Sonia Johnson. Mary Daly.
Photos by Con Buckley
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By Micki Leventhal
Four days in sun-drenched Santa Fe. Gawking at spectacular art in the Canyon Road galleries, feasting on spicy southwestern cuisine, surviving a six-mile wilderness hike in the mountains, spending quality time with daughter Jennifer and her partner William and bonding with our grandpuppy Lola.
So far so good. Tuesday at 7 a.m., we pack up the car and I spend the morning at Body, sweating, panting and thoroughly enjoying my first Nia class and then stretching and aligning during an awesome yoga class. I swing back by the beautiful Casita we've been renting [ an elegant New Mexico version of a housekeeping cottage ] , pick up Con who's been reading on the patio and we're off to Ojo Caliente, about an hour north of Santa Fe.
As a town, Ojo Caliente is barely a speck on the map—even by standards of the great southwest. Its claim to fame is the mineral springs, which are owned and very nicely operated by a private spa concern. What's also in Ojo Caliente, just one-quarter mile from the spa ( where you can pay $16 for a day pass with in/out privileges ) is Casa Feminista ( CF ) , a womyn-only bed and breakfast owned and operated by Sonia Johnson and her partner, Jade DeForest.
We've booked into CF's Barbara Jordan suite, choosing to really treat ourselves with a kitchen and sitting room instead of the more economical choices available in the Cowgirl, the Audre Lorde or the Margaret Meade. Because we have had some experience staying in lesbian B&Bs and because the Jordan costs $79 per night for the two of us, we are merely hoping for a clean and quiet space for our three days and nights of exploring and soaking before heading back to Santa Fe for the Feminist Hullaballoo.
We are more than pleasantly surprised by the accommodations. Sonia and Jade bought the property, which includes a main house ( built in the 1700s ) and a 'long house,' in 2004 and have done most of the earth-friendly restoration and renovation themselves. Everything is stunning. Love, care and vision went into this place—exquisite ceramic tile, colorful yet calming paint on the walls, comfortable bed, plush towels, organic coffee in the fully stocked kitchen.
And the warm welcome from the women is wonderful. We meet Jade who greets us like old friends; Sonia is off buying supplies. Jade tells us they are fully booked for the days leading up to the Feminist Hullaballoo. So many women wanted to come and stay at the Casa, they actually had to turn some away. We meet Joy from North Carolina. She is part of the Whisper RCG ( Re-formed Congregation of the Goddess ) Circle and will be part of the opening and closing rituals at the Hullaballoo. Sonia arrives and is effervescent, with hugs all around. I had had no idea what to expect. Her reputation certainly precedes her and she is, after all, a rock star within a special firmament. I did not expect this tiny, sweet, gentle woman.
What I really didn't expect to see at Casa Feminista are MEN ON THE LAND! Yes, there are men—with sweat, and body hair and ( I can only guess ) penises—right there, working each day, installing a brick courtyard and politely greeting the women, wimmin and womyn who come by and respond politely.
Well, it seems as if we have indeed mellowed.
Over the next couple of blazing bright desert days we come and go with trips to the spa, to Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch and to Taos. We also meet Pam, who lives nearby; Braden, who joined the community a few months ago and lives at CF; and Connie Rose, a former P.E. teacher and current graphic designer from Buffalo, N.Y., who met Sonia and Jade about four years ago in Arizona and who came to live at Casa Feminista in 2006. Connie helps manage the property, designed the website for the Hullaballoo and is part of the event committee.
Our county idyll must come to an end. It's Friday and time to drive back to Santa Fe and the Feminist Hullaballoo: Wild Sisters Reunite ( FH ) . We rendezvous with Daughter for lunch at Body Organic Café, stop by the New Mexico School for the Deaf to register for the FH that will begin that evening, and then check into the Santa Fe Sage Inn, a clean, friendly and conveniently located motel swarming with lesbians and a sprinkling of other summer touristas.
There are about 230 women who have come together to 'end our isolation and create a bond so strong that nothing can shatter it again…to remember that we're alive at this perilous and momentous time to raise our limitless female power together to save the planet and all beneficent life….to fulfill our cosmic purpose and destiny…and to have a hullaballotta fun' ( www.feministhullaballoo.com ) . The venue could have accommodated twice that, but it's a nice-sized crowd, allowing for some actual conversations and connections.
There are no airfare bargains to Santa Fe and we all know about the price of gas. Most of the attendees live in the Southwest, California and the Pacific Northwest, although some have come from as far away as New England. There are even six attendees from Australia. Many are back-to-the-landers. There is a nice cross section of working-class and middle-class women, artists, academics, current or former professionals, and just plain wage slaves. Although there's a sprinkling of younger women, we are overwhelmingly 45+, with the largest single age group certainly over 60.
