| "A feminist news journal." | |
 The first issue of BMR (1973) | |
| Format | monthly print newspaper |
|---|---|
| Founded | October 1972 |
| Language | English |
| Ceased publication | April 1984 |
| Headquarters | Denver, Colorado |
| City | Denver, Colorado |
| ISSN | 0277-7533 |
| OCLC number | 23201144 |
Big Mama Rag was a radical feminist collective alternative newspaper published monthly from Denver, Colorado, between 1972 and 1984.
Big Mama Rag was developed by a collective of feminists that recognized issues with traditional media outlets. The newspaper published eleven issues per year. [1]
Vicki Piotter, Peg Rapp, and Kay Young opened Women to Women Feminist Book Center in Denver in 1974, where many of the young feminists collected. During this time, Piotter was involved with Big Mama Rag. [2] Other members included Chocolate Waters, Jackie St. Joan, [3] Jane Severance, [4] and Kathleen Riley. [1]
Big Mama Rag was part of the Liberation News Service. [5]
One of the original funders of the newspaper was Denver's Aton Foundation. Big Mama Rag requested additional funds from the Denver Sustaining Fund, but was rejected. [6] The original collective were paid by an association of methodist women, but the grant eventually ran out. [1]
The original founders formed a "core group," which was open to anyone willing to meet twice a week and commit to the work. Most staffers were volunteers, with one paid staff member who had administrative responsibilities. They changed the name from "core group" to "collective" in order to remove the hierarchy associated with the term. [7]
In 1975, the BMR offices were vandalized. This compounded the newspaper's financial troubles. [7] They saw this as a "deliberate political attack," where advertising and mailing lists, files and equipment were stolen or destroyed. [1]
As of 1980, BMR distributed about 2700 copies per month, and 2100 were free. [1]
Big Mama Rag published news items related to feminist and women's liberation topics, including reproductive rights and abortion, civil rights, lesbianism, and legislation. They included film and culture reviews as well. [5]
According to spokesperson Carol Lease, "The purposes of the paper have been defined in a broad context as the communication of news, ideas, to other women, and in a specific context as proving a way for women to get involved in a real way of working to change and enrich their lives." [7]
BMR recognized the hostile environment that mass media created for women's issues, lesbianism, and feminism, and they often published rebuttals to larger publications that addressed these issues insufficiently. [7]
In 1976, staffers attended the Women in Print conference in Omaha, Nebraska. After hearing the needs from women's book publishers, BMR changed their book review process to only include women-owned presses. [7]
They shared extensive coverage about violence against women and pornography. They promoted stories of women who experienced violence and were ignored by mainstream media outlets. They included women in the US as well as international stories, eventually recognizing the inequities suffered by minority women. [7] In 1982, the newspaper and collective received criticism for being an all-white group, and the newspaper was seen as a white middle-class paper. Their issues attempted to address the problem with articles and special issues that named racist structures and highlighted women of color. [1] They shared stories from the National Alliance of Black Feminists, focusing on Black women who were missing from mass media. They reported on the 1971 First National Chicana Conference. [7]
In 1973, BMR applied for federal exempt tax status from the IRS. They were granted nonprofit status in Colorado, but not nationally. The IRS denied their application because the newspaper had political and legislative content and because "its articles promoted lesbianism." [1] The collective saw the organization as an educational one, but the IRS did not agree.
In 1980, a circuit court of appeals sided with them, but it was too late to save the financial outlook for the paper. [8]
In the early 1980s, the collective was encumbered by infighting and ideological rigidity. [3] Finances became more difficult in the 1980s. [1]
The newspaper shut down in 1984 due to financial and production issues. [1]
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.
Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.
Feminist separatism is the theory that feminist opposition to patriarchy can be achieved through women's separation from men. Much of the theorizing is based in lesbian feminism.
Black feminism, also known as Afro-feminism chiefly outside the United States, is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism also acknowledges the additional marginalization faced by black women due to their social identity.
Political lesbianism is a phenomenon within feminism, primarily second-wave feminism and radical feminism; it includes, but is not limited to, lesbian separatism. Political lesbianism asserts that sexual orientation is a political and feminist choice, and advocates lesbianism as a positive alternative to heterosexuality for women as part of the struggle against sexism.
Chicana feminism is a sociopolitical movement, theory, and praxis that scrutinizes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersections impacting Chicanas and the Chicana/o community in the United States. Chicana feminism empowers women to challenge institutionalized social norms and regards anyone a feminist who fights for the end of women's oppression in the community.
