Roberta Arnold writes about her mother, June Arnold, novelist and founder of Daughters, Inc. publishing company. Julia Penelope once said that June filled out a form stating her religion as âWomen,â and this was true. She was fierce in her devotion to the Womenâs Movement.Â
Susan Robinson writes about her then partner Betty Bird, and tells the story of how she and others began a system for recording feminist journals like *Sinister Wisdom* and distributing those recordings through services for the blind.
May and June 2024 are multiple anniversaries for the SLFA Herstory Project. Itâs the fifteenth anniversary of our first Herstory Project planning workshop at Womonwrites. Itâs the tenth anniversary of our first special issue of Sinister Wisdom. And itâs the second anniversary of the launching of this website.
We celebrated the publication of our sixth and final Sinister Wisdom volume two years ago. The six special volumes contain a treasure trove of collected stories, interviews, timelines, and photographs from three decades of twentieth-century, lesbian-feminist activism in Southern states. Now, we are focusing on making these edited interviews available online as we continue to add new interviews.
The herstory of lesbian-feminist activism in the South was rapidly being lost as these stories of unsung sheroes were not being reported in any of the memoirs and histories of the womenâs liberation movement in the twentieth century.
Interview by telephone by Rose Norman on April 12, 2013 Rose Norman:Â What made you a social justice activist? Mandy Carter talked about getting turned on by an American Friends Service Committee speaker in high school. What was your âahaâ moment? Joan Garner: I grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s and 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement. I was in the eleventh grade when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. That event was the aha for me. That very weekend, I was attending the annual conference of my high school sorority. Girls from several surrounding states were meeting in Washington, D.C., the weekend of April 4, at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Dr. King was assassinated, and a curfew was put on the city. We couldnât leave the hotel. We were about 150 African American girls, and the rest of the hotel was completely white, except for some of the maids and other service staff. We were petrified about the assassination and the curfew; and we didnât know what was happening. We could look out of our hotel window and see U Street starting to burn. Our sponsors decided …