine, but of the male and inanimate that perpetuates the dominant language of capitalism and exploitation. The histories of the earth and Indigenous peoples are thereby interlaced: “It is a crazy, dangerous joke / to forget the red hills / that border your city / with passion. / They are mirrors / that make you hate yourself / for what you didn’t / want to remember” (146). Here, Harjo directly references the ignorance of the history of genocide and oppression against Indigenous peoples that society was founded upon. The land embodies those histories and serves as a reminder to combat the continued oppression of the land and Indigenous peoples, especially to those of us who benefit from that exploitation and robbery.

While the land is intrinsically tied to Indigenous culture, there is an even deeper connection between the earthen and the feminine and their shared history of violation: “Salt Lake City, / you grow hot and ashamed / when you look East, / and feel uncomfortable / with the power of the womb, / and place the blame / on the devil / and your wives” (146). White culture is patriarchal and ignores the inherent “power of the womb,” subjecting women to inferior roles in society rather than the forces of change and power that they embody. Here, Harjo echoes rhetoric from the Second Wave of Feminism by challenging the Manifest Destiny ideology that elevates the patriarchy, but she also importantly calls upon white women for their complicity in oppressing people of color: “I see your women caught behind windows / in their homes, behind rows and rows / of bleached and frightened children. / They speak men’s words, not their own / except those languages they’ve learned to speak in secret / and in dreams, if they’ve / not forgotten” (146).

In these last two lines, Harjo makes a turn in the poem by suggesting the possibility that some women have not forgotten the vital language of truth, the earth, and the life force of womanhood. Harjo understands that language, in addition to being a tool of liberation, has historically been used as a weapon to suppress thought and dialogue. Harjo is among many Native poets who speak the language of resistance, who are fluent in these dialects of freedom, reciprocity, spirituality, and intergenerational connection. White women in the Second Wave of Feminism were only beginning to find their own words, and are still learning the difference between appropriating the experiences of women of color and authentically making space for Indigenous feminist voices within the movement.

Portrait of Joy Harjo taken by LaVerne Harrell Clark in Albuquerque, NM, 1975.

Harjo continues to look towards the future: “I see tribes / gathering themselves together / not for war, but for recognition” (146). By envisioning this acknowledgement in spaces of gathering that prioritize neither war nor reconciliation but recognition of history and responsibility, Harjo actively challenges the status quo of silence and ignorance that has perpetuated systems of oppression. Action against these systems necessitates the empowerment of femininity and indigeneity: “The Earth does break open and spill / by the quakings of the heart / by forces other than man. / The lake of salt that floats / West of here feeds you. / She is the womb of your discomfort, / your mother, a ghost / you could easily disrupt” (147). Harjo returns to the theme of white mens’ fear of the earth and thus their drive to conquer it, a fear related to their fear of the deep, natural force of women that threatens to dismantle mens’ hierarchies of power.

The final stanzas of Harjo’s poem.

Harjo once again emphasizes that the power of women’s liberation is bound to the liberation of truth. As she urges her reader to “Let your memory break open,” Harjo asks us to remember the history of this land and let it move us to change (147). The land, after all, is our greatest teacher. Harjo exemplifies Indigenous feminism in the final lines of her poem: “When we die / all our bodies darken / into rich, scarlet / woman earth. / When we die / our bodies turn to salt / but our spirits are shimmering / colored stars / and we are food” (147). Harjo is no stranger to the relation between the generative force of women as makers of change and the soil of the earth where natural processes of renewal take place. Women are sources of regeneration, the eternal tenders of the flame of revival. Harjo leaves us with the knowledge that the way forward must be to decolonize, indigenize, and womanize our systems of life so that future generations may grow stronger from a more fertile ground.

 

Sources:

Brant, Beth. Sinister Wisdom: A Gathering of Spirit, no. 22/23, Iowa City Women’s Press, 1983.

Clark, LaVerne Harrell. Joy Harjo, Albuquerque, 1975, Silver Birch Press, https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/eagle-poem-by-joy-harjo/.

Harjo, Joy. “From the Salt Lake City Airport-82,” Sinister Wisdom: A Gathering of Spirit, no. 22/23, pp. 145-147.

