ADS: in the magazine Feed

"What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear" at The Museum Of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art has a major exhibition called  "Is Fashion Modern?"  Part of the exhibtion covers t-shirts. 

Coordinating with the exhibition, the museum publishes a blog with some wonderful articles. I'm honored that they wanted to know the backstory of my photograph of Alix Dobkin wearing "the future is female" shirt from Labyris Books.  Please read the actual blog...it's got some great essays. I've reprinted mine here.

The future is female t-shirt labyris books worn by alix dobkin photo by liza cowan 1975

The story behind the The Future Is Female graphic T-shirt is well known, both within feminists circles and outside them. In 2015, the Lesbian history Instagram account @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y posted a photo of folk singer Alix Dobkin wearing a T-shirt with the logo in 1975, a piece of merchandise from Labyris Books, New York City’s first women’s bookstore. Soon after, the owners of Los Angeles–based boutique Otherwild approached Liza Cowan — the photographer and Dobkin’s then partner — requesting permission to reproduce the T-shirt. The garment and logo have since become an enduring symbol, worn by celebrities and civilians alike. It has also sparked numerous debates about the binary nature of gender and about the necessity for more inclusive discourses in mainstream feminism.

The story of the groundbreaking project that gave birth to the famous photograph is less known, however. As an artist working in the context of separatist Lesbian politics, Cowan was interested in the semiotic power of fashion to communicate identity. Years before costume and dress gained academic validation, Cowan developed a photo essay called “What the Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear,” an exploration of Lesbian dress and its role in the construction of identity. As part of our research for item #044 on the Items: Is Fashion Modern? checklist, the Graphic T-shirt, we spoke with Cowan about the project, the political implications of Lesbian dress, and the proliferation of identity-proclaiming merchandise.

 

You first published your photo series “What the Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear” in COWRIE Lesbian Feminist magazine. Can you talk a little more about what prompted you to work on this and the context in which it was developed?

COWRIE was a small magazine I started in 1972, originally as the newsletter of a women’s group on the Upper East Side of New York City. The group was called Community of Women, and our goal, unachieved, was to start a women’s center to serve the women in the neighborhood. By the third issue, in June 1973, the group had disbanded, but my editorial partner and I decided to continue publishing the newsletter as a magazine for Lesbians, renamed COWRIE Lesbian Feminist.

I had been observing how the women in the Lesbian community — as we called it then — were dressing. In 1972 I was inspired by a wonderful article in Rags Magazine, edited by Mary Peacock and Daphne Davis, called “What Gay Women Wear.”

I began to ask questions about clothing, both to myself and to my friends. I had just come out the year before, at age 21, and had started to dress like my Lesbian peers. I wanted to know why we dressed as we did, and what were the social and political implications. Mind you, this was decades before fashion, or even culture theory, was considered worthy of study as an academic discipline. In those days it was considered trivial, and I was often ridiculed for being interested in fashion. I knew it wasn’t trivial, and I knew that clothing carried a message. I wanted to decipher it.

In the seven-part series, I covered general observations, history of Lesbian clothing — including ancient Amazons — and contemporary lesbian clothing designers, hair, and shoes. In every one, I was trying to decipher the political and social consequences and meanings of our clothing choices.

My main theory, I suppose, was that contemporary Lesbians didn’t want to look like men, as we were constantly accused of trying to do, but we wanted to look like Lesbians — women-loving women — to invoke the styles of at least some of our foremothers. We wanted to honor our history and to wear clothes that would signal our identity to other Lesbians.

Why did our foremothers, some of them, dress in men’s clothing? Because of the power and freedom that men’s clothing both symbolized and allowed. Through the ages men have dressed for freedom, for comfort, and for power. Women have been forced to dress as second-class citizens and sexual objects. From hobble-skirts to corsets, from stiletto heels to beehives, our clothing has confined and constricted us. Lesbians didn’t want to look like men, they wanted to be free — free to move, free to play, free to run, free to work, free to catch the eye of other women, and free to mark themselves as off-limits to men.

