The History of the Lesbian Land Movement
by David Bianco
In 1993, near the town of Ovett, Miss., lesbian life partners Wanda and
Brenda Henson founded Camp Sister Spirit, a feminist retreat and educational
center, on a 120-acre pig farm. Camp Sister Spirit soon made national
headlines when the Hensons began to experience harassment and receive death
threats from the neighboring community. The chance of serious physical
violence became so great that Attorney General Janet Reno finally sent
federal mediators into the area. But the news reports rarely noted that the
Hensons' center was part of a peaceful feminist tradition that goes back 20
years before the founding of Camp Sister Spirit to the early 1970s and
the beginnings of the lesbian land movement.
The roots of lesbian land communities were in the countercultural "back to the
land movement" of the 1960s. Some pioneers of the lesbian land movement had
originally belonged to mixed-gender communes and had been partnered with men.
When they came out as lesbians, their interests turned to establishing safe,
collectively owned communities for women and children to live free of male
domination and violence. These separatist communities were designed to
provide an affirming, alternative living arrangement in which women could
strengthen themselves physically and emotionally and get in touch with
their creativity and spirituality.
Some of the earliest lesbian land communities were in southern Oregon, where
land was forest-covered, abundant, and cheap. At WomanShare, founded in 1974
near Grants Pass, three women formed "a home and family of lesbians,"
purchasing 23 acres on which the only useful structures were a broken-down
cabin and a chicken coop. A neighbor taught them carpentry, and the following
year the collective members constructed their first cabin, made of recycled
wood and costing only $350. Over the next few years, they opened their land
to lesbian campers and took in apprentices who learned to build more cabins.
Life at communities like WomanShare was filled with hard work and isolation.
Billie Miracle, one pioneer, remembered that in the early winters there was
"so much rain, so many days with no new faces." At Rootworks, founded at
Sunny Valley, Ore., in 1978, Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove had to edit and
typeset their feminist magazine, WomanSpirit, in a nearby town because of a
lack of electricity. As late as the 1980s, some of the communities still
had outhouses.
Throughout the 1970s, separatist communities began springing up across the
country. Outdoor women's events like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
began in mid-decade and fueled many lesbians' desire to live in women-only
communities. As one festival-goer and future commune member saw it, the music
festivals were "the first time many of us saw how powerful and rich an
all-women environment could be."
Upstate New York was another common site for lesbian land communities. In
1974, A Woman's Place was founded in the Adirondacks on the site of an
abandoned camp, Moose Mountain Lodge, which had been a popular retreat for
heterosexual families in the 1950s. "Our original dream was a woman's
utopia," Buckwheat Turner, one of the founders, later wrote. The women took
out an ad in and in lesbian newspapers and were soon welcoming campers
to their retreat. But in November 1982, AWP folded, a victim of the same
problems that had plagued other land communities.
These problems went beyond grueling work and loneliness. Consensus
decision-making was time-consuming and exhausting, yet all decisions
regarding the community had to be reached by full agreement of the members.
And conflicts were common. Should the community allow male children? How
about transsexuals? Should the group practice strict vegetarianism?
Power and money also figured prominently. Though the ideal was to share power
by rotating jobs and making all decisions jointly, women who lived on the
land the longest wielded more power and influence. Newcomers often left after
only a short time, saying they felt shut out and powerless. Members rarely
had their own money. "We each had two to five dollars a week 'allowance,'"
Joyce Cheney recalled of her years at Redbird, a land community in Vermont
from 1976 to 1979. "We all shared one car and one truck." A member of Cabbage
Lane in southern Oregon noted that, in her community, "it was politically
incorrect to have greater needs than others."
Although lesbianism was a common bond at land communities, living in a
tightly knit group of women-loving women could have a downside. Monogamy
equaled "possession," but non-monogamy in a limited circle of women could and
did lead to jealousy and arguments. At Redbird, one member ran away the first
year, charging the collective with emotional abuse. Race and class issues,
too, plagued the communities, whose members tended to be white and
college-educated. One Latina lesbian who helped start a women-of-color
community in California wryly observed that most of the other lesbian land
communities were "retreats for white women who have fled the middle class."
Some lesbian land communities were able to deal with their problems, and
several remain in existence today, though not with all their original
members. New communities, like Camp Sister Spirit and Spiral Wimmin's
Land Trust in Kentucky, continue to crop up. Lesbian Natural Resources, a
nonprofit group founded in 1991, helps keep the land movement going by
awarding grant money to those who start new communities or try to
revitalize older ones.
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