Journey to the (Women's) Center of the Juniverse

I’m nearly finished with the first draft of the chapter on feminist bookstores, but each of the six archetypal lesbian spaces the book is structured around also has some related secondary places. For bars, that might be restaurants and coffeehouses; for lesbian land (or maybe vacation resorts—oy!), that might be women’s music festivals; and for feminist bookstores, it’s women’s centers and women’s buildings. So, today, a bit about those last two locations.

By “women’s center” I mean the kind of multi-use building that started to sprout in the early ’70s. The sorts of projects found in these centers might include a library, a space to hold consciousness-raising-group meetings (many of which evolved into counseling centers), a clinic or at least a source of medical information and referrals, offices for theater groups or magazine collectives, maybe a coffeehouse or cafe, and sometimes informal classrooms. According to Daphne Spain’s book Constructive Feminism (the best source I found on the topic), by 1975 there were more than 100 women’s centers across the country. A few still remain—the Women’s Building in San Francisco, and the Cambridge Women’s Center have both been in operation since 1971—but these days, the remaining women’s centers are mostly on college campuses, which means, practically speaking, that they’re only accessible to people associated with those institutions. (¹)

So how are feminist bookstores and women’s centers related? For one thing, they oscillate on the same wavelength. Re-creating that “all female life is here” lots-of-things-under-one-roof vibe was a goal of some of the early feminist bookstores’ DNA. The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie’s report on their tour of the new feminist projects cropping up around the country, described Oakland’s Information Center Incorporate: A Woman’s Place, which was founded in 1972, as follows:

A WOMAN’S PLACE occupies a very large, very comfortable space. There are indeed “tables and chairs to sit and relax at.” Also a bulletin board that must total at least twenty by eight feet. Very little goes on in the Bay area women’s movement that is not posted here. As Alice confided to us, “A WOMAN’S PLACE is really a Women’s Center disguised as a bookstore.” Some disguise.

And, of course, some centers included bookstores: The “real” Amazon was based in the Lesbian Resource Center in the Wedge neighborhood of South Minneapolis 1973-74, and Los Angeles’ Sisterhood Bookstore, which operated between 1972 and 1999, started in the LA Women’s Building.

Women’s centers started to disappear long before the decline in bookstores and bars, and the usual cause of their demise was slightly different from the ones we’re now used to reciting. Generally speaking, the problem seemed to be that there were too many groups with different visions of how a center should operate, and they were often in different stages of development and commitment and having their shit together. It was hard to get everyone on the same page, and—prepare to be shocked—hard to raise money to keep them going. Money, as always, is key. You might well be thinking, “What do you mean, they (almost) all closed? What about the the NYC LGBT Center or the Los Angeles LGBT Center?” There are indeed queer community centers in some big cities—but that’s mostly down to funding streams around HIV/AIDS, mental-health counseling, or other medical conditions well-served in queer-friendly spaces.

Unable to privately fund a broad-based social service center, some women decided to try to serve at least one need by starting a business—and often that business was a bookstore. Daphne Spain described this cycle in Constructive Feminism:

Feminist bookstores were often an outgrowth of women’s center libraries. The libraries’ collections grew as mimeographed copies of movement articles were brought back from conferences, and through subscriptions to national newsletters like No More Fun and Games and off our backs. Eventually women’s centers sold these materials to pay the rent. An independent bookstore might follow, which would carry with it the mission to serve the women’s community.

And then they closed, too, but Sisterhood survived until 1999, which represents a lot of books and magazines and albums and flyers.

I have to admit, though, that one story really stuck with me, that of Del Whan and the Gay Women’s Service Center of Los Angeles. Daphne Spain again:

As a recovering alcoholic, Whan wanted to establish a place outside the bar scene where lesbians could gather without encountering drugs or alcohol. Toward the end of 1970 she found a storefront at 1542 Glendale Avenue in Echo Park for one hundred fifty dollars per month. On impulse, and without consulting members of the Lesbian Feminists, she rented the building. She had unwittingly committed a major feminist sin by taking a leadership role. She was accused of being “male identified,” “elitist,” and of “dividing the movement.” Remembering her expulsion, Whan wrote that it was a “deeply shaming event to be trashed by my erstwhile ‘sisters.’” She left the Lesbian Feminists, taking eighteen-year-old Virginia Hoeffding with her, and turned the empty building into the Gay Women’s Service Center. They installed a pay phone, and Whan learned later that it may have been the first time the word gay appeared in the Los Angeles telephone book

The center hosted meetings and dinners and dances and organized a contingent to march in the Christopher Street West Parade (a Pride before it was called Pride!), but Morris Knight had founded the Gay Community Services Center (now the LA LGBT Center) and wanted all the queer centers to consolidate. The GCSC started to compete directly with Whan’s labor of love, scheduling women’s events on the same nights as dinners at the Gay Women’s Service Center. In 1972, the GWSC closed and was absorbed into the gay center.

RECOMMENDATIONS: Is Succession feminist? Probably only in the sense that it shows how awful men are. It’s funny as hell, though. A billion thumbs up! (Must be paired with The Slate Money: Succession podcast, featuring all manner of star guests from the media-covering mediaverse.)

LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I talked with the world’s most productive human, Rebecca Lavoie, who has a fancy job at New Hampshire Public Radio but also makes about 35—OK, five or six, but still!—other podcasts in her “spare time.” She was delightfully open about how she gets all that done, why it’s worth it to her, and the joy of getting paid for making good podcasts people want to listen to.

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