COLETTA REID

FURIES, DIANA PRESS

The Furies packing and distributing their newspaper. Left to right: Ginny Berson, Susan Baker, Coletta Reid, Rita Mae Brown, and Lee Schwing by Joan E. Biren, 1972.

As the lesbian feminist movement was emerging, Coletta Reid was forming her political identity by attending consciousness raising meetings, living in collective homes with other women, supporting women-owned media, and beginning to publish her own writings. Her experience illustrates how intertwined the development of feminist political thought was with everyday life during this time and how there was great potential to create, build, and distribute knowledge about liberation through a wide range of publications.

The path Coletta took is similar to that of many other women who became politically and socially engaged during the same period. Coletta worked with, among others, the Furies and their newspaper. The Furies were a Washington, D.C., based lesbian feminist collective founded in 1971, which sought to develop a radical theory of women’s liberation rooted in lesbian identity, collective living, and political self-determination. This Project has featured other members, including Ginny Berson, who also co-founded Olivia Records. In 1972, Coletta founded Diana Press, an influential imprint dedicated to amplifying women’s voices and lesbian literature. All these women carried their shared political beliefs into different forms of cultural revolution.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“I was born out in the country in Kingman, Kansas, which is a small town about 60 miles west of Wichita. So that's south central Kansas, wheat country farmers. My father had a cinderblock garage next to our house, and he worked on farm machinery. I didn't even know that there were gay people when I was growing up. I didn't even know there were lesbians until 1969, so that was quite a different world—the 1940s and 50s in rural Kansas. When I was in high school, I had a very good friend who was a butch woman, and my mother used to bug me about why we both walked with such long strides. It was really unladylike.

I was the first person in my family ever to go to college. My father had not finished high school. He had to go to work on his family farm. I got a scholarship to a church school in Enid, Oklahoma, and I spent two years there. While at that school, I met my future husband—a man from Enid—and after we married, he went to graduate school at the University of Oklahoma and I worked to put him through. I worked at the university; I was a graduate student’s wife. When he got a job teaching at a private school in Connecticut, I went back to school at the University of Connecticut. Then, when he got a job in New York City working for Science magazine, I started a PhD program at New York University.

We were very involved in anti-war efforts. We were supportive of anti-war organizations. We had a good friend who was starting an anti-war counseling service in Boston. He was a graduate student at Harvard. My husband was part of Scientists Against the War. We lived in the Lower East Side while I was at NYU, which was primarily Puerto Rican, Jewish, and hippies. We took part in various demonstrations and events. We were told about Stonewall. The next morning, after it happened, we walked down to Stonewall, stood outside, and watched what was going on.

I had a toddler, and I was pregnant, so I was not thinking about being gay, not at all. We moved to Washington, D.C., in the Dupont Circle area, to the northwest. A lot was going on in Dupont Circle at that time. There was a woman named Marilyn Saltzman Webb who started a periodical called off our backs. She contacted me and said they were starting a women's liberation newspaper. I was really interested, and I immediately started going to their office, which was just a few blocks from our house. We started exploring our own sexuality. I started working at off our backs in December of 1969, and in December of 1970, my husband and I separated, and I started the process of coming out so that, you know, things happened fast in those days.

Off our backs was the first national women's liberation newspaper. It started in Washington, D.C. Other newspapers at that time were Ain't I a Woman in Iowa City, It Ain't Me Babe in Berkeley, California, and, in the East Village in New York City, the underground newspaper called Rat, which women had taken over in early 1970. These underground papers were widely read and contributed to the movement.

We cared about every woman's issue you can think of: whether housewives should be paid, how they can be part of the economy, and all reproductive issues. We were very involved with a women's health collective in Washington, D.C. At that time, they had the pill hearings to find out if contraceptive pills would be banned, and all the people who were testifying to the Senate for the pill hearings were male doctors. No women were testifying, and so members of the women’s health collective stood up in the gallery and had banners about the pill and women and control over your own body and the ability to decide when you wanted children, etc. So we're very interested in that—in rape and domestic violence, in child care, in getting women elected to public office, in making sure that women have legal resources and that it was easy to change their names. Women were extremely active, and we felt we were part of the progressive left at the time. Women's liberation was to the left of people working in mainstream institutions, such as the women from the National Organization for Women. Although we were to the left of them, we saw the necessity of every wing of people working on women's rights.

D.C. women's liberation was probably 50 to 100 active women. We ran consciousness raising groups. They had started the first women's center. They had different people active in other areas, like the women in the health movement. The collective for off our backs was probably about a dozen of us who were really active and worked on every issue in the first year.

I attended the first women's media conference held in New York City in April of 1970. All the women's newspapers and magazines that existed at that time, from as far away as Iowa City, sent representatives to this conference to talk about women's newspapers, issues, and how to collaborate. It was at that conference that I met my first lesbian: Martha Shelley. She helped start the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. For the longest time, I thought that all lesbians were like Martha Shelley. I had no experience with lesbians, and I didn't even know what lesbian life was like.