“Joy Harjo.” Joy Harjo Website, 2021, https://www.joyharjo.com/.

Zongker, Brett. “Joy Harjo Appointed to Third Term as U.S. Poet Laureate,” Library of Congress,10 November 2020, https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-20-075/joy-harjo-appointed-to-third-term-as-u-s-poet-laureate/2020-11-19/.

“I Walk in the History of My People” — Chrystos

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Chrystos, a Menominee and two-spirit writer and activist, exemplifies several commonalities among Native feminist poets in the three brief stanzas of their poem, “I Walk in the History of My People” (“Chrystos,” 2021), which is included in the renowned feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. Among these themes is the recognition of the Native American’s body as exploited and corrupted. Chrystos establishes their own body as a manifestation of oppression of generations past, describing in the first line how they carry the “women locked in my joints / for refusing to speak to the police” (53). In the first stanza they list out the suffering that lives “In my marrow,” along with “women who walk 5 miles every day for water / In my marrow are hungry faces who live on the land the whites don’t want / In my marrow the swollen faces of my people who are not allowed / to hunt / to move / to be” (53). In three lines, Chrystos points to the dangers that Native Americans face in their communities, including hunger and scarcity of clean water, both of which result from the forced separation of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and relocation to underserved and isolated areas.

A scan of Chrystos’s poem “I Walk in the History of My People” from the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back published in 1983.

This injustice manifests in the physical and emotional psyches of Native Americans today. Indigenous activism is seldom featured in mainstream media and contemporary social justice movements. Chrystos speaks to the danger of this ignorance in the third stanza: “My knee is so badly wounded no one will look at it / The puss of the past oozes from every pore / The infection has gone on for at least 300 years” (53). In the first line they reference the massacre at Wounded Knee, in which over 300 Lakota people were killed by the US army (“Wounded Knee Massacre,” 2021), one of multiple massacres that are accepted as American histories and were celebrated as victories in their time. Now, the lack of these events from the education of American history contributes to the “infection” of the American colonial initiative to erase Native culture and life and robbing them of their right “to be” (53). Oppression also manifests in the appropriation of Native culture, the way it has been commodified and made into “pencils, names of cities, gas stations” (53). Chrystos highlights the burden of these oppressions carried by Native Americans and that every day they face dismissals of their very existence.

Along with intergenerational trauma, Native Americans inherit resilience from their ancestors. The continued existence of Native Americans is an act of resistance itself, a reminder that Indigenous life has survived despite centuries of attempted genocide: “My knee is wounded / see / How I Am Still Walking” (53). Chrystos empowers indigeneity by recognizing atrocities committed against their ancestors and thereby affirming their ancestors’ existence and success against all odds in protecting the future, in immortalizing Indigenous resistance through surviving and creating new life. Chrystos demands that we see how they continue to resist by existing proudly, fully, and unapologetically.

 

Sources:

Anzaldúa, Gloria and Moraga, Cherríe. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed., New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983.

Anzaldúa, Gloria and Moraga, Cherríe. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., SUNY Press, 2015.

Chrystos. “I Walk in the History of My People,” This Bridge Called My Back. 4th ed., SUNY Press 2015, p. 53.

“Chrystos.” Wikipedia, 19 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrystos.

“Wounded Knee Massacre.” Wikipedia, 4 December 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre.

 

Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition: Judy Grahn’s Perspective

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“[Sappho] was central to her culture, and even in fragments has been as central a poet in Western culture as it has developed over twenty-five centuries,” begins Judy Grahn in her 1985 piece “Writing from a House of Women” (Grahn 257). In this essay, Grahn, a feminist activist and important figurehead in the poetry of the Second Wave, discusses Sappho’s life, work, and what it conveys to today’s readers about the eternal nature of female love.

An imagined depiction of Sappho by English Neo-Classical painter John William Godward, 1904.

