Primary Sources:
Mountaingrove, Ruth. Diary. Box 9, Ruth Mountaingrove Papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, OR. Mountaingrove's personal diary described her negative feelings about living in a mixed male and female community called Golden. She discussed feeling oppressed by the very presence of men in the community in many entries, wishing that she could instead live in an all-women collective and cited her partner Jean’s thoughts and feelings about men discounting her difficulties when menstruating. This source shows Ruth Mountaingrove’s early motivation for starting a lesbian separatist community later in her life, important in understanding the goals and ideals of the lesbian separatist community as …show more content…
Important articles included coverage of the 1974 Ashland Women’s Festival and “(Hetero)Sexual Politics by Su Negrin,” an article discussing the oppressive forces of patriarchy and how political feminism and political lesbianism could combat this oppression. The copies of this newspaper available at the University of Oregon Special Collections Library belonged to Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, prominent figures in the Southern Oregon Women’s Land community. The Mountaingroves subscribed to this newspaper, read it regularly, and occasionally even submitted their own articles for publication. This source is important for understanding how the greater Oregon feminist community interacted and intersected with the lesbian separatist communities in Southern Oregon. It shows how the context of the feminist movement in Oregon affected the ideologies of the women in the lesbian separatist …show more content…
The most relevant chapter from this book is “Sexual Revolutions,” which discusses the impact of second wave feminism on attitudes about women and sexuality. It discusses lesbianism in the context of oppression at the hands of heterosexual feminist groups and articulates the rise of lesbianism as a radical feminist political stance in the 1960s and 1970s, not just a sexual orientation. In this chapter, D’Emilio and Freedman rely on scholarly monographs about political lesbianism and the origins of second wave feminism, such as Myron and Bunch’s Lesbians and the Women’s Movement and Hole and Levine’s Rebirth of Feminism to articulate lesbian women’s roles in the feminist discourse of the 1970s. This is a general source about political lesbianism without focusing on Oregon or lesbian separatist communities, providing national context for the formation of women-only communities in Southern Oregon in the
Mountaingrove, Ruth. Diary. Box 9, Ruth Mountaingrove Papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, OR. Mountaingrove's personal diary described her negative feelings about living in a mixed male and female community called Golden. She discussed feeling oppressed by the very presence of men in the community in many entries, wishing that she could instead live in an all-women collective and cited her partner Jean’s thoughts and feelings about men discounting her difficulties when menstruating. This source shows Ruth Mountaingrove’s early motivation for starting a lesbian separatist community later in her life, important in understanding the goals and ideals of the lesbian separatist community as …show more content…
Important articles included coverage of the 1974 Ashland Women’s Festival and “(Hetero)Sexual Politics by Su Negrin,” an article discussing the oppressive forces of patriarchy and how political feminism and political lesbianism could combat this oppression. The copies of this newspaper available at the University of Oregon Special Collections Library belonged to Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, prominent figures in the Southern Oregon Women’s Land community. The Mountaingroves subscribed to this newspaper, read it regularly, and occasionally even submitted their own articles for publication. This source is important for understanding how the greater Oregon feminist community interacted and intersected with the lesbian separatist communities in Southern Oregon. It shows how the context of the feminist movement in Oregon affected the ideologies of the women in the lesbian separatist …show more content…
The most relevant chapter from this book is “Sexual Revolutions,” which discusses the impact of second wave feminism on attitudes about women and sexuality. It discusses lesbianism in the context of oppression at the hands of heterosexual feminist groups and articulates the rise of lesbianism as a radical feminist political stance in the 1960s and 1970s, not just a sexual orientation. In this chapter, D’Emilio and Freedman rely on scholarly monographs about political lesbianism and the origins of second wave feminism, such as Myron and Bunch’s Lesbians and the Women’s Movement and Hole and Levine’s Rebirth of Feminism to articulate lesbian women’s roles in the feminist discourse of the 1970s. This is a general source about political lesbianism without focusing on Oregon or lesbian separatist communities, providing national context for the formation of women-only communities in Southern Oregon in the