Clothing — in addition to being necessary, sometimes fun, and always interesting — is about power and class. It always has been. Clothing is deeply symbolic. That is my interest. Writing about clothing was always an intellectual pursuit. I was not interested, or able, to tell women what to wear or where to shop, or what accessories to buy. I wanted to explore the meaning.

“The discussion I had with my friend [who had asked me why I wanted to look “dykey”] made me start thinking about the Lesbian Look. What the Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear. And why. I knew we look different from straight women. Is it a clothing style? A hair style? The movement Lesbians that I know, the community that shows up at conferences, women’s dances etc. all tend to dress similarly: comfortable clothes, T shirts, sturdy footwear, hair cut short, tied back, or loose au naturel. Women wear put-together suits, and blazers are always popular. But many of the women that go to bars (at least on weekends) wear outfits straight from Glamour magazine: platform shoes, tube tops, baubles, crimson mouths and plucked eyebrows. These clothes carry quite a different message.”

Cowrie Lesbian Feminist, Vol. 1 #3, June 1973

“The clothes I wear help me to know my own power. So does being a Lesbian. I love the way I look. I love the way other lesbians look. I’m learning to rid myself of all straight patriarchal values and build my own world. So it’s a combination of clothes and attitude that make a woman identifiable as a lesbian”

Cowrie Lesbian Feminist, Vol. 1 #3, June 1973

In 1975, along with my childhood friend Penny House, I started another magazine called DYKE: A Quarterly. The “What the Well Dressed Dyke” series continued there, but only for one issue. Our inaugural flyer for the magazine has become somewhat famous now, and exemplifies that Dyke look I had been describing in my articles. Decades later, in 2016, the flyer was featured in the book Gay Gotham, by Donald Albrecht and Stephan Vider, who curated the Gay Gotham exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

Penny House and I had read fashion magazines ever since we were young girls. We both came from upper-middle-class families in New York City, where fashion — and the fashion industry — was part of the air we breathed. We had one school chum who had moved to England and became one of the world’s first supermodels in the ’60s, and we also had other friends whose parents were photographers, fashion editors, or were featured in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the like. We thought it would be amusing to do a photoshoot of Dykes as a fashion image. Dykes — the famously “ugly” and badly dressed. We found a Lesbian photographer who had access to a fashion photography studio. Her dad owned it and she was one of his assistants.

Penny and I gathered a couple of women to join us in the shoot, including Alix Dobkin as well as Penny’s modelesque friend Val. The photographer’s girlfriend was also in the shoot. Alix and I were wearing jeans. I had just shaved my head and was wearing a bandana and a blue work shirt, the kind I’d loved since I was a “folkie” teen. Blue work shirts were emblematic of ’60s folkies, as were bandanas. Laborers’ outfits, appropriated by middle-class kids, had become trendy again within a subcategory of Dykes who had grown up as Beats and folkies. Penny, Alix, and I are wore vests. Alix and Penny’s were traditional, woolen “men’s” vests, which we used to buy at thrift stores. Mine was blue cotton with tiny white flowers on it, a kind of a vestigial hippy item. Val had on gorgeous tall leather boots with a folded-over top. Alix and I were wearing workmen’s boots and shoes, another leftie/folkie appropriation that was quite popular among Lesbians. Debbie and Penny seem to be wearing Frye boots, which were all the rage.

More than anything, though, it is our posture that says, “We’re Dykes!” Ladies just did not stand like that; hands on hips, standing squarely on two feet, balanced and ready, staring straight at the camera with no smiles. It would never be unusual to see a group of men with this body language, but a group of women? Highly unusual, and only could be read as Lesbian.

It was around this time, 1974 and 1975, that Alix Dobkin and I were contacted to do presentations at an event in California called The Lesbian History Exploration. I decided to make my series into a slide show. One of the photos I used was an image I took of Alix wearing The Future Is Female T-shirt from our friends at Labyris Books, the first women’s bookstore in New York City.

In the series, you explore what you call Lesbian “archetypes,” like the Amazons, but you also discuss certain stereotypes like “haute Dykes.” What was your research process like?

I prepared for the slideshow by taking photos of images in books of Lesbians from a particular era of Lesbian history, mostly American and British expats living in Paris — women like Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Margaret Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Clifford Barney, Sylvia Beach, Alice B. Toklas, Romaine Brooks, Janet Flanner, Renée Vivien, and more. I relied heavily on photos taken by the legendary Lesbian photographer Berenice Abbott. These women had recently earned legendary stature among my Lesbian friends and colleagues.

Then I took photos of contemporary Lesbians, mainly in New York City. I created the categories of fashion expression, “DYKE Schlepp” and “DYKE Finery,” and set about going to every event I could find at the time. For a couple of months I went to many events for Lesbians including dances, workshops, conferences, networking gatherings, concerts, and even a fashion show by Lesbian clothing designer Morgan Zale, whom I had interviewed for COWRIE. I went looking for what women were wearing, and asking permission to photograph them. In that era, there were many such events every month in New York City. I did not go to bars, mostly because the lighting would be terrible.

DYKE Schlep was, as it sounds, our everyday clothing: jeans and T-shirts, pea coats, work boots, denim overalls, sneakers, and Frye boots. Pretty much an up-cycled workman/folkie look. DYKE Finery included the outfits we wore to mostly evening events: jeans, suspenders, blazers, Frye boots, wingtip shoes, and the occasional fedora or tie. The difference between Schlepp and Finery was not huge, as I recall.

There was a section on hair. We tended to wear our hair short, sometimes the very bold shaved their heads. I did it once, just to see what it was like, and so I could document it for the slide show. I also included categories of lesbian accessories, like feminist/lesbian political buttons, which everyone wore, and the ever-present bandana/kerchief, which was tied in many different ways. As I travelled around the country, I continued to add slides and would include them in subsequent presentations around the US.

The last section of the show was about the style evolution of a few Lesbian friends, showing how their looks had changed as they went from girlhood to adulthood. I made slides from the photos in their photo albums and then photographed the women as they were at the time I was putting together the presentation. Most had gone through a period of being heterosexual, which made the whole thing both interesting and hilarious to my audiences. I think only one woman had been a Dyke her whole life, but even she had a marriage of “convenience,” which she had documented and was in the show.

In addition to my live photoshoots, I also did a number of interviews for the COWRIE series. I spent a wonderful afternoon at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with Stella Blum, who was at that time the curator of their fashion/clothing department. I also tried to interview Dietrich Felix von Bothmer, curator of Greek antiquities at the Met when I was researching Amazon clothing. He scoffed at me and told me he would not do my “homework.”

“h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y” and Otherwild took inspiration from your photograph of Alix Dobkin for their first collaborative clothing collection, which gave rise to many Lesbian-history-inspired garments. What are your thoughts on the growing availability of queer identity-proclaiming garments and their popularity? What is the biggest change that you see when you compare this context to the radical Lesbian one in which you came of age?

I don’t know why garments with slogans are popular in general. I never wear shirts with slogans, no matter how much I agree with them. I never have. I don’t enjoy being a walking billboard, and I find it odd that so many women do. The only one in my household who wears slogan shirts is the Rootstein mannequin who lives in my dining room. She likes when people stare at her — it’s her job. If I were going to wear one, I’d wear the T-shirt from Old Lesbians Organizing for Change that says, in simple block letters, “This is what an old Lesbian looks like.” It’s an inspiring message, it’s a fundraiser for a great organization, and it would be really hard to appropriate it.

However, the fact remains that these shirts are now big business. There were plenty of feminist and Lesbian T-shirts, of course, during the 1970s. Enough that DYKE: A Quarterly was planning for a theme-based issue on Lesbian Media, including T-shirts and buttons. But most of the T-shirts of that era were decorated with slogans and symbols from women’s groups, events, or places. Bars, conferences, sports teams, political groups and actions, etc. had their shirts. They were popular, and they were a great way to fundraise. T-shirts commemorated a place, an event, a group, but usually not a free-floating idea. Even the original The Future Is Female T-shirt had the name of Labyris Books on the back.

