Land of Women: How Feminist Communes Live
"I want to organize my female commune, because talking to men makes me ill. It is not only about physical security, but also about psychological violence. Therefore, I want to communicate only with women and live only with women. "This is how Tatyana Bolotina is a feminist, lesbian, vegan and anarchist who dreams of creating a women's commune in Central Russia. Last year she announced plans to establish a female settlement in the village and organized a meeting where she sketched an approximate plan for creating a commune with several interested in the idea of the community. According to Bolotina on the VKontakte network, the project is still at the stage of finding and approving a place; Tatyana is ready to go to the village this summer.
Judging by the comments on the record of the organizational meeting that Tatiana laid out on youtube, the idea of a feminist commune seems at least strange to many. The most gentle epithet used by commentators is “diseases”, and meeting participants are advised to “choose a place as distant as possible” in order not to interfere with “normal people”. But Bolotin is not the first woman who had the idea to abandon any interaction with men. History knows many successful examples of separation: they are inspired by both the Russian activist and her peers abroad. As one woman writes in a discussion on Reddit: "I want women of us to have our own city, country or planet. No kidding."
Lesbos, Amazons and feminist sci-fi
Little is known about women's communes before the 20th century: perhaps the most vivid example of such a union is a group of Artemis fans, led by the legendary ancient Greek poetess Sappho (all this happened on the island of Lesbos). There are still some stories about progressive women from the world of art - for example, about the French writer of American origin, Natalie Barney, who was an open lesbian and stirred the foundations of the Parisian society of the 1900s. Until the twentieth century, women had few rights and opportunities for separation, but in mythology and art the theme of “the land of women” occurs frequently. You must have seen one of the latest pop cultural interpretations of this plot - the Amazon Island from Wonder Woman, a piece of land isolated from the cruel world, where proud warriors live in harmony with nature, work and train hard against the backdrop of waterfalls and rocks. possible blow from the outside.
A similar picture of a prosperous world ruled by women was portrayed in 1915 by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the cult novel "Herland". During the second wave of feminism, many works in the genre of feminist utopia appeared: for example, in the book "The Female Men" science fiction Joanna Rass describes a world in which the plague epidemic destroyed all men hundreds of years ago. In feminist utopias, women, freed from patriarchy, show extraordinary abilities in various fields, develop technologies and build a fair and humane society, in which there is no place for violence and any forms of discrimination, enter into lesbian unions or completely abandon relations, preferring a peaceful life among equal sisters.
"A slave who drives her master out of her shack, thereby determines that she is not a slave. Definition is another side of the government," Fry wrote
Something like this and imagined an ideal future Western feminists of the 1970s, who began to actively develop the theory and practice of separatism. They reasoned that the only way to truly free themselves from patriarchy is to separate from the existing political system, mass culture, get out of family relations and limit communication with both men and women who support the patriarchal structure of the world. Gender researcher Marilyn Fry defined feminist separation as "various types and forms of separation from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities that are determined by men, dominated by men and who work for the benefit of men and the maintenance of male privileges." Manifestations of separatism were considered and the rejection of the TV and reading sexist literature, and the cessation of sexual relations with men, and financial independence, and a separate housing.
Fry emphasized that separation is “initiated and maintained by the will of women,” that is, gender ghettos offered by the state or individual men — say, girls' schools — do not serve the liberation of women, but vice versa. "The slave who drives the master out of her shack, thereby determines that she is not a slave. Definition is another side of the government," Fry wrote. In the same essay, she noted that men's separation - clubs for gentlemen, sports teams, student fraternities and so on - was always considered natural, and women's associations cause a violent negative reaction (an example of such disproportionate aggression can be observed today - in the same comments to video Swamp). According to Fry, the rage of men means that the separatists are doing everything right.
"Throw away cosmetics and move to the forest"
The first organization to proclaim deliberate isolation from patriarchy is the Boston Cell 16, founded in 1968. The head of the group, Roxana Dunbar, advised women to forget about make-up, fashion, and in general the “unhealthy practice of self-expression through appearance”, change their name and learn self-defense, preferably karate. Also, the participants of “Cell 16” recommended “to separate from men only if they do not help the liberation of women,” and to refrain from romantic and friendly relations with men. Other organizations went further and said that the only sure way to escape from patriarchy is lesbianism, because heterosexual and bisexual women always risk to fall under the male influence and betray their friends for the sake of "heterosexual privileges." According to this logic, lesbian relationships are an ideal model in which women can invest to the maximum in other women, inspire and care for each other, without spending energy on men.
