Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism / Edition 1

by Finn Enke

Overview

In Finding the Movement, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women's engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women's activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women's shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women's bodily autonomy.

By considering the development of feminism through an analysis of public space, Enke expands and revises the historiography of second-wave feminism. She suggests that the movement was so widespread because it was built by people who did not identify themselves as feminists as well as by those who did. Her focus on claims to public space helps to explain why sexuality, lesbianism, and gender expression were so central to feminist activism. Her spatial analysis also sheds light on hierarchies within the movement. As women turned commercial, civic, and institutional spaces into sites of activism, they produced, as well as resisted, exclusionary dynamics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822340836
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2007
Series:	Radical Perspectives Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Anne Enke is Associate Professor of Women's Studies, History, and LGBT Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Read an Excerpt

Finding the Movement

Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism

---

By Anne Enke

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4062-1

---

Chapter One

"Someone or Something Made That a Women's Bar"

Claiming the Nighttime Marketplace

One January night in 1972, the historically straight, predominantly white Poodle Club bar on East Lake Street in Minneapolis refused entrance to two white women. Within two days, gay men and lesbians formed an action group, Gay Political Activists, specifically to take over the bar in protest. They entered in heterosexual pairs, but once inside, regrouped as gay and lesbian couples to occupy the dance floor. Bar management allowed them to stay, later explaining, "business was slow that night anyway." Less than a week later, the bar again denied entrance to two white women. In response, Goldflower Feminist Newsletter organized a mass picket that drew over 100 protestors on February 4. The women who had created Goldflower a mere month earlier were well practiced at this: Shirley Heyer, a self-identified "old bar dyke" tapped faithful connections she had made over years at gay bars, and younger women brought countercultural resources to what was advertised as a feminist demonstration. Far from enlightening bar managers, the feminist picket drew a hostile response: male bouncers and managers yelled, shook their fists in women's faces, and physically tore the picket signs away from women's backs and hands. The picketers left, never to return. It was worth making a statement at the bar, but the bar itself was not worth fighting for. The event was significant, however, in that straight women, lesbians, and gay men collectively sought to challenge the sexism and homophobia that organized public, commercial space.

The bar's discrimination policies made plain some of the ways that all women were excluded from conventional commercial social spaces. Poodle Club managers defensively avowed that women were always welcome there; indeed, women's patronage was critical to a business that literally capitalized on heterosexuality. At the same time, the managers openly discriminated against homosexuals, claiming that gays and lesbians disrupted the normal functioning of the bar. Though men who arrived in all-male pairs or groups were rarely denied entrance, women without male "escorts" were often turned away at the door-usually on the grounds that they were "unable to prove their age," even when they presented legal id cards. What legal ID cards actually could not prove was a woman's heterosexuality: only a man could produce that appearance. Bouncers and bar owners thus turned "unescorted" women away for failing to abide by heteronormative restrictions on women's autonomy and mobility. The protest action at the Poodle Club offers a snapshot of the influence of "bar dyke" activism on emerging feminist activism, their interdependence, and their combined impact.

Feminism found itself in part through struggles such as these. Bars acted as mainstays of public space; whether conventionally heterosexual or queer, bars organized sociality, social status, and social norms. As such, they became key sites of women's activism around public space itself, and they therefore provide windows into the emergence of publicized feminist challenge. Through the 1960s, lesbians-butches, fems, studs, ladies, gay women, and women seeking women-provided the driving force behind demands for leisure spaces in which women could openly congregate, particularly at night. Though bars were the most public meeting places that non-normative women could call "home," that space had to be won, too. Rules prohibiting "unescorted women" mandated against the visibility of lesbianism and prostitution; and virtually all bars, including gay bars, prohibited lesbian dancing and other obvious homosocial intimacy. In response, women protested straight-appearing bars for requiring escorts, and they protested gay bars for not welcoming women enough. Inadequately served by conventional venues, women also built alternative spaces for nonsexist, queer-friendly, and racially affirming commerce that supported their own emergent communities. As they did so, they became a constituency capable of making collective political demands on the public landscape.

By the early 1970s, much of this activism became explicitly associated with feminism. Some women who had long fought for bar space began to consider themselves feminists, and-as a glance through just about any feminist periodical of the early 1970s will show-many feminist-identified women began to protest women's exclusion not only from gay bars but also from straight bars, lunch grills, and other normative public accommodations. Taking inspiration not only from civil rights efforts to desegregate public space but equally from queer demands for a nonhomophobic landscape, feminist activism emerged partly in a nighttime marketplace structured around gender and race hierarchies. Feminist-identified women increasingly politicized their demands on commercial spaces: they fought to maintain and create presence in gay bars, they attempted to racially desegregate gay bars, they published feminist evaluations of bars, and they organized women's economic influence on bars. This aspect of feminist emergence is too easily overlooked, and it is altogether lost when historical analyses separate "gay liberation" from "women's liberation" or assume that feminists dismissed gay bars as vital social spaces. Feminism was not disconnected from other struggles over queer public space, but grew in part from them. It should not be surprising, then, that while some of these actors claimed the label "feminist" for their actions, others did not. This chapter takes bars and bar-like commercial spaces as a starting point. Through such spaces, women across race, class, gender expression, and sexuality changed the public landscape even as, in the process, they formed distinct homosocial communities.

