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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971
1971-04-02 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 3
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We first decided to try and write an article on our living collective because it seemed important to us that our experiences be communicated and analysed in some way. We all feel that women have to learn to live together and support each other and we thought some collective effort at describing our collective and the problems we had to (or still have to) solve would help other women. Only three women out of the seven now living together wrote articles and although all seven of us have discussed the articles it still is not a complete picture. More importantly, there is so much we have not mentioned at all. We haven't really talked about the political work all of us do or fully described our relationship to women's liberation groups in Iowa City. After examining our articles it was noted that we sounded more like marxists than feminists because we dealt so heavily with the economics of our collective and almost totally ignored the feminist haven--the sub-culture that had grown. It is so much easier to speak in economic terms. Our culture is still so new, so much a feeling. Also in trying to analyze things which have happened we tended to dwell on the problems and hardly any of us mentioned any of the really nice changes, really nice experiences that happen within and because of our amazon ghetto. What we have written we think describes some aspects of living together that are important but we plan on writing more in a future issue to deal with what we have omitted--what is particular to a feminist living collective. [hand drawing of women] LIVING COLLECTIVE COLLECTIVE LIVING when we first decided to form the living collective we thought in terms of finding ways to live together that would be better than ways we all were living individually or in twos. So many of the things we decided to do were solutions to the problems caused by the way things were then done. For example, by eating communally and sharing the tasks involved in food preparation, each of us could only have to cook once a week, we could eat better and cheaper, and be relieved of much of the labor we each did preparing meals and washing dishes for ourselves. Similarly, by pooling our money resources not all of us would have to work at jobs we hated; we could equalize economic privileges to some extent, and people would have time to do political work. It isn't really a question of whether these solutions worked or not that caused problems in living together. What I think we discovered instead were new problems. The solutions we worked out to old problems to some extent did work and to a great extent old problems were solved. But by creating a new space, by going on to a different way of living we encountered not happiness ever after but a set of new problems to struggle with. This was perhaps the thing most misunderstood by ourselves and women out side of our situation and think we had done all this to correct problems and yet we still had problems. We and those outside of the house saw our problems as evidence of failure instead of seeing them as new problems to deal with, new problems that could only have been recognized in new situations. Unlike the problems we were familiar with all our lives, the new ones could not be dealt with in old conventional ways. In the situation we created for ourselves we all in some way experienced real changes in our time and responsibilities. Many of us had more time because some of us no longer had to work, some of us didn't have to spend the amount of time at housework as we had before, but pooling cars many of us had transportation available that we hadn't before, etc. For some women, those who continue to work or go to school or both, experienced a decrease in time because of the new demands of collective lifestyles (re-arranging ourselves). Emotional traumas, everyday hassles and such were increased by the number of extra people each of us were relating to. Our responsibilities also changed drastically but in a nebulous, undefined way. Suddenly we had a responsibility to take care of each other, a responsibility to everyone else in the house, a responsibility for their financial and emotional security. These responsibilities, always spoken of in either idealistic or fairly nebulous terms, were hard to deal with 'cause there were no societal standards or conventions to use as there are in responsibilities to your job, nuclear family, etc. This vaguely defined responsibility caused all of us to sometimes feel guilty, sometimes feel very let down, or confused as to what people expected of us or what we could expect from them. How much of this could have been avoided none of us know. Venturing in a new life style has to be somewhat ambiguous but we could have perhaps tried to define responsibility more clearly. Doing this would have probably kept us from being as idealistic as werwere. Somehow if we had spelled it all out, we may have known immediately that we couldn't expect as much of each other as we did. The changes we went through with time are really interesting. I personally experienced more time and that caused problems in scheduling myself to be somewhat productive. I found that I had more time spent on personal relationships and emotional problems. I found it hard to handle dealing with things like this at high intensity. But, that probably happened and 'cause I had the time to let it happen and 'cause I was relating at a deeper level to more people than before. I always spent as much time as I could on personal relationships but never had enough time to really get all wrapped up in them, analyzing peoples' actions, interpreting and reinterpreting at all levels - 'cause I always worked. I always thought people all hung up like that were crazy- never realized probably everyone does it when they have the time, e.g. housewives all wrapped up in family relations. The changes in time we experienced were pretty determined by outside material conditions, e.g. who could get jobs and what kind of jobs I think we have to be able to live collectively, support each other to be able to change those conditions. Consequently we must find ways to utilize extra time, ways of changing our heads as to what labor is prestigious. We can now all agree that things would be better if we all had part-time jobs but that isn't really feasible, as it is important that we find other ways to deal with the conditions we have no choice but to live with, without letting them destroy us. One mistake we made was in defining the responsibility we had to each other. We seemed to waver between the priority of caring for each other and the priority of being responsible for W.L. in Iowa City. Once we started to realize that we had to make our living situation bearable for ourselves, the house was happier and our relationships to other W.L. members improved. This meant sometimes saying no to crashers when members of the house felt they couldn't handle having extra people around, and not having as many meetings here, and being honest with outsiders about the problems of collective living and about our first concern being the well-being of collective members in all matters concerning the house and its relationship to W.L. Despite all I can say about the hassles of collective living, it by and large has been a really good change for me. I have related to more people than ever before, have learned to love and trust more women and realize I am no exception, not alone. I now have an optimism about women working together than I never had. livingcollective livingcollective livingcollective 3