The growth of the separatist movement was also facilitated by the fact that in the 1960s many American women had already gained practical political experience. They painted posters and marched with them at demonstrations, called for an end to the Vietnam War, advocated for the care of the planet and the rights of LGBT people, some even managed to live in anarchist communes. However, many were disappointed: activists noted that even in the most progressive circles women remained on the sidelines, and sexism simply assumed less obvious forms, but in fact it did not disappear. According to Fry and other gender researchers, even in the fight for LGBT rights, the goals of gay and lesbian feminists did not coincide, and activist Del Martin in her program essay "If this is all there is" directly accused the LGBT community of sexism. Radfem lesbians created their own organizations, and some realized the dream of complete separation from men: they moved to communes, where access for men was closed regardless of orientation.
Documentary film "Lesbian: Parallel Revolution"
In the summer of 1971, Furies appeared in Washington - lesbian feminists who founded their own commune. Twelve young women and three children lived in it, all of them shared not only housing, but also incomes, and also personal belongings - including clothes. The Furies said that lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but a political position that all women are supposed to choose if they want to put an end to patriarchal domination. As the heroine of the documentary Lesbian: Parallel Revolution Selma Miriam explains: “For me, lesbianism was not related to sex. I believed that lesbians are primarily self-sufficient women who belong to themselves and can take care of themselves.”
Following urban communes, women's festivals and self-awareness growth groups in the early 1970s, “women's lands” began to appear in the United States — rural settlements whose residents sought to separate not only from the patriarchal society, but also from the market economy. “Women taught each other, inspired each other,” says Laurie York, who still lives with his wife in a plot bought at the time in northern California. “This is a dandelion effect. Increasing self-awareness gave seeds, and the wind blew them everywhere.”
Lesbians moved to the village, learned to grow vegetables, fruits and herbs, were engaged in manual labor and mastered traditionally male skills like car repair and construction. Separatists refused patriarchy even at the level of a language that was recognized as phallocentric: instead of the word "woman" they used "womyn", "womin" or "wimmin" - to get rid of the root "man". Kommunarki bought land or cottages in the clubhouse, lived on their own savings, funds from the sale of old housing, donations or what they managed to gain for the vegetables grown on the site. In 1976, the first non-commercial trust "women's lands" Oregon Women's Land Trust appeared in Oregon.
Survive on the "land of women"
According to estimates by The New York Times journalist, there are still about one hundred lesboseparatist communities created in the 1970s and 1980s in the USA and Canada. Most of them keep their location a secret, first of all for security reasons: many communes are in conservative states and the locals would hardly have been delighted with the neighborhood with lesbian feminists. Like thirty years ago, strict rules apply in rural communes. No men are allowed into the territory: for example, boys over ten years old are not allowed into the village of HOWL in Vermont for women of any orientation, and in the lesbian commune of Alapine in Alabama they sent a half-laughable message “Man on our land!” When she came to one of the residences daughter with a six month old son. "Men are prone to violence. With the advent of men, the alignment of forces within the group changes instantly, so I decided that I simply did not want to be with them," says Winnie Adams, a sixty-six-year-old communist. In the past, she had a husband and two daughters, but over time, Adams realized that she did not live her own life, but only fulfilled the expectations of society, and came to lesboseparatism.
Today, twenty women live in Alapine, about fifteen more own the plots and plan to move here after retirement, however, the average age of the Communal is approaching seventy, and the community faces new challenges. Older women no longer have much strength to support the household, and young lesbians are not attracted to an isolated existence in a commune, where orders have not changed for several decades. As gender researcher Jane R. Dickey notes, her students do not define their identity as strictly as supporters of lesbian separatism, and do not want to spend their entire lives separate from the rest of the LGBT community and the city. Also, the millennials do not agree with many of the beliefs of the second-wave feminists, primarily with trans-exclusiveness. Because of the controversy over whether transgender women should be allowed to a women's event, in 2015, the famous Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which had been held for nearly forty years, closed with scandal.
The first residents of the village combined traumatic experience - rape by British soldiers, after which they could not continue their former life in their native villages, as they were "dishonored"
Some formerly closed communes adapt to modern life: in order to earn and attract new people, they conduct paid activities and open doors for tourists. As the manager of Camp Sister Spirit says, “feminist utopia is great, but we would not have survived if only lesboseparatists were accepted”. Judging from the blogs and reviews of travelers, staying in a “village for women” like Sugarloaf or SuBAMUH reminds of a summer camp vacation: women live in a campsite, sing in the evening by the fire, make each other haircuts and learn needlework, cook dinner in a bowler hat, take pictures on the background nature and promise to write to each other, going home.
