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Phyllis Chesler

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For Barbara Love

Sep 12, 2023

By Phyllis Chesler

Our generation of revolutionary feminists, is softly aging out, disappearing into illness and death. Our ranks are thinned. How did this ever happen? I thought we would live forever.

But thanks to Barbara Love, many of us will never be forgotten due to her encyclopedia, “Feminists Who Have Changed America.” The great scholar, Dale Spender, documented how feminism was disappeared, century after century, so that each new generation had to reinvent the wheel without being able to stand on the shoulders of Foremothers.

Barbara’s work has ensured that this will no longer be true.

I used to keep a list of our dead—but after I reached 125 I stopped. Doing so was too heartbreaking. But I did not have to keep this watch any longer once Barbara began the Encyclopedia.

I met Barbara way back in the day when she was still a member and a leader at the National Organization for Women. We spoke, rather animatedly, after my 1970 or 1971 keynote lecture about Women and Psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY—and we also knew each other as she, Tina Mandel, and others were founding Identity House. I thought of her as a within-the-system fighter but as an uncommonly fearless and strategic one. I was there at the Second Congress to Unite Women when she, and Martha Shelley and Rita Mae Brown and others doused the lights and came onstage wearing t-shirts which proclaimed that they were the much dreaded Lavender Menace, turning Betty Friedan’s fears into defiant, somewhat mischievous activism.

I knew she was a principled fighter for lesbian rights as well as for women’s rights; I knew she cared about gay men with AIDS. Eventually, I came to understand that she was also given to mad gay crushes—and, according to her Memoir, “There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist,” that she was also something of a…slut. (Read it, you’ll see what I mean). This shocked me because she always appeared so well put together, so, forgive me, “straight.” Never disheveled. Always dressed neatly, appropriately, as the blonde upper middle class Protestant that she was.

Her Memoir, by the way, tells some strong truths about our favorite movement leaders. Enough said.

We were both close to Kate Millett and the Farm Women. We were both close to Linda Clarke and Joan Casamo. Barbara has been in my home any number of times.

Please allow me to give my sister-soldier a proper send-off, one that has moved other feminists whenever I’ve read it aloud. You may find it in A Politically Incorrect Feminist, at the end of the Introduction.

“For more than a half century I’ve been a soldier at war. I carry scars; all warriors do. Most of us were felled, daily, both by our opponents and friendly fire.

Despite everything, despite anything, I wouldn’t have missed this revolution, not for love or money. I remain forever loyal to that moment in time, that collective awakening that set me free from my former life as a girl. Allow me to paraphrase the most memorable speech Shakespeare gave King Henry V:

[She] that outlives this day, and comes safe home . . . ,

Then will [she] strip [her] sleeve and show [her] scars.

And say “These wounds I had. . . .”

This story shall the good [woman] teach [her children] . . .

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’ d;

We few, we happy few, we band of [sisters];

For [she] to-day that sheds [her] blood with me

Shall be my [sister]; be [she] ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle [her] condition:

And [gentlewomen everywhere] now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their [humanity] cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us. . . .”

Barbara, rest in peace and may “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

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