“In everything that remains of what [Sappho] did,” Grahn states, “she maintained a female-based point of view, a female collective center from which to speak of life and death, of beauty and love in general” (Grahn 257). This idea is where Grahn obtains the title for her essay, describing Sappho’s work as emerging from a literal “House of Women” and speaking for the whole of the female community surrounding her. Sappho would later be referred to as a whore for having so many female lovers and companions in her lifetime (Grahn 260). Yet in her time, she and her poetry were renowned and respected. She was referred to as the “tenth muse,” a title that placed her among the nine muses, the highest divine symbols of artistic creativity in ancient Greece. Much of her work was meant to be sung in accompaniment to music, often played on a lyre or other stringed instrument (Mendelsohn). Therefore, she created her art with performance in mind—an interesting point, as most Second Wave poets interacted with her poetry only on the page.

What is perhaps most compelling about Sappho is the influence her works continue to have on the queer people of today and of the Second Wave of Feminism, considering the fact that the majority of her poetry has been lost to time. Only around 650 lines of her poetry survive today from the original 10,000—a large portion of which Grahn suggests were “burnt and partially submerged” due to their “overtly Lesbian love lyrics” (Grahn 257). Yet, as I hope to illustrate in this curation of works, Sappho’s identity as a lesbian icon took on a life of its own, extending far beyond the poetry she left behind.

Works Cited:

Grahn, Judy. The Judy Grahn Reader. Edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland, Aunt Lute Books, 2009, pp. 257-260.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “How Gay Was Sappho?” The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted.

Rita Mae Brown – “Sappho’s Reply”

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In this poem, Rita Mae Brown embodies her imagined perception of Sappho, addressing lesbians of her time. Speaking to them “through thousands of years,” she offers words of encouragement and survival. She, as Sappho, has witnessed and understood their suffering, and yet consoles them that “an army of lovers shall not fail.”

“Sappho’s Reply” was first published in Brown’s 1971 poetry collection The Hand That Cradles the Rock. By using this title to refute the maternal cliche (“the hand that rocks the cradle”) and turn it into an image of power and resilience, Brown sets the tone for her entire collection.

Brown was an integral figure to the Feminist Poetry Movement of the ‘70s, serving as a contributor and editor for several prominent periodicals and journals including Sinister Wisdom, Lesbian Connection, Amazon Quarterly, and The Furies. She was a leader of the Redstockings, a consciousness-raising radical feminist group, yet eventually left the group due to the lack of support of lesbian issues. Similarly, she left her position with the National Organization for Women after its attempts to distance itself from and ignore lesbian feminist groups.

Speaking on her time with these organizations, Brown stated that she “felt like the only lesbian” in America at times in the 1970s. “Yeah, I don’t recommend it,” she reflected in a 2015 Washington Post article (Burns). Yet Brown had a fulfilling career fighting for lesbian rights through poetry and politics. After leaving the Redstockings, she was a prominent figure in the Lavender Menace, a group of lesbian radical feminists that formed in 1970 in response to the exclusion of lesbians from many feminist issues. She also served as a founding member of The Furies Collective, a lesbian commune that treated heterosexuality as a barrier to revolution (Burns).

Brown’s struggles as a lesbian woman within the feminist movement give a deeper meaning to her interpretation of Sappho. “You who have wept in direct sunlight / Who have hungered in invisible chains” could speak to Brown’s own fight and the isolation she felt due to her sexuality.  The poem’s final line, “An army of lovers shall not fail,” was adopted by gay and lesbian activists throughout the 70s and beyond—and even featured on the cover of the periodical The Lesbian Tide (Faderman 232). The “army of lovers” imagery could very well have its roots in Plato’s writing, specifically his Symposium, where the character Phaedrus employs that exact phrase to refer to the Sacred Band of Thebes, a group made up of pairs of male lovers that fought as part of the Theban army. Describing the queer people of the 1970s as “an army” is immensely powerful, especially after following the descriptions of their pain and suffering that make up the body of the poem. It emphasizes their strength and the unity that exists between them, and using Plato’s phrase harkens back to the powerful army made up of queer people in ancient history.

Works Cited:

Burns, Carole. “Rita Mae Brown, Awarded as Pioneer of Lesbian Literature, Scoffs at the Term.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 30 May 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/rita-mae-brown-awarded-as-pioneer-of-lesbian-literature-scoffs-at-the-term/2015/05/30/60169a62-00a5-11e5-833c-a2de05b6b2a4_story.html.

