There’s no doubt that things are pretty terrible right now on all kinds of fronts. Roe will likely be overturned next month, after having been severely undermined over recent years, and that surely won’t be the end of the great undoing. So this is very much NOT in the spirit of “look how great things are now compared with the bad old days.” But, JFC, some things used to be really bloody awful.
Just check out the opening paragraphs of the 1973 New Women’s Survival Catalog section on restaurants:
Seldom is a woman more acutely aware of her second-class citizenship than when she goes to a restaurant “unescorted” by a man. If she does, she knows she risks being treated with condescension by the maitre d’ and/or waiters; stared and leered at by waiters and diners (male, naturally); hassled for an I.D. to prove her drinking age, even though she is thirty-three and looks it; being “joined” by uninvited males who regard any single women out by themselves as fair game; and insulted if she asks an intruder to take his unwanted attentions elsewhere. Two women together fare little better.
This is just one side of the subtle, but powerful ploys used by men to discourage women from exerting independence–on a par with street harassment and violence which is meant to remind women that the world outside the home belongs to men, especially after dark. “What is a nice girl like you doing out alone (sans male) by yourself.”
It was only when reading this a few months ago that I remembered being invited to a gentleman’s table on my first visit to the States back in 1980. It was probably the first time I’d eaten alone in a restaurant in any country—so of course I said yes, thinking that was just what people did in restaurants, certainly American restaurants. As I recall, the guy was perfectly harmless and dull. (I was a college freshman at the time, but since I was an American Studies major, we got to spend the summer at Carroll College [now Carroll University] in Waukesha, Wisconsin. This dining experience was after that, when I spent a week or so in New York at the U.S. Open. I stayed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women! Lots of short-story-prompt-level-strange facts in this parenthetical, but let’s move on!)
One problem feminist restaurants faced was around how much profit it was considered ethical to take. The handbook How to Start Your Own Business, which Ms. magazine published in 1976, advised readers that “the margin of profit should be large enough to ensure the survival of the enterprise but not so large that one becomes a guilt-ridden profiteer.” Unfortunately, it proved so difficult to accomplish the former that I’m not sure the latter was ever tested.
According to a Ph.D. dissertation I read last week (another one–they really are the best!), there were more than 250 feminist and lesbian restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses in the U.S. and Canada in the 1970s and ‘80s. Each was different, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing how many of them took great pride in what is one of the most commonly mentioned nouns in my interviews as well as in writings about all the lesbian/feminist locations I’ve researched so far: the humble bulletin board. According to a 1977 piece of student journalism from the University of Iowa’s Lynne Cherry, at Grace and Rubies of Iowa City, which opened in 1976, “Downstairs are a kitchen, two dining rooms connected by a small chamber lined with bulletin boards. On the boards hang handwritten notices for such things as a club meeting, a costume party, inter-mural flag football, and a women’s clinic.”
I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of Grace and Rubies before reading Alex Ketchum’s dissertation, but having done so, I now realize it’s probably the most famous feminist dining establishment of the era, at least outside the community.
Something this luxurious had to be brought down a peg or two, right?
In order to maintain a women-only clientele, Grace and Rubies was set up as a private club, which any woman could join by paying 50 cents. Iowa City’s mayor (a woman, several feminist periodicals noted) asked the local human rights commission to determine whether those lifetime dues were too low to qualify it as a “real” private club. (It eventually decided they weren’t.) This investigation put a strain on the owners, but that was nothing compared with the impact of a story published in 1977. When T.C. Boyle was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he became obsessed with Grace and Rubies and wrote a short story, imaginatively titled “A Women’s Restaurant.”
I read it so you don’t have to. (Please don’t. It really is gross.) The first paragraph, after an epigraph from, naturally, Moby Dick, begins:
It is a women’s restaurant. Men are not permitted. Women go there to be in the company of other women, to sit in the tasteful rooms beneath the ancient revolving fans and the cool green of spilling plants, to cross or uncross their legs as they like, to chat, sip liqueurs, eat. At the door, the first time they enter, they are asked to donate twenty-five cents and they are issued a lifetime membership card. Thus the women’s restaurant has the legal appearance of a private club, and its proprietors, Grace and Rubie, avoid running afoul of the antidiscrimination laws. A women’s restaurant. What goes on there, precisely, no man knows. I am a man. I am burning to find out.
It’s 17 pages of stalking and literal male-gaze fantasies. (The protagonist starts out trying to peep through the windows, though he eventually escalates to attempting to “penetrate” the sanctum sanctorum.) It’s homophobic and misogynist, and did I mention gross, but it is at least revealing. Of the many gross things—and, hoo boy, the story’s kicker is a doozy—one of the worst was surely the way Boyle built back stories (you’ll never guess ... they’re gross) for the “characters” called Grace and Rubie, who own and operate the restaurant.
Boyle originally published the story in the May 1977 issue of Penthouse, which at the time had a circulation of more than 4.5 million.
Grace and Rubies closed a year later.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I guess there’s a slight conflict in my recommending the May Outward podcast, since I produced it, but, man, I loved this episode, which features a fantastic interview with Hugh Ryan, author of the great new book The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison.
LISTEN TO ME: On Working Overtime, Karen Han and I helped a listener figure out how to decide which creative project to work on, and for the first time in a while I wrote a movie review … of Downton Abbey: A New Era. (A movie theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, quoted this bit from my review: “”DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA was as satisfying a filmgoing experience as I can remember” without noting that the first part of that paragraph read, “It’s all a lot of poppycock”!)
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