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Activism Lives

was thrilled with" our
|Vermont Supreme Court’s

decision to grant our com- .

munity equal rights.

Of course by the time this
article comes out, I’m sure the
backlash will be in full swing.
Hopefully, like good martial
artists, we’ll be able to use the
momentum of the opposition’s
insanity to our advantage.
Congratulations to all those
activists who are sticking their
necks out to face the hate head-
on so that this monumental shift
towards fairness can come
about.-

Vermont has a long history
of responding to activism. I
started thinking about the early
days of the women’s movement
in Burlington and would like to
share some of the memories
orfour community activists

"*ba‘ck in"’the" 1970s, which l’ve

collected on tape.

This was a time when the
media were not paying much
attention to us, nor did we have
the money to launch campaigns
or hire lawyers. What we
lacked in resources, we made
up in fervor. One of our earliest
grassroots organizations was
called WAR — Women Against
Rape. We were just beginning
to make the connection that
rape is not just an isolated sex-
ual crime that befalls unfortu-
nate individual women, but a
symptom of the global detenni—
nation of men to dominate all
women. Rape is about power,
not sex. It is a tool of male
oppression.

According to one lesbian I
interviewed, radical feminists,
who tended to be in the fore-
front of the movement at that
time, used “the formation of
that organization as a testing
grounds for our politics that we
were forming about patriarchy
and domination in the context
of [personal] relationships,
which is interesting if you think
about it — to form a politic
around rape.” We weren’t yet
creating a social - service
agency, but forming an identity.
“Some of the motivation was
an attempt to build the lesbian
nation,” said another lesbian. “I
was uneasy about that.” She
was not alone. We tended to
push and prod whomever
walked in the door. Our goal
was to charge into new territo-

ry.
This radical activism was

created in a ripe environment.
“It was an interesting progres-
sion from leftist politics [that
emerged] from the Vietnam
War,” explained a lesbian,
“where mostly the men had
been the mouthpiece, to where
suddenly the topic was rape. I
fell into the rape organization
because that’s what was there,
not so much because that was a
compelling topic for me. I was
learning how to be political,
how to work collectively which
began to be defined as feminist
process. I remember finding a
mimeograph machine at a yard
sale, one of those old A. B.

‘Dick’s. That’s how we [printed

our. literature]. You had to wind
it and wind it. There were no
Xerox machines, no computers.

Money was a perpetual
obstacle. “We were all volun-
teers. We didn’t have one dol-
lar. We paid ourselves for the
hotline service. We raised
money for stickers you couldn’t
peel off. The sticker was a
wo1nan’s symbol in the middle
of a white square, which said,
‘Women Against Rape’ with the
telephone number. We stuck
those everywhere — every pay-
phone, the doors in women’s
bathrooms, in every bar, all
over the University.”

The visibility of our politics
helped some of us to release
long surpressed pain. Some of
those early meetings were held

at the old Onion River Co-op

site, which was basically a
warehouse on Archibald Street.
“I hadn’t been part of the co-op,
but I had been raped; and I saw
the sign [for the WAR meet-
ings],” remembered one
woman. “I had never told any-
body that I had been assaulted.
I thought I’d go and learn how
to counsel rape victims, and
then I’d know how to take care
of myself, which is the way I
did everything. For four hours
we sat on upended tofu buckets
in the unheated co-op.”
Forging a new lifestyle along
with radical politics presented
problems. We weren’t really
just talking to queers. We were
trying to educate the cross-sec-
tion of women who were sur-
vivors of rape. When training
women to run the organization,
we tried to radicalize them

without alienating them alto-
gether — a fine line.

One lesbian said, “I talked
to them about the politics of
rape — not just how to run a
hotline, because they certainly
knew how to do that. I said,
‘Be careful. Here’s the history
of this organization. Here’s
what we told the police, and
here’s what you have to be on
top of around the politics if
you’re going to do education,’
which is a big arm of what we
did. We had to learn that you

can’t come on as a bunch of no-
haired dykes and have these
women think about their
daughters rather than think
about us.”

As a matter of fact, a moth-
er/daughter team, sheep farrn—
ers from out of town, were
apparently not put off by our
styles. “They came to a training
that was held in one of our
apartments on Grant Street with
a baby lamb because they were
farmers, and they were poor.
The mother of the lamb had

died, and they had to keep this

lamb alive. When they showed
up, left their fanning boots at
the door and came into this
group of dykes, we thought,
‘Oh my god. They’ll never
last.’ But they did. [The moth-
er] got sick and was house-
bound, so she became our 7am
to 7pm daytime phone answer-
er. She was panicked. She was
way out in the country, which
took an hour to get to and did-
n’t have the gas. We as a collec-
tive raised the gas money for
them to come to meetings,
because they were poor in a dif-
ferent way than we were poor.
They had a mortgage, taxes and
children in a rundown fann-
house where the indoor plumb-
ing rarely worked.”

It didn’t take long for these
activists to become inundated
with the needs of Victims of
male violence. “We realized
very soon some people were
calling our hotline because they
had been raped or assaulted by
their live-in boyfriends or hus-
bands, and there was nowhere
for them to go. They didn’t
need an advocate to go to the
hospital or the police, but need-
ed a place to get away. So we
were having women, and some-
times their kids, sleeping on the
floor of our houses.”

When the Burlington
Women’s Community took on
an issue, it was easier in our
small town to make a big noise.
“About the time they created
the Burlington Square Mall,
there was a string of assaults
against women in the
evenings,” said one intervie-
wee. “The police announced
that women needed to be more
careful and shouldn’t go out
alone at night. So just on a

phonecall tree, we showed up

March 2000 | Outin the Mountains 19

 

with all our kids and all our big
sheets made into banners paint-
ed overnight in front of the mall
with a table with information
about assault as a crime of
power and violence, not a pri-
vate, sexual matter. If men were
assaulting women, that was a
community issue and the last
thing police should be doing
was telling women to stay in.
Isn’t assault against women,
assault?”

a vigilante group against him;
and every one of us, whenever
we saw him in the street, would
stare him down, point at him
and mouth the word ‘rapist.’ It
eventually got quite difficult
and dangerous.”

Luckily, we also knew how
to communicate effectively
with Vermont lawmakers. “We
went to the legislature in 1974
for the first time to testify about
a proposed law, which stated

What we locked in resources,‘
we made up in fervor.

Sometimes our passion for
justice spilled over into cowgirl
tactics. “We made great strides
in a very short time. We trained
all the Burlington police, as
well as the workers at the hos-
pital. We had infiltrators in the
police department who would
even confirm when a woman
pointed out on the street that
somebody was a rapist who had
been arrested and released. We
actually had a dispatcher con-
firm it to us. Sometimes we
went after him. Why wasn’t this

guy being jailed? There was no V

proof, supposedly, so we started

men cou1dn’t rape their wives —
spousal rape. It was finally
passed in 1976.”

I’m not sure back then we
would have been pushing for the
right to many. We were general-
ly focused on the damage that
the institution of marriage has
on women, but there is no ques-
tion that our courage in speaking
out helped pave the way for
more visibility. Vermonters now
know we are a political power to
reckon with! V

860. 1 1 44

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