Martha Shelley | |
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| Born | Martha Altman December 27, 1943 Brooklyn, New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Activist, writer, poet |
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Martha Shelley (born December 27, 1943) is an American activist, writer, and poet best known for her involvement in lesbian feminist activism. [1]
Martha Altman was born on December 27, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, to parents of Russian-Polish Jewish descent. [2] In 1960, she attended her first women's judo classes in New York City, trying to meet lesbian women. Two years later, at age 19, she moved out of her parents' home to a hotel and went to lesbian bars, where she "was miserable". She did not find herself fitting in to the roles of "butch" or "femme", common lesbian gender roles during this period. [3]
During this period, she was exposed to Betty Friedan's famous work, The Feminine Mystique , a text which inspired many feminists. She was also involved in a group based on the work of Harry Stack Sullivan which led to her first Anti-Vietnam War movement protest.[ citation needed ]
In 1965, she graduated from City College. In November 1967 she went to her first meeting of the New York City chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), [4] of which she later became president, despite her feelings of resistance to events like the "Annual Reminder" held by the organization. [5]
Due to FBI surveillance, members of the DOB were encouraged to take aliases, and Altman took Shelley as a surname. [3] While working as a secretary in the office of fundraising for Barnard College, she joined the Student Homophile League [6] and worked with bisexual activist Stephen Donaldson, who she was also dating at the time. Shelley has described the affair as causing a scandal, stating, "We used to walk into these meetings arm in arm... because the two of us were so blatant and out there in public being pro gay, they certainly couldn't afford to throw us out." [7] [8]
In approximately 1969, the first major essay of Shelley's appears in the newsletter Liberation News Service : "Stepin' Fetchit Woman". [9] This same essay later appeared in other publications under alternate titles including "Women of Lesbos" and "Notes of a Radical Lesbian"; it was called "Notes of a Radical Lesbian" in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement . [10] Shelley states that she did not choose the title under which it first appeared. [11]
In 2023, she published a memoir, We Set the Night on Fire: Igniting the Gay Revolution. [12]
While in a leadership role with the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Shelley sometimes provided tours to women who were in New York City to learn about how to make their own chapter of the organization. While giving one of these tours to women from Boston the night of the Stonewall riots, Shelley and her visitors walked past the beginnings of the riots outside of the Stonewall Inn. Shelley dismissed them as anti-war protests initially, but was later informed about the actual cause. [13] Recognizing the significance of the event and being politically aware, [14] Shelley proposed a protest march and, as a result, DOB and Mattachine sponsored a demonstration. [15] With time, it became clear to those involved that Shelley and others desired a new organization to better serve their political goals; she was one of the twenty or so women and men who formed the Gay Liberation Front after Stonewall [16] and was outspoken in many of their confrontations. [17] Over time, the Gay Liberation Front's name was used in similar organizations but without any inherent direct connection to Shelley or other organizers in New York City at this time.
Shelley also wrote for Come Out! , the New York City Gay Liberation Front's newsletter, and helped get the issues printed. [18] [19] The newsletter published essays, reports, art, and poetry of submitters and members of the organization. It ran, however inconsistently, for three years. Shelley’s work appears in all eight issues of the newsletter, with a variety of genres, including essays on the movements she was participating in, reports on the Gay Liberation Front in other cities and related organizations in New York City, and some of her poetry. Many of her essays, including “More Radical Than Thou” and “Subversion in the Women’s Movement - What is to be Done?” involve critiquing the competitive and cutthroat nature of the women’s movement, gay liberation movement, and other adjacent movements. Come Out! is one of the places in which Shelley was first published, providing insight into her developing political ideology as well as the events around her.
The Gay Liberation Front allied itself with other movements going on at the time, including black liberation and women's liberation. For some, this unity was not desirable, and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) formed as a splinter group from GLF, and sought to focus more exclusively on gay rights. [19] In addition to GAA, members of GLF also formed subgroups—cells—with different goals and purposes. One of the groups that formed primarily out of GLF women was Lavender Menace, named after the comment made by Betty Friedan (then president of NOW) regarding lesbians as a "lavender menace" in the feminist movement. Lavender Menace was later renamed Radicalesbians.
In 1970, Lavender Menace, later Radicalesbians, organized the Lavender Menace zap of the Second Congress to Unite Women. [20] Shelley played an instrumental role in the zap itself, and some have claimed she assisted in the writing of the Radicalesbians manifesto, "The Woman-Identified Woman", which introduced "women-identified" and "male-identified" terminology to the lesbian feminist discourse community. Later that same year, Shelley wrote "Subversion in the Women's Movement", which was published in both Come Out! and in off our backs , a feminist publication.
Beginning in 1972, Shelley produced the radio show Lesbian Nation on New York's WBAI radio station. [21] The Library of Congress claims Lesbian Nation to be, most likely, the first lesbian radio show. [22]
She contributed the pieces "Notes of a Radical Lesbian" and "Terror" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement , edited by Robin Morgan. [23]
After moving to Oakland, California in October 1974, she was involved with the Women's Press Collective where she worked with Judy Grahn to produce Crossing the DMZ, In Other Words, Lesbians Speak Out and other books. Her poetry has appeared in Ms. magazine, Sunbury, The Bright Medusa, We Become New and other periodicals. Shelley appeared in the 2010 documentary Stonewall Uprising , an episode of the American Experience series. [24]
Despite being involved with lesbian feminism, Shelley does not describe herself as a lesbian separatist: though she liked the idea of lesbian-only spaces, she has said that the splitting of gay liberation into splinter groups weakened the movement as a whole. She also was allied to many other left-wing causes of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the pro-choice movement, and civil rights groups such as the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and has described herself as a socialist. [2] Shelley was also a strong critic of the prevailing psychiatric views of homosexuality in the 1960s and argued that the stigmatization of homosexuality as a mental illness was a major contributing factor to psychological issues within the gay and lesbian community. [25]
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The Daughters of Bilitis, also called the DOB or the Daughters, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States. The organization, formed in San Francisco in 1955, was initially conceived as a secret social club, an alternative to lesbian bars, which were subject to raids and police harassment.