The point of buying these shirts was to support the places, the women, or events that created them. Sometimes the shirt was a medium for communicating a political action or “zap,” like the day in 1970 when a group of radical Lesbians occupied the stage at a meeting of the Second Congress to Unite Women wearing “Lavender Menace” T-shirts, protesting the exclusion of Lesbians and Lesbian issues from the feminist movement.That was a defining moment in lesbian history, made more powerful by the shirts themselves. This was not T-shirt as commodity. The action and the shirt are entangled.

T-shirts also acted as a way to signal other women. Wearing a T-shirt that said “Amazon Expedition,” for example, was a cue to let other women know that you’d been at that wonderful event, and the word “Amazon” let other women know that you were probably a Lesbian without actually broadcasting a message to everyone.

It was not hard to find T-shirts that included words like “Lesbian” or “Amazon” or “Sister” commemorating a march or an event, if you knew where to look, but you’d rarely find a T-shirt without the name of the group that made it, and date of the event. There were, of course, times when you’d see shirts that were just a slogan without a corresponding place or event. One well known photo shows a pair of women wearing shirts, one of which said “femme” and the other “butch,” but I think those shirts were homemade.

The big change came when T-shirts went from being fundraisers, cues, and memorabilia for events or groups to being commodities in themselves. In the past, the only place to buy Lesbian T-shirts, buttons, etc. was at an event, or at a woman’s bookstore. So you were supporting either an event, or a feminist venue, or both. Today, there are only a couple of women’s bookstores in existence. In the past, there were dozens and dozens.

Today, e-commerce and the huge popularity of slogan T-shirts have changed the whole ballgame. Anyone can buy a shirt without ever setting foot into a women’s bookstore or a feminist or Lesbian event. The shirts are are now just free-floating commodities. When you see someone wearing a T-shirt that says “Feminist” or “Love wins,” it does not reference a particular event, group, or even timeframe. It’s just something you bought.

Back cover dyke a quarterly 1977 photo by Irene Young
Back cover, DYKE, A Quarterly. Lesbian t shirts. photo by irene Young

DYKE A Quarterly, No. 3, pp.50 + inside back cover: ADS

 

Dyke a quarterly no 3 pp 50 and inside back cover ads DYKE A Quarterly, No. 2 p. 50 + inside back cover, ads

TEXT OF ADS in gray, indended. Commentary follows.

Living With Lesbians

Women’s Wax Works A002

An Uncommon Musical Adventure with Alix Dobkin & Friends


Livingwithlesbians Living With Lesbians was the second album from Alix Dobkin. Like her first album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, this one had two versions of a cover. This was the first. Most women found it threatening although we were really just raking apples at the farm. Pictured are left to right, Mary, Smokey, Alix, Penny House and Liza Cowan. Photo by Ginger Legato. Design by Aenjai Graphics.

This album has been blogged about a lot, mostly showing how awful, funny, wierd, it is. Worst record album cover etc. We loved it, but the people spoke and we listened. We made a new cover for the next pressing.

 

266-1 This cover sold well. Photo of Alix Dobkin and the dog Three Maple Betsey Booper (aka Saint Betsey) , photo by LIza Cowan.

Of course, there were always Dykes who loved the first cover, as well as the second. See QueerMusicHeritage

 Also Lavender Jane Loves Women

Women’s Wax Works A001

 $6 Each (includes postage) Make check payable to

Project No. 1 Preston Hollow NY 123469

 

Alix-dobkin-lavendar-jane-loves-women Lavender Jane Loves Women was Alix's groundbreaking first album. Never before in the history of the world had there been an album made entirely by women. The musicians, the engineer, even the vinyl pressers were women (although the vinyl pressing company was male owned - the only part of the whole process for which we couldn't find a woman - owned company. But the actual pressers were women. We met them. And, equally important, the album was conceived for an audience of women. Also groundbreaking.

 

For the first pressing, the abums were shipped to us in plain white sleeves. We had a work party where half a dozen women came over to our apartment and sat around the living room R-150-1490532-1223777275 rubber cementing the 12x12 printed paper of the cover art, which was a drawing by Alix. I'm sure there was lots of food, probably a joint or two passed around and lots of good laughs and hard work. Now that's a collector's item.