Faderman, Lillian. The Gay Revolution: The Story of The Struggle. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016, p. 232.

Moore, Honor, and Rita Mae Brown. “Sappho’s Reply.” Poems from the Women’s Movement. Library of America, New York, 2009, p. 41.

Holly Lu Conant

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Holly Lu Conant first published a poem in Sinister Wisdom’s Spring 1977 issue. The issue focused on the relationship between mothers and daughters, including various photographs, personal essays, and poems. Conant submitted a poem called “disunited nations,” which explores the relationship between Mother Earth and Native Americans.

In the poem, Conant explores the extent to which the colonists violated the American continent, detailing how they “landed on my body / planted flags between my breasts / charted trade routes and highways across my belly” (Conant, “disunited nations,” lines 1-3).

Her diction indicates a distinct tone of desecration and mutilation of the beauty of Mother Nature. But Mother Nature is protective and declares, “ALL COLONISTS WILL BE REPATRIATED / this is the motherland / I will not be settled” (Conant, “disunited nations,” lines 11-13), and in this declaration the motherland establishes her conviction to resist the colonial influence that directly harms the Native American people who are, by extension, her children.

Holly Lu Conant’s untitled poem. Featured in Sinister Wisdom vol. 5, page 80.

And so, in this poem Conant steps outside the immediate impression of what a mother-daughter relationship is, and elevates it to a greater level. She accomplishes something similar in her second poem, published in Sinister Wisdom’s fifth issue (winter 1978). In her untitled poem, Conant focuses on the sound of silence. The poem begins with a child in sleep, and ends with the speaker stunned and contemplative. However, the lines between are rich with sensory language and imagery, suggesting that even in silence a powerful message can be conveyed. This seems to contradict the focus of Sinister Wisdom’s fifth issue. The issue aimed to counteract social deafness and amply women’s voices. But Conant’s poem focuses so heavily on silence, that it actually rings louder than words. By focusing on the silence, Conant’s piece highlights the importance of everything that women do not say, keeping in line with the theme of the periodical. In this way, Conant stepped outside the expected to illustrate the theme, the same way she did in “disunited nations”.

We could infer that this unconventional presentation is simply Conant’s artistic style, but these appear to be the only two poems published by Conant. Even though Conant describes herself as, “born 22 years ago, am not dead yet & am writing furiously in between,” her other pieces never seemed to make it to print (Desmoines and Nicholson, “Contributors”, p103). Thus is the nature of the press culture during the Feminist Movement. Even though the platform provided opportunity for expression and many women did utilize it, not every woman found a future in press and literature, though their words are immortalized in the record.

Martha Courtot

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Martha Courtot first featured the poem, “This is trying not to be a love poem,” in a 1974 issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation. Up until the 1980’s, Courtot proceeded to publish in various periodicals; including,  Lavender Woman, Heresies, WomanSpirit, and Sinister Wisdom.

Timeline of some of Martha Courtot’s publications in Feminist periodicals: 1974-1980

Sampling her poems from various periodicals, it is evident that Courtot often focuses on women’s relationship with nature. Some of her poems following this pattern are “the snake woman,” which was featured in Sinister Wisdom’s sixth issue,  and “The Woman Who Lives with Owls,” in Sinister Wisdom’s ninth issue. In these two poems, Courtot explores the idea of women finding their true identities.

At the start of “the snake woman,” Courtot details all the ways in which this snake woman is undesirable. “She is a snake woman / she has no eyelids / she wears the skin of dead animals” (Courtot, “Snake Woman,” lines 1-3) and she hides from the light. But Courtot ends the poem with,

this woman is bad

her name begins with your initials

her face is very familiar

this woman moves the way your body does

crawling toward morning

 

do you know this woman?

do you know her?

do you know? (Courtot, “Snake Woman,” lines 35-42)

This sequence of questions pushes the reader to look below their own skin, to find their dark insides, and to truly come to terms with it no matter how disfigured it may be. In “The Woman Who Lives with Owls,” Courtot equates women to nature once again, but this time to illustrate how society is deaf to the female voice.