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.
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the name of several gay liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots. Similar organizations also formed in the UK, Australia and Canada. The GLF provided a voice for the newly-out and newly radicalized gay community, and a meeting place for a number of activists who would go on to form other groups, such as the Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Youth New York, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in the US. In the UK and Canada, activists also developed a platform for gay liberation and demonstrated for gay rights. Activists from both the US and UK groups would later go on to found or be active in groups including ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Stonewall.
Rita Mae Brown is an American feminist writer, best known for her coming-of-age autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. Brown was active in a number of civil rights campaigns and criticized the marginalization of lesbians within feminist groups. Brown received the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement at the Lambda Literary Awards in 2015.
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement is a 1970 anthology of feminist writings edited by Robin Morgan, a feminist poet and founding member of New York Radical Women. It is one of the first widely available anthologies of second-wave feminism. It is both a consciousness-raising analysis and a call-to-action. Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (1984) is the follow-up to Sisterhood Is Powerful. After Sisterhood Is Global came its follow-up, Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (2003).
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.
The gay liberation movement was a social and political movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s in the Western world, that urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.
Karla Jay is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, where she taught English and directed the women's and gender studies program between 1974 and 2009. A pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies, she is widely published.
Lavender Menace was an informal group of lesbian radical feminists formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and their issues from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970. Members included Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo, and were mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). They later became the Radicalesbians.
Grace Atkinson, better known as Ti-Grace Atkinson, is an American radical feminist activist, writer and philosopher. She was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and presided over the New York chapter in from 1967-68, though she quickly grew disillusioned with the group. She left to form The Feminists, which she left a few years later due to internal disputes. Atkinson was a member of the Daughters of Bilitis and an advocate for political lesbianism. Atkinson has been largely inactive since the 1970s, but resurfaced in 2013 to co-author an open statement expressing radical feminists' concerns about what they perceived as the silencing of discussion around "the currently fashionable concept of gender."
"The Woman-Identified Woman" was a ten-paragraph manifesto, written by the Radicalesbians in 1970. It was first distributed during the Lavender Menace protest at the Second Congress to Unite Women, hosted by the National Organization for Women (NOW) on May 1, 1970, in New York City in response to the lack of lesbian representation at the congress. It is now considered a turning point in the history of radical feminism and one of the founding documents of lesbian feminism redefining the term "lesbian" as a political identity as well as a sexual one.
The sexual revolution in the 1960s United States was a social and cultural movement that resulted in liberalized attitudes toward sex and morality. In the 1960s, social norms were changing as sex became more widely discussed in society. Erotic media, such as films, magazines, and books, became more popular and gained widespread attention across the country. These changes reveal that sex was entering the public domain, and sex rates, especially among young people, could no longer be ignored.
Radical lesbianism is a lesbian movement that challenges the status quo of heterosexuality and mainstream feminism. It arose in part because mainstream feminism did not actively include or fight for lesbian rights. The movement was started by lesbian feminist groups in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. A Canadian movement followed in the 1970s, which added momentum. As it continued to gain popularity, radical lesbianism spread throughout Canada, the United States, and France. The French-based movement, Front des Lesbiennes Radicales, or FLR, organized in 1981 under the name Front des Lesbiennes Radicales. Other movements, such as Radicalesbians, have also stemmed off of the larger radical lesbianism movement. In addition to being associated with social movements, radical lesbianism also offers its own ideology, similar to how feminism functions in both capacities.
"Radicalesbians" were several lesbian-feminist organizations founded in the post-Stonewall period of gay activism. The first, most well-known of these groups was founded in New York City, and was short-lived, though their impact was not: the manifesto the group distributed during their protest, titled "The Woman-Identified Woman," came to be known as one of the foundational documents of lesbian-feminism.
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.
Ernestine Eckstein was an African-American woman who helped steer the United States Lesbian and Gay rights movement during the 1960s. She was a leader in the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Her influence helped the DOB move away from negotiating with medical professionals and towards tactics of public demonstrations. Her understanding of, and work in, the Civil Rights Movement lent valuable experience on public protest to the lesbian and gay movement. Eckstein worked among activists such as Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Barbara Gittings, Franklin Kameny, and Randy Wicker. In the 1970s she became involved in the black feminist movement, in particular the organization Black Women Organized for Action (BWOA).
Barbara Joan Love was an American feminist writer and the editor of Feminists who Changed America, 1963–1975. With the National Organization for Women, Love organized and participated in demonstrations, and she also worked within the organization to improve its acceptance of lesbian feminists. She helped to found consciousness-raising groups for lesbian feminists and was active in the gay liberation movement.
Ellen Shumsky is a lesbian feminist activist, photographer, psychoanalytic teacher, psychotherapist, supervisor, and writer.
Dolores Bargowski (1943–2008) was an American feminist and lesbian activist active in the early years of second-wave feminism.
Come Out! was an American LGBT newspaper that ran from 1969 to 1972. It was published by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a gay liberation group established in New York City in 1969, immediately following the Stonewall riots. The first issue came out on November 14, 1969, it sold for 35 cents, and 50 cents for outside of New York City. Its run only lasted for eight issues. Its tagline for the first paper was: "A Newspaper By And For The Gay Community".