Because queer bars were such contested spaces, they provide a lens to bring into view the centrality of lesbians in women's struggles for expanded access to public space during this era. My focus on bars does not romanticize historical queer bars as spaces apart, nor does my analysis describe a now-lost moment of utopian possibility. Rather, as commercial sites of sociability, queer bars provide insight into the ways that feminism inherited, transformed, and sometimes accepted the structuring systems of the built environment. For over a century, queers have claimed a presence in bars and speakeasies despite gay bashing, police raids, and arrests. Queer bars were virtually alone among licensed commercial venues to affirm women's sex/gender self-determination; as such, they fueled increasingly visible lesbian and transgender cultures. Accordingly, queer theory and gay/lesbian historiography have celebrated bars and the bold women who fought for them during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Many of these narratives rightly charge 1970s feminism with stigmatization of butch/fem expression and "role-playing." Some further suggest that feminism drove lesbian bar life underground during the 1970s. According to queer theorist Arlene Stein, the "lesbian past" consisted of a working-class sexuality that "for all intents and purposes, had disappeared from public view by the 1970s, in the face of a feminism that was middle-class and 'ladylike.'" In this popular rubric, the 1950s represents an era of accessible bars, visible lesbian erotics, and expansive gender transgression, whereas lesbian life in the 1970s seems conditioned by interiority, invisibility, and sex/gender repression. A focus on the nighttime marketplace during the 1970s, however, shows that bars proliferated rather than shrank in number, that they were an ongoing site of struggle, and that lesbian life still took place in bars and house parties peopled by self-identified butches, studs, fems, gay and passing women, lesbians, and feminists. The movement of more women into a greater variety of spaces including new lesbian bars, simultaneously expanded and decentralized bar life as a site of visible lesbian sexuality.

Bars were contested spaces precisely because they were deeply embedded in the exigencies of capital and material structures. One of the ways that women resisted the limitations of nighttime commercial spaces during the 1960s was through the creation of quasi-commercial alternatives such as dollar parties and warehouse parties. On the margins of-but not outside-the economy, such spaces partially circumvented normative race and gender hierarchies. These other spaces relied on and fed the clientele of commercial spaces; they often entailed their own systems of resource exchange; and they fostered communities with the agency necessary to alter marketplace relations. Seizing alternative venues, white women and women of color became producers of marketplaces in resistance to heteronormative control. Furthermore, these marketplaces belied the binary separation of domestic and commercial spaces and of formal and informal economies. The ways in which women intervened in the public landscape of bars during the 1960s and 1970s thus laid the groundwork for the conception of feminist spaces and feminist critiques of the social hierarchies embedded in the built environment.

In turn, analysis of contestations within the nighttime marketplace yields a historical story about the materiality of the emergence of feminist activism. Far from declining, the number of women's bars proliferated dramatically beginning in the late 1960s in all three areas under study; white and black lesbians began to own their own bars, and these bars were more publicly visible than the bars that women patronized in the 1950s and early 1960s. The activism of studs, ladies, butches, fems, and gay and passing women-including some self-identified feminists-made it far more possible, common, and less deviant for women in general to inhabit and create the nighttime marketplace independently of men. Here we see the ways that women across race, class, and gender expression productively used the marketplace to make collective claims on public space and how, in the process, they suggested the contours of feminist subjectivity.

This chapter uses select cases in each urban area to highlight different dynamics and dimensions of women's expansion of nighttime market-places. These cases do not provide a comprehensive history, but instead illuminate the variety of actions that took place and the race and class dynamics they produced. I begin with African American dollar parties and bars in Detroit during the 1960s. Black working women used bars and dollar parties together to build an alternative economy and elaborate a visible, black, queer community. Due to extreme segregation, few had any direct contact with white bars or with sites of white feminist organizing, and few identified with women's liberation. Yet they believed that the community-building work they did as black lesbians constituted "the first feminism." This sets up a framework for understanding white women's use and creation of queer commercial space in the Twin Cities. In the Twin Cities during the 1960s, the gender restrictions that bars imposed on women made bars into locations for enactments of whiteness, and they also pushed white women to illegally occupy warehouses for gender-liberating gatherings. These dual foundations led to concerted feminist claims on commercial leisure space between 1970 and 1975, as I show through a focus on the Town House bar in St. Paul. The Detroit and Twin Cities stories together lend themselves to comprehension of Chicago's multiracial Monday Night Meetings and feminist-identified organizing around gay bars between 1969 and 1975. There, as women publicized and protested bars, they contributed to the consolidation of "lesbian" and "feminist" as a white, North Side subject, despite the involvement of African American and South Side women in the expansion of the nighttime marketplace. Although localized conditions contributed to the particular feminist sensibilities developed within and around bars, some common structural conditions shaped queer commercial spaces in all three urban areas. Bars became primary locations for newly politicized enactments of social segregation; the assertion of gender, race, and class hierarchies among women; and the publication of a newly defined feminist subject.