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We first decided to try and write an article on our living collective because it seemed important to us that our experiences be communicated and analysed in some way. We all feel that women have to learn to live together and support each other and we thought some collective effort at describing our collective and the problems we had to (or still have to) solve would help other women. Only three women out of the seven now living together wrote articles and although all seven of us have discussed the articles it still is not a complete picture. More importantly, there is so much we have not mentioned at all. We haven't really talked about the political work all of us do or fully described our relationship to women's liberation groups in Iowa City. After examining our articles it was noted that we sounded more like marxists than feminists because we dealt so heavily with the economics of our collective and almost totally ignored the feminist haven--the sub-culture that had grown. It is so much easier to speak in economic terms. Our culture is still so new, so much a feeling. Also in trying to analyze things which have happened we tended to dwell on the problems and hardly any of us mentioned any of the really nice changes, really nice experiences that happen within and because of our amazon ghetto. What we have written we think describes some aspects of living together that are important but we plan on writing more in a future issue to deal with what we have omitted--what is particular to a feminist living collective. [hand drawing of women] LIVING COLLECTIVE COLLECTIVE LIVING when we first decided to form the living collective we thought in terms of finding ways to live together that would be better than ways we all were living individually or in twos. So many of the things we decided to do were solutions to the problems caused by the way things were then done. For example, by eating communally and sharing the tasks involved in food preparation, each of us could only have to cook once a week, we could eat better and cheaper, and be relieved of much of the labor we each did preparing meals and washing dishes for ourselves. Similarly, by pooling our money resources not all of us would have to work at jobs we hated; we could equalize economic privileges to some extent, and people would have time to do political work. It isn't really a question of whether these solutions worked or not that caused problems in living together. What I think we discovered instead were new problems. The solutions we worked out to old problems to some extent did work and to a great extent old problems were solved. But by creating a new space, by going on to a different way of living we encountered not happiness ever after but a set of new problems to struggle with. This was perhaps the thing most misunderstood by ourselves and women out side of our situation and think we had done all this to correct problems and yet we still had problems. We and those outside of the house saw our problems as evidence of failure instead of seeing them as new problems to deal with, new problems that could only have been recognized in new situations. Unlike the problems we were familiar with all our lives, the new ones could not be dealt with in old conventional ways. In the situation we created for ourselves we all in some way experienced real changes in our time and responsibilities. Many of us had more time because some of us no longer had to work, some of us didn't have to spend the amount of time at housework as we had before, but pooling cars many of us had transportation available that we hadn't before, etc. For some women, those who continue to work or go to school or both, experienced a decrease in time because of the new demands of collective lifestyles (re-arranging ourselves). Emotional traumas, everyday hassles and such were increased by the number of extra people each of us were relating to. Our responsibilities also changed drastically but in a nebulous, undefined way. Suddenly we had a responsibility to take care of each other, a responsibility to everyone else in the house, a responsibility for their financial and emotional security. These responsibilities, always spoken of in either idealistic or fairly nebulous terms, were hard to deal with 'cause there were no societal standards or conventions to use as there are in responsibilities to your job, nuclear family, etc. This vaguely defined responsibility caused all of us to sometimes feel guilty, sometimes feel very let down, or confused as to what people expected of us or what we could expect from them. How much of this could have been avoided none of us know. Venturing in a new life style has to be somewhat ambiguous but we could have perhaps tried to define responsibility more clearly. Doing this would have probably kept us from being as idealistic as werwere. Somehow if we had spelled it all out, we may have known immediately that we couldn't expect as much of each other as we did. The changes we went through with time are really interesting. I personally experienced more time and that caused problems in scheduling myself to be somewhat productive. I found that I had more time spent on personal relationships and emotional problems. I found it hard to handle dealing with things like this at high intensity. But, that probably happened and 'cause I had the time to let it happen and 'cause I was relating at a deeper level to more people than before. I always spent as much time as I could on personal relationships but never had enough time to really get all wrapped up in them, analyzing peoples' actions, interpreting and reinterpreting at all levels - 'cause I always worked. I always thought people all hung up like that were crazy- never realized probably everyone does it when they have the time, e.g. housewives all wrapped up in family relations. The changes in time we experienced were pretty determined by outside material conditions, e.g. who could get jobs and what kind of jobs I think we have to be able to live collectively, support each other to be able to change those conditions. Consequently we must find ways to utilize extra time, ways of changing our heads as to what labor is prestigious. We can now all agree that things would be better if we all had part-time jobs but that isn't really feasible, as it is important that we find other ways to deal with the conditions we have no choice but to live with, without letting them destroy us. One mistake we made was in defining the responsibility we had to each other. We seemed to waver between the priority of caring for each other and the priority of being responsible for W.L. in Iowa City. Once we started to realize that we had to make our living situation bearable for ourselves, the house was happier and our relationships to other W.L. members improved. This meant sometimes saying no to crashers when members of the house felt they couldn't handle having extra people around, and not having as many meetings here, and being honest with outsiders about the problems of collective living and about our first concern being the well-being of collective members in all matters concerning the house and its relationship to W.L. Despite all I can say about the hassles of collective living, it by and large has been a really good change for me. I have related to more people than ever before, have learned to love and trust more women and realize I am no exception, not alone. I now have an optimism about women working together than I never had. livingcollective livingcollective livingcollective 3
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