There are a few women's studies graduate students, including Sarah Lawrence's Caroline Bitter, who is doing her master's thesis on Sonia Johnson. Bitter, like Johnson, grew up Mormon and so has a special connection with and insight into some of Sonia's experiences and ideas. I sit in while Bitter is interviewing Johnson and witness, for the first time, Johnson's rage against the patriarchy as she talks about foot binding, female circumcision and other historic and current brutalities against women. Bitter and I spend some time chatting. I am very interested in getting her take on the 'old school' separatist perspective of foremothers such as Johnson and Daly. As a 29-year-old grad student, she is steeped in the current mode of gender queer and questioning. She asserts that she must remain academically aloof while researching her thesis, but that, personally, she lives her life in a more inclusive and accepting manner than her thesis subject would embrace.
Of the thirtysomething women, 36-year-old Jodi JewDyke from Vancouver explains that she simply relates to the philosophy and politics of second-wave feminism and that her 'friends are mostly over 50.'
In addition to being mostly older women, we are also overwhelmingly white, with probably more presenters of color than attendees of color. Of course, to be honest, if this is a reunion of the Sister of the Lesbian Separatist movement, that was an overwhelmingly white group.
Ruthie Berman and Connie Kurtz serve as emcees for the FH. This couple—who met as 1960s Jewish housewives in Brooklyn and, 14 years later, left their husbands for each other—was an inspiration. Kurtz is the comedian of the pair—an elderly, lesbian Roseanne, providing insightful social satire while proudly strutting her working-class New York Jewish style. Berman, a retired schoolteacher who won the landmark partner benefits case against the New York City Schools in 1988, provides a calmer balance to Kurtz's delightful brass. They keep the event on schedule all weekend, improvising through the occasional technical glitch.
Sonia Johnson is first up on the program and she speaks not, as I feared she might, about hating men, but about loving women. This energy will mostly sustain through the event. There is very little talk about men at all; I can probably count on one hand—well, okay, maybe on six hands—the number of times presenters say 'patriarchy.'
There is still, to be sure, the assertion that women, simply by virtue of having the double-X chromosome, are essentially kinder, gentler, more wise, less violent and indeed superior to the XY variety of the species. 'The patriarchy [ there's one ] bases its power on control, but control is not power,' Johnson spins. 'Control is always negative and power is always positive, always female. The sole source of power in the universe is female. The sun, the stars, the moon the planets, this planet and all planets are female. Femaleness is life, is love, is limitless. But we have forgotten our power and that women can do anything.'
How do we begin to feel our power again? We must feel it in our bodies. Drum. Laugh. Make noise. She talks about how we must raise our power to save the earth. Mother Earth is depending on us. She speaks poetically about our connection to all other life on the planet and our responsibility toward these beings and is joined on stage by Evelyn Green for a couple of songs. The themes of connectivity, of interdependency and of saving the earth weave and build through every presentation, save one, all weekend.
On Saturday these ideas, enhanced by fabulous wordplay, will be echoed and affirmed by Mary Daly, whose groundbreaking philosophical works had a huge influence on not only Johnson but on every woman present.
Johnson quotes from the late, great Monique Wittig: 'There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. … Make an effort to remember, Or failing that, invent.' I cried and shivered the first time I read Les Guerilleres and I shiver again. And I am back in the '80s and back in graduate school as I feast on Wittig and Daly and Johnson and hooks and Carolyn Merchant and a host of others and I wonder what happened to the wonder. And then I realize that many of these ideas are shared by my current communities of Buddhists and yogis and Green folk and Wiccans and spiritual seekers and dancers. Some of these communities have honored, and worshipped, the female divine and asserted the interconnectedness of all life for thousands of years, and some are just waking up. But there is hope that this meme—this propagation or diffusion of a cultural idea—will grow into an actual paradigm shift and help change the constructs of society.
Reading from her memoirs-in-progress, chatting, joking and being utterly charming, Alix Dobkin entertains the crowd with story and song. She talks about the 'imperative of collective joy,' and sings some old favorites and some new tunes—including an anti-war, anti-Bush song called Dangerous Times, by Chuck Brodsky. Remembering the rigidity of some separatists, I ask her later if she got any negative comments about sharing a work by a male. 'No, no one cares about that anymore,' she tells me. Whew!
During her set, Dobkin graciously welcomes a guest artist to the stage: singer Susan Abod. Abod, who grew up in Chicago, was involved in the women's music scene here in the 1970s. She had appeared at Mountain Moving Coffeehouse and was a member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band. After graduating from DePaul University with a degree in music composition, Abod toured Europe and moved to Boston to work on her career. Health problems ( multiple chemical sensitivities and related complications ) put both career and graduate school on hold. She moved to Santa Fe in 2004, is feeling much better and is working on rebuilding her music career. She is a charismatic professional with a polished jazz style, a really lovely voice and a first CD available at www.susanabod.com
NEXT WEEK: Micki Leventhal talks about what happened Saturday and Sunday.