The woman who lives with the owls speaks with the birds, learning the intricacies and secrets of the owl language, a metaphor for a woman’s connection to nature and the primal. However, when the woman transcribes what the owls have taught her she attempts to share her findings with the world. But, “no one will look her in the eye / they claim she writes like everyone else / on white paper and sends them through the mail,”  highlighting the prominence of sexism in publishing at the time (Courtot, “The Woman Who Lives With Owls,” lines 10-13). Eventually, the woman who lives with owls becomes the owl woman, secluded in nature away from the society that refused to hear her. The owl woman is happy in her new state, suggesting that the modern woman can find joy in her craft regardless of whether the society she lives in can properly appreciate it.

Jacqueline Lapidus

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Jacqueline Lapidus was active in the Paris women’s movement, but submitted many of her pieces to American feminist presses (Desmoines and Nicholson 95). Lapidus was primarily a poet, but did occasionally review other feminst literary works. Her poetry was featured in WomanSpirit, Sinister Wisdom, Conditions, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Arts & Politics, Big Mama Rag, 13th Moon, as well as Sojourner.

In her work, Lapidus frequently takes a cultural canon, such a as a nursery rhyme or myth, and twists it to illuminate a feminist perspective. Sinister Wisdom’s ninth issue, published in the spring of 1979, featured two of Lapidus’s poems. Each took Greek stories and reimagined them under a feminist lens. The first, “Thirteenth Moon,” mentions the Greek goddesses Persephone, Artemis, and Hera. What is most interesting is Lapidus’ representation of Hera. In the third section of the poem, Lapidus writes,

where Hera reigns

behind her curtained face her courage flames

blood simmers in her womb

heavy as soup

spoonful by spoonful

she feeds the baby secrets

it was not Zeus who lived the cycle of transformations!

it was I who loved Leda – Io – Danaë! (Lapidus, “Thirteenth Moon,” lines 33-41)

In Greek mythology, Leda is the mother of Helen of Troy, the woman who was the cause of the war between Troy and Sparta (Gill). Unlike most Greek figures, Leda’s genealogy is unclear: her father is known but her mother is not. Io was the first priestess of Hera, with whom Zeus, Hera’s husband, became infatuated. To protect Io from Hera’s wrath, Zeus turned Io into a white heifer (“Io”). Danaë was the mother of Perseus (“Danae in Greek Mythology”). Lapidus’ claim that Hera was the one who loved all three of these women, has radical implications, suggesting that Hera, the goddess of marriage, is a queer woman. Typically, Artemis is the Greek symbol of queer solidarity, but when Lapidus poses Hera this way, she becomes a symbol for queer women with an entirely different set of connotations than those of Artemis. Hera is the queen of the gods of Olympus, the most powerful female goddess in the pantheon, and she is queer. For lesbians in America, this is a novel symbol of the power of lesbian women. Furthermore, in the case of Leda and Danaë, Hera is the grandmother of powerful figures: Helen, a woman capable of bringing entire nations to war, and Perseus, the slayer of the Gorgon Medusa. This correlation illuminates the power of the maternal influence, even if it is not readily apparent in this generation. In the case of Io, it paints Zeus as a jealous king who transformed Io out of spite. This parallels the way in which the patriarchy condemns queer women, and then reorients the story to paint them as the savior of the story.

 

Timeline of some of Jacqueline Lapidus’ Features in Feminist Periodicals (1975-1980)

Robin Ruth Linden

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Robin Ruth Linden began her journey within the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement in Sinister Wisdom’s eigthth issue. At the time, she was simply a normal woman. Her author description at the back of the periodical was simply, “lives in San Francisco” (Desmoines and

Robin Ruth Linden’s untitled poem featured in Sinister Wisdom vol. 8, pg 22

Nicholson 103). She submitted an untitled poem in which she tackles the complexities of the lesbian identity. In a society where lesbian love felt unstructured when stacked against the strong heteronormative influences of love, Linden asserted that there was no set formula for lesbian relationships, which she articulated as “We are the points along the matrix    phonemes / We are the matrix, syntax” (Linden 15-16).

