Ginny Berson
Ginny Z. Berson is a radical lesbian feminist, political activist, and community organizer who lived and worked collectively as a lesbian separatist with The Furies Collective and Olivia Records. Early life Born in Hartford, CT in 1946, Berson is the second of three daughters. Her parents were first generation Americans of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. The family moved to Fairfield, CT when Berson was in kindergarten and opened a family run children’s clothing store called the Peter Pan shop. Athletics From a young age, Berson recognized the professional limitations imposed on women during the mid-twentieth century. One of her childhood dreams was to play baseball in the Major Leagues, however, this opportunity was denied to her because of her gender. She went on to play softball as a shortstop on the Pinturas Glidden softball team while serving in the Peace Corps in Panama, helped organize wo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Furies Collective
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. History and mission The Furies Collective, which lived at 219 11th St SE in Washington, D.C., was, along with the Gay Liberation House and the Skyline Collective, among Washington, D.C.'s best known communal living groups in the early 1970s. They were an example of lesbian feminism which emerged during the women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The twelve women in the collective were aged eighteen to twenty-eight, all feminists, all lesbians, all white, with three children among them. They shared chores and clothes, held some of their money in common, and slept on mattresses on a common floor. All of the founding members had extensive organizing and acti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Olivia Records
Olivia Records is a women's music record label founded in 1973 by lesbian members of the Washington D.C. area. It was founded by Ginny Berson, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, and six other women. Olivia Records sold more than one million records and produced over 40 albums during its twenty years of operation. History A separate lesbian feminist movement emerged in the 1970s that reacted to the discrimination of women within the gay rights and counterculture movements, and to the heteronormativity that was embedded in the 1960s US feminist movement. Women's music labels such as Olivia contributed to a 1970s lesbian sub-culture by providing a public platform for the expression of topics that were lacking in dominant political discourse, and helped consumers develop strategies to cope, organize, and articulate their experiences. Cris Williamson encouraged the Olivia collective to use an independent music label as an economic base for lesbian social organizing. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order of President John F. Kennedy Executive Order 10924 and authorized by Congress the following September by the Peace Corps Act. Kennedy first publicly proposed the Peace Corps during his 1960 presidential campaign as a means to improve America's global image and leadership in the Cold War; he cited the Soviet Union's deployment of skilled citizens "abroad in the service of world communism" and argued the U.S. must do the same to advance values such as democracy and liberty. The Peace Corps was formally established within three months of Kennedy's presidency, garnering both bipartisan congressional support and popular support, particularly among recent university graduates. The official goal of the Peace Corps is to assist developing countries by providin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States. The college was founded in 1837 as the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary by Mary Lyon, a pioneer in education for women. A model upon which many other women's colleges were patterned, it is the oldest institution within the Seven Sisters schools, an alliance of East Coast liberal arts colleges that was originally created to provide women with an education equivalent to that provided in the then men-only Ivy League. Mount Holyoke is part of the region's Five College Consortium, along with Amherst College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst: through this membership, students are allowed to take courses at any other member institution. Undergraduate admissions are restricted to female, transge ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Women's Liberation Movement
The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which effected great change (political, intellectual, cultural) throughout the world. The WLM branch of radical feminism, based in contemporary philosophy, comprised women of racially- and culturally-diverse backgrounds who proposed that economic, psychological, and social freedom were necessary for women to progress from being second-class citizens in their societies. Towards achieving the equality of women, the WLM questioned the cultural and legal validity of patriarchy and the practical validity of the social and sexual hierarchies used to control and limit the legal and physical independence of women in society. Women's liberationists proposed that sexism—legalized formal and informal sex-based discrimination predicated on the existence of the socia ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Meg Christian
Meg Christian (born 1946 in Lynchburg, Virginia) is an American folk singer associated with the women's music movement. Early life and career Christian was born in Tennessee in 1946 and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has spoken about being an only child, learning stringed instruments while spending a lot of time alone and later being influenced by Joan Baez, The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte to organize folk groups in the '60s. Christian graduated from the University of North Carolina with a double degree in English and music. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1969, where she performed in bars covering easy listening material by artists such as Joni Mitchell and Burt Bacharach. Christian has said that her "entrance to sexual politics" began after witnessing the way David Frost during an interview, showed little respect for two women authors Ti Grace and Robin Morgan, and she began writing material from an explicitly political and feminist perspective. For a time in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aunt Lute Books
