In only 25 years, a visionary feminism has managed to seriously challenge, if not transform, world consciousness. Nevertheless, I am saddened and sobered by the realization that no more than a handful of feminists have been liberated from the lives of grinding poverty, illness, overwork, and endless worry that continue to afflict most women and men in America.

I have seen the best minds of my feminist generation go “mad” with battle fatigue, get sick, give up, disappear, kill themselves, die, often alone, and in terrible isolation, as if we were already invisible: to each other, and to ourselves, our role as pioneers and immigrants diminished, forgotten.

Immigrants always form infrastructure or self-help groups and tithe themselves accordingly. We are the immigrants who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, left the Old

Patriarchal Country to clear a path in History for the generations to come. It’s too late for us to turn back, and we’ve still got “miles to go before we sleep” in our own feminist country.

There are few feminist networks in place whose mandate it is to assist feminists (or female adults) when they lose their jobs, fall ill, stay ill, face death, and are without patriarchal family resources, supportive mates, or other safety nets.

Surrounded by epidemics, I ask: Where are our feminist credit unions and emergency funds (remember those failed attempts in the mid-70s?)? Our feminist soup kitchens, Meals

on Wheels, land trusts, and old age homes (remember those fiascos?)? Our breast cancer fundraising campaigns, our hospices, our burial societies? (Feminists are just starting to get serious about breast cancer, and about women with AIDS.)

They do not yet exist. Instead, feminists say: “I didn’t tell anyone I was sick because I didn’t want my employers or my enemies to know.” Or: “I didn’t ask anyone for help.

Pride maybe, but also fear. People tend to avoid you when you’re in trouble.” One survivor of breast cancer told me that in the mid-80s, her newly formed cancer support group disbanded(!) when its first member died. A formerly disabled lesbian feminist said: “Sick men know how to get others to take care of them. Sick women don’t know how to ask for help and can’t get it when they do. Maybe gay men are also learning how to take care of others. Gay men took care of me when I was sick, not other lesbian feminists.” A chronically disabled woman said: “Only a few friends visited me more than once. Most had a hard time with the fact that a strong woman could become so sick, and an even harder time fitting me into schedules already overcrowded with other care-taking responsibilities.” 1

Some feminists blame those whose immune systems cannot absorb any more environmental toxins—or toxic amounts of hostility. Some of us still say: “It’s her own fault she has no health insurance,2 no nursing care, no job, no mate. She should have planned better or compromised harder.” Or we say: “But isn’t she really a little (or a lot) crazy?”

In 1982, Elizabeth Fisher, founder of Aphra magazine and author of Women’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society, and in 1987, my dear friend Ellen Franfurt, author of Vaginal Politics , killed themselves. Not just because they were depressed, on drugs, discarded at midlife, or without hope that things would get better (although some of this was so), but also because they were tired of fighting so hard for so long for a place in the sun (a community, a decent-enough book contract), tired of being hated so much and of never having enough money. They despaired of both man’s and woman’s inhumanity to woman.

So many of us have died, mainly of breast cancer and metastasized breast cancer. To name only a few: June Arnold, Park Bowman, Phyllis Birkby, Jane Chambers, Barbara Deming, Audre Lourde, Mary-Helen Mautner, Barbara Myerhoff, Lil Moed, Pat Parker, Barbara Rosenblum, Isacca Siegel, Sunny Wainwright.

We have no quilt, and no memorial.

So many of us have wrestled with and survived breast cancer. So many of us are struggling with long-time disabilities, reeling from Lyme Disease, and from Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), myself included. 3

Some of us have been blessed by feminist care-taking. I think of how magnificently Sandra Butler cared for—and orchestrated community support for—her cancer-stricken lover/partner Barbara Rosenblum (an account is contained in their book Cancer in Two Voices); I think of how tenderly, how enduringly, Jesse Lemisch has cared for his CFIDS-racked wife, my beloved comrade Naomi Weisstein; I think of how many lesbian-feminists cared for and sent “white light” to Barbara Deming and Jane Chambers, and who continue to do so for Audre Lorde. 4

But these are splendid exceptions, lucky, individual solutions, even trends, not yet sturdy, immigrant infrastructure.

I recently attended a rent party for Ti-Grace Atkinson, author of Amazon Odyssey. Ti-Grace’s health was seriously impaired by exposure to low dose radiation. (Her father was

the head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Plutonium ByProducts Division at Washington State’s Hanford Reservation.) She says: “First, I had a hysterectomy. Now, I have no thyroid left. I take tons of thyroid medication, some of which has made me sick and unable to work.”

The rent party was a determined, even inspired, grassroots effort that yielded more good will than cash; however,such events are too labor-intensive, too hard to repeat on a

monthly basis for every pioneer feminist, whether or not she’s written a book, who’s in an illness-related economic crisis.

Ti-Grace at least has an apartment. Other feminist pioneers are—or are about to become—homeless.

For example, a legendary anti-pornography activist has been forced to warehouse her files and move in with a friend. The co-author of a lesbian-feminist classic, a well-known feminist comedienne, an abortion rights activist—and countless other pioneers all sway unsteadily on the brink of joblessness and homelessness. The co-author of a much-loved book on feminist spirituality became homeless last year; she left New York for a warmer climate to be homeless in. Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectics of Sex and a

welfare recipient, had to battle, hard, to hang onto her rent-controlled apartment in between “visits” to Belleview in the late 1980s.

The fact that none of these women have written second books impoverishes us all.

Two of my dear friends, both major feminist leaders, have kept writing, despite a variety of health problems, but like so many great writers, both dead and alive, simply cannot earn a living by the pen. (A writer’s annual income is about$5,000.00.) Neither are independently wealthy, have tenured positions or pensions; they remain dreadfully, bravely poor, unable to act on their own grand visions without unimaginable personal sacrifice and constant worry.

I am not blaming any of us for not having done more; we did the best we could, and we did alot. But in all our imaginings, we failed to imagine that we ourselves would grow weary or fall ill and have no real, specific “family” to take us in and tide us over until we could get back on our feet.

Some of us acted as if we didn’t think we’d need families again. Perhaps our collective experience of transcendence blinded us to our ordinary needs. But most of us were longing for “communitas.” We talked about sisterhood and community, tribes and alternate families—but only in the abstract, as we rushed from one dazzling spectacle to another.

I know: the republic ought to provide employment, health insurance, and medical care for all its citizens, but it doesn’t; and we have fallen on hard times, along with everyone else. All we have is each other: our sisters, ourselves.

NOTES

1. Some women either opposed or were so uncomfortable with my identifying them by name that I chose not to do so.

2. In May of 1992, the Older Women’s League released a report that showed that due to low-paying and part-time work, American women between the ages of 40 and 60 are far more likely than their male contemporaries to lack health insurance.

3. Some survivors of breast cancer and other serious diseases are: Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jan Crawford, Edith Konecky, Phyllis Kriegel, Eleanor Pam, Alma Rautsong (Isabel Miller), Gloria Steinem—these names come immediately to mind. Some survivors of long-time disabilities are: Flo Kennedy, Bea Kreloff, Bettye Lane, Judy O’Neil, Betty Powell; of Lyme disease: Beverly Lowy, Max Dashu; of CFIDS: myself, Susan Griffen, Joan Nestle, Aviva Rahmani, Arlene Raven, Naomi Weisstein—to name only those I know personally.

4. Since this article first appeared, more feminists have developed breast cancer and some have died from it. I have added/changed some names accordingly.