It’s reasonable to think that Linden set a precedent for herself when she published herself as a poet, but Linden did not continue with poetry. Though in Sinister Wisdom’s tenth issue, she submitted a creative writing piece that expressed her views on age, rage and language, Linden found her calling in editing. Alongside Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. H. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star, Linden curated an anthology of feminist works called Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis. This anthology received support from the majority of feminist periodicals of the time. Periodicals such as WomanNews, Big Mama Rag, New Women’s Times, and Sojourner all featured an advertisement for the anthology, illustrating how interconnected the feminist press culture was at the time. Linden made a name for herself in the Lesbian community, bolstered by the collaborative nature of feminst periodicals. By Sinister Wisdom’s sixteenth issue in 1981, Linden’s author description was, “an editor and video producer living in San Francisco” (Cliff and Rich 115).

Judith McDaniel

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Judith McDaniel, a professor at Skidmore College, appeared in print in the seventh issue of the third volume of Big Mama Rag in 1975 (Desmoines and Nicholson 103). Ironically, her first debut in print was not with her own words. McDaniel was quoted saying “‘I learn by going where I have to go’ – Judith McDaniel, quoting someone else,” but McDaniel would go on to disseminate her words in a variety of mediums.

McDaniel made a name for herself primarily as an essayist, typically writing about her own experience as a lesbian. One of her most notable essays, “Is There Room For Me In The Closet Or My Life As The Only Lesbian Professor” was published in Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Arts & Politics, volume 2 issue 3, in the spring of 1979. This essay provides a window into the social climate at the time when McDaniel writes, “We spoke briefly about our work. ‘Why did you leave your last job?’ they asked. ‘I was fired,’ I said, ‘with another woman. We were too “feminist.”’ ‘Did you sue them?’ one woman asked. ‘It was difficult,’ I said. ‘We were both lesbians.’ My comment lay like something unpleasant in the middle of the table. No one referred to it” (McDaniel, “Is There Room For Me In the Closet…”, p36). By retelling this experience, McDaniel provides a window to the treatment that lesbian women face at the time and it reveals the degree of the injustices that spurred the Women’s Liberation Movement.

McDaniel gained enough notoriety for her essays that her pieces were featured in a plethora of feminist periodicals, such as Sinister Wisdom, Conditions, Chrysalis, and the Lesbian Tide. With this reputation, McDaniel also made a point of speaking at panels; a transcript of her speaking at 1975 Modern Language Association seminar about sexism in publishing was included in Sinister Wisdom’s second issue in 1976. McDaniel also dabbled in poetry, publishing a poem in Sinister Wisdom’s third issue and two more in the fourth. In the short time that McDaniel wrote poetry, she experimented with both long and short prose.

McDaniel’s “Ideograms” in Sinister Wisdom’s third issue follows a stricter poetic structure. Each stanza is four lines and even though the syllable count of each line varies and the stanzas do not all follow the same pattern, the beat of the poem is consistent. In the fourth issue, McDaniel submitted a longer poem that broke her self set precedent. In “Circe’s Cup,” McDaniel’s stanzas vary in length and canter, and she explored with composition, setting the second half of the poem adjacent to the first. This placement reinforces the dichotomy at play within the poem. The first half of the poem retells the story of Circe from the feminist perspective. Instead of Circe being a temptress who cruelly abused Ulysses and his men, Ulysses, “sank/ into a haze / of bestiality” (McDaniel, “Circe’s Cup” lines 8-10), causing him to forget his wife and son as he feel victim to Circe’s charms.

This perspective shift exposes the sordid qualities of man and shifts the blame away from Circe. The poem then moves horizontally across the page, to a stanza detailing how the speaker is intoxicated by Circe’s presence. This suggests that the reader can find strength and power in Circe and rightly rebel against the vile actions of men that contribute to sexist oppression.

Judith McDaniel’s literary versatility allowed her to spread the ideals of the Feminist Movement through a variety of forms. Her essays found their way to nearly every feminist periodical of the time, either directly or through quotations in other authors’ pieces. Though short lived, McDaniel’s poetry aligned with the sentiment of the time and advocated for women’s empowerment.

 

Timeline of some of Judith McDaniel’s publications in Feminist periodicals 1975-1980