Wisdom of the Lavender Menace: The Queer Side of Women’s Liberation

In planning our post for this year’s Woman’s History Month, we decided we wanted something that touched on the relationship between women’s liberation, and queer activism. Our theme selected, I began the research process. (This is Miles, btw. Friends call me “Mi”) Fairly soon into my research, I stumbled upon a beautifully transgressive piece of writing, with an equally transgressive story behind it.

The document in question was “The Woman Identified Woman” (read here), published by Radicalesbians in the year 1970. (Yes, that’s their real name.) The group was founded by Rita Mae Brown, after she and a number of other lesbians were purged from the National Organization for Women (NOW) by the organization’s openly homophobic president, Berry Friedan, who referred to lesbians as the “Lavender Menace”. (You’d think she’d pick a less badass sounding name.) Brown and the other Lavender Menaces faced similar difficulties with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) whose members were largely disinterested in addressing the unique challenges that come with having an identity that intersects between Queer and Female.

In May of 1970, NOW hosted the Second Congress to Unite Women. In organizing this event, the leadership at NOW had failed to include an open lesbian in any talk, workshop, or meeting. In response, lesbian activists from the GLF (Brown included) organized a protest, in which they wore home-made T-Shirts that read “LAVENDER MENACE”, and passed out a 4 page document titled “The Woman Identified Woman”, which would later become the founding document for Radicalesbians.

The manifesto’s opening line is grippingly incendiary: “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” What does the author mean by this? Well, I really do recommend you give it a read for yourself (it truly is poetically composed) but I shall do my best to summarize: “The Woman Identified Woman” posits that our modern notion of Male and Female has been designed by a male-dominated society to keep people (women especially) trapped within their assigned roles. The nature of these roles disconnects people from essential aspects of themselves, trapping them in an eternal self-conflict that they are denied the emotional vocabulary to articulate. It further posits that the “essence” of what it means to be a “woman” in this system, is defined by their deference to and sexual relations with Men. Because of this, lesbians, simply by nature of being who they are, find themselves butting up against the edges of their assigned cultural restraints, unable to exist as their authentic selves until they cast off the shackles of heteronormativity. The piece goes further, asserting that the nature of our strict sexual classifications are Themselves a product of our oppressive gender norms. As it so eloquently states: “In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.”

As we celebrate the great and accomplished women of the past, present, and future, let us not forget: Male, Female, Homosexual, Heterosexual, all these and more are Prescribed Identities, crafted in the context of male-dominant society preoccupied with maintaining its exploitative hierarchies. Whatever traits we may have, we are all, first and foremost, unique and beautiful individuals. If we limit ourselves to only those aspects that are prescribed and permitted within our label, we inevitably loose sight of who we truly are.