As time went on, we became more interested in the idea of a women's commune, because we were a women's collective, but we were not a commune. We did not live together. Many of us were married, we all thought we were heterosexual, and a number of us had children, and so we decided to have an experimental commune for two weeks at Marlene Wicks’s. She was the other person who started off our backs. Her husband and her kids went away for two weeks, and in the process of living together, spending time together, smoking dope together, etc., I think we all sort of began to explore our feelings for women. That was in August of 1970.

Rita Mae Brown, Sharon Deevey, Joan E. Biren, unknown, Marilyn Webb; middle row: Helaine Harris, Judy Winsett, unknown, Jennifer Woodul; front row: Coletta Reid, Lee Schwing, and Tasha Peterson by Ginny Berson, 1971.

In January, I fell in love with a woman and began thinking about leaving my husband. He took our son and moved to the West Coast, where he joined a country commune that eventually bought land in Oregon and became a self-sufficient farming community. They lived on the land, and they became self-sufficient there. I stayed in Washington, D.C. with my daughter, and came out in January of 1971 through a consciousness-raising group that Rita Mae Brown had started.

Rita Mae had been in New York City, and she was part of the National Organization for Women. She zapped the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, because they refused to acknowledge the plight of lesbians. She decided to leave New York City and moved to Washington, D.C. In January, she started a women's consciousness raising group focused on lesbianism. About 15 or 20 of us in D.C. women's liberation became part of that consciousness raising group. Three-fourths of us ended up coming out.

I was becoming—I don't know what the right word is, maybe more alienated or feeling more isolated within off our backs, because nobody else was coming out at the same time. So I was beginning to move more and more away from off our backs—the straight women in off our backs were very threatened by lesbianism. They felt like lesbians wanted to take over and tried to make them all become lesbians, and that lesbians didn't want them to be able to keep their male children. It was a very fearful environment. In that environment, a group of us who were part of the consciousness raising group decided—this was really the vision of Rita Mae Brown—that the women's liberation movement needed the perspective of lesbians, the perspective of women who were not heterosexual, and some lesbian leadership. We formed a collective in July, and by August and September, it was fully developed. We moved from Dupont Circle, the hippie area, down to the Capitol, a gay male area. We were shifting our alliance towards seeing ourselves more as part of the gay and lesbian movement and less as part of the hippie leftist women's liberation movement, which is more centered around Dupont Circle.

We got to the point where we were starting to look at mythology, to look at names, and I think Ginny Berson came across the story of the Furies, who were famous in Greek mythology for standing up for women. It sounded as good a name as any. The early women's movement had wonderful names. People were very clever. There were many wonderful names.

We sort of coalesced as a group around Rita Mae Brown, who definitely had the vision that a lesbian collective was needed. I think she felt that we should develop a theory for women's liberation that was centered around lesbianism, and that would provide leadership to the women's movement as lesbians. She was extremely visionary. There were a dozen of us.

We saw ourselves as a communication organ of the women's liberation movement to try to increase its membership, increase the knowledge of women around the country, and share what each other was doing so that everybody could use each other's ideas. We aimed at women who were thinking about becoming lesbians or wondering what lesbians might have to say to them in the women’s liberation movement. Our idea was to create theoretical articles. It was not about journalism. I mean, every article by the Furies was taking some issue within the women’s liberation movement and talking about the lesbian perspective on that issue. Every issue would include an article about women's self-defense and strength. We would have an article on lesbians and women's history: lesbians of the past, who they were, what they did, and how they survived. We'd have an article about a lesbian view of the economy that was anti-capitalistic, and how a socialist economy could benefit women. We were trying to build a theory and communicate it to other small groups of lesbians so they could become leaders in their communities.

The Furies had trouble finding a printer. Various printers were constantly telling us—and this happened at off our backs—that we were ‘pornographic.’ We couldn’t find someone to print our newspaper. It was ridiculous. When I was at off our backs, we had printed a center fold in the newspaper that was making fun of vaginal sprays. The printer refused to print it. So we had to start going all the way from Washington, D.C., clear to Long Island to find a printer. Who would print it? They printed Rat and alternative magazines in New Jersey. There was always the problem of censorship by printing people who had printing presses. Our newspaper was a regular tabloid. It looked like the New York Post, but it had 32 pages or whatever instead of 60. We were constantly—always looking for a printer. One of the issues of the Furies we had to take to Atlanta, where women we knew could get it printed.

We communicated with the lesbians who started Ladder magazine. We communicated with women who were in the Daughters of Bilitis. We were communicating with Judy Grahn and The Women's Press Collective in San Francisco and Oakland. We were in touch with all the women's newspapers. We traveled around and talked to women in different places and states.

The Furies went on to form Diana Press, to form Olivia Records, and to form Quest: A Feminist Quarterly journal. Everybody gravitated to where their interests were, and mine were in writing. I became involved with Casey Czarnik. We started Diana Press. We named it after Diana Oughton, who died in the West Village in an accidental explosion while making a bomb with other members of the Weather Underground. We then would say it was named after Diana, the goddess who was the Roman counterpart of Artemis in Greek mythology.

We were a different generation, and we saw ourselves as part of the progressive left. We saw ourselves as anti-establishment. It was very exciting. It was great. A lot happened in a short period of time. You look at it back now, and you think, oh my goodness, that was just a year. In a year, we went through all of these different things.”