Dollar Parties in Detroit

As scholars have noted, public spaces are structured by exclusions, and it is easy to see the ways that Detroit during the 1960s bears that out. Liquor licenses and property ownership were prohibitively expensive for most people, and women faced added economic and social barriers to opening licensed gay clubs. By law, all licensed clubs prohibited homosexual dancing, and the high cost of drinks at most gay clubs largely paid white landlords and police. Those factors contributed to the complete absence of licensed queer venues owned by African American gay women, studs, fems, bulldaggers, and sooners (local parlance for women whose gender expression confounded binary categorization). Even the most queer-friendly clubs were owned by ostensibly straight men, and their clientele consisted mostly of drag queens, gay men, and men seeking sex with men; though studs and fems patronized them in small numbers, "ladies' nights" were rare to nonexistent. However, lacking nearby queer bars, black women and men seeking gender/sex non-normative communities were far more apt to make use of ostensibly straight bars in black neighborhoods than they were to cross color lines to congregate in gay and lesbian bars in white neighborhoods. As historian Roey Thorpe has shown, racism and segregation posed significant barriers to black women's patronage of the twenty-some white lesbian bars that operated from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. Most black women who had grown up in the inner city during the 1950s stayed away from white neighborhoods into the 1970s. Queer commercial spaces maintained segregation even when white flight created massive demographic changes between 1967 and 1973: while most suburbs refused (white) lesbian bars, white women opened new (white) urban bars ever farther from Detroit's black neighborhoods. Through the 1970s, no lesbian bar in Detroit served a racially mixed clientele. In many ways, then, public and commercial spaces formally excluded black studs and fems.

Although segregation, economic limitation, sexism, and homophobia surely shaped black women's mobility in Detroit, even the most structurally marginalized groups made use of and transformed the marketplace. Studs, fems, and sooners often connected domestic and commercial arenas to build community space: they used domestic spaces as avenues into queer commercial spaces, and they used commercial spaces as avenues into queer domestic spaces. Elaborating the long-standing and highly adaptable African American practice known as house parties, black women created dollar parties-so called because that's what women paid to get in-in resistance to economic marginalization. Though they were not licensed venues, dollar parties composed a queer marketplace; they were locations through which women redistributed resources and built a queer-affirming world that did not wholly depend on access to commercial space. Doing so, studs, fems, and sooners developed community autonomy, constituted themselves as a viable market, and became a public constituency.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Finding the Movement by Anne Enke Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

About the Series ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Locating Feminist Activism 1

Part 1: Community Organizing and Commercial Space

1. “Someone or Something Made That a Women’s Bar”: Claiming the Nighttime Marketplace 25

2. “Don’t Steal It, Read It Here”: Building Community in the Marketplace 62

Part 2: Public Assertion and Civic Space

3. “Kind of Like Mecca”: Playgrounds, Players, and Women’s Movement 105

4. Out in Left Field: Feminist Movement and Civic Athletic Space 145

Part 3: Politicizing Place and Feminist Institutions

5. Finding the Limit of Women’s Autonomy: Shelters, Health Clinics, and the Practice of Property 177

6. If I Can’t Dance Shirtless, It’s Not a Revolution: Coffeehouse, Clubs, and the Construction of “All Women” 217

Conclusion: Recognizing the Subject of Feminist Activism 252

Notes 269

Bibliography 335

Index 357

Editorial Reviews

"Enke gives us an account of feminist political values as they are struggled over in action, day by day. Taken cumulatively, the record she provides in this book of the flexibility, genius, and solid achievements of the modern women's liberation movement--in all its varied forms--is simply astonishing."--Ann Snitow "Women's Review of Books"

"Enke's book confidently moves beyond any feminist need to legitimize itself and instead explores the explosion of sites of feminist activism . . . that challenged social practices and laws restricting women's use of public space, thereby producing the possibility for greater feminist organizing."--Julia Balén, "Signs"

"In places like softball fields, church basements, and dance floors, Anne Enke locates a cast of compelling characters who don't usually make it into history books. The result is a startlingly original history of second-wave feminism. Enke forces us to think freshly about the 1960s, political mobilization, and the ways that people change the world around them."--John D'Emilio, coauthor of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America

"Possibly the best book to date on the 'second wave' women's movement and certainly the most original . . . one of the best handful of studies of any social movement. I look forward to using it in my courses."--Linda Gordon, author of The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

From the Publisher

Enke’s book confidently moves beyond any feminist need to legitimize itself and instead explores the explosion of sites of feminist activism . . . that challenged social practices and laws restricting women’s use of public space, thereby producing the possibility for greater feminist organizing.

Signs - Julia Balén

Enke’s book confidently moves beyond any feminist need to legitimize itself and instead explores the explosion of sites of feminist activism . . . that challenged social practices and laws restricting women’s use of public space, thereby producing the possibility for greater feminist organizing.

Signs - Julia Balén

Enke gives us an account of feminist political values as they are struggled over in action, day by day. Taken cumulatively, the record she provides in this book of the flexibility, genius, and solid achievements of the modern women’s liberation movement—in all its varied forms—is simply astonishing.

Women's Review of Books - Ann Snitow