Off Our Backs was an American radical feminist periodical that ran from 1970 to 2008, making it one of the longest-running feminist periodicals in the United States. Marilyn Salzman-Webb and Marlene Wicks were among Off Our Backs original founders, creating the periodical in Washington, D.C. as a response to what many felt was an underrepresentation of the women’s liberation movement in mainstream media. It was a self-sustaining periodical edited and published by a collective of women consisting mainly of volunteers who practiced consensus decision-making. Reporting on feminism related topics, the periodical transitioned from a monthly to a bi-monthlynewspaper, and ultimately to a quarterly magazine before financial difficulties led to its termination in 2008.
The Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) was an American feminist organization founded in 1969 at a conference in Palatine, Illinois.
The feminist sex wars, also known as the lesbian sex wars, sex wars or porn wars, are terms used to refer to collective debates amongst feminists regarding a number of issues broadly relating to sexuality and sexual activity. Differences of opinion on matters of sexuality deeply polarized the feminist movement, particularly leading feminist thinkers, in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continue to influence debate amongst feminists to this day.
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is the Bernard Brommel Distinguished Research Professor and Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
The Furies Collective was a short-lived commune of twelve young lesbian separatists in Washington, D.C., in 1971 and 1972. They viewed lesbianism as more political than sexual, and declared heterosexual women to be an obstacle to the world revolution they sought. Their theories are still acknowledged among feminist groups.
The Combahee River Collective (CRC) ( kəm-BEE) was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston, Massachusetts from 1974 to 1980. The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and more specifically as Black lesbians. Racism was present in the mainstream feminist movement, while Delaney and Manditch-Prottas argue that much of the Civil Rights Movement had a sexist and homophobic reputation.
Feminist views on sexuality widely vary. Many feminists, particularly radical feminists, are highly critical of what they see as sexual objectification and sexual exploitation in the media and society. Radical feminists are often opposed to the sex industry, including opposition to prostitution and pornography. Other feminists define themselves as sex-positive feminists and believe that a wide variety of expressions of female sexuality can be empowering to women when they are freely chosen. Some feminists support efforts to reform the sex industry to become less sexist, such as the feminist pornography movement.
The personal is political, also termed The private is political, is a political argument used as a rallying slogan of student movement and second-wave feminism from the late 1960s. In the context of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it was a challenge to the nuclear family and family values. The phrase was popularized by the publication of a 1969 essay by feminist Carol Hanisch under the title "The Personal Is Political" in 1970, and has been repeatedly described as a defining characterization of second-wave feminism, radical feminism, women's studies, or feminism in general. It has also been used by some women artists as the underlying philosophy for their art practice.
Fag Rag was an American gay men's newspaper, published from 1971 until circa 1987, with issue #44 being the last known edition. The publishers were the Boston-based Fag Rag Collective, which consisted of radical writers, artists and activists. Notable members were Larry Martin, Charley Shively, Michael Bronski, Thom Nickels, and John Mitzel. In its early years the subscription list was between 400 and 500, with an additional 4,500 copies sold on newsstands and bookstores or given away.
Feminist businesses are companies established by activists involved in the feminist movement. Examples include feminist bookstores, feminist credit unions, feminist presses, feminist mail-order catalogs, and feminist restaurants. These businesses flourished as part of the second and third-waves of feminism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Feminist entrepreneurs established organizations such as the Feminist Economic Alliance to advance their cause. Feminist entrepreneurs sought three primary goals: to disseminate their ideology through their businesses, to create public spaces for women and feminists, and to create jobs for women so that they did not have to depend on men financially. While they still exist today, the number of some feminist businesses, particularly women's bookstores, has declined precipitously since 2000.
The Women's liberation movement in North America was part of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and through the 1980s. Derived from the civil rights movement, student movement and anti-war movements, the Women's Liberation Movement took rhetoric from the civil rights idea of liberating victims of discrimination from oppression. They were not interested in reforming existing social structures, but instead were focused on changing the perceptions of women's place in society and the family and women's autonomy. Rejecting hierarchical structure, most groups which formed operated as collectives where all women could participate equally. Typically, groups associated with the Women's Liberation Movement held consciousness-raising meetings where women could voice their concerns and experiences, learning to politicize their issues. To members of the WLM rejecting sexism was the most important objective in eliminating women's status as second-class citizens.
Lavender Woman was a lesbian periodical produced in Chicago, Illinois, from 1971 to 1976. The name Lavender Woman comes from the color lavender's prominence as a representation of homosexuality, starting in the 1950s and 1960s. It is believed that the color became a symbol due to it being a product of mixing baby blue and pink. Lavender truly hit the spotlight as a symbol of homosexuality empowerment in 1969 when lavender sashes and armbands were distributed during a "gay power" march in New York.