The second cover came a few years later. Design by LIza Cowan, photo using Mita 900-D copier and cut-out heart. Liza's hand. I don't remember why we changed the art.

 

 

Dobkin400_10 Alix released her memoir, My Red Blood, in the Spring of 2010. The last chapters chronicle the time leading up to the release of Lavender Jane Loves Women. Published by Alyson Books you can buy it from them if your local bookstore doesn't carry it. Alyson Books

 

 

 

  Limited supply available:

The Flying Lesbians

German record album

Send $6 to : Project #1

Preston Hollow, NY 12469


Logo163X200 The Flying Lesbians was a Lesbian Rock Band from Germany.

You can read about them HERE

When band members Monika Jaekel and Monica Savier came to the States, they stayed with us. Later, Alix toured Europe with them.


 WOMANSPLACE

Feminist Books and Periodicals

Booklist Available

Mail Orders

9 East 5th Street

Tempe AZ 85201

One of the many women's bookstores that peppered the landscape in the 1970's Womansplace no longer exists. Any information about it is welcome. Just drop a line in the comment box.

 

MEGAERA PRESS

A women’s press collective for 3 ½ years- formerly Mother Jones Press

‘wimmin printing for wimmin

lesbian publishing

 

design layout offset printing binding sipping

write or call for an estimate

mail to: c/o WIT Inc P.O.. Box 745, Northampton MA

 

Deliver to: 19 Hawley St. Northampton MA, Rear Building

See Elana Dykewoman, here and here

 

LONG TIME COMING

CANADIAN LESBIAN FEMINIST NEWSPAPER

BOX 128 STATION G, MONTREAL P.Q.

SUBS: $5 YR INDIVIDUALS

$10 YR INSTITUTIONS  5O c SAMPLE COPY

 

I asked asked the CLGA- Canadian Lesbian and Gay archives if they had some infromation on Long Time Coming. They had a response for me within hours. Archivist RULE! Thanks to Elizabeth Bailey at CLGA and Michelle Schwartz who supplied the following information:

From Never Going Back by Tom Warner, page 83

"A few months after its founding, some members of Montreal Gay Women began publishing Long Time Coming, the first regularly produced publication exclusively for lesbians in Canada. Long Time Coming found a receptive readership that stretched across North America. But, in testament to the times, none of the women involved allowed her real name to be published. In all, Long Time Coming produced approximately twenty issues from June 1973 until it folded in 1976."

The citation given for this is: Laura Yaros, "Long Time Coming: Long Time Gone," Amazones d'Hier: Lesbiennes d'Aujourd'hui, vol. 5, March 1988.

From Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Chronology, 1964-1975 by Don McLeod, page 130

"July, 1973. Montreal. The first issue of Long Time Coming was published by Montreal Gay Women. Edited by Jackie Manthorne, this was the first lesbian journal published in Canada. Long Time COming contained news, poetry, opinion pieces, book reviews, advertisements, and listings. It ceased publication in April-May 1976, after twenty issues."

The citation given for this:

Margaret Fulford, ed. The Canadian Women's Movement, 1960-1990: A Guide to Archival Resources/Le mouvement de femmes, 1960-199: guide de resources archivistiques (Toronto: Canadian Women's Movement Archives/ECW Press, 1992), Entry 618.

Don McLeod's book is available for free as a pdf from the University of Toronto website.

White Mare Buttons in DYKE A Quarterly 1976A You're An Amazon button by White Mare Inc


Buttons by white mare inc


For more on White Mare Buttons see HERE

Ad they will know me by my teeth elana dykewomon
ad for Riverfinger Women by Elana Dykewomon

For more on Elana Dykewomon see HERE and HERE




 

 


DYKE A Quarterly no. 3 p. 51: ADS

Dyke No 3 p 51
DYKE A  Quarterly No. 3, p. 51, ADS

Text of Ads- in gray, indented. Commentary follows.