Aunt Lute Books is an American multicultural feminist press based in San Francisco, California. The publisher also seeks to work with and support first-time authors. Publishing history In 1982, Aunt Lute Book Company was founded by Barb Wieser and Joan Pinkvoss in Iowa.Hoshino, Edith S. ''Feminist Publishing'', in ''International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia'' editors: Philip G. Altbach & Edith S. Hoshino, 1995, Routledge , p134 Aunt Lute merged with Spinsters Ink, another feminist publisher, in 1986, and the two organizations published jointly for several years in San Francisco under the name Spinsters/Aunt Lute. In 1990 the Aunt Lute Foundation was established as a non-profit publishing program. In 1992, Spinsters Ink was purchased by lesbian feminist philanthropist Joan Drury and moved to Minneapolis. Aunt Lute continues to operate independently as a nonprofit to the present day. Titles Aunt Lute has published a number of high-profile feminist and lesbian authors, inclu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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KPFA
KPFA (94.1 FM) is an American listener-funded talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station signed on the air April 15, 1949, as the first Pacifica Radio station and remains the flagship station of the Pacifica Radio Network. The station's studios are located in Downtown Berkeley, and the transmitter site is located in the Berkeley Hills. History Launched in 1949, three years after the Pacifica Foundation was created by pacifist Lewis Hill, KPFA became the first station in the Pacifica Radio network and the first listener-supported radio broadcaster in the United States. Previously, non-commercial stations were licensed only to serve educational functions as extensions of high schools, colleges, and universities. This departure into listener-oriented programming brought many detractors as KPFA aired controversial programming. Th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pacifica Foundation
Pacifica Foundation is an American non-profit organization that owns five independently operated, non-commercial, listener-supported radio stations known for their progressive/ liberal political orientation. Its national headquarters adjoins station KPFK in Los Angeles, California. Pacifica Foundation also operates the Pacifica Network, a program service supplying over 180 affiliated stations with various programs, primarily news and public affairs. It was the first public radio network in the United States and it is the world's oldest listener-funded radio network. Programs such as ''Democracy Now!'' and ''Free Speech Radio News'' have been some of its most popular productions. History Early history Pacifica was founded in 1946 by pacifists E. John Lewis and Lewis Hill. During World War II, both of them had filed for conscientious objector status. After the war, Lewis, Hill and a small group of former conscientious objectors created the Pacifica Foundation in Pacifica, C ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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National Federation Of Community Broadcasters
The National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) is a national membership organization of community-oriented, non-commercial radio stations, media organizations and producers committed to community radio in the United States. History NFCB was founded in 1975, out of meetings that began at the National Alternative Radio Conference that June, held in Madison, Wisconsin. The preceding years had seen an explosion of community radio stations, led largely by Lorenzo Milam, who founded Seattle radio station KRAB in 1963. These new stations included KBOO in Portland, WORT in Wisconsin and KGNU in Colorado, which were founding stations of NFCB. Around Milam's concept of "the right to be heard," community radio stations were established to provide access to the airwaves. Milam would join others in convening the NARC in 1975. In Madison, the 75 Madison conveners held four days of meetings, exploring a variety of issues facing community radio stations and new licensees. A name, the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sophia Smith Collection
The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history. General One of the largest recognized repositories of manuscripts, archives, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources of women's history, the collection consists of over of material documenting the historical experience of women in the United States and abroad from the colonial era to the present. The Sophia Smith Collection shares facilities with the Smith College Archives on the college’s campus in Northampton, Massachusetts. Subject strengths include birth control and reproductive rights, women's rights, suffrage, the contemporary women's movement, U.S. women working abroad, the arts (especially theatre), the professions (especially journalism and social work), and middle-class family life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. Many of these collections are rich sources of vis ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lesbian Feminists
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. Some key thinkers and activists include Charlotte Bunch, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Frye, Mary Daly, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |