Bridging the Movement: A Geography of the San Francisco Women’s Building

Bridging the Movement:
A Geography of the San Francisco
Women’s Building
By Emily Mayer
April 25, 2014
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Abstract
This thesis maps the history of the San Francisco Women’s Building, the first women-owned and
-operated community center in the United States. Telling the chronology of the Building but also
situating it within the long narrative of “women’s space,” this thesis demonstrates how the shape
of the Building was the product of particular configurations of feminism arising from the radical
proximities of the San Francisco Bay Area. Traversing New Left collectives, women-only
conferences, lesbian bars, and small offices, the activists in San Francisco Women’s Centers
(SFWC), the organization that bought the Building in 1979, sought to use the Building to
respond to the possibilities and limitations of the spaces populating the landscape of their lives.
Marking a moment in which many groups involved in women’s liberation turned to non-profit
status, this thesis wrestles with the simultaneous onset of institutionalization and a burgeoning
Third World women’s critique of separatist space and feminist politics. As this thesis situates the
Building at the convergence of these two phenomena, it argues that the shape and place of the
Building enabled women to produce a new kind of social and political space unprecedented
within the movement. In structuring the staff’s daily struggles with the varied dynamics of power
and race, the architecture of the Building made possible a truly integrated yet difficult activism
that sought to speak directly to those made most vulnerable by the racist and sexist climate of the
state in the eighties. While actively displacing many women disillusioned with the premium put
on a “correct” way of doing politics, SFWC moved towards a vision of the Building as a haven
from a hostile political climate and the embassy of a counter state. By drawing a concurrently
narrower and more expansive political map, the Building paved the way for a language of
conservative backlash yet also preserved the radicalism of the earlier years of women’s
liberation. Armed with the privilege of privately owned space, activists at the Building remade
the contours of feminist and progressive politics. Illustrating how the San Francisco Women’s
Building structured a lived experience of a “bridge,” this thesis provides a window into the sites
that produced and transformed the women’s movement into and through the eighties.
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Acknowledgements
Insofar as feminism and feminist scholarship have taught me never to take for granted the
relationships that bring any kind of work into being, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to the
many people who have guided me through this process from near, far, and across the pages of
books. I feel lucky to have found throughout college such profound personal and intellectual
companionship in the authors of feminist history and theory. Thank you to Dolores Hayden, who
first taught me to think about how women both navigate and transcend the spaces in which they
live, and to Judith Butler for giving me the tools to think about gender, resistance, and so much
more. I give my utmost thanks to Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, two women whose
poetry, activism and theory I will constantly return to for solace and an intellectual challenge.
And most of all, thank you Carmen Vazquez, for your tireless activism, wise sense of the world,
and tell-no-bullshit attitude. Although we never got to formally meet, you loom large in this
work.
This thesis would not have been possible without the meticulous critique of my advisor, Andrew
Friedman, who illustrated in classes and in conversation just how malleable and critical the work
of history is. Thank you for pushing me to do justice to my characters in thought and language. A
similar thanks to Bethel Saler, for asking invaluable questions that forced me always to be more
specific, more clear, more immersed in my subject matter and the world I wanted to invoke.
Thanks to Mike Zarafonetis and Rob Haley for their help in finding crucial sources without
which this thesis would not be complete. And to Tatjana Loh, for giving me a tour of the
Women’s Building, and also for pressing me to answer why I was doing this work in the first
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place. I hope in the future I will ask those questions of myself and others with the same vigor and
clarity as you did.
I want to thank my friends and fellow history majors who have graced me with their incredible
intellect and desire to think through problems in their entirety. You have taught me both the
incredible fun and incredible stress there is to be had in intellectual work, both of which I
appreciate (albeit in different ways). Thanks to those who gave hugs, snacks, stretches on the
floor of Magill, and their time to hearing through this project. And to my family, for so much.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Women’s Space, Diverging……………………………………………………...5
I. “Well, Where Is it?” Finding Women’s Space in the San Francisco Bay Area………….19
II. The Dangerous Work of the Inside………………………………………………………...33
III. Learn Spanish! Queer Visibility and Outreach in the Mission District………………...51
IV. The Building as Counter State…………………………………………………………….68
Conclusion: The Shifting Shape of Coalitional Space………………………………………..80
Works Cited.…………………………………………………………………………………….87
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Introduction: Women’s Space, Diverging
In 1976, the women of the young organization San Francisco Women’s Centers (SFWC)
found themselves in the midst of what seemed like, by then, a tired yet ceaseless crisis. Amid
elaborate plans to organize a conference titled “Violence Against Women,” San Francisco State
had pulled the event from its calendar upon discovering that the conference was intended to
admit women only. Administrators claimed that such an event violated Title IX, civil rights
legislation that had, ironically, been instituted ten years prior to guarantee women’s equal access
to education.1 The organizers, most of who were volunteers, conversed for hours about how to
respond. Faced with a choice to either make the conference open to men or find another space,
the women of SFWC weighed in multiple meetings the sacrifices necessary to maintain their
vision in light of the immobilizing limitations of calling the conference “public.” Jean Crosby, a
founding member of SFWC led to feminism through civil rights agitation in San Francisco,
ended a planning meeting on a frustrated note: “[W]e’ve lost no matter what decision is made
tonight, because of time and energy we’ve been forced to spend on this issue; [We are] caught in
the dilemma of having bad choices to choose from…”2
By “bad choices,” Crosby referred in part to the alternative locations all over the Bay
Area that the Space Committee surveyed, most of which they had discarded as too small for a
movement then regularly attracting thirteen hundred women to feminist events to dialogue about
the possibilities of a politics deeply rooted in the personal lives and everyday intimacies of
women.3 What the Committee demanded from the potential options was intimately tied to what
kind of political work they hoped the location would do. Mills College was ruled out because the
1
Sushawn Robb, Mothering the Movement: The Story of the San Francisco Women’s Building (Outskirts Press, Inc.,
2012), 29.
2
Planning Committee San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Violence Conference Planning Meeting,” October 28,
1976, Box 5, Section 12, San Francisco Women’s Building.
3
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 30.
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staff “felt that it would not attract Third World Women,”4 and the Space Committee required any
place they looked at to be easily accessible by public transportation and have a facility available
for childcare.5 Yet “bad choices” also protested an inadequate number of institutions favorable
towards hosting an all-women’s conference, revealing the deeply seeded biases against feminist
organizing that tried to seriously reorganize the masculine shape of the built environment.6 While
the Planning Committee eventually settled on a split-rental of Grace Cathedral and Cogswell
College, these spaces were only made available for what the organizers understood to be “the
wrong reasons.” Rather than solidarity with women and their desire to shape their own spaces of
resistance, the administrators of the two institutions merely sympathized with the idea that
“different genders had different needs and different needs to organize separately.”7
While a lament, Crosby’s comment and the organization’s dilemma also reared a
newfound consciousness about women’s place in the public sphere. As the women of SFWC
found, the radical politics coming out of the conference and the movement depended entirely on
the existence of available, accessible, and hospitable space in which women could gather.
Emerging from the conference exhausted but with a call to action, the women of SFWC
established the Women’s Building Project in February 1977, articulating the concept as a fantasy
vague in content but urgent in theoretical appeal. After months of searching, SFWC settled on
Dovre Hall, a four-story former community center in the Mission District, in the latter part of
1978. As the women of SFWC finalized the purchase in 1979 and began moving in, the
4
Planning Committee San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Minutes Violence Conference,” April 9, 1976, Box 5,
Section 12, San Francisco Women’s Building.
5
Planning Committee, ”Planning Committee Minutes of Meeting.”
6
Planning Committee San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Planning Committee Minutes of Meeting,” September 2,
1976, Box 5, Section 12, San Francisco Women’s Building.
7
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 30.
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Women’s Building took its place as the first and only women-owned and -operated Building in
the country.
Yet despite its monumental symbolism within feminist history, the Women’s Building
experienced in its first moments the contested and profoundly in flux character of women’s
space. As questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the seventies sent quakes through the
women’s movement that frayed the already unstable intellectual bounds of women’s space, the
Building found itself in the Mission at the explosive center of feminist and Third World
discourse in the Bay Area. A predominantly Latino neighborhood, the Mission in the mid- to
late- seventies had seen an influx of lesbian residents who established a highly visible women’s
community in the Mission. Placed in the contested overlap of separatist lesbian-feminist and
Third World territories, the Building mapped internally a women’s movement struggling to make
sense of the politics of its outside. As its architecture put women with different identities and
struggles in conversation with one another, the Building became both a site of politics but also a
political actor. Making possible alliances across difference in a moment in which many feared
difference was undoing the women’s movement, the women of SFWC used the Building to
construct nuanced solidarities that marked coalition as the only space in which a truly multiracial
feminist organizing could occur. To center the spatial history of the Building, then, is to elucidate
how women wielded space as a strategy to sustain and transform a broad-based liberation rooted
in difference into and through the eighties.
Originating in the early seventies as the definitive proposition of women’s separatism,
“women’s space” demanded two things: places in which women as an oppressed group could be
free from the naturalized constraints and labors of a patriarchal home and civic life, and also
space in which a newly articulated and imagined “women’s culture” could take root. Bombarded
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by domestic violence in the home, economic discrimination and sexual harassment in the
workplace, and unlivable scripts of femininity in media, women recognized early the need to
claim spaces free from patriarchy in which they could organize and cultivate a collective and
revolutionary consciousness.8 “Free Space” took shape most often in the form of small, rap
groups that met in living rooms and New Left collectives across the country. Ranging from four
to twenty people, rap groups provided space for women to reflect, share thoughts and feelings,
analyze their position, and abstract from personal experience a political ideology.9 As women
sought to grow these groups, however, they came to recognize that in order to bring a cultivated
consciousness to the outside, “free space” had to extend past a privileged constituency of women
already clued into feminist networks. While the women’s movement was in “the airwaves, on the
streets and on the shop floors, in schools and the halls of government, in kitchens and in
bedrooms throughout the United States” in the seventies, many women did not know how to
identify and access feminist organizing.10 Attempting to reach these women, many feminists
began organizing to attain the resources necessary to make the movement visible and accessible
to all who might seek it out.
Born dually out of this struggle and the frustration of locating women’s space for the
Women and Violence conference, San Francisco Women’s Centers in its foundation sought
create an opening for women’s organizations in the sexist landscape of institutional life. Founded
in 1969 by a coalition of Bay Area women’s groups, including the National Organization of
8
The phrase “free space” was coined by Pamela Allen in her book “Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group
in Women’s Liberation,” (New Jersey: Times Change Press, 1970). While she holds back from explicitly describing
the phrase, she uses “free space” to refer to the time and process marked out by consciousness-raising groups in
which women can relate to each other and to oppressive structures “apart from our everyday lives” (20).
9
Pamela Allen, Free Space, 6.
10
Enke, Finding the Movement, 1-2.
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Women (NOW),11 Daughter of Bilitis,12 and San Francisco Women’s Liberation,13 SFWC was
envisioned by its founders as a hub for burgeoning women’s organizations looking to find their
economic and structural footing. Illustrating a formative moment as non-hierarchical women’s
liberation groups moved into the “mainstream,” SFWC in its beginnings hoped to reap the
benefits of institutionalization while preserving its radical roots, leading the founding members
to reject the hierarchical requirements of non-profit status that mandated rank among members
and pick straws to name the president, secretary, and treasurer. Despite initial enthusiasm and
political maneuvering, however, the women of SFWC came up dry in the search for funding; the
problems that they had rallied to confront undid them for the next three years, as the scarce
resources available in the public sphere for women’s issues made organizing so exhausting as to
be virtually impossible.14 While the founding members of SFWC immersed themselves in their
own projects, SFWC existed only in the paperwork Jean Crosby had committed to updating,
stowed away in her closet.15
In 1972, the organization was jumpstarted by Barbara Harwood and Jody Safier, partners
coming into women’s organizing through feminist publishing and newly committed to finding
funding for SFWC. Along with Crosby, these women renewed a vision of SFWC as a
consolidation of the multiple agendas of the women’s movement. In an initial meeting of the
11
NOW got its start in 1966 through a series of congressional conventions on the status of women. Comprised
mostly of professional women, NOW advocated for the full and equal integration of women into all spheres of
society and was one of the most well-known organizations to lobby for the Equal Rights Amendment. Sara M.
Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 24.
12
Founded in 1955 , Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) began as a social alternative for lesbians afraid of police raids and
persecution in lesbian bars and rapidly grew into one of the forefront organizations of the homophile movement.
Deborah Wolf, The Lesbian Community (University of California Press, 1979), 49-50.
13
San Francisco Women’s Liberation was an umbrella organization that brought together the numerous radical
small groups participating in the local women’s movement. Such groups included the Young Socialist Alliance, the
SDS Women’s Caucus, Free Women’s Press, and Women’s Street Theater.
14
“A study done in the mid-70s by the Funding Feminist Coalition (a project operating under the auspices of the
SFWC) found that in 1972-74, only one-fifth of 1 percent…of foundation grant making went to programs to
improve women’s status. Robb, Mothering the Movement, 5-6.
15
Ibid., 6-7.
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Coordinating Committee, the new members of SFWC, most of whom were in their twenties and
thirties, listed “feminist counseling, legal counseling, rape counseling, health group, phone
hotline, library, liberation school, lesbian office, funding committee, NOW and Off Our Backs [a
national radical feminist weekly newspaper]” as possible projects.16 Still only a box of files in
Harwood and Safier’s living room, SFWC had dreams to provide a pulse and a gathering place
for the many strands of women’s organizing hidden from the majority of women isolated from
ideological hubs. Aiming to consolidate and make visible women’s liberation across the ambient
expanse of the city, SFWC also foresaw centralization as a conduit for better communication and
resource sharing. Yet within centralization was a larger vision. SFWC hoped that in linking
activists throughout the Bay Area, it could equip women’s spaces with the tools to collectively
transform the landscape of the Bay Area. To this end, the women involved self-consciously and
forcefully emphasized that SFWC would not be a service organization (though it provided them),
but rather a “catalytic agent to develop and maintain feminist community.”17 Anchored in a
radical feminist critique, SFWC set out not only to patch the gaping voids of a landscape
systematically hostile to women’s needs, but also to collect and generate enough organizational
power to change the landscape itself.
As the women’s movement grew in public consciousness, SFWC secured key grants that
provided the necessary means to move out of Harwood and Safier’s living room. In June 1974,
the staff relocated to a storefront office on Brady Street, located on the southern edge of the
South of Market (SoMa) district and the western edge of the Mission district, where they began
for the first time to hold daily hours. Tiana Arruda, an early member of the collective, describes
the bustle of Brady St.: “There were four people there, and we did everything. We staffed the
16
Ibid., 7-10.
Roma Guy, “Planning Committee Meeting Minutes,” October 20, 1976, Box 1, Section 21, San Francisco
Women’s Building.
17
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phones. We answered calls…And the Women’s Centers was like a community
organizing…place, so there were lots of activities, a lot of support groups and new projects going
on…We had a newsletter that was monthly, and we had to type, gather material, and then do the
layout…So there was a mixture of work. Some paperwork, office work, organizing internally,
and other things. A little bit of everything.”18 Necessary to respond to the needs of women in the
Bay Area, “a little bit of everything” also provided the staff with skills previously withheld from
women confined to home life and lower levels of professionalism. Through the four-room office
on Brady Street, SWFC took the liberatory space and consciousness-raising of rap groups and
transported it from the living room into the skill-oriented urban landscape. Whereas women in
the small groups had met once a week, the routine of an office normalized women’s liberation so
that it might permeate more holistically into the women’s lives and into the public register.
SFWC’s move from private to public also formally inducted the organization into the
history of lesbian space in the city. In San Francisco, the media-depicted crown jewel of
American gay life by the mid-1960s, the 1970s marked a period of ecstatic possibility for the gay
community of San Francisco: increased political activism (represented most prominently by
Harvey Milk’s election to the Board of Supervisors in 1978) and a “contract of accommodation”
between queer organizations and the police struck in 1965 meant that gay life could emerge out
of the underground and into the public eye. 19 Queer sociality embarked on a spatially grounded
and citywide “coming out,” as it proliferated in bars, cafes, bookstores, and apartment buildings
in four neighborhoods spread across the city, each with its own distinct character. However, in
the seventies lesbians were also rebelling against their marginalization within the hotspots of a
18
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 13.
Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (Oxford University Press,
2009), 83-6.
19
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hypermasculine and often sexist gay life. Departing not only politically but also spatially, queer
women began to move into their own residential and social arenas of the city.
To follow the trails of this scattering is to see the splintering of a movement growing in
size yet growing apart, as the identity of lesbian and particular categories of queerness collided
and diverged through San Francisco’s urban landscape. In its home at the edge of SoMa, SFWC
was surrounded by a neighborhood christened the “Valley of Kings,” (as opposed to Castro’s
“Valley of the Dolls”) a playground for men seeking “sex without politics.”20 South of Market
(SoMa) was a historically industrial zone whose few residents were largely poor immigrant men
drawn to the promise of jobs clustered around factories and docks. Defined in name and in the
culture of the city as a space of “otherness” in relation to the Financial District across Market
Street, SoMa functioned as an urban margin, a periphery whose residents were largely forgotten
by a city racing towards the future and “Manhattanization.”21 Yet for the gay men previously
persecuted in bars by police, this erasure promised an escape from scrutiny. In the sixties and
seventies, SoMa also became the hottest spot in the country for public gay sex, housing at least
forty bars, bathhouses, and sex clubs by 1980.22 At least three of these clubs were within three
blocks of SFWC’s office at 63 Brady Street – The Cauldron at 953 Natoma, The Stud at 1535
Folsom, and Rainbow Cattle Co. – a place for “gay cowboys” – at Valencia and Duboce.23 These
leather clubs, in which men would drink, eat, dance, and “play,” were saturated with a “macho”
or “butch” posturing,24 and were effectively “boys only.” Not only did the clubs not have “ladies
20
Ibid., 104.
Susan Shepard, In the Neighborhoods: A Guide to the Joys and Discoveries of San Francisco’s Neighborhoods
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1981), 61. For more on the Manhattanization of San Francisco, see Chester W.
Hartman, The Transformation of San Francisco (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984).
22
Sides, Erotic City, 105.
23
Shepard, In the Neighborhoods, 77.
24
Eric Rofes, “A Walking Tour of South of Market in the 1970s,” 2005,
http://www.ericrofes.com/pdf/70s_Walking_Tour.pdf, 2.
21
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rooms,” many also barred admission to women entirely under the rationale that gay sexual
practice was “too raunchy for female company.”25
So while SoMa was a certain type of queer utopia, Brady St. was cut off as a “women’s
space” from the modalities of queerness staring it down from across the street. Arising like steam
from the neighborhood, gay sexuality in SoMa was predicated on a heightened performance of
maleness and a critique of lesbians as “not gay enough.” While gay men found solace and sexual
excitement in the “dark alleys,” the lesbians of SFWC who experienced SoMa in the
institutionalized daylight could only see in the surrounding streets a potential for violence and
their exclusion from the collective protection enjoyed by their male counterparts. Ultimately
unwilling to risk breaking the already tenuous threads of solidarity through a critique of SoMa as
gendered space, the women never mention the presence of gay men in SoMa. The descriptions of
the Brady Street days from SFWC’s materials thus rarely reference the surrounding environment,
and when they do, it is only in shadowy euphemism – as the “dark alleys” which the staff blamed
for scaring away potential clients.26 The women of SWFC circulated “safety at night” as a
repeated trope to critique SoMa and utter a desire for a different kind of queer setting,
reimagining a “women’s space” that could exist not only in its interior but also integrated within
the surrounding built environment.27 Just as women had radically broken with the New Left, the
predominantly lesbian staff of SFWC broke away from the sexism of gay sexual life surrounding
them in SoMa, turning toward the Mission in an effort to stake out separate space in the city in
which they could utter the multiplicity of their gendered and queer vulnerability.28
25
Sides, Erotic City, 107.
“Women’s Centers Planning Meeting,” October 1976, Box 2, Section 3, San Francisco Women’s Building.
27
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 44.
28
Sides, Erotic City, 114.
26
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However, before it was the site of the Women’s Building, the Mission itself was pulling
together the seemingly disparate strands of “women’s space” and radical identities in the Bay
Area. Blossoming on the western periphery of the neighborhood was a community of lesbians,
who, drawn to the relatively cheap rent of houses and storefronts, had jumpstarted a separatist
economy and public life along Valencia beginning in the mid-seventies. In its centers along the
perpendicular Mission St. and 24th, however, the Mission was still a solidified Latino
neighborhood with a distinctly Third World political consciousness, whose feminist residents
were experiencing the collision of Third World and lesbian-feminist ideologies at the same
moment that San Francisco was becoming the epicenter of Third World feminists formulating
with a new vocabulary of critique.29 Since the beginnings of women’s separatism, Third World
women had dismissed the “lesbian separatist utopia” for assuming the centrality of whiteness,
demanding that any liberatory ideology had also to free other marginalized peoples from racism,
imperialism, and poverty.30 As the sixties and seventies wore on, these voices of dissent had
solidified in the widely popularized term “Third World Women,” as women of color in the
United States sought to carve out an alternate space in which imperialism, racism, and sexism
could be wrestled with in tandem. Emerging from the Black Women’s Caucus of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most crucial organizations of the Civil
Rights Movement formed in 1968, the Third World Women’s Alliance turned to the phrase both
as an ideological and strategic move, reasoning that “a third world women’s group can
potentially be one of the most revolutionary forces confronting the U.S. ruling class.”31 Drawn
explicitly in opposition to the state as an imperialist actor but as a method to call out white
29
Of the twenty-nine contributors to the famous Third World women anthology This Bridge Called My Back,
thirteen lived in the Bay Area at the time of publication.
30
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press,
1981), xii.
31
Third World Women’s Alliance, “Women in the Struggle,” National SNCC Monthly 1, no. 6 (March 1971): 8.
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women who, in the words of Cherrie Moraga, had grown through feminism to be “exclusive and
reactionary,”32 the term Third World was used to point out the flaws of the mainstream women’s
movement embodied in the concept of separate space. Yet it also performed a dream of new
kinds of solidarity built around “a total vision” of a liberatory agenda.33 Unable to separate out
their gender from their sexuality, race, and class, Third World women united across difference to
articulate a “new connection, a new set of recognitions, a new site of accountability, a new
source of power” meant explicitly to challenge women’s spaces like the multi-layered lesbian
community forming on the edge of the Mission.34
Drawn to the Mission because of the lesbians arriving there in droves to set up businesses
and collectives, the Search Committee in October of 1978 approached the fraternity organization
Sons of Norway about purchasing Dovre Hall, a grand four-story building on 18th off Valencia
Street. Although the building had formerly served as a Norwegian community center, it had lost
most of its members to white flight, and in the late seventies stood virtually vacant. The owners
of the building, Sons of Norway, agreed to sell. In March of 1979, the Women’s Building
lurched off paper to occupy its new home in the Mission. Entering the nexus of tension between
the idealism filling the category of women’s space and its Third World critique and the presence
of both in the neighborhood, the activists of SFWC found themselves in the midst of a virulent
critique pitched at white lesbians and gay men understood by locals as occupiers. Proclaiming
itself as a place for “all women,” the staff of the Building had to wrestle with the misfires and
oversight of “women’s space” as members of their espoused community eerily reenacted the
neighborhood’s history of colonization. Faced with the choice to disown the Building’s lesbian
and feminist roots or align themselves with the experiences of Third World women within and
32
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, xiv.
Ibid., xix.
34
Toni Cade Bambara, “Foreword,” This Bridge Called My Back, vi.
33
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outside of the Building, the women of SFWC turned, hesitatingly at first, to the Building as a
unique political tool that they hoped could shape a new politics out of spatial proximity and
adjacency. As the Building made inescapable the splinters of the women’s movement, the
women inside the Building welded its shared interior as a site of intimate contact in a
neighborhood and city racially and geographically divided, refusing the limited terms of the
choice altogether. The Building thus made concrete previously unthinkable coalitions that would
fundamentally transform the landscape of possibilities of liberatory politics. Through these
experiences enabled by the Building’s specific spatial contours, the women inside altered deeply
the symbolic present and incipient future of “women’s space” and the women’s movement as a
whole.
The Women’s Building thus provides a window into a narrow and literal space of overlap
in which the women’s movement came face to face with calls for a more intersectional feminism
emerging from women of color. As it always had been, the women’s movement was spatially
produced and geographically specific; the Women’s Building, as a site arising from the queer,
Third World, and feminist strands of the city, speaks to the way in which conflicts occurring
across the nation were locally felt. Yet it is important to note that the Building was not simply a
site of discursive reaction but also a crucial tool of women influencing the shape of the
movement as it crossed into the eighties, especially in its emphasis on localized politics and a
critique of the state. Situated in a cross-section of contested lesbian and Third World spaces,
through its physically overlapping socialities the Building assembled coalitional relationships
and an integrated social and political life. These relationships challenged quotidian interactions
inside the Building and also resisted the violent and material backlash to the women’s movement
as America embarked into the Reagan years. Even in moments of crisis, the activists occupying
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the Women’s Building drew from its internal configurations a solidarity across difference that
would become their most effective tool. Shedding light on a formative moment for progressive
politics, the Women’s Building explains not only how the women’s movement survived in the
eighties, but also how women built alliances whose possibilities would transform what politics in
San Francisco could mean.
Taking as its object the spatial history of the Women’s Building, this thesis situates itself
in the intersection of four overlapping geographical narratives. Section I maps the diffuse
chronology of women’s space in the Bay Area as it emerged from queer social life and the
liberation struggles of the New Left. As it locates the seeds of the Building in the symbolic
politics of “free space” coming into public landscape, the chapter suggests that the Building from
its beginnings intended to structure itself as a bridge between different sets of politics
represented through differently lived and local spatial tropes. Bringing these symbolic politics
into the interior, Section II investigates how the interior of the Building structured its inhabitants’
experiences of the women’s movement. Shedding the small-scale and private intimacy enabled
by past iterations of women’s space, the Building displays a new coalitional politics-in-themaking through questions of ownership, adjacency, and interpersonal struggle. As these politics
arose not only from the interior of the Building but also from its place in the Mission, Section III
illustrates how the Building navigated conflicting claims to the neighborhood by a queer
women’s community and its Third World neighbors. Demonstrating the jagged process by which
this conflict profoundly imbued the Building with a more expansive and localized idea of what
women’s space could mean, this section reveals an anti-state politics in the making more fully
explored in Section IV. This section centers the relationship between the Building and the San
Francisco police, honing in on a controversy with a group of policewomen in 1981 and using it
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to explicate how right-wing violence drove the Building towards a coalitional politics predicated
on the shared vulnerability of progressive organizations and Third World peoples to the state.
Taken together, these sections depict the convergence of a movement rapidly institutionalizing
while simultaneously trying to grapple with its internal assumptions and constructions of the
category of “woman.” In looking to how the Women’s Building blurred boundaries between
women through space, this paper explores how the Building was not only informed by but also
produced the shifts of a women’s movement stepping tenuously into the hostile climate of the
eighties. Decidedly suggesting a change in shape and strategy but not in strength, this paper
draws a picture of a women’s movement finding a radical future for its politics within the built
cityscape at a time when many claimed it to be fatally fracturing along divides of race.
Mayer 19
I. “Well, Where Is it?” Finding Women’s Space in the San Francisco Bay Area
“…[I]n my journey to find the women’s movement, I kept [saying], like, Well, where is it, you
know? And I went to Women’s Centers when it was on Brady Street…It was on a small
street…and it was two small rooms with like a big stack of newsletters and information, but the
phones were ringing. There was one person in the office, nobody’s really talking to you. And I’m
like, What the fuck, you know. And so, that clearly wasn’t the women’s movement.”35 – Carmen
Vazquez
Carmen Vazquez had only recently arrived in San Francisco. A New York implant who
was one of fifty students to shut City College down in 1969 demanding a Black and Puerto Rican
Studies Department,36 Vazquez came to the West Coast in 1975 looking for work in the Latino
community and “the gay thing.”37 At Scott’s, a local bar in the Duboce Triangle District,
Vazquez fell into a crowd of politicized queer women of color that christened themselves the
Family. The Family had a “political ideology and way of thinking about themselves as lesbians
and as feminists,”38 and referred Vazquez, curious to learn more, to the Women’s Centers, then a
small organization that had just moved into an office on Brady Street. While Vazquez had faced
sexism in the Puerto Rican students movement and homophobia at the Latino organization she
first worked at in the Bay Area, her search for the women’s movement was an attempt to find
evidence of collective action attached to feminist rhetoric. Coming out of a consciousness of the
eruption of freedom struggles all over the world yet not “having read any books” about women’s
liberation, Vazquez wanted to locate both tangible and theoretical avenues towards an ideology
that had appealed to her since meeting classmates in college who had declared themselves,
somewhat abstractly in her mind, as feminists.39
35
Carmen Vazquez, Interview with Kelly Anderson, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Smith College, May
12, 2005, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Vazquez.pdf, 35.
36
Ibid., 28.
37
Ibid., 31.
38
Ibid., 35.
39
Ibid., 30.
Mayer 20
Yet, despite the ubiquity of the phrase “women’s liberation” by the mid-1970s, for
women across the United States like Vazquez the women’s movement was difficult to locate.40
More “social system” than “political movement,” the early wing of women’s liberation was
organized through overlapping circles of friendship aggregating in small anarchic collections of
women that met mostly in private homes and enclosed community centers.41 Claiming a
“transformation of consciousness,” the grandeur of the feminist ideology obscured the small and
quotidian places from which it was produced, especially for women not already clued into
central networks. So when women like Vazquez finally arrived at the small offices, shelters, and
health clinics at the frontier of feminism (although not all sites of the movement identified as
feminist), they often were disappointed by a material reality that shrank in the glaring limelight
of feminist rhetoric and the blaring media backlash. Fleshing out the shadows of expectation in
Vazquez’s dismay, these women expected well-staffed and well-organized offices on major
streets ready to welcome newcomers in with open arms. Yet the reality of women’s space was
always much messier, as women lay the shaky foundations in an attempt to broaden the
movement into the public sphere.
While it did not look like “liberation,” what Vazquez found on Brady Street was a node
of the local movement to which “virtually [every] women’s organization in the Bay Area” would
later trace its history.42 Yet in 1975, the concepts of “women’s organization” and “women’s
space” as permanent and worthwhile fixtures of the movement were just beginning to creep into
the urban landscape. This type of women’s space, fresh-faced in its two-room offices, had its
roots in earlier taxonomies of the New Left and the young women’s liberation movement. The
40
Anne Enke, Finding the Movement, 2.
Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is An Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 161.
42
Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 38.
41
Mayer 21
women who founded San Francisco Women’s Centers were convinced of the urgency of a place
like Brady Street because of their previous experiences in gendered and queer activist spaces and
in women’s organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), San Francisco
Women’s Liberation, and Daughters of Bilitis. SFWC constituted a place of overlap that sought
to respond to the different possibilities and limitations for transformation presented by each of
these configurations of women’s space, which were not only analyzed but also lived through the
events of these women’s lives. As they traversed the patterns and breaks of a movement ever
evolving, women in the movement accrued a spatial residue that collected at the steps of the
Building and lent its particular shape. To understand how and why the collective vision of an
organization like SFWC came to rest on Brady Street and then on the four-story façade of Dovre
Hall, one must trace how women in the Bay Area women’s community in the seventies
navigated the different spatial utopias offered by political advocacy, anarchic separatism, and
lesbian social life, represented at least in part by the organizations that coalesced to found
SFWC.
Originally foreign to San Francisco, The National Organization for Women (NOW) had
been transplanted to the Bay Area from the halls of Washington D.C where it was launched in
1966. NOW was founded by women of a slightly older generation who had found one another as
feminists through bureaucratic circles such as the Presidential Commission on the Status of
Women, convened in 1961 by President Kennedy. Anchoring its demands in the language and
politics of the state, NOW envisioned itself as a “grassroots civil rights lobby” that aimed to
“take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society.”43
This was not only a social and political argument but also a spatial one, aimed to free women
from their isolation in the home by radically equalizing the university, the office, and the media.
43
Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave, 24-5.
Mayer 22
Campaigning for federal enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made
illegal employer discrimination on the basis of sex, and legislation like Title IX of the Education
Amendments of 1972, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in educational
programs receiving federal assistance, NOW and similarly focused women’s organizations such
as Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) defined “the mainstream” as the necessary site of
liberatory desire. The argument that these reformist organizations promoted was deeply
pragmatic, focused on women gaining access to centers of institutional power who had
previously gazed from the peripheries of wealth and social mobility. “The mainstream” as a
defining space highlighted questions of access for women as a purportedly homogenous
category, and by definition failed to address other interlocking systems of power that barred
women’s access to the benefits of participation in public life.
The rhetoric of the “mainstream” felt peripheral to the politics of everyday transformation
that a younger generation of women activists was experiencing in the non-hierarchical models of
the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. Advocating revolution rather than inclusion, the
political consciousness forming in such movements held as its center a critique of the state as a
patriarchal, racist, and militant actor. As they confronted rampant sexism in their supposedly
non-hierarchical activist circles, these younger women, learning from black nationalism, sought
to remake their marginalization into, as theorist bell hooks expounded, a “site of radical
possibility, a space of resistance…a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic
discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives.”44
Instituting a wave of consciousness-raising groups, these young women converted private spaces
– kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms – from sites of women’s oppression to objects of study,
44
bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin As a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural
(Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 149.
Mayer 23
making them “free spaces” that could serve as vehicles of personal and collective transformation.
The mission of “free space,” a phrase coined by the first “small group” in San Francisco founded
in 1968, was to act as “a space where women can come to understand not only the ways this
society works to keep women oppressed but also ways to overcome that oppression
psychologically and socially.”45 Free space was not set up only to satiate and fuel the women
involved, but also to develop a vanguard ideology that could challenge and change “men’s and
women’s male supremacist values and assumptions” as they occurred inside of the mainstream.46
Married to various forms of political action occurring in the public sphere, free space aimed to
infuse activism with a revolutionary consciousness cultivated in collectivized and intimate
private spaces.
Pulsing with the excitement of the New Left, the Bay Area in the early seventies made
visible the spatial shift of the women’s movement away from the federal “mainstream” and into
a lived, quotidian politics. In collective living arrangements, consciousness-raising groups, bars,
cafes, bookstores, and writing guilds, women began to sculpt space to serve a burgeoning
women’s culture that distanced itself by varying degrees from the Leftist movements from which
it had emerged. Touting various positions on women’s separatism (usually correlated with their
racial composition), these spaces were linked in their implicit attempt to create “free space” in
public in which women could find temporary release from the weight of patriarchy. While some
understood themselves as purely social and others as more overtly political, all existed to reclaim
the city as a livable space for women, and in doing so, to create an alternate configuration of an
otherwise masculine urban geography.
45
46
Pamela Allen, Free Space, 8.
Ibid., 39.
Mayer 24
However, taking shape in women’s lives, these spaces often produced new constructions
of a “proper” sexuality, ideology, and racial politics.47 While the earliest women’s groups had
placed a taboo on homosexuality, by the early seventies women’s space had become
synonymous with lesbian space, as queer women became virtually overnight “the vanguard of
the movement” and lesbian bars entered hesitantly into the feminist narrative. A mainstay of San
Francisco’s queer geography since the mid-1930s, the lesbian bar was simultaneously a site of
vulnerability and protection for lesbians who wanted to be “out.”48 Often raided on charges of
prostitution, bar owners and patrons joined in informal collective protest by forming business
alliances and fighting police violence in the streets and the courts.49 The nature of lesbian bars
was fundamentally changed in 1965, when a well-publicized police raid on a city-approved
homophile event fundamentally shifted the relationship between the queer community and the
San Francisco Police Department to a “contract of accommodation.” Proliferating in the late
seventies and early eighties, lesbian bars in San Francisco enjoyed a new freedom in the public
sphere.50 As a historically crucial site of contact in which lesbians could access community,
queer bars were the first spatial configuration that claimed social space in the public sphere as
the rightful possession of women to engage physically and sexually apart from men, a “free
space” lived out in a narrowly masculine and heterosexist world.
Yet lesbian bars were not always friendly to the feminist and separatist ideologies they
seemed to symbolize. For many, bar culture internalized a public discourse that equated
homosexuality with deviance as women indulged in “sexist jokes that put down women…and
47
Anne Enke, Finding the Movement, 4.
For the intersection between lesbian and women’s space, see Anne Enke, Finding the Movement, 10.
For the specific place of lesbians in the San Francisco women’s movement, see Deborah Wolf, The Lesbian
Community, 67. For more on the history of lesbian bars in San Francisco, see Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town:
A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (University of California Press, 2003).
49
Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space, 39.
50
For more on the Council on Religion and the Homosexual and its New Years Ball, see Josh Sides, Erotic City, 85.
For shifts in lesbian bar culture, Anne Enke, Finding the Movement, 28.
48
Mayer 25
lesbians,” furtive “eye games,” and jealousy. One of many homophile organizations emerging in
the mid-fifties, Daughters of Bilitis sought to redefine the lesbian as a positive social being and a
participatory citizen of society “not so different” from heterosexuals by providing social
alternatives to lesbian bars often in the privacy of homes.51 Even as feminism saturated queer
life, lesbian bars in San Francisco were often openly hostile to any visible markers of women’s
politics. In 1970, Amber Hollibaugh, an early women’s rights activist who would co-author one
of the most important articles on butch/femme, itched to find a piece of the women’s movement
where she could come out of the closet. Frequenting Scott’s every night, Hollibaugh learned that
when lesbian feminists would go to the bars, they would be met by open vitriol: “…it’s like who
in the fuck are those women. They are so ugly.”52 Entering the bar with a feminist critique of the
constrictive gender roles proscribed for women, Hollibaugh struggled to market herself as
attractive in a site of exchange that was circumscribed by the butch/femme roles that served as
markers for belonging. While she eventually adapted, many women who held their politics as
central rejected bars as sites of political possibility. While women had fought hard in the fifties
and sixties for the right to assemble as sexual beings outside the purview of men, the constructed
confines of gender performance also restricted bars as spaces in which politics had to be left at
the door.
Yet lesbian bars succeeded in modeling the possibilities of women’s space in the public
sphere. By the mid-seventies, women were erecting similar “free spaces” throughout the city –
women’s cafes, bookstores, music festivals, residential collectives, health and skill-building
centers, free schools, and bathhouses glittered the Bay Area. Making visible in lived space the
separatist ideology coined in consciousness-raising groups, these various forms adhered as best
51
Deborah Wolf, The Lesbian Community, 47-8.
Amber Hollibaugh, Interview with Kelly Anderson, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Smith College,
December 2003, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Hollibaugh.pdf, 122.
52
Mayer 26
they could (within the purview of the law) to a strictly female-only policy. Intended as do-ityourself projects within which women could obtain knowledge about themselves, their bodies,
and the world that had previously been prohibited to them, women’s spaces in the Bay Area were
pervasive enough that Carmen Vazquez in the seventies and eighties walked through daily life
socializing only with women.53 However, while Vazquez and other Third World women
frequented women-only spaces, in intellectual circles they articulated a radically different
spatialized rhetoric. Clustering in the Bay Area in the mid- to late-seventies, women of color
used the image of a “bridge” to draw attention to their tokenized position between feminist and
Third World struggles. This vocabulary cohered most visibly in This Bridge Called My Back, a
1981 anthology of writing by women of color collected by Cherrie Moraga as her Masters thesis
at San Francisco State University. In the book’s preface, Moraga categorically rejects women’s
space: “The lesbian separatist utopia? No thank you, sisters. I can’t prepare myself a
revolutionary packet that makes no sense when I leave the white suburbs of Watertown,
Massachusetts and take the T-line to Black Roxbury.”54 Rejecting a spatial model that refused to
make sense of racial divides built into the American landscape, Moraga and the other authors in
the book positioned the bridge as both the problem and the answer, calling for the women’s
movement to treat the Third World subject as the primary site of struggle and the speaker of her
own demands. As they critiqued a white-washed and easy proclamation of “sisterhood,” Third
World women turned to the “bridge” as a guide for the work women’s liberation had to take on,
and furthermore what women’s liberation should look and feel like in the process.
Spatial in a figurative sense but also in the lived dance of daily life, the bridge spoke
deeply to how Third World women navigated an in-betweenness in the feminist landscape of the
53
54
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 53.
Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, xiii.
Mayer 27
Bay Area, a landscape that married women’s and Third World space in uneasy union. Coming
out of the sixties as a center of multiple liberation struggles, Berkeley, Oakland, and San
Francisco structured a proximity that made women face one another across different identities
and separatist spaces. When Amber Hollibaugh came back to Berkeley in 1970 she frequented
the house of the “Red Family, which was Tom Hayden’s group…next to the Black Panthers, so
right next to Huey and Eldridge and Bobby Seale and people like that, all of whom I’d known.”55
Traveling from the women’s collective where she lived to a revolutionary New Left cell next to
the residential base of the Black Panthers, Hollibaugh’s experience even as a white woman was a
lesson in the political production of liminality. Another typical case: Hollibaugh met Cherrie
Moraga as a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant located around the corner from Modern Times, a
radical bookstore in the Castro. Always carrying books on “Marxism and books on feminism and
poetry books and books on art and books on prison systems,” Hollibaugh figured that Moraga
would wait on her because “ she knew I was a dyke and I knew she was a dyke.”56 As their
relationship took flight through discussing lesbianism, butch/femme, class, and violence, they
decided to transcribe their conversations in their now preeminent essay “What We’re Rollin’
Around in Bed With.” For the these women and others crossing the activist landscape of the Bay
Area, proximity structured discourse, as relationships formed politics out of the adjacencies of
radical space.
So although women’s space as an intellectual endeavor painted “the lesbian separatist
utopia” as a totalizing ideal, in navigating their world women regularly transgressed its sense of
boundedness. Always in conversation across the radical geographies of the city, women’s spaces
brought together the seemingly contradictory discourses of the separatist utopia and the “bridge.”
55
56
Amber Hollibaugh, Voices of Feminism, 81.
Ibid., 138-9.
Mayer 28
Demonstrating this fact through the patterns of their lives, Moraga met the collaborators of
Bridge Called My Back through separatist organizations, like the Feminist Writers Guild and the
Radical Women Organization, in which activist feminists of color were “coming up from all over
the place.”57 In speaking back to separatist ideology, these women indicated that, as occupants of
an intersectional identity, “free space” was never actually emptied of the specters of oppression.
To propose the “bridge” only made sense within a multiracial milieu of women’s liberation in
which women mingled in and outside of the limits of a shared women’s space. As the women’s
movement ran full-force into the late seventies and early eighties, these spaces, bounded and also
always coming apart at the seams, required new mechanisms for organizing space that could
execute the figurative metaphor of a “bridge” through the lived landscape. It is this burgeoning
trope that the San Francisco Women’s Centers and the Women’s Building would enter.
Revived in 1972 well before a fully articulated Third World critique of separatist space
entered feminist discourse, San Francisco Women’s Centers and the many kindred women’s
organizations founded in the same moment intended to bring the “free space” of consciousnessraising into a place of visibility and accessibility in public consciousness. A 1975 San Francisco
Examiner article entitled “Feminism’s New Way to Fight” stated confidently that “[w]hat’s
going on in the centers here, headquartered at 63 Brady St…is happening all over the Bay
Area.”58 Depicting a movement straying from the “shrill demonstrations” of the years prior
towards a model of “knowledge and organized clout,” the article documents (despite its sexist
underpinnings) a shift in women’ s liberation as rap groups began to grapple with a bureaucratic
landscape “more geared to a general community need than to women’s special problems.” These
57
Cherrie Moraga, Interview with Kelly Anderson, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Smith College, June
2005, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Moraga.pdf, 53.
58
Eloise Dungan, “Feminism’s New Way to Fight,” San Francisco Examiner, January 19, 1975, Box 2, Section 17,
San Francisco Women’s Building.
Mayer 29
mostly localized community endeavors, emerging from the private sphere, sought to forge a
different sort of public space, a space that was not floating “free” or separate from an oppressive
interior/exterior, but instead was actively trying to grapple with how “liberation” might engage
with and answer to a hostile bureaucratic landscape. Attempting to transcend the limits of private
radical collectives and homes yet sustain their radical ideological formations into the
“mainstream,” SFWC’s desire to act as an incubator for women’s organizations and spaces
placed it at the forefront of a changing movement making room in the boundary space between
private and public.
Yet despite the SFWC’s reported timeliness, many women approached the Women’s
Building idea with skepticism and fear. During the gestation of the Building, many in the SFWC
collective admitted their hesitancy as to what it would mean for liberation to become
institutionalized on such a grand scale. While many of the women’s centers established in the
same moment focused on providing direct services, those conducting the Women’s Building
project wanted desperately to retain a transformative political agenda. Worrying that the project
would drain SFWC’s human and financial resources, women were wary of the organization
becoming “another YWCA” and losing sight of larger political aims.59 While naming it the “The
Women’s Building” inverted the logic of a masculine public sphere in the hopes of disseminating
change from the inside out, institutionalization for many threatened to do the opposite: subsume
politics of liberation into built space. Whereas the anarchic quality of “free space” had claimed
multiple sites throughout the Bay Area for the topography of the women’s movement, SFWC’s
attempt to centralize women’s space for some represented a process of ghettoization that might
depoliticize the movement.
59
Sushawn Robb, Mothering the Movement, 43.
Mayer 30
Situated within these concerns and the conflicting tropes huddled around women’s space,
the Building in its first moments illustrated a women’s movement struggling to remake a threedimensional vocabulary that would decenter the experiences and ideologies of white women and
maintain its relevancy to a rapidly diffusing feminist politics. This struggle appears prominently
in one of the first announcements of the Building project in SFWC’s December 1977 newsletter,
two years before the Building was bought, in which SFWC christens the need for “a room of our
own,” a phrase borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own in which Woolf
asserts that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”60
Woolf’s phrase would become an oft-recycled motif in publicizing and fundraising for the
Building project, acting as a call to the financial and material resources necessary to do the
creative labor of women’s organizing. Drawing a line to this firmly white lineage of women’s
history, the article additionally codes the “room of our own” as white by rooting the need for
space in “our personal lives.”61 This “our” comes into focus in the allusion to the twenty-five
women representing organizations interested in renting space in the Building. The list of
organizations reads as a chronicle of the prominent and mostly white lesbian groups in San
Francisco, including the Feminist Writers Guild,62 Full Moon Coffeehouse,63 and Mothertongue
60
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1929), 4.
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “What? Ah, A Women’s Building,” December 1977, Box 4, Section 3, San
Francisco Women’s Building.
61
62
Described by Cherrie Moraga, the Feminist Writers Guild was comprised of “a lot of really upper-middle-class
women, a lot of Berkeley Hills women that were divorcees who came out and, you know, they had their husbands’
alimony (laughter) — and child support, had some nice houses.” Cherrie Moraga, Voices of Feminism, 49.
63
Full Moon Coffeehouse was established by five women who had met in gender studies courses and formed a
collective vision of a private place in which women could relax away from men. Deborah Wolf, in her ethnography
The Lesbian Community, describes the Building: “Only a small stenciled sign on the front window indicates that the
building houses a women’s coffeehouse. Though it has large front windows, these are screened off for the sake of
privacy.” Deborah Wolf, The Lesbian Community, 113.
Mayer 31
Theater.64 Scattered and made invisible by the opacity of the built landscape, these women
hungered to be in close proximity in order to support and strengthen their common effort to
entirely rebuild women’s experience of built space in order to challenge a masculine public
life.65
Yet speaking already to a Third World critique it does not name, the newsletter
immediately disturbs the notion that such a list is satisfactory. Destabilizing its just-completed
image of the Women’s Building as an idyllic finale to the story of women’s space, the newsletter
ends the paragraph by stating: “We will not have a ‘full-house’ until we explore more completely
the interest of disabled women and Third World women.” Playing out the spatial metaphors, the
newsletter seeks to situate the separatist “room” within a more expansive “house,”
acknowledging the illusory boundaries of women’s space as a self-contained entity. While
leaving the “room” intact, the newsletter gestures towards a new mode of organizing space in
which a single “room” will no longer suffice – not only for moral or abstract political reasons,
but also for strategic ones: a “full house” is a hand more likely to win. The Women’s Building
sought to include the interests of Third World women not only to deflect a public critique, but
also because the women of SFWC wanted desperately to utter a new spatial order of women’s
liberation, one which would channel previously separate yet colliding factions of women’s
organizing into a site of contact and coalition. Even as it deems the interests of Third World and
disabled women as additive, the 1977 newsletter foreshadows the Building as a politically
necessary and strategically useful tool for women to retain difference while simultaneously
64
The Mothertongue Theatre Collective emerged out of the Women and Violence conference in 1976. Performing
mostly in women’s coffeehouses, the topics they initially sought to address included sex roles, body image,
lesbianism, motherhood, and spirituality.
65
Transition Team San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Why Is a Women’s Building Needed?” 1979, Box 7, Section
14, San Francisco Women’s Building.
Mayer 32
combining efforts under one roof. The Building, from its inception, was envisioned as a unique
experiment in remapping the women’s movement.
Carmen Vazquez’s disbelief that the purported “center” of the San Francisco women’s
movement was a small office building on a small street tucked away in an industrial no-man’sland was not atypical. As a younger generation of feminists theoretically strayed from the
“mainstream,” women’s activism in the Bay Area radically dispersed in casual and everyday
corners of the built environment like Scott’s Pit, Full Moon Coffeehouse, and vegetarian
restaurants. For the women who crossed into and out of these locations, women’s liberation was
in the material surroundings that allowed them to hold hands and dance together in public, find
and form relationships with like-minded women, learn accounting, finances, how to handle a
printing press. While each site of women’s activism relocated the “free space” of consciousnessraising groups to the public sphere, each of these spaces also ran against the limits of its shape –
the bars were too apolitical, the coffeehouses too white, the collectives too difficult to maintain.
Although SFWC understood the Women’s Building project as a symbolic solidification of this
mostly white narrative of feminist separatism, the Building entered into the narrative at the very
moment in which a Third World critique of separatist space began to rock the women’s spaces
from which it emerged. As the women of SFWC experienced the conflicts boiling in women’s
spaces, they began to reimagine the Building as a possible site of overlap between the separatist
model and a Third World vernacular. Trying to reimagine both how liberation could transform
the landscape of bureaucracy and the demographics and ownership of women’s space, SFWC lay
the foundations of a building that undeniably resided in a racially conflicted present but that
would also desperately reach for a future geography women in the city, both white and Third
World, had not previously lived.
Mayer 33
II. The Dangerous Work of the Inside
“Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries,
matched slipcover material…lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of
herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’”66
So begins Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Exploding public consciousness
seemingly overnight, the book elucidated the claustrophobic loneliness of women’s space
saturated with “the problem that has no name.” As an actor within the book, the suburban house
ensnares women in private labor unmentioned and unacknowledged by the members of her
nuclear family. Her condition, as she moves through space, is framed by the word “alone.” Even
as her family members cycle through the scene, the archetypal housewife is sequestered and
estranged by the inanimate objects that fill her days. While Friedan’s text aestheticizes the home,
it also reveals the feverish experiences of “women’s space” by the actors who traveled through it,
tried to inhabit it, felt it structure the bounds of their world. Theorizing the relationship between
women and the built environment, Friedan demonstrates how the home contained but also
produced women’s isolation and the subsequent call for their foray into the workplace. As
feminism permeated the home, the collective, the living room, and the office building, the
interior quality of these spaces determined the particular shape and meaning of liberation.
Learning from Friedan, a spatial history of the Women’s Building must gesture not only to a
moment in the symbolic politics of women’s liberation, but also to a lived interiority of Brady
Street and Dovre Hall as they fashioned women’s contact with the disembodied politics of the
women’s movement.
If Brady Street reacted to the public opacity of women’s collectives and domestic spaces
coming out of the sixties, then Dovre Hall offered a stark alternative, rising above the two story
apartment buildings of the Mission as a beacon monumentally visible in height and poise. While
66
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1963), 15.
Mayer 34
the staff of SFWC proclaimed how much the symbolic politics of the Building meant for the
local women’s movement as a “room of our own,” they did not anticipate to what extent the
space would alter how they related to one another and to women’s liberation. While Brady Street
structured an almost claustrophobic proximity and intimacy among the women of SFWC, the
Women’s Building placed in a spatial conversation multiple tenants with varying orientations to
the movement, interrupting the homogeneity of Brady Street through a demanding that its
inhabitants reexamine the previous shapes of their politics. Structuring an experience of overlap
unique in the women’s movement, the Women’s Building estranged its tenants from easy
alliances and forced newfound proximities that created the space as a site of struggle but also one
of coalition. Coming out of the stairwells and hallways of the Building, the future of the
women’s movement appeared in the dangerous work of passing through the interior.
To construct the genealogy of space that generated the particular form of the Women’s
Building, one must turn to the intertwined intimacies and strains of Brady Street. Typifying the
form of women’s organizations proliferating across the bureaucratic landscape of San Francisco
in the seventies, the Brady Street office was the outcome of a choice necessarily circumscribed
by the complete lack of foundation funding for programs dedicated to women.67 The dimensions
of the office, jointly leased by SFWC and the San Francisco Women’s Switchboard after SFWC
coaxed the Switchboard out of the local YWCA, were restrictive at best, consisting of four
rooms devoted to fulfilling the immediate and long-terms needs of women throughout the entire
Bay Area. In 1977, Tiana Arruda had just migrated from the more institutionalized and well
financed NOW to SFWC. One of the first two women of color hired, Arruda found at Brady
Street a space completely unprepared to house the work SFWC and the Switchboard had taken
on: “The Women’s Centers had one little room, the Switchboard had another one. Then there
67
Sushawn Robb, Mothering the Movement, 6.
Mayer 35
was another room, called a drop-in room, where all the flyers and housing postings and all kinds
of different information was posted, and also that was the meeting room for groups like support
groups. And then there was another little room in the back, narrow and long, that was also used
for meetings. There were all these pieces of old furniture and broken couches…[T]here were
more staff than there were desks.”68 The office was not ideal. Squeezing meetings into a “narrow
and long” room cluttered with broken furniture, and assigning a space with no privacy to support
groups indicated a clear incongruity between the vision for the organization and the limited space
in which such a vision had to fit. In Arruda’s mind, “calling” one little room a “drop-in room”
and another a “meeting room” could not disguise the fact that these spaces did not suggest at first
glance to be suitable for those purposes. Seemingly resigning themselves to what they could
afford, SFWC and the Switchboard simply left the “old furniture and broken couches” where
they were, apparently pessimistic about their ability to transform the space.
Yet despite a consistent lack of funds and tight offices, these burgeoning groups created
pockets of support in a largely inhospitable built and bureaucratic landscape and made the
narrow hallways and little rooms malleable to their needs. Within a framework of restriction,
these spaces produced an inescapable intimacy that rejected the isolation in women’s earlier
geographies and flooded each organization’s political work. One can see in Arruda’s memories a
nascent community forming through the constant and close labor of Brady Street: “We had a
newsletter that was monthly, and we had to type, gather material, and then do the layout. In those
days we did everything on the typewriter…And then we had a membership that renewed their
subscriptions every month. So there was a mixture of work.”69 Patterning through her speech, the
consistent “we” offered an alternative to the strictly individualized labor of the housewife
68
69
Ibid., 14.
Ibid., 13.
Mayer 36
psychically imprisoned in her home, making visible and collectivizing women’s labor.
Immediately on view were all the activities of the organization, and each woman had a stake in
ensuring that every task was done well. Community organizing was not only the content of the
work done at Brady Street, but was also forged through the proximities under its roof.
However, even as the women of SFWC relished their new presence in public and the
kinds of relationships Brady Street fostered, they also tired quickly of the conditions built-in to
their experience of the office. Forcefully resisting romanticization, one unnamed women jotted
down in handwriting her frustrations on an otherwise typed Work Journal, a comment seemingly
scribbled out in a moment of uncontrollable angst: “[G]ot so disoriented by meetings a nauseum
[sic], plus the impossibility of reflecting, work space in the office I could no longer keep-up this
effort. I feel emotionally battered in the office during work hours, but can’t seem to work in the
Meeting room – light, heat, and desk space impossible.”70 Lashing out at the conditions that
made her feel hopeless, hot, and desperate for the outside, the author compares the office
environment to an abusive man, battering her “during work hours” to the point that she could not
go on. For her, the purportedly liberatory inside emulated an oppressive outside, and in that
moment of frustration Brady Street became just another space disrespectful and destructive of
the lives of women. While early women’s liberation posited the collective as the totalistic answer
to capitalism and to gendered oppression, this model, scrunched into improper spaces by a sexist
bureaucratic landscape, spawned its own unique brand of isolation and exhaustion.
Echoed repeatedly by the staff, these sentiments accumulated in the desire for another
kind of space. In 1976, when the women of SFWC convened a Planning Committee to reevaluate
the character and purpose of the organization,71 Holly Reed, who had been a member of the
70
71
Unknown, “Work Journal 1977,” January 1977, Box 1, Section 20, San Francisco Women’s Building.
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 34.
Mayer 37
collective since 1974, contended that “space is the first priority.”72 She set out two clear options:
“…redo this one or get a new one,” especially since it was “unreasonable to talk of more staff,
volunteer or paid, in the present office set-up.” Reed’s demand for a new location would take
another six months of parsing through offices either too expensive or too small and run down.73
Yet once the idea was borne, “just the experience of looking at and imagining that potential
space built a momentum that was not to be derailed.”74 As canvases for the dreams of the staff of
SFWC, the offices up for rent provided an imaginative platform from which the promise of
liberation from the clutter of Brady Street could take flight. Faced with the enormous task of
fundraising for a Building, the staff set out determined to find a place that would continue Brady
Street’s intimacies while eliminating its confines.
When the Search Committee finally settled on Dovre Hall, the Building was heralded in
the feminist press as the entryway into an expansive set of possibilities for the future of the
movement. This praise, phrased most often in the vernacular of the Building’s architecture, used
its specific dimensions and style to construct a lofty hope for women’s liberation. The October
1978 front-page issue of the widely circulated feminist magazine Plexus that broke the story
lavishly described the Building as a “downpayment on the future”: “Dovre Hall has a feeling of
age, tradition, and beauty. Built in 1911 and renovated in the ‘30’s, the building has high
ceilings, antique light fixtures, beautiful carved wood, and elegant carpeting.”75 Repeating
almost the precise phrasing in SFWC’s own proposal,76 the Plexus article points to the way in
which the sheer scale of the place, its particular architecture, harkened to a tradition and
72
Roma Guy, “Planning Committee Meeting Minutes.”
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 38.
74
Ibid., 46.
75
Unknown, “Downpayment on the Future,” Plexus, October 1978.
76
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Women’s Building of the Bay Area: A Proposal,” May 1978, Box 7, Section 8,
San Francisco Women’s Building, 4.
73
Mayer 38
formality that worked to legitimize both the legacy and promise of women entering public life.
Purportedly “one of the area’s most historic sites,”77 the Building also naturalized the women’s
movement within the geographical topography of San Francisco, staging a claim not only to the
city’s history but also to a piece of the cityscape that these women could rightly claim as their
own.
As the news circulated, descriptions of the Building accrued a more explicitly gendered
weight. The San Francisco Sentinel, a weekly periodical serving the gay community of San
Francisco, described the Building as a “stone dowager,”78 a widow emerging from a dead
masculine landscape with property deeds in hand. Casting it in the form of an old woman, the
article converts successfully the Building from its past as a men’s gymnasium, a site of
hypermasculine performance, into a suitable locale for a women’s building. Gendered as female,
the Building dotingly “[threw] its doors open” and “open[ed] its arms wide.”79 So while the
Building legitimized SFWC and the movement through its architectural form, it also required a
rhetoric that could inaugurate the space as the property of women. A reminder of the masculine
public in which it was situated, efforts to gender the Building as female pointed to the spectacle
and joy of their success, but also the rhetorical and literal work that the women of SFWC had to
take on to make the space theirs. Investing in the Building as a fitting site of liberatory politics,
the staff of SFWC and the local women’s community took the Building’s existence as a material
sign that the movement had entered into a period of political and historical grandeur.
Yet without funds to do drastic renovations, in 1979 the women of SFWC were still
dreaming about how to refashion the interior of Dovre Hall a year after they had moved in, even
77
Ibid.
Suzanne Fried, “Women’s Building - Miracle on 18th St.,” The Sentinel, May 4, 1979, Box 2, Section 17, San
Francisco Women’s Building.
79
Ibid.
78
Mayer 39
as their makeshift office was erected in the Dining Room.80 The rawness of the space fueled
fantasies not only about the shape the women’s movement could take, but also how it ought to
expand. A staff meeting in July of 1980 perfectly exhibits how the women of SFWC used space
to articulate the dimensions of what each understood as a more comprehensive agenda of
liberation.81 After the financial report, the meeting turned to a discussion of Rental Policy
intended to define the purpose of the Building and to how to balance the need to make money
while fulfilling its political potential. Moving from the facilitator to the participants, the meeting
quickly devolved into a recounting of each woman’s political fantasy, with Nita Winters, by then
a member of the collective for two years, beginning: “[The Building] would include children of
various ages, both sexes, varying backgrounds. Senior Citizens – lunch program, tea dances,82 a
place of gathering…Many programs and workshops for women…Space to do messy work. A
garage to work on cars. A theater space to be used for theater runs.” Building off Winters’
comments, Carmen Vazquez envisioned “black women in the Building, Asian women, Native
American women” but also lived forms of sociality: “Bingo nights once a week, monthly
women’s dances as an alternative to bars. Dining hall be [sic] a coffeehouse on weekends. Rest
of time [sic] a club room for members to relax, have coffee. More trades classes or workshops.”
Other women threw out different possibilities: a childcare center, a bathhouse, a library, a
restaurant, a meditation room, and a crisis center, all huddling under the high ceilings of Dovre
Hall.
80
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Meeting Minutes from Staff Retreat,” 1981, Box 9, Section 7, San Francisco
Women’s Building.
81
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Staff Meeting Notes,” July 22, 1980, Box 12, Section 7, San Francisco
Women’s Building.
82
Created at the gay resorts, tea dances became a “gay American institution” in the 1960s. Occurring on Sunday
afternoons, the gay equivalent of “happy hour” evolved from a Victorian tradition of parties following tea. Indulging
participants in dancing, food, and drink, tea dances were distinctly “camp-classy” events. Esther Newton, Cherry
Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 134-5.
Mayer 40
Taken together, these women’s hopes for the Building collage a women’s movement with
many possible faces. Making visible divergent ideas for the future of women’s culture, the staff
of SFWC used space to utter the potential transformations of the category called “women” once
emancipated from the degraded labor many had experienced in New Left organizing. As women
tried to concretely imagine building an autonomous women’s culture piece by piece, they set
their sights on a working-class set of skills they thought it liberatory and also pragmatic to
practice, skills that allowed them to “get messy” and move into roles conventionally held by
men. For these women, building muscle and learning the inner workings of a car were imbued
with a revolutionary consciousness, especially as women taught other women and affirmed the
existence of working-class knowledge already in their midst. The Building would be a site of
constant experiential education that would give women the tools to pull apart and put back
together the entirety of their lives, as it bridged spaces of leisure, work, personal expression, and
familial duties. In the Building, relaxing, drinking coffee, learning, and socializing would be
broken of the homogeneity these activities assumed in racially and socioeconomically segregated
geographies, as the inclusion of “black women…Asian women, [and] Native American women”
provided an integrated space unlike anything on the outside. What Vazquez in particular
articulated was definitively not a project of racial inclusion, but rather a vision for a truly
integrated social life as a lived form of politics.
Despite the differences in the staff women’s priorities, their comments were all shaded by
queerness, as they turned the Building into a subtle homage to a gay and lesbian legacy. Creating
a montage of an imagined queer sociality through tea dances, monthly women’s gatherings, and
a bathhouse, the women of SFWC staged their desires for the Building on the needs and
experiences of their own lives as tangled in the limits of lesbian space. Hoping to provide an
Mayer 41
“alternative to bars,” the women held up the Building as a site where politics and sociality could
coexist, where one would be a conduit for the other. So while the Building offered a seemingly
never-ending list of possibilities, the visions thrown into the space were intimately tied to the
walls that encroached on each woman’s life, most often as a lesbian coming out of the social and
intellectual spaces of gay liberation and feminism. Given the chance to theorize into the still
empty halls of the Women’s Building, the staff built a picture of a woman’s movement marked
by divergent possibilities but also by the felt limitations of their own trajectories through other
spaces of liberation. Seeking to transform “woman” as a lived category, the SFWC staff used
space to mark their collective identities and also the splintering trails of their differences.
Their dreams, however, had to be squeezed into the physical and financial realities of the
Building and also into the narrative of the movement in which the Building was situated.
Because of the need for revenue and also SFWC’s promise to provide affordable rental space to
budding women’s organizations, most of the Building was designated for tenants. Yet this plan
ran into the physical limits of the building’s architecture. Previously a German and then a
Norwegian community center, Dovre Hall was clearly designed for social gatherings. Spanning
four stories, most of the floors were segmented into large halls, many of which were complete
with their own bars.83 A two-story auditorium reaching from the first floor filled approximately
seventeen percent of the total square footage.84 Attempting to stay true to their foundational
mission, the women staffing SFWC and the Building’s new tenant organizations had to carve out
bureaucratic space from the grandeur, erecting walls in some cases and in others just moving in
tables to delineate one tenant from the next.85 Employing women’s manual labor and creative
83
Sushawn Robb, Mothering the Movement, 131
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Floorplans of the Women’s Building,” 1986, Box 13, Section 6, San Francisco
Women’s Building.
85
Ibid.
84
Mayer 42
maneuvering, SFWC struggled to make the interior of Dovre Hall fit even its most modest aims.
As the daily labor of an institutionalized women’s movement bumped awkwardly into the built
space, the women inside complained of new feelings of isolation, foreign to them after the
claustrophobia of Brady Street. Disoriented from the previous politics of intimacy, the staff
entered a spatial estrangement for which they were not prepared.
Therefore, as the eighties began and the women of the Building settled in, the interior of
Dovre Hall read as a summary of the larger movements of women’s liberation. While engraving
in monumental size the rapid institutionalization of women’s groups, the Building also illustrated
a movement rapidly segmenting into organizations clustered around increasingly specified
struggles. While a Third World critique of women’s space had existed since “women’s space”
claimed itself as a category, formalized organizations made visible and public divergent ideas
about separatism. Recalling its promise of a “full house,” the staff of SFWC actively sought to
bring in organizations that spoke to different constituencies. Among the Building’s initial tenants
was Concilio Mujeres, a group of Chicana feminists founded in the Mission that dedicated itself
to supporting Chicanas in higher education and unveiling the particular histories of Chicanas as
an oppressed group.86 Another tenant, Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women, mostly
peopled by radical white feminists, had just organized a multiracial taskforce that successfully
fought for anti-sterilization legislation.87 Options for Women Over 40 sought to respond to the
needs of a sector of women often marginalized by a very young women’s movement. The
Building also housed the San Francisco chapter of the Third World Women’s Alliance, a
86
Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second
Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143.
87
Rebecca M. Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980 (Rutgers
University Press, 2011), 199-200.
Mayer 43
national organization that named the “triple jeopardy” of race, gender, and imperialism bearing
down on women of color across the globe.
While the staff of these organizations perhaps joined the Building project simply because
of the draw of cheap office space, Dovre Hall’s inconvenient lack of walls and clearly delineated
offices put these dissimilar women with dissimilar dreams and politics inescapably face-to-face.
Whereas proximity at Brady St. was predicated on a common vision and endeavor, this new kind
of proximity expanded across difference, mobilized as women themselves moved throughout the
Building. While the Building project hoped that centralizing disparate spaces of the movement
would lead to women “sharing ideas and information,” 88 they had not foreseen that these
interactions would be shaped in and through design. As women overheard one another across
thinly erected walls, conversed with one other in the stairwell, attended events, and sat on
committees together, the Building staked out a potential coalitional space new to a women’s
movement caught in the chaos overlapping and intersecting identities.
From their initial moments in the Building, the staff repeatedly pointed to this sense of
overlap as a central attraction and a defining characteristic of the space. In a fundraising letter to
the local women’s community, Carmen Vazquez explained: “What makes the Women’s Building
so unique? It’s the only place we know of where you can find…[a] young [L]atino couple
exchanging marriage vows in the gallery. A floor above a forum addressing the problems of antiSemitism in the women’s movement commencing. Lititheatre [sic], an all women’s theatre group
rehearsing two original one act plays in a small performance hall across from the Women’s
Switchboard…and downstairs, auditorium seating being arranged for the 1981 Mr. Golden West
Body Building Championship.”89 The conscious simultaneity of these events was made possible
88
89
SFWC, “Women’s Building of the Bay Area: A Proposal,” 6.
Carmen Vazquez, “Direct Mail Letter,” 1981, Box 9, Section 3, San Francisco Women’s Building.
Mayer 44
only by the large-scale rooms set in close proximity to one another within Dovre Hall. While
these events were odd-bedfellows, that they were “above” and “downstairs” and “across” from
one other structured a profound relationship through space. Someone travelling through the
Building, as Vazquez rhetorically invites the reader to do, would witness the imagined urban
community collapsed in space and time. The distant constituencies that the Building served –
Latino residents, radical feminists of different identities, the organizational staff, and male
bodybuilders alike – could run into one another in the halls, in the bathrooms, on 18th Street as
the events were letting out, and feel part of a patchwork community whose borders were
constantly expanding in the shadow of the Women’s Building. The visibility that the Building
constantly performed, then, was not only that of the women’s movement in the public sphere, but
also a visibility of contact made real through the proximities of the space. Expanding the
experience of the “women’s community” in a moment when most thought it to be narrowing, the
Building defined its meaning through the in-between and small encounters collaging the
everyday.
Yet these proximities were not without conflict and unease. Overlap did not
automatically engender inclusion, a fact represented perfectly by an anonymous editor of
Vazquez’s letter who noted with an arrow to the “1981 Mr. Golden West Body Building
Championship,” “[d]o we have to include HIM?”90 Contested even as they were being
constructed, the boundaries of this community were shaped through a tug-of-war of different
renters and opinions that struggled over whose visibility mattered and whose claim to the shared
space should be prioritized. These disputes played out not only through descriptions of the space,
but also in its daily functioning. In an apologetic letter written to the then-burgeoning black
“womanist” writer Alice Walker in 1981, Carmen Vazquez gestures to a conflict between a
90
Ibid.
Mayer 45
reading given by Walker and a simultaneous salsa dance, in which the SFWC staff “made several
attempts to accommodate both your party and the salsa dance” yet “got very little cooperation
from anyone.”91 Judging from consistent complaints of the lack of soundproofing in the
Building,92 one can make an educated guess that salsa music, wafting from the auditorium
below, interrupted Walker’s reading on the second story, prompting Vazquez to return Walker’s
rental fee for the Dining Hall with an apology. In her letter, Vazquez’s exasperation seeps
through as she belatedly warns against “an even more tragic reality, one where mutually
oppressed people lash out at each other.” She attributes the offense to “an ongoing struggle to
find ways of working with a diversity of people in a non-oppressive manner…[O]bviously, last
Saturday we had to give up something and we didn’t know how.” Asked to “give up” a vision of
the Building as a site of harmonious coexistence, Vazquez refused to divest from an ideal in
which “mutually oppressed people” could overlap and treat one another with respect. Although
betrayed by the lack soundproofing, contact for Vazquez was the staging ground of a community
in which “a diversity of people” cooperated and began to speak in the language of solidarity.
While the hope for the Building was complicated by a “technical and dumb mistake,” the
coalitional “spirit” of the Building, for Vazquez and the staff of SFWC, remained, even in light
of constant moments of friction between vastly different constituencies played out through the
Building’s architecture.
As illustrated, the danger of coalitional space accumulated in the interpersonal, everyday
moments of the Building as the hesitancies of a women’s movement slowly gazing inwards at its
own prejudices echoed throughout. Growing solidarities from across the many chasms of the
women’s movement was deeply vulnerable work, one that required an honesty that, for radical
91
Carmen Vazquez, “Dear Alice,” May 29, 1981, Box 9, Section 3, San Francisco Women’s Building.
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Plans for Renovation of the Women’s Building,” Unknown, Box 13, Section
12, San Francisco Women’s Building.
92
Mayer 46
women deeply invested in antiracist politics, was weighted down by emotional and social risk.
As the notes from an early SFWC meeting on racism remarked, “Change comes on daily basis,
ex. letting go of defensiveness.”93 This statement signified a deep shift in the women’s
movement, a turn away from a critique of a patriarchal, racist society that acted on its oppressed
peoples towards an internal excavation of the ways such a society acted through and depended
on those oppressed to reproduce itself. As they came into a more deeply understood and personal
space, the women inside the Building took on a degree of emotional strain necessitated by the
very points of radicalism that they acclaimed.
The strain came to settle like dust on the question of ownership within the Building.
While SFWC had intended initially to sponsor the Women’s Building Project and then have it
apply for separate non-profit status, the Project was so consuming that the lines between the two
organizations became inextricably tangled. Comprising the majority of the parent organization,
the white women of SFWC were predominantly responsible for the Building, and the clear racial
divide between SFWC and the Women’s Building staff made urgent the question of ownership.
As Carmen Vazquez remembers: “[T]he Women’s Building was predominantly women of color
staffed. Women’s Centers was predominantly white. We’re talking major power struggle —
major, major, major power struggle. I was hired as the membership coordinator…at Women’s
Centers, but as I told you, my lesbian of color feminist friends were in the Women’s Building. So
there was this huge sort of tug back and forth [between]…the Women’s Centers’ white women
landlords and…the peon workers [who] didn’t have any real power.”94 Outside of the scope of
decision-making, the women hired to maintain the Building were solely responsible for “the
daily maintenance of the Building,” which, according to collective member Graciela Perez
93
Collective San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Collective Meeting Notes,” March 14, 1984, Box 11, Section 10,
San Francisco Women’s Building.
94
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 39.
Mayer 47
Trevisan, was “always a headache, always a headache. The bathrooms, probably they overflowed
three times a week…”95 As the Third World women were assigned to tasks that eerily recalled
the labor performed by the housewife in The Feminine Mystique, the Building recycled a stale
definition of “women’s labor” and placed it onto the staff of the Building, exemplifying through
space the Third World portrayal of a feminist movement that could not see its own racism.
Coming into a Building that was supposedly theirs to claim, women of color on staff had no
avenues through which to assert ownership, and the Building seemed fated to become yet
another terrain in which women wrestled impossibly with questions of racial marginalization.
Yet the visibility of this dynamic as manifest through space allowed it to be challenged
and creatively managed. When Vazquez suggested that the two collectives merge, the staffs of
the Building and SFWC were forced into uncomfortable conversations about “the power that
white women had, that Women’s Centers as the sort of owning entity had, that we did not
have.”96 When, after “many, many, many meetings,” the merger finally went through in 1980,
Vazquez and Roma Guy, one of the white SFWC members who had been at SFWC the longest,
bet whether or not staff women would agree to move their desks to make room for the recently
added members of the collective. Holding not only a symbolic weight but also a real question
about the configuration of power in the Building, the precarious bet tested the how dedicated the
women of the Building were to the demands of coalition- and relationship-building that they
espoused in words. Within this bureaucratic power struggle, “moving desks” meant more than
just accommodating the critique of women of color; it meant using space to restructure the flow
of power through different locations and subjectivities. “Moving desks” would indicate the
desire of the newly joined collective to destabilize whose “place” mattered within the Building.
95
96
Sushawn Robb, Mothering the Movement, 144.
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 46.
Mayer 48
So when Vazquez, who had predicted optimistically that women would move, won, the Building
made real a new epistemology of the “bridge,” indicating at the very least a desire to take
seriously the spatial reconfiguration that coalition necessitated.
However, the continuous danger of coalitional work elicited doubt and anxiety that
burrowed deep into the Building, replacing the optimism at the moment of purchase with
consistent complaints of exhaustion and resentment that fixated on the Building itself. Coming
out of radical consciousness-raising spaces, the women of SFWC had little idea what or how
much labor the building’s upkeep would require. Previously tasked with internally organizing
and funding the local women’s community, SFWC and its staff now turned almost entirely to the
quotidian work of maintaining the Building. Perceived by the local women’s community as a
victory of women’s potential and for the movement, many women on the inside grew tired of
calling the plumber and cleaning the halls as their primary political agenda. For them, the
Building was too big, too scattered, too isolating, fundamentally a mistake. At a quarterly staff
meeting in February 1982 devoted to discussing the task of owning and operating the Building,
one woman stated bluntly, the “size of bldg. is an obstacle to political work.”97 Viewing the
Building as an out-of-control, four-story monster, the women who repeated this comment
throughout the meeting harbored an unfettered nostalgia for Brady St. and the intimacy of fourrooms that required little upkeep. Forgetting the restrictive conditions that had sequestered them
in the awkwardly sized Brady Street office, these women had grown enamored with the politics
of the women’s movement through private, safe, and relatively homogenous spaces. The
“community organizing” to which they wanted to return idealized proximity. It distinctly did not
encompass a politics of “making room” for a dangerous and often dispiriting coalitional praxis in
97
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Quarterly Staff Meeting,” February 13, 1982, Box 9, Section 11, San Francisco
Women’s Building.
Mayer 49
a Building whose intimacy arrived with interpersonal demands and whose architectural scale
required a newly invisible kind of gendered labor.
In contrast, others saw the Building and the labor required to keep it as the only political
work that really mattered in an increasingly institutionalizing movement. For this latter group, of
which Carmen Vazquez was the undisputed spokesperson, the Women’s Building was an
inherently symbolic and useful project. At the 1982 meeting, Vazquez attempted to put a halt to
the voices that deemed the Building apolitical: “Two years ago, there was no coalition work, no
gallery, no Third World programming.” Dismissing the nostalgia for Brady Street, she reminded
the group that “we talk as if there is no perspective of where we’ve come from. Our questioning
whether or not we can make it could well come from buying into belief [sic] that women could
never [own and operate a building].” 98 From her vantage point as a woman of color, “where
we’ve come from” was an office kept small and invisible by oppressive forces from the outside.
Turning on the “we” of a now multiracial collective, Vazquez interrupts the homogenized
romanticizing of the prior years of the women’s movement, the years of intimacy and relative
homogeneity to which the entire “we” had not been privileged to come from. Regressing to this
definition of community, Vazquez warns, would not only erase the contributions and value of the
coalition and of Third World women but also return to a sense of self-doubt in which women
reproduced the restrictions and prejudices heaped onto them by a patriarchal public. While
Vazquez tried to empathize with the frustrations of the other staff members, for her the
naturalized inhospitality of the previous space of SFWC, constructed in the minds of others as
“safer” and less emotionally and financially “expensive,” did not provided a viable alternative.
The vacillations of the SWFC staff between danger and safety, intimacy and
estrangement, coalitional and organizing work echoed throughout the interiority of the Building
98
Ibid.
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and represented the conflicted and complex juncture at which the women’s movement had
arrived. As institutionalization by the mid-eighties rapidly became the ubiquitous model of
women’s organizing, women sought to utilize their new place in the civic landscape to make the
movement visible and accessible to women who didn’t know where to look to find it. Yet as
formerly anarchic groups morphed into established women’s organizations, institutionalization
radiated both possibility and loss – the loss of a grassroots sensibility enabled by the personal
and collective revelations of consciousness-raising and the loss of intimacies only plausible in
living rooms and four-room offices. But the potential gains were vast – reaching larger numbers
and a more diverse swath of women, commanding reflection on internalized prejudice and
oppression, and maintaining a permanent space in the city and in the public consciousness. As
the Women’s Building navigated and pushed forward into an institutionalized space, at stake
were its radical politics and the affective bonds which had been foundational to the birth of the
women’s movement as a whole. Looking to preserve its radical origins in an increasingly
conservative civic sphere, the Building would turn outward to the Third World neighborhood in
which it was beginning to grow roots.
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III. Learn Spanish! Queer Visibility and Outreach in the Mission District
Despite common and often ahistorical misconceptions of San Francisco as a timeless
haven for homosexuality, San Francisco has lived out its history crossing and re-crossing the
divide between liberatory queer spaces and public acts of homophobic violence. Although
questions of homosexuality have coursed through the city since the Gold Rush, as gay liberation
joined the struggles of the long 1960s, a famous two-part series on homosexuality published in
Life Magazine in 1964 constructed San Francisco the site of national attention as a place of
“special appeal” for homosexuals.99 Weaving into American consciousness a vision of the city as
a haven for those considered deviant, immoral, or lewd in the public eye, as this myth rolled into
the seventies it obscured the fact that those engaged in gay activism and public social life in San
Francisco constantly ran into violence at the hands of police and other residents. While in the late
sixties and early seventies, lesbians and gay men collectively began to speak out against
previously accepted practices of sexual policing and to embark on a spatially grounded “coming
out,” their transgression into public life was punished by common police abuse in gay and
lesbian bars up to the 1960s, the murders of two gay men in the Mission in 1968, and constant
reports of targeted violence against gay white men in the streets.100 Culminating in the
assassination of gay activist and politician Harvey Milk in November 1978, violence enacted on
particular types of queer bodies was a mark of civil life in San Francisco throughout the
seventies.
While this was true across the city, in the Mission District violence was especially acute.
Fallen from its post-war grandeur and a case study in white flight, the Mission in the sixties was
home to a burgeoning Latino community, which by 1970 comprised half of the neighborhood
99
Josh Sides, Erotic City, 84.
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 55.
100
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census.101 Historically the resting place of immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe yet also
haunted in name by its foundational Spanish colonization, the Mission attracted Mexicans and
Central Americans fleeing the wars of the seventies to its sunny climate and developed sense of
political and Latino identity. Yet, in 1977, the queer community turned its eyes to the Mission as
the locus of homophobic violence when four Latino boys stabbed Robert Hillsborough, a
professional gardener who had recently made his home in the neighborhood, to death outside his
apartment building. As the media and the gay community blamed the neighborhood for its strict
Catholic understandings of homosexuality and masculinity, little attention was paid to the racial
and socioeconomic displacement that accompanied the migration of upwardly mobile white gay
men into the Mission, many of whom romanticized their new homes as located in the midst of, as
one resident put it, “stunningly beautiful latino people and…their marvelous language.”102
Although the neighborhood had throughout the seventies been a site of conflict between
neighborhood residents and white gay men coming into a more visible public, after the
Hillsborough incident, attention to the intersection of gay and Third World politics in the
Mission reached a point of tension that would formatively sculpt the experience of San Francisco
Women’s Centers on 18th and Valencia Street.
Framed by the call of one gay activist to “take the streets back,” SFWC purchased Dovre
Hall and after necessary renovations, relocated in 1979.103 Drawn to the neighborhood because
of a new yet established lesbian community along Valencia Street, the Search Committee fixed
their eyes on Dovre Hall before it was even for sale.104 Yet while the migration of lesbians into
the Mission was symbolically tied to the contested claims of displacement and violence between
101
Josh Sides, Erotic City, 116.
Ibid., 153; 159-60.
103
Ibid., 164.
104
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 50.
102
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gay men and Latino residents, lesbians in fact were at the end of a process of spatially and
politically detaching themselves from their male counterparts. Motivated by the sexism of the
homophile movement and gay liberation as gay men claimed the Castro, Polk District, and
SoMa, lesbians moved deliberately out of the centers of gay life and towards a separatist feminist
community developing along the Western periphery of the Mission. Drawn to the relatively
cheap rent, the new lesbian residents jumpstarted a lesbian economy along Valencia Street that
drew the lines of queer life from the steps of their ubiquitous women-only collectives to
women’s storefronts and spaces of leisure, triangulating patterns of lesbian social life in the
neighborhood beginning in the mid-seventies. By 1980, more than eight lesbian businesses stood
along Valencia, proudly affirming a newfound visibility of lesbian life.
Figure 1: "The Woman's Guide to Valencia Street," n.d.
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“The Woman’s Guide to Valencia Street,” a map in the Women’s Building archive drawn
sometime after 1979, attests to the unique form of women’s leisure, politics and sexuality that
grafted a lesbian separatist ideal onto the western edge of the Mission and that reshaped the
contours of lesbianism as lived in the public sphere.105 Visually, the map treats equally the
feminist law offices, the women’s bath house, the women’s bookstore, and the women’s bar,
pulling spaces that perhaps in reality embodied different sets of feminist politics together to
constitute an apparently comprehensive center. The size of Valencia Street unfolds the moviescreen promise of social life, signifying a triumph radically different from the shield of secrecy
erected to hide lesbian sociality in the preceding decades. Dwarfing the individual women’s
businesses, the street is a grand and declarative unwrapping of a feminist presence in the
Mission. The gay man is effectively erased; rather than depicting the Castro, the mostly-male gay
neighborhood immediately to the West into which the Mission bleeds, the map green-screens the
picturesque backdrop of Twin Peaks. Through the spaces that the map depicts and those it
defaces, the category of “woman” becomes the foundational element of belonging. Answering to
the Castro and SoMa as masculine-dominated queer spaces, in the women’s world of Valencia
Street womanhood was invited to enter every position in the public sphere.
The world depicted makes a point in highlighting the exposure of female sexuality to the
daylight. As illustrated by the small citywide map in the left hand corner of the map, Valencia
Street and the larger Mission were desirable to the lesbians who lived and worked there precisely
because they were accessible by public transportation and integrated within the larger space of
the city. Publicizing access as an attraction and not a danger, Valencia Street figured as the
center of a personal and collective existence coming to life in three dimensions. For the women
105
Teresa Brown and Sara Lewinstein, “The Woman’s Guide to Valencia Street,” Unknown, Box 13, Section 5, San
Francisco Women’s Building.
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who flooded the neighborhood by bus and the newly opened Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
stops at 16th and 24th and Mission Streets, to walk along Valencia Street was to witness before
your very eyes a patriarchal public redefined, to see lesbians busy with the small pleasures of
every day life basking in the revolutionary comfort of seeing and being seen.
Strolling down Valencia from the BART station on 16th, a woman looking for the lesbian
enclave would first encounter Old Wives Tales on 16th, a women’s bookstore opened on
Halloween 1976. A hallowed place for women to “hang out and hook up with people,” Old
Wives Tales provided the community with readings by feminist authors, a place to meet friends
over coffee, and bulletin boards that served as information hubs for the lesbian and women’s
community.106 Next she would find Amelia’s at 18th, the famous lesbian bar founded in 1978 as a
counterpart to the older Maud’s, marked by a line down the street at all hours of the night, a
built-in security apparatus that ensured against male assault. According to Joan Crittenden, one
of the bar’s original managers, “[Amelia’s] was a place to come and get dressed up, not any old
bar. [It] became a place to be seen and be proud.”107 If she continued down Valencia, she would
come across Good Vibrations on 22nd, the first women-oriented sex toy store in the country
opened in 1977.108 According to founder Joani Blank, Good Vibrations was the first “sexpositive, clean, well-lighted place” for women to buy sex toys.109 Cattycorner from Good
Vibrations would sit the Artemis Society, another women’s café established in 1977 and named
for the Greek goddess of virginity and childbirth, which catered to upper class and femme
106
Lenn Keller, We Thought the World We Built Would Be Forever, interview with Adrienne Skye Roberts, June
16, 2012, http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2012/06/we-thought-the-world-we-built-would-be-forever-an-interviewwith-lenn-keller/.
107
Heather Cassell, “BARchive: Come As You Are,” Bar Tab, November 3, 2010,
http://www.bartabsf.com/2010/11/barchive-come-as-you-are/.
108
Sides, Erotic City, 122.
109
Annie Auguste, “This Toy Is Not a Toy,” Salon, June 28, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/06/28/toys_3/.
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lesbians.110 These lesbian-feminist spaces communicated through their appearance and structure
that they were not the covert lesbian bars of the previous decades. Replete with good lighting and
lines down the block, these new spaces flaunted a distinct sense of pride and redefined the
movement of lesbians “out” in public and in the streets of the city. Through these storefronts,
women proclaimed their queer identities as newly visible, the grounds of a public life and
collective existence that had heretofore existed underground. To walk down Valencia Street was
to witness the redefinition of lesbianism through urban space.
Yet the street and experience depicted in “The Woman’s Guide to Valencia” is gapingly
incomplete, obscuring Valencia as a mixed space and site of contact between a lesbian and Third
World aesthetic and public politic. Illustrating a seemingly comprehensive lesbian-feminist
closed-loop, the map removes all signs of Latino life, blotting out the ubiquitous Latino
restaurants hawking burritos and empanadas that lined the street. Isolating formalized and
whitewashed “women’s spaces,” the map designates Valencia as an experience solely in white
queer femininity. Yet Third World lesbians, attracted to the street for its very promise of
visibility and queer sociality, navigated a more complex and varied terrain that married their
multiple identities through built space. Cherrie Moraga, in 1980 a graduate student in gender
studies at San Francisco State University and in the process of compiling This Bridge Called My
Back, conjures Valencia Street as the ultimate space of belonging: “[S]peaking on a panel about
racism here in San Francisco, I could physically touch what I had been missing. There in the
front row, nodding encouragement and identification, sat five Latina sisters. Count them! Five
avowed Latina [f]eminists: Gloria, Jo, Aurora, Chabela y Mirtha…After the forum, the six of us
walk down Valencia Street singing songs in Spanish. We buy burritos y cerveza from ‘La
110
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 42.
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Cumbre’ and talk our heads off into the night…”111 In this anecdote, Moraga navigates Valencia
not only as a feminist and a lesbian, but also as a Latina, an identity which radically transforms
how she maps the street. Burritos and cerveza at La Cumbre, the legendary restaurant first to sell
a San Francisco-style burrito, are for Moraga just as foundational to an experience of lesbian
Valencia as is Amelia’s, which lay only two blocks away. Arm in arm, singing Spanish songs
with her fellow Latina feminists, Moraga basks in a queer visibility just as breathtakingly
liberatory as that of the invisible white audience of “The Woman’s Guide to Valencia,” yet she
also simultaneously interrupts the presumption of whiteness with a proud assertion of Latinidad.
In the gap between Moraga’s words and the map, Valencia comes into view as a
kaleidoscopic space with shifting patterns, suggesting a struggle played out through disparate
experiences of the built environment. Insofar as the street brokered a collision between Latina
and queer feminist worlds, investigating the experience of “overlap” illuminates how, in moving
into the neighborhood, the Women’s Building elicited a conversation centered on fear of erasure,
violence, and racialized visibility. Perhaps no document conveys the tension inundating the
neighborhood in the late 1970s as does a letter to the editor of Plexus Magazine entitled “Mission
Solidarity,” authored by a self-described “Chicana lesbian” named Monica Lozano in July
1979.112 Written approximately one month after the first tenants moved into the Women’s
Building, the letter does not specifically cite the Building yet is presumably a response to this
most visible occurrence of lesbian-feminists claiming “women’s space” along Valencia.
Describing the Mission as a “very volatile situation,” Lozano blames a trend of “more and more
lesbians and lesbian establishments coming into the Mission and being very noticeable in their
presence.” If lesbian-feminists were attracted to Valencia in part because it allowed them to
111
112
Cherrie Moraga, “Preface,” in This Bridge Called My Back, xvii.
Monica Lozano, “Mission Solidarity,” Plexus, July 1979.
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become intelligible as lesbians, in the eyes of the Lozano this visibility constituted an attack on
the public character of the Mission. The affront of these women was not just that they are
seemingly invading the Mission, but that they were “noticeable” – opening bookstores and
bathhouses, waiting in line for lesbian bars through the night, presumably holding hands as they
walked down the street – signs that they were not only occupying space but also making it their
own.
Although as an “out” lesbian Lozano surely empathized with the desire to practice
queerness in public, what she decries in her letter is the intrusiveness of whiteness. Recalling a
long history of colonization rooted in the neighborhood, she turns to the new residents directly:
“But women, you need to know more of what barrios like the Mission are all about, especially if
you plan to move into them. The Mission is more than a quaint place with a ‘South-of-theborder’ atmosphere. It is a place where…every breath reflects the struggles and solidarity of an
oppressed people. It’s the backbone for the survival of a people that have been completely
oppressed and exploited since the white man first descended on this continent centuries ago.”
Emphasizing the image of the “white man descending,” Lozano implies that the lesbian feminist
territorialization of the Mission is in fact not about sexual freedom, but instead an act of violence
hiding behind the language of Third World fetish and queer feminist liberation. As she highlights
Latino and indigenous survival, Lozano argues that race and racial resistance lives within the
architecture of the neighborhood still, inevitably framing the descent of the Women’s Building in
terms of racial displacement. Historicizing the site of overlap, Lozano reveals it to be incredibly
fraught, burdened with a legacy of struggle over space as old as the neighborhood itself.
However, Lozano’s critique also resists race as a historical dead end, proposing instead a
set of demands emerging from the shifting terrain of her position as a Third World lesbian. To
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the white lesbians settled in the Mission, she warns: “You’re being watched – how you act, how
much of a conscious effort you make to reach out to the Latino community. If you speak of the
mutual struggles of oppressed peoples, then do something about it. Be respectful to the people in
the Mission and the traditions and culture that exist here. Do work around gay oppression, but do
it in a progressive and sensitive way. Learn Spanish! Try to communicate in a way that is nonalienating.” Departing from the symbolism of racial colonization, Lozano zooms in on the
possibilities of small encounters between lesbian-feminists and Third World peoples that might
undercut racial conflict and instead build active solidarity in the site of overlap. Occupying the
place of intersection as a Latina lesbian, her interest in an uneasy process of reconciliation was
perhaps motivated by her desire to reconcile the very parts of herself in the space where she
lived. Without many social spaces in the public sphere in which they could be “out,” and
marginalized by culture and numbers in the Gay Alliance of Latin Americans (GALA), Latina
lesbians in San Francisco were left largely to informal relationships and race-based groups as
their primary political havens.113 As a queer woman of color occupying the contested border of
colonial space, Lozano saw in structures like the Women’s Building both a critique of historical
violence yet also a possible future of visibility coming to the fore in the space of an often tense
overlap.
The demands of Third World women like Lozano fundamentally structured the way in
which the staff at the Women’s Building maneuvered their newfound place in the Mission.
While “The Woman’s Guide to Valencia” purports to define the experience of lesbian-feminists
in the Mission, the map is the only gesture to the lesbian-feminist presence along Valencia Street
in the Women’s Building archive. Marking a notable silence, the “neighborhood” surrounding
113
For more info on GALA, the most prominent gay Latino organization in the city, see Horacio N. Roque Ramirez,
“‘That’s My Place!’: Negotiating Racial, Sexual, and Gender Politics in San Francisco’s Gay Latino Alliance, 19751983,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 2 (April 2003), 254-5.
Mayer 60
Dovre Hall is cast in the archive as a purely Latino space, described as “ideal” only in that it
offered an avenue towards a proclaimed radicalism that centered solidarity with racial struggles
for justice. Countering both the erasure of the Latino character of the neighborhood in “The
Woman’s Guide to Valencia” and Lozano’s depiction of the culturally unaware lesbian, the
women of SFWC created a politics of racial caution, deferring to the Mission solely as a
politicized Third World community. As they expanded the goals for the Building to include
“provid[ing] residents of the surrounding Mission neighborhood with a space for community
activities – political, cultural, and social” alongside creating a “centralized ‘headquarters’ for
women’s activities,” the SFWC staff displayed an anxiety, perhaps due to a lack of Third World
women staff members, that a productive space of overlap between a Third World and women’s
community could not exist outside of or within the Building.
This anxiety profoundly exemplified how the Third World feminist demand to connect
ideology to place radicalized the women’s movement. Five days before SFWC moved into the
Building, the staff concluded a process of self-reflection and investigation around issues of race.
In the notes from the final meeting, under “What We Learned,” the women listed, among others:
“1. Ignorance of Mission community issues 2. We need to change our approach i.e. P.R.,
visibility and outreach in the Mission.”114 As the notes make clear, the shared educational
program radically modified the staff’s understanding of the very nature of visibility, as a room of
mostly white lesbians newly enjoying a visible “coming out” in the city shifted away from a
politics of unconcerned sexual liberation enacted through the space of Valencia. Centering the
need to make the Building visible in such a way that wouldn’t indicate occupation or ownership,
the women of SFWC deferred to a more cautious and intentional process of “outreach in the
114
San Francisco Women’s Centers, “Notes from Final Racism Meeting,” May 30, 1979, Box 34, Section 5, San
Francisco Women’s Building.
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Mission.” Recognizing that spreading throughout the neighborhood demanded an awareness of
“Mission community issues,” women learned that, in order to interrogate identity as
geographically and racially specific, they had to engage with a much longer process of selfeducation. Hinging on the category of visibility, made urgent by the nature of a shared built
space, the staff of SFWC departed once and for all from “women” as a purportedly homogenous
category.
Modeling a trajectory from awareness to action that would carry over into the daily life of
Dovre Hall and mirror a rapidly changing women’s movement, the women of SFWC committed
to transforming the Building’s relationship to the space and residents of the Mission. Under the
heading “What We Want to Follow Up On,” the women enumerated: “1. Learn to speak Spanish
(Kim) 2. Go to block club meetings and other community meetings, organizations, [and] events,”
coupling external efforts with internal changes: “Learn more about imperialism and relate it to
daily experiences of racism on a daily basis, ex. agendas, special meeting or forum, open up
process.” Rather than presume the neighborhood to be open upon their arrival, the staff of SFWC
sought instead to embed themselves within the extant Third World structures and in doing so,
build solidarity as the foundation upon which they could enter responsibly into the
neighborhood. Outlining this process, the staff found that a commitment to solidarity had to
transgress the very boundaries of a categorical inside and outside, women’s space and
neighborhood space, feminism and a politics of the Third World.115 Beginning to comprehend
the possibilities and demands of a space of overlap, the women of SFWC realized that the
Building could only achieve its goal as both a community and feminist space within intersecting
geographies. Actively grappling with the interpersonal and political dimensions of change in a
moment of racial paralysis for the women’s movement, the staff of SFWC molded a vision of a
115
Ibid.
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new and more holistically liberatory shape of women’s space that would weld a racially
integrated political and social life through its place in the Mission.
Yet when theory refracted back to relationships on the ground and in between
individuals, the desire to actively make space for a feminist Third World politics spiraled into
complex arrangements of power that struggled to enact the promise of coalitional space. While
SFWC’s initial impulse was to hire more Third World women, the new staff members of color
greeted the “good white girls” with disdain, a phenomena that indicated that ingrained power
imbalances would be difficult to shake.116 This pattern replayed between the Third World women
staff members and Latino residents of the neighborhood as well, illustrated by a quinceañera that
took place in the Building in 1979. Economically motivated and politically determined to
provide rental space to neighborhood residents who were not members of the lesbian-feminist or
women’s community, SWFC had started to offer itself as a site for community-oriented events
almost as soon as it moved in. On the night of November 3rd, Jacque Dupree, an early Third
World member of the Building collective, arrived at the Building to do security for the night.
According to Dupree’s security report, the evening began tensely when the two birthday girls
arrived at the Building and protested that Dupree had locked the second floor.117 While the girls
perhaps thought they had reserved the second floor for the party, Dupree dismissed the teens
almost immediately as “rude and disruptive and uncooperative” and refused their request to open
it.
As the night went on and attendees began to flood the Building and the street outside, the
party spiraled out of Dupree’s control: “About 100 youth are outside, someone is…pulling down
the fire escape to the Lapaige Street side of the Building. They climb up through the window on
116
117
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 37-8.
Jaque Dupree, “Security Report,” November 3, 1979, Box 20, Section 7, San Francisco Women’s Building.
Mayer 63
the 2nd floor trying to sneak into the dance…Things are getting hairy and now it’s about 10:00
some kid has gotten in through the air vent in the 2nd floor bathroom and has entered from the
drop in room. There are about 150 youths outside now…” Dupree narrates the event as if in an
action film, employing a slick stream-of-consciousness that configures the neighborhood as a
warzone infiltrating into the interior of a vulnerable Building from all sides. Fluctuating between
alarm and an attempt at calm, Dupree renders herself locked in battle with a Latino mob, keeping
tabs as their numbers multiply and as they continuously defeat her efforts to keep them from
entering the Building: “…people on the streets have kicked in the backdoor panel which we kept
replacing (twice now)…Yes, everyone is keeping us very busy. I applied emergency patchwork
to board up the bathroom window hole only to have it removed outside of an [sic] ½ an
hour…We locked the doors. And refused them entrance to the Building…They proceeded to
kick in the window doors.” Unable to act as a garrison, the Building in her words is the primary
subject of violence, horribly victim to the neighborhood and the kids who represent it.
Yet, curiously, Dupree destabilizes her distress with half-hearted attempts at an
intellectualized justification of the quasi-riot. Throughout her report, Dupree’s refrain is that
“things are getting hairy,” remarking casually that the kids are “keeping us busy.” Trying to
lower the volume of her alarm, Dupree breaks the dichotomization of the “home front” and the
“enemy” late in her report: “It is about 11:00pm. Now other than policing the bathroom for kids
passing liquor and drugs through bashed openings in the men’s bathroom, as well as checking
back and forth on the beer, there’s a lot of dialogue about Daly City gangs, with low riders –
Mission gangs outside.” In this confusing rhetorical turn, Dupree interrupts the chronicle of the
security guards’ frantic activities to gesture to an apparently crucial conversation about gang
violence in neighboring Daly City and the Mission and its possible incursion into the Building,
Mayer 64
revealing SFWC’s still hesitant attitude towards their Mission work. In 1979, low riders in the
Mission had a particular reputation of violence. Named for the cars they gunned that sat close to
the ground, “low-riders” were commonly associated with trouble. According to a San Francisco
Guidebook published in 1981: “…kids cruise[d] the main streets of town looking for action.
Cool kids of the Mission cruise in large, mint-condition American cars, sometimes outfitted with
red plush carpeting or chandeliers, but always sported a hydraulic system that pumps the car up
and down. These low-riders listen to sixties soul and Motown while they drive very slowly up
Mission Street.”118 Viewed as flashy and disruptive by visitors to the neighborhood, they were
also commonly associated with particular types of anti-gay violence, and white gays who had
begun to move into the neighborhood decried low-riders as “thuglettes.”119 In light of the cycles
of backlash between gay men and Latino youths in the Mission, it is perhaps easiest to interpret
Dupree’s “dialogue” as an invocation of this type of racist rhetoric common in gay circles
hovering over the neighborhood.
Yet, taking into account Dupree’s position as a Third World woman and the history of
anti-police work at the Building, one might also read the “dialogue” as resisting the flat
“monologues” that stereotyped low-riders as perpetrators of violence. By 1979, the Women’s
Building had joined a coalition of community organizations in the Mission whose aim was to
change the conversation around low-riders to recognize that Latino youth themselves were the
subjects of structural violence at the hands of the police and the forces of displacement coursing
throughout the neighborhood. As Roberto Hernandez, in 1994 a political organizer in the
Mission, remembers, low-riders were in fact a symbol of a strategic resistance: "I believe that the
low-riders, and I was one of them, when we cruised down Mission St. that's what saved the
118
Shepard, In the Neighborhoods, 71.
Sides, Erotic City, 159.
119
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Mission St. from being taken over and gentrified."120 In an effort to ally themselves with such
protest, the women of SFWC had sought avenues for advocating for low-riders, partnering with
other Latino and Third World queer organizations in the Mission to put up public information
fliers like one titled “Stop Police Harassment in the Mission”: “The San Francisco Police
Department and a small group of Mission merchants and homeowners…are working together on
a repressive campaign to ‘clean up’ the Mission…The targets of this vicious and racist campaign
are the young Latinos, Blacks, and Filipinos who hang out on the streets or cruise up the Mission
in their low-rider cars…These young people are not social problems. Instead, they are the
victims of the real, major social, economic and political problems that affect all Third World
communities.”121
SFWC’s advocacy signified a profound choice to resist alignment with gay men in the
Mission and to instead recognize the intersections between racist and homophobic acts of statesanctioned violence. At the moment of the quinceañera, the SWFC was desperately trying to
attach “solidarity” to the identity of lesbian as it appeared in the Mission, signing the flier:
“Lesbians and gay men who live in the Mission [and] condemn the tactics of the police in the
Mission…” Taking the articulated relationship between the Women’s Building and the lowriders into account, one can read Dupree’s “dialogue about Daly City gangs, with low riders –
Mission gangs outside” as a moment of theorizing in the midst of chaos, of stepping back from a
position of immense personal and professional vulnerability and choosing to understand the
Latino kids coming in through the windows and kicking down the doors as experiencing a
similar, albeit differently charged victimhood. It is this pause that demonstrates the multiple and
contradictory positions of lesbians in the Building: as occupiers of a neighborhood that perceived
120
Pam Rorke-Levy, “The Mission,” VHS, Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco (KQED, 1994).
Unknown, “Stop Police Harassment in the Mission,” 1979, Box 26, Section 21, San Francisco Women’s
Building.
121
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them as colonizers, as landlords fighting the abuse of the Building, as queer victims of citizen
violence in the Mission and of police violence in San Francisco. Dupree’s “dialogues”
demonstrate the complex arrangements power took as the neighborhood sabotaged the boundary
between the inside and the outside. This moment resists the otherwise over-determined narrative
of the Building as fortress protecting against its destructive neighbors, or alternatively, of the
Building as a colonizing actor taken back by those to whom the neighborhood belongs. Instead
the Building locates and structures the space of the pause – the retreat from chaos into theory and
the turn away from obvious solidarities to more complicated, intersectional sets of alliances often
weighted down by offense.
This moment of crisis speaks to how the Building functioned as a site of contact for two
communities alternatingly divided and united by histories of violence, forcing its inhabitants to
navigate a complex terrain of solidarity consistently fraught yet increasingly centered within the
women’s movement as it moved into the eighties. Complicating the naïve and abstract visions of
coalition decided upon at the Building’s founding, those at the Women’s Building fleshed out the
space of overlap as one of mutual demands and accountability. In a subsequent publicity release
explaining the quinceañera incident and announcing a community meeting to discuss potential
changes in the Building’s rental policies, SFWC asserted that “[t]he experience and cost in
physical and emotional injury to employees and property damage can not be tolerated. We do
support the understanding that youth, particularly in the Mission Community, are victims of
social and economic forces outside their control. We are aware of the frustrations of our
community youth. We are aware that we cannot accept the violations against Women’s Building
employees and property. We are aware of the disrespect and disregard of our neighbors and
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neighborhood the November 3rd incident clearly demonstrated.”122 Using parallel sentence
structure to express seemingly conflicting statements, the authors of the notice carved a space in
which they could weigh equally a recognition of Latino youth as “victims of social and economic
forces outside their control” and the real and sometimes violent consequences of breaking down
the interior/exterior divide. As they mapped the tensions of their location in the Mission, the
women at SFWC entered into a new understanding of the reciprocity coalition demanded
between all its players. Encompassing the neighborhood, the youth, and the Building under a
floating “we,” the staff sought to remake a multiracial, multigenerational identity that could
collectivize both resistance and responsibility. Turning down the possibility of retreat from the
public or antagonism towards the neighborhood, the women of SFWC invested in dialogue as an
essential tool to create formative sites of intersection that could talk across and transcend the
boundaries structuring the women’s movement of the seventies. Making room both for a space
but also a practice of overlap in a neighborhood and movement burying itself in ever-multiplying
divides, the women at the Building embarked on a dual politics of self-reflection and outreach
that would fundamentally change its politics in the eighties.
122
Women’s Building Coordinating Committee, “Announcing: A Community Meeting,” November 11, 1979, Box
20, Section 7, San Francisco Women’s Building.
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IV. The Building as Counter State
In February of 1980, a woman with “black hair, bangs, probably ear length hair tucked
under a black rain slicker hat”123 entered the Women’s Building asking about dance classes.
After going up to the second floor to use the bathroom, she left. Judith Birnbaum, a security
officer sensing something suspicious, climbed to the second floor fifteen minutes later to find a
fire silently spreading that would eventually gut the drop-in and childcare rooms and the office
of the Third World Women’s Alliance before it was put out.124 In the following September, a
bomb threat vacated the Building. On October 8, 1980, a pipe bomb exploded in the middle of
the night at the Building’s entrance, shattering the marquee signs and spraying glass and shrapnel
against the concrete. As this string of violent incidents inducted the Women’s Building into the
eighties and marked a bleak celebration of the Building’s one-year anniversary, the women who
worked in the Building emerged from their shock grappling with the role of the Building in a
movement rapidly spiraling into the Reagan years and a newly hostile conservative backlash. As
both feminists and critics of feminism alike declared the eighties as the era of crisis for the
women’s movement, as the Equal Rights Amendment finally failed to be ratified in 1982 and the
Reagan administration vastly defunded federal programs that assisted women and women’s
organizations, the women of SFWC turned away from a one-platform politics of women’s
liberation to rethink how the Building might stake out a counter state that would put an
intersectional analysis of violence at its center.125 Refining a rhetoric that placed the 1980 attacks
among a horizontally constructed narrative sewn throughout the Bay Area, the United States, and
the world, SFWC transformed the Building into a site of an expanded theorization of the state as
123
Jaque Dupree, “Police Report: Fire,” February 1980, Box 20, Section 4, San Francisco Women’s Building.
Lulu Lilith, “Formal Press Release Re Fire,” February 25, 1980, Box 20, Section 4, San Francisco Women’s
Building.
125
Unknown, “International Women’s Day 1984: Women Stand Up to Reagan,” March 8, 1984, Box 11, Section 11,
San Francisco Women’s Building.
124
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an agent of global and local hegemony. Breaking with women who had chosen to work within
the state apparatus, this strategy radically redefined both how the Building would situate itself in
relationship to the state and the Mission and also what kind of politics it would shape in the
shadows of the conservative eighties.
Nuancing common historiographies of the women’s movement that couch the 1980s in
the language of “fragmentation” and “loss of focus,”126 the attacks on the Women’s Building
provoked not only a foreboding climate of fear but also a distinct sense of accomplishment. In
the San Francisco Chronicle article about the October pipe bomb, Carmen Vazquez railed: “I am
more mad than worried…I think we were targeted because we’re a self-avowed feminist
organization. When it’s women’s liberation, our opponents think it’s kind of fun and ha, ha. But
when women organize at the grassroots level for child care and better housing, then we become a
threat.”127 As she situated the Women’s Building as the best example of grassroots organizing,
Vazquez renewed the fact of a women-owned and –operated Building as a site in which the
rhetoric of women’s liberation actually threatened the lived order of the city and women’s place
within it. While the women in the Building understood the arson and bombs as obvious financial
setbacks and safety hazards, the extremist violence revealed at that moment a space of visibility
in the narrative of the women’s movement and in the mainstream press that affirmed the ability
of feminism to alter women’s material conditions. Vazquez’s anger came not from the mere
occurrence of violence, but rather from her conviction that the opponents of women’s liberation
had decided to play dirty in a war that the Building and the movement it symbolized was in fact
winning. Insofar as the Building, in name and in presence, made inescapable the triumphs of
126
For a traditional history of the Women’s Movement in the eighties, see Chapter Six of Sara M. Evans, Tidal
Wave.
127
H.G. Reza, “Pipe Bomb Damages S.F. Women’s Building,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 1980, Box 20,
Section 3, San Francisco Women’s Building.
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women in the United States, its very vulnerability inducted it into a position of prominence
within the movement. Newly felt as an embassy for women’s liberation, the Women’s Building
made concrete through its violated architecture the vast gains of feminist organizing,
contradicting the narrative of decline as the Building and its staff entered the eighties.
Yet as they looked out from the Building across the geography of the Bay Area, the staff
of the Women’s Building began to link extremist violence to that of a state deeply embroiled in
the politics of domination. Outlined most cogently in a March 1981 editorial by Vazquez in
Plexus Magazine entitled “Thoughts on Violence From A Women’s Building Community
Meeting,”128 the women of the Building used the 1980 attacks to chronicle and critically resist a
nation whose civic and public faces were bent on destroying the gains liberation struggles had
won during the two previous decades. Linking inextricably acts of state and civilian offense,
Vazquez states clearly that “[t]he Women’s Building is not the only target of violence. Black
families in Contra Costa have had their homes and dignity violated for months;129 women are
still being murdered in Marin,130 police brutality in the Mission goes on with impudence.” As she
drew lines across the Bay Area to connect these instances of racialized and gendered violence,
Vazquez knit together geographically isolated acts through a map of outrage. Whether
perpetuated by a racist state or sadistic individuals, “violence” inducted its subjects into a
coalition of common experience for which the Building stood as a public spokesperson as it
fixated on vulnerability as the gathering place of politics. “Set[ting] a tone for the Women’s
128
Carmen Vazquez, “Thoughts on Violence From A Women’s Building Community Meeting,” Plexus, March
1981.
129
In the last months of 1980, three families in Contra Costa County, a suburban district across the Bay, had their
homes terrorized by white youths. Although the county’s Ku Klux Klan chapter was growing, the police in the area
failed to respond effectively to the families’ plight. See George Williamson, “East Bay Terrorism,” San Francisco
Chronicle, November 28, 1980.
130
In eight months in 1980 and 1981, a mysterious “trailside killer” murdered six women and one man hiking along
trails in Marin and Santa Cruz county. See Jaxon Van Derbeken, “DNA Ties Trailside Killer to ’79 Slaying,” San
Francisco Chronicle, February 24, 2010.
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Building and a progressive set of politics,” Vazquez’s speech established the Building as a
counter state tasked with calling out injuries against its citizens, reimagining the Building’s
institutional solidarity and geographical scope of concern.131
Entering into this new stage of progressivism through a complex web of interlocking acts
of terror, the activists at the Women’s Building cultivated a new analysis of the state as the
primary arbiter of violence. Centering the narratives of Third World women who worked in the
Building, the women of SFWC moved away from a definition of violence as “physical force
used so as to injure or damage” and towards another: “unjust use of force or power, as in
deprivation of rights.” Permanently attaching the state to notions of what oppression at the turn
of the eighties would mean, Vazquez illustrates the latter definition, which she cites from
Webster’s dictionary, through her personal narrative:
I’ve experienced much violence in my own life because I grew up in Harlem and in
Harlem many people are either violent or violated. My father was a violent man. I
remember the beatings my mother suffered. I remember the axe with which he threatened
me, my brothers, my sisters…He is a Puerto Rican who went to war in defense of the
U.S. and got his body mangled when he drove over a mine. In return for his ‘heroism’ he
got a monthly pension – no job, no medals, no government loans or education. He lived
the rest of his life out as an alcoholic. What dignity he had in his life I never knew and
he’s dying now in Puerto Rico of cancer and a rotten liver and a violent life.
Using her personal maturation as a metaphor for what she hopes will be the future politics of the
women’s movement, Vazquez says: “As a child, I suffered violence. As a woman, I understand
that my father was a violated man.” As she strays from a politics of individualized blame,
Vazquez instructs that as the Building and the movement mature, both must conduct a structural
analysis of power in which women aren’t only victims but called to a nascent coalition of
vulnerable subjects. Vazquez performs choosing empathy and not resentment, narrating her
father’s story as caught in a colonial subjectivity that explains his abuse as actively reproducing
131
Carmen Vazquez, Voices of Feminism, 45.
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that of an imperial state. Depicting Puerto Rico as a wrecked haven, Vazquez drapes her feminist
consciousness in the layers of inferiority, violence, and misogyny that American imperialism has
wrought. Citing in the same breath her father’s story while asserting that the Women’s Building
is a “family place,”132 Vazquez remakes the Building as a site for the rounded stories of Third
World women and their familial histories, all rooted in an intersectional narrative of an
overlapping set of state-inflicted wounds.
Taking Vazquez as exemplary of trends occurring within the Building’s interior as the
merger shifted the demographics of the SFWC collective, one sees how Third World women
reshaped the Women’s Building as a container for previously disparate liberation struggles,
positing womanhood as a departing point for a complex set of solidarities constructed as the
foundation of a counter state. In the most fast-paced paragraph of her piece, Vazquez says: “We
hear little of the violence that is a deprivation of our rights. Black people all over the world can
tell us about that kind of violence; the peoples of Nicaragua and El Salvador and Chile and
Argentina and Puerto Rico can tell us about that kind of violence. Lesbians and gay men can tell
us about that kind of violence. Jewish people can tell us about that kind of violence.” In this
refrain, we hear a harmonized narrative straddling history and continents that speaks of a long
history of persecution and marginalization in the Americas and across the globe. While women
as a category are noticeably absent from the list, Vazquez points to the way in which women are
implied in each subsequent piece of the litany, thus breaking open the category of women as
subject not only to patriarchy but also to racism, homophobia, and colonization. Positing the
Building as the possession of this self-reflexive “we,” Vazquez forges the space as a center of
organizing through which “we are going to unite as a people violated.” Still under the banner of
132
Ibid., 39.
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women in name and in practice, the Building plunged into the eighties as the ambassador of a
newly imagined constituency and a newly radicalized Third World sense of identity and struggle.
However, the Building would face its institutional reckoning not only in the chaos of
violence but also in the everyday dilemmas facing it as a women’s space, illustrated by a 1981
incident concerning a group of policewomen who wished to organize in the Building. In
December of 1980, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founding members of Daughters of Bilitis and
of SFWC, requested space in the Women’s Building to hold a community outreach meeting on
behalf of Police Community Relations as well as ongoing meetings to support women police
officers in their work. Although not policewomen themselves, Martin and Lyon had come out of
queer struggles with the San Francisco police in the early seventies advocating working within
the force to address police brutality against women, queer people, and Third World communities.
To this end, they had founded a support group for policewomen looking to challenge sexism
within the force.133 Searching for a place to hold meetings away from the presence of male
officers, Lyon and Martin most likely ran into the controversy at the Building with their eyes
shut, as they had been essential to shaping SFWC’s beginning as an organization whose primary
aim was to nurture the multiplicity of female experience.
The Booking Coordinator at the Building felt strongly that the requests clashed with the
politics formed out of SFWC’s anti-police brutality work and the recent violence at the Building.
Indeed, when she brought the issue to the staff of SWFC, after many hours of debate the
collective chose to refuse both requests. Whereas the previous rhetoric of the Women’s Building
had somewhat abstractly protested “imperialism” and “oppression,” this decision reoriented the
Building to face head-on its triangulated relationship with state power and Third World politics.
A March 1981 editorial in Plexus signed only as “Women’s Building staff" explained: “Given
133
Robb, Mothering the Movement, 150.
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that the police have historically played a repressive role in the organizing efforts of all oppressed
peoples in this society, given the Mission and Gay communities’ present struggles with police
brutality, we could not, in good conscience, agree to their presence in our midst.”134 The trope of
“in our midst” is repeated later in the editorial: “We, the present staff of SFWC/WB have been
entrusted by the membership and past leadership of this organization with the task of establishing
and maintaining an on-going dialogue and a position of solidarity between the Women’s
Movement, as represented by our organization, and the liberation struggles of other oppressed
peoples. We cannot do that work and have the police, of any sex, in our midst.”
The repetition of this phrase draws attention to the presence of the state already
omnipresent in the lives of the women in and around the Building, especially as police
harassment against lesbians and Latino youth in the Mission gained infamy and public attention
in the late seventies and early eighties. Subtly invoking one of the most notable of incidents of
police violence in the Mission, “in our midst” gestured in part to a 1979 episode at Amelia’s, the
lesbian bar around the corner from the Building on 17th and Valencia. In January of that year,
SFPD officers had sexually harassed and carted off to jail two lesbians without informing them
of their offense.135 Causing ripples of anger across the Bay Area women’s community, the case
precipitated an open meeting at the Building, out of which Lesbians Against Police Violence
(LAPV), an East Bay organization dedicated to the shared vendetta of Third World and gay
residents against the police, was founded.136 The event itself, the protest of LAPV, and SFWC’s
subsequent work against racist police harassment in the Mission put on trial a state that refused
to remain at a distance, intruding often and publicly into the most intimate spheres of a gendered
and racialized subjectivity. SFWC put these unabashed violations at the core of its refusal to rent
134
S.F. Women’s Centers and Building, “Women’s Building Responds,” Plexus, March 1981.
Sides, Erotic City, 165.
136
Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space, 117.
135
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space to the policewomen, wielding the Building’s new intersectional politics to protest the
incursion of rights experienced squarely in its field of vision.
Gathering the resources at their fingertips, the women of SFWC deployed the Building’s
rental policy as a symbolic tool of resistance. By ousting the policewomen from an assumed
community of women to which the Building belonged, the collective lashed out at what it
understood as an inevitably patriarchal, racist state transgressing the bounds of justice. Acting
out of their new theorization of the Building as an embassy of the intersection, the women of the
Building tried through excluding the policewomen to stake out space in which Third World
communities could feel safe, a perhaps ironic choice only two months after the pipe-bomb attack.
However, with limited options of sites in the public sphere detached from the purview of the
state, the women of SFWC put to work privately owned built space to create a haven for
communities experiencing fear and loss of dignity on the streets. In a political climate
increasingly hostile to the critiques of women and people of color, rejecting the police felt to the
women of SFWC like an urgent measure vital to maintaining the Building as a space dedicated to
the safety and needs of a Third World constituency. Still in the early years of the Building, the
police decision signaled the women of SFWC coming into consciousness of how they might
wield space to achieve political ends.
Yet the decision and repositioning of the Building were not without consequences. The
Building’s decision caused a firestorm within the local feminist press as women in the movement
fiercely contested what kind of politics the Building should house and who could stake claim to
the space and to the movement. In one letter to the editor entitled “Women’s Bldg For All,”
Anna Towner and Karen Pucci from Richmond, California protested what they understood to be
the Building’s “incredibly outrageous stand”: “Once cannot fathom any rational explanation,
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short of blatant political discrimination. When the building was purchased, many of us were
under the impression that it was to be used by ALL women – not just blacks, not just leftists, not
just the whites, not just the lesbians, not just the Third World – but all women.”137 In their
outrage lay the tension between a pluralist politics coalescing through anti-patriarchy work and a
politics predicated on resistance to interlocking shapes of marginalization. Understanding
advocacy for all women as the centerpiece of the Building’s existence in the public sphere,
Towner and Pucci expressed fear that the decision and the Third World orientation from which it
emerged had irrevocably disrupted the unity of the category of “women.” While recognizing
women’s vastly different positioning, the authors of the editorial sought desperately to piece
back together the capital letters of an “all” that, for them, had rung so true in the early years of
women’s liberation.
In the lament of SFWC’s critics, one can trace not only the disintegration of an earlier
iteration of the women’s movement but also the turning mechanisms of a future right-wing
critique. Indeed, feminists who opposed the Building’s decision formulated a language of
disappointment that in the coming years would be latched onto by conservative hawks looking to
discredit the liberation struggles of the previous two decades. Foreshadowing the battleground
rhetoric of the 1990s culture wars, Towner and Pucci cry out: “Once again we have been duped
by a handful of women who have taken it upon themselves to protect the women’s community
from any politically incorrect group.” Ridiculing the women of SFWC in the sexist light of
calculated manipulation, Towner and Pucci suggest in veiled language that radical Third World
women, descending into political self-righteousness, had deceived the women’s community by
pushing interests unrepresentative of the whole. In another Plexus editorial titled “‘PC’
Building,” policewoman Sharon F. Miller railed: “I am outraged by these events. I have been a
137
Anna Towner and Karen Pucci, “Women’s Bldg For All?,” Plexus, May 1981.
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contributor to the Women’s Center/Building. I had been led to believe that the purpose of this
building was to provide a facility which all women could use. I had been unaware until this time
that the group of women running the Center/Building decided what groups were politically
correct and therefore what groups could use the facilities.”138
Trying desperately to grab onto the remnants of a women’s movement to which they
thought they had belonged, women like Miller, Towner, and Pucci responded to a deeply felt
fracturing of what a liberatory politics could mean. Describing the decision as “overemphasizing
difference” at the expense of a presumed unity, the many critics of the decision who revoked
donations and wrote letters of dissent waxed nostalgic for earlier days in which calls to a
universal “sisterhood” had felt revolutionary, empowering, and effective in changing public
discourse.139 The phrase “politically correct” would be appropriated and widely circulated as
ammunition in the culture wars of the 1990s, yet in some of its earlier moments the term
provided a window into profound disappointment. In the eyes of the policewomen and their
supporters, a solidarity between all women was torn apart in favor of a “correct” way to do
structural critique – from the outside and from the margin. While many of the policewomen had
entered the force under the same logic as that of the Building, attempting to make in-roads into a
sexist landscape, the meaning of their years of hard work to address rape and domestic violence
had rapidly changed in a women’s community dramatically shifting its orientation to the state.
Despite the staff’s half-hearted assurance that “we surely have compassion” for the “concerned
and committed women who earnestly want to humanize the police force,” their request to have
the policewomen “take off their guns and uniforms and participate as individual women in our
programs as long as they are up front about who they are” marked as taboo some innate quality
138
Sharon F. Miller, “‘PC’ Building?,” Plexus, February 1981.
Satya P. Mohanty, Linda Martin Alcoff, and Michael Hames-Garcia, eds., Identity Politics Reconsidered
(Virginia: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3.
139
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that the policewomen were presumed to possess.140 Requiring a confession of a politics deemed
contradictory, the women of SFWC imparted to the policewomen that their political work,
previously risky and on behalf of women’s safety, was now viewed as an unwelcome mingling
with the enemy. Leaving the officers with few “free spaces” to which they could turn, SFWC
closed off alliances of identity in favor of those predicated on a shared critique of state violence,
ultimately arming the right in its war against progressive politics.
As demonstrated by the 1981 police controversy, the eighties for the women’s movement
marked a moment of mourning for many women who felt threatened and estranged by
feminism’s turn to what would later be remembered as “identity politics.” However, looking to
the Building’s encounters with violence and SFWC’s subsequent pivot to a set of anti-state
politics, one can see in the same frame the closing of doors and the dramatic expansion of
coalitional pathways. Defining their work as cohering a counter state bound in opposition to
hegemonic power, the women at the Building used a newly grounded solidarity to extend the
structure’s geographic reach across the Mission and outside the borders of the United States.
Throughout the eighties, the staff of SFWC and other organizations within the Building
channeled a vast proportion of their energy to providing services for undocumented Latinos
fleeing from the violent upheavals in Central America, provisioning resources and gathering
space for communities radically defunded in the Reagan years, and sending delegations to
Nicaragua and El Salvador to help shape transnational dimensions of protest.141 In 1987, the
Building was the target of a widely publicized burglary in which presumed federal agents
ransacked the file cabinets of, among other organizations, Options for Women Over 40, which
ran an employment program for older Latinas with no questions asked about their immigration
140
S.F. Women’s Centers and Building, “Women’s Building Responds.”
See Anna Carastathis, “Identity Categories as Potential Coalitions,” Signs 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013),
doi:10.1086/669573.
141
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status.142 Featured in the media as an essential constituency in the progressive war against
Reagan, the Building stood as evidence of a narrowing and changing space of progressive
activism at the hands of a conservative public and state, one which fundamentally changed the
kind of work the women of SFWC were called to do.143 Straying from earlier anxieties about the
Building as an apolitical provider of direct services, the women of SFWC recognized that in a
climate of drastic cuts to government services, providing urgent assistance to women had
become a counterhegemonic act of community building. Deserting those who had invested in the
Building as a pluralistic space, the SFWC staff found in the Building’s institutionalization the
ability to create a haven from intersecting forms of state-sponsored violence. Holding up to the
light the past and present experiences of Third World women, SFWC anchored in the interior of
the Building a counter state whose configuration would preserve and perform a different kind of
progressive politics, a politics that threatened in its everyday iterations the totality of right-wing
enclosure accruing across the United States.
142
Warren Hinckle, “Info-Thieves Hit the Women’s Building,” March 13, 1987, Box 20, Section 8, San Francisco
Women’s Building.
143
See Tim Kingston, “Break-In at the Women’s Building,” Coming Up!, April 1987, Box 20, Section 8, San
Francisco Women’s Building.
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Conclusion: The Shifting Shape of Coalitional Space
Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And
it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some
people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they
feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home!
- Bernice Johnson Reagon, Presentation at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, 1981144
Celebrated in its founding as a “room of our own,” and in retrospect as “one of the last
major collective efforts by radical elements of the San Francisco women’s movement,” the
Women’s Building was never a place of nostalgic sentimentality for the women who worked
often without pay and after hours to fix the toilets, appease the tenants, and sweep the halls.145
Produced by a long legacy of “women’s space,” the Building contained few of the exclamations
of unity or good feeling that had saturated earlier iterations of women-only events. “Imagine:”
one woman in Minneapolis had said, “two or three times a week hundreds of predominantly
lesbian women gathering for workshops, political organizing, dances, and concerts…It was like
you had died and gone to lesbian heaven!”146 Although it emerged from this vernacular of
liberation, the Building diverged dramatically from the sentiments that had marked the shortlived revelations radiating from consciousness-raising groups in the late sixties and early
seventies. Radiating resentment and regret, the women of SFWC until the mid-eighties debated
whether or not they had made a mistake in buying the Building. Their anxiety arose mostly from
the nature of their labor: Was maintaining a four-story Building really going to bring about a
revolution of individual and collective consciousness that they were hoping for?
Characterized by interpersonal struggle and political controversy, the Building at first
glance affirms narratives of the women’s movement that locate its demise in the 1980s.
144
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology,
ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).
145
Sushawn Robb, Mothering the Movement, 134.
146
Anne Enke, Finding the Movement, 217.
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However, to dismiss the Building as a sign of a gutted and bureaucratic institutionalization or an
impossible fracturing of women’s unity would be to profoundly miss the new spaces of
radicalism the Building opened up inside of its four stories and through its place in its Third
World neighborhood. Leaving behind the intimacy and comfort of the private, relatively
homogenous sites that comprised the initial radical base of the women’s movement, the
Women’s Building stands as a living monument to the new and dangerous frontier of coalition
summoned by Bernice Reagon Johnson. As the women of SFWC recognized, this new space of
coalition would necessarily happen in the public sphere. Too many women had been locked out
of the services and feminist communities claiming themselves for “all women” simply because
they didn’t know where to turn. Seeming to affirm a new visibility through grand facades and
upright architecture, the Women’s Building distilled a politics of outreach as it sought to
ingratiate itself within the Third World landscape in which it existed. Unlike the lesbian
separatist community established along Valencia, the visibility of the Building was never meant
as a sign of liberation in and of itself; rather, the women of SFWC used the Building to bring
women into the assistance of the movement. Fundamentally changing the Building as they
recruited and centered a Third World constituency, the staff at Building dug their hands into built
space and fashioned a new coalitional politics for feminism in the eighties that centered
resistance to the multi-faceted incursion and violence of a right-wing state over a single-issue
women’s platform.
So while the women of the SFWC took pride in the symbolism of the Building’s status as
the only women-owned and –operated building in the country, their vision for the Building
increasingly took shape in the issues facing the Mission and inside the interior of Dovre Hall
itself. The women found that, in order to construct solidarity “in the streets,” they first had to
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grapple internally and interpersonally with the quotidian racial divides made tangible by the
Building’s architecture. As a particular experience in collapsed community, the Building brought
into the realm of possibility an integrated social and political life not only for women who
declared themselves feminists but also for the Mission and the city as segregated terrains.
Turning to the unique utility of a building, the women of SFWC made themselves an alternative
to the uneasy overlap outside the doors of Dovre Hall, where the lesbian separatist microcosm
erected in small storefronts and Victorians along Valencia rubbed against the Third World Latino
neighborhood lining Mission and 24th Streets. As they tried to distance themselves from cultural
and spatial displacement threatened by the everyday trajectories of queer women in the Mission,
the women at the Building refused a split intensifying in the ideology and physicality of the
women’s movement between a whitewashed lesbian separatism and the Third World critique
emanating from the “bridge.” Putting their anxiety to use, the women of SFWC tried desperately
to live out the demands of formal and everyday coalitions. A true experiment in women’s space,
the task was no less than the deeply vulnerable work of integrating the women’s movement. A
product of the eighties, this project reoriented feminist politics to speak directly to those made
most vulnerable by the racist and sexist climate of the state, sublimating the theoretical frame of
the Building into the daily provision of direct services. The politics of outreach were not simply
an addendum to SFWC’s previous story of itself, but rather changed the very nature of what the
women in the Building considered urgent in their activism.
It is not by historical chance that this new form of lived coalition coincided with the hour
of institutionalization in the women’s movement. As groups like SFWC contemplated how to
bring a liberatory consciousness out of small and intimate locales and into the public eye,
institutionalization carved out a space of possibility that caused feminists to consider seriously
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the positions of women spread throughout the uneven landscape of the city. While the initial
vision of SFWC was to sustain the revolutionary and transformative “free space” many had
experienced in rap groups, the staff had to face quickly their own sets of assumptions and
proscriptions about what “all women” truly needed and how a Building that claimed itself as a
concrete symbol of women’s success could provide for those needs. Led by the Third World
women on staff who actively incorporated a critique of power within women’s liberation into
Dovre Hall’s interior, the collective found that “free space” could never disengage from political
reality; instead, it had to situate itself at the forefront of changing both material conditions and
discourse within and outside of the Building’s walls. The Building lent women a concrete
resource to manifest the changing theoretical geography of the women’s movement. And indeed,
as feminism moved towards a multivocal, intersectional, and necessarily decentralized map of
women’s space, women’s organizations across the country tried to use the often cramped spaces
they could afford to make dents in a landscape that privileged whiteness and structured its ease.
Yet the politics of outreach, a phrase formulated through the very process of
institutionalization, demanded in the eighties a more firmly anti-state politics. Refugee women
fleeing violence in Central America were flooding the Mission, and the staff in the Building saw
obvious connections between American support of the contras and the police violence that met
Latino men in the Mission once they arrived. Determined to make the Building politically
relevant and theoretically grounded, the women of SFWC revised the space as a necessary haven
away from the surveillance of an implicated American state. As it married the provision of direct
services and the continued cultivation of a radical consciousness, SFWC signaled the political
displacement of those who had been attracted to the movement out of a more singularly-focused
concern for the safety and well-being of women, women who were more often willing to work
Mayer 84
within state channels to change the realities of women. Lamenting the turn of the organization
and the Building to “political correctness,” these women demonstrated the personal tragedy and
estrangements of a movement shifting towards an analysis straying from the “mainstream” to
equally weigh interlocking forms of oppression. Yet these women were not the only ones left
literally and metaphorically outside. SFWC also gained critics from the left when, in 1981, the
collective decided to deny space to a support group for women practicing S&M on the grounds
that its members inappropriately reenacted a racialized power struggle of master and slave. A
window into an organization and a movement trying to find its political ground, taken together
these two examples suggest that the Building both broke from and continued the legacies of
previous iterations of women’s space that bounded specific definitions of what a gendered
oppression should mean. Unapologetic at times yet consistently in flux over the progressive
course of action, the women of SFWC crafted new lines of solidarity that remapped a women’s
movement newly determined to patrol its politics while simultaneously expanding their scope
and breadth.
While many in retrospect blame a divisive “identity politics” for the dissolution of the
second wave of the women’s movement, the history of the Women’s Building and women’s
space in the Bay Area demonstrates the Third World notion that womanhood has always been
decentralized and internally fragmented by race and class. Yet such histories also point to the
ways in which women have regularly transcended the bounds of geography and identity to form
relationships crucial to the trajectory of feminism. Placed in a landscape that made the
fragmentations of identity already built into the city particularly acute, the women of SFWC
learned to understand womanhood as a revolutionary category only as it could make sense out of
a phenomenon of overlap. In the Mission’s divides, then, they saw not only paralyzing conflict
Mayer 85
but also an opportunity to do the dangerous work of organizing across and between difference.
Using space as a tool to foster new configurations of intimacy, activists anchored their
organizing in the adjacencies of a Building that condensed and made visible the broken
geography of the city. Working, thinking, and speaking in inescapable proximity, the women of
SFWC and the Building drew a new political consciousness from the hardships and rewards of a
truly integrated political and social life. In a women’s movement caught in the chaos of
integrating an already made identity politics, the Building shaped a new path, a new bridge
across identity and into the precarious space of coalition.
Coming to the forefront of lesbian and progressive politics in San Francisco in the
eighties, the Women’s Building gave the distinct impression to those in the women’s community
that “the most exciting work happening in the Bay Area…was lesbian-led” and that “good
politics and lesbian identity went together.”147 Yet, as women’s non-profits aged, many did not
have the capacity to sustain the grassroots organizing and political theorizing that the women in
the early years of the Building had so intentionally cultivated. According to Vazquez, the
entrance of lesbians into the city’s political culture increasingly meant that “in order to be a
successful lesbian, you had to aspire to public office,” an ironic claim considering the Building’s
previously firm anti-state stance.148 So while those at the Women’s Building fought through the
narrow progressive space of the eighties, the departure of lesbian leadership from the Building to
City Hall evidenced the profound toll the state had taken on the women’s movement and those
who devoted their lives to it, many of whom quit the Building exhausted. Yet Vazquez’s
comment is not an elegy. It is also indication that the Building truly transformed the city, as
147
Aurora Levins Morales, Interview with Kelly Anderson, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Smith
College, September 2005, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/LevinsMorales.pdf, 58.
148
Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vazquez, Interview with Kelly Anderson, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project,
Smith College, November 19, 2007, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Allison-Vazquez.pdf, 6.
Mayer 86
women politicized in and through its interior punctured the sites of power with the long legacy of
women’s space. A site of possibility, of survival, of preservation, but never of failure, the
Building, still standing in the ever-gentrifying Mission, makes visible the potential of truly
integrated, face-to-face coalitions to radically alter individual lives, public consciousness, and the
political geographies of public space.
Mayer 87
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