White Mare Inc.
I Like Older Women,
3 color button, 1  ¼” diameter. Also available, Mother Nature Is a Lesbian and A You’re An Amazon. From White Mare, Box 90, Preston Hollow Y 12469. 55c each. New York residents add state and local sales tax.
 A You’re An Amazon
Mother Nature is a Lesbian.

 

Buttons by white mare inc

White Mare was the button and graphics company owned and run by me, Liza Cowan. I've written about my button company at my art blog HERE

Notice the Medusa button on the upper left. Medusa was a big theme for Lesbians. She was a Gorgon, a fierce fighting woman, who turned men to stone if they dared take a peek at her. The Medusa button shown here was drawn by cartoonist Roberta Gregory.

White Mare Buttons, direct image on Mita 900-D photocopier by Liza Cowan

 

 

 

 

 

 

They Will Know Me By My Teeth  By Elana Dykewoman

Author of Riverfinger Women

Megara Press

To be Sold and Shared With Women Only

 

 

Elana dykewoman they will know me by my teeth See Elana Dykewoman's website HERE

and Wikipedia entry HERE




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come to Womencrafts

Unique and beautiful work

Handcrafted by New England Women

Provincetown

Yhst-21813777465723_2121_11048983 Womancrafts is still in Business in Provincetown.

Here's their website.

Go see them if you are in P'Town.

 






Sistersilver is Back
Fine handmade sterling silver jewelry: Lesbian symbos, rings, bacelets, etc. Free Brochure. Lesbians only. M’lou Brubaker, Chicago

 

LadyslipperSet M'Lou is also still in business. See her website HERE

 

Ladyslipper pendant and earrings by M'Lou Brubaker

 

 

 

Interesting. Everyone on this page is still in business doing the same thing, more or less, that they were doing 35 years ago. I'm still doing graphic design, creating product and selling retail. Elana is still writing and publishing, M'Lou is still making and selling jewelry and Womancrafts is still in business. What's up with that?? I'm impressed.


DYKE A Quarterly, No. 2, Correspondents- Iowa City

DYKE A QUARTERLY No 2 p 86
DYKE A Quarterly, No. 2, p. 86, Correspondents and ads

click on image to enlarge. Edited text in grey, below:

We would like to have correspondents from communes and communities all over the country. We would like to hear about what books Dykes are reading, what movies they are going to, how they are raising their children, how they are celebrating their holidays, what arts they are involved with, what their living arrangements are. We are interested in all the varied things that happen in the every day life of a Dyke community. If you would like to be a correspondent, please write for details.

IOWA CITY

....Meanwhile, back in Iowa City, Grace & Rubies Restaurant is still alive, kicking and struggling to get out from under while the City's new mayor, a woman, instructs the human relations commission to investigate the legality of the restaurant's policy of refusing membership (and admittance) to men. The outcome of the investigation is unknown, but if it takes the commission as long to investigate Grace & Rubies as it does to investigate sex discrimination in employment claims, the restaurant will be around fo a number of years, no matter what the outcome.

     The Iowa City Women's press, a Lesbian press collective, just finished printing "Sister Heathenspinster's Almanac and Lunation Calendar" last month and is currently working on a series of skills manuals written by local Dykes on auto mechanics, carpentry and electrical wiring.

    The press collective has been around since 1972 trying to give Lesbians/women access to printing tools, whether that be to learn the skill of printing or to print material done by Lesbians/women who do not have access to commercial printing.  In addition to their press, the collective also operate a photography darkroom.

     The press can print color, black and white reverses, and reproduce photographs. In the past the press has printed cards and posters with the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective, a Lesbian calendar, a non-sexist children's book and health pamphlets for the women's health clinic in Iowa City. Other women have also used the press to print their works: The Common Woman, a woman's poetry book; and the Ain't i A Woman collective printed a pamphlet about academic women in the movement, Academic Feminists.

  Iowa city women's press flier circa 1975     At this point, the press is trying to make contacts in the Midwest and other parts of the country with women who have material to print and are looking for a press to print it. The press collective doesn't have the resources for publishing, but they are willing to work on ideas to get money and can help find distribution sources. The press can be reached by mail....