Women's communes outside of North America are not so numerous and tend to avoid attention rather than attract visitors, but there are exceptions. One of the most famous women’s settlements in the world is Umoja, a village in Kenya, which in 1990 founded fifteen women of the samburu people. The first residents of the village united traumatic experience - rape by British soldiers, after which they could not continue their former life in their native villages, as they were "dishonored". Later they were joined by other Kenyans who suffered from sexual and domestic violence, “female circumcision”, humiliating initiation rites, forced early marriages or simply did not want to put up with their slave position (girls of puberty and even younger than samburu “sell” married in exchange on livestock). Now there are forty-seven women and about two hundred children living in Umoja who attend a school organized by the commune. Adults bred animals and engaged in crafts - in the village are always welcome to tourists who are snapping up colorful beads and traditional outfits. The women in Umoja live very modestly, but they managed to raise money and buy out the land on which the village is located.
Separatism for beginners
Today, Roxana Dunbar, the founder of the legendary “Cell 16,” admits that her ideas about feminist escapism as a “patriarchal killer” for forty-six years have not been justified. “The communes deprived the feminist movement of energy,” says the researcher. “Those who went there to live, simply removed themselves from society and did not cause any large-scale political changes.” Dunbar-Ortiz also notes that life in the communes required savings or a passive source of income, and not all women could afford it, so the lesbian-separatist movement in the USA became elitist.
Full separation for life still seems to be the ideal solution for many radical feminists, but they also recognize that this is not an option for everyone. The author of the “radical wind” resource writes that the main thing is not physical separation, although it is desirable, but the separatist consciousness is “readiness to move forward, adhering to the principles of radical feminism, deep empathy towards women and rejection of male domination”. "I agree that most of us, if not all, cannot get rid of men in everyday life. Most women are forced to interact and work with men - often the only possible employment option available to us," says Witchwind . She believes that women should first of all strive for awareness and struggle with manifestations of the patriarchal consciousness in themselves, and literally separate from men only in those areas where this is possible without harming themselves.
Even women who have never heard of or actively accept feminism do it intuitively: it’s easy to imagine a company of Russian women who gathered to "sit without men" and discuss their experiences
Marilyn Fry also wrote that "most feminists, and perhaps all of them, practice some form of separation from men and male domination institutions." Surely you do it too, even if you do not consider yourself a radical feminist: for example, do not add unfamiliar men to your friends in social networks or hold parties only for girls. Even women who have never heard of feminism or are not actively accepting it intuitively do this: it is easy to imagine a company of Russian women who have gathered to "sit without men" and discuss feelings. Women's spaces, clubs, meetings and other events are based on the principle of separation, where participants can learn, share experiences, support each other emotionally or simply relax without men - this can be a feminist film club, and courses for female writers, and a hotel or resort designed only for women. Such spaces exist in Russia: for example, the country estate "Zaleskaya" near Moscow reminds of Western feminist campgrounds like Sugarloaf - nature, master classes, ascetic life in dog houses and the atmosphere of a sisterhood. The founders of the project emphasize that "the proposals are primarily focused on the needs of women" and "profits remain in the hands of women."
Radical feminist Anna Zhark believes that there are opportunities for complete separation from men in Russia, but still the most accessible form is partial: many women have the opportunity to support themselves and share the house only with women, for example, to find a partner for a Boston marriage or lesbian relationship. "I am personally partially separated myself. My separation is that I have stopped social ties with men, that is, I do not live with a man in the same house, do not communicate with male relatives, do not maintain friendship with men, and the rest of me так или иначе приходится взаимодействовать с мужчинами, но это чисто деловые контакты, связанные с работой", - говорит Жарк.
"Открываешь новости - и сразу возникает мысль, что живёшь в социальной антиутопии: список запрещённых для женщин профессий хотят расширить, предлагают, чтобы женщины для аборта были обязаны получить разрешение в церкви, и так далее. Организация и обустройство коммуны - это большое, трудное дело, на него нужно много ресурсов. And in Russia, for many women, all personal and economic resources go away just to survive. But if someone succeeds, I consider the possibility of joining for myself, ”says Viktoria Skibina, who was interested in the idea of Bolotina. Bolotina herself assumes that the communal workers will be able to deal with construction and the garden independently, but if necessary, work online, and the main rule of the future commune She calls the principle of non-violent communication, which warns that moving to the wilderness and abandoning comforts will be a serious challenge for city women - but the opportunity to live with like-minded women is worth it.
Photo: Wikipedia, Lesbiana: A Parallel Revolution, Umoja: The Village Where Men Are Forbidden