     In the entertainment world, 100 Dykes bought a block of tickets and got dressed to the tee to see Lily Tomlin perform in Iowa City. Tomlin's interview about how it was to play a heterosexual in "Nashville" brought cheers of approval from the Dyke crowd and perplexed looks from the straight audience. How nice it was to see so many Dykes have so much fun with so many straight people wondering how there ever came to be so many of us in one place.

 For more on Iowa City Dyke history go here.

 

Chicago women's graphics collective circa 1975
The Chicago Women's Graphics Collective circa 1975. source

In Celebration Of Amazons chicago women's graphics collective Almost every Lesbian household we visited in those days had at least one poster from the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective. This was a favorite of ours. Horses, Amazons and Dykes. Who could resist? Not us.

 

For more on The Chicago Women's Graphics Collective see HERE Michelle Moravec, Towards a Revolutionary Women's Culture, The Politics of Women's Culture.


 

 


DYKE A Quarterly No.1, inside back cover. Ad For Diana Press Publications

DYKE A QUARTERLY issue #1 inside back cover-pg079
DYKE A Quarterly. Issue #1, Inside Back Cover. Ad for Diana Press Publications

 

 

The new woman's survival catalog 1973 DIANA PRESS

From The New Women’s Survival Catalog: edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, 1973 Coward, McCann & Geoghagan Inc./Berkeley Publishing Corporation, New York

 

“Tucked away in the basement of a tidy Baltimore townhouse, the DIANA PRESS looks like just another commercial print shop. Inside you find the usual array of sophisticated printing equipment: to Multilith printing machines, and instant plate-maker, a strip-printer for making headlines, an IBM composer for typesetting, a plate burner for making negatives, a Xerox copier, along with beautifully self-styled drafting and layout tables. Yet there are several features that distinguish DIANA PRESS from you average print shop. First, DIANA PRESS combines successful commercial printing (they hold the printing contract for one of the nations’ largest sporting magazines) with publishing and printing of feminist and radical feminist literature. Second, DIANA PRESS is entirely owned and operated by three remarkable women: Coletta Reid, Casey Czarnik and Erma Randall.

 

The Story of DIANA PRESS goes back to January, 1972 when the press was established and incorporated by a diverse collective of working and middle class women. As Coletta explains it, the press had problems right from the outset. In the first place, the collective lacked any uniform political position. “The name, DIANA PRESS, for example, was agreed upon as a compromise between those who wanted to commemorate weatherwoman Diana Oughton and others who saw Diana as a symbol of ancient women’s culture.” Second, in choosing to operate as an open collective with women working whenever they had the time, the press functioned only haphazardly, with no clear lines of responsibility.

 

Thirdly, from its very beginning, the women worked in tandem and shared an adjoining office with “a group of leftist hippy men” who did the typesetting and paste-up while the women handled the printing. Together they put out movement work for the price of the cost of paper only – all labor was donated.

 

By October of the same year, it was apparent that the press could not continue to function in this haphazard manner and still survive as a viable enterprise. Tensions over the conflicts in the collective had already caused most of the women to leave. Realizing the necessity of the situation, the remaining women totally re-organized the operation, asked the “hippy men” to leave, and agreed to give themselves nine months to make the press self-supporting – a goal which they achieved long before their deadline. With money obtained through donations they were able to equip their shop with essential printing machinery. They divided up the print shop into departments and initiated clear lines of responsibility and a production schedule.

 

The sheer determination of Casey, Coletta and Erma – the 12 hour working day, the material sacrifices – has insured the future of DIANA PRESS. The have successfully competed for bids on commercial work, and although none of them is eager to perpetuate capitalism, it is their commercial business that pays the bills, finances them through print school, and makes the publication of women’s literature possible. Their next goal is to get a Webb press with which they will be able to print any size format, and be no mistake about it, with their determination and energy they’ll have their Webb press, and make a giant stride toward freeing women entirely from male printing establishments."

 

PS: Check out this amazing online resource: The Library of Radiant Optimism For Let's Re-make The World. You can download The New Women's Survival Catalog, just in case you don't happen have one sitting around the house like we do.