On May 1, 1970, 17 women stood in the aisles of an auditorium at Manhattan’s Intermediate School 70. Their shirts were hand-dyed various shades of purple, then silk-screened with the words “Lavender Menace.” Standing amongst some 400 other women seated, they held up signs bearing phrases like “Take a lesbian to lunch!” and “Superdyke loves you!” and “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.”
“Yes, yes, sisters! I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement,” shouted activist Karla Jay, as she recounts in her 2000 memoir, Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation. 40 more women clad in Lavender Menace shirts appeared soon after.
Famed writer and activist Rita Mae Brown followed. “Who wants to join us?”
Eventually, the Lavender Menace would help catalyze lesbians as an important part of women’s liberation. Equality for women did not have a ceiling, and they made sure their lives and interests were just as much a part of the burgeoning women’s movement as those of heterosexuals.
“It was time to tell the women’s movement we would not be ignored any longer,” Karla Jay wrote.
The forum was the Second Congress to Unite Women, which was supposed to be a weekend of feminist talks and workshops held by the National Organization for Women (NOW). The First Congress to Unite Women had been held the year before, and purposely excluded lesbian organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors. In 1970, feminist author, activist, and NOW co-founder Betty Friedan referred to lesbians in the organization as a “lavender menace” in The New York Times Magazine, believing their open presence in the organization would hinder the respectability of the march toward women’s rights and make feminist activists look like unsound manhaters. That year, Rita Mae Brown, long known for being vocal and out, was fired from her position as the editor of NOW’s newsletter. Many lesbian NOW members quit in solidarity.
It didn’t help that writer Susan Brownmiller, in attempting to make a joke and dissociate from Friedan’s views, referred to lesbians as perhaps more of a “lavender herring” instead of a menace. But some activists did not see the humor in it, and instead saw it as a comment on lesbians’ insignificance in the march toward women’s rights.
The “herring” remark, Jay wrote, inspired lesbian feminist activists toward action. Some had been active in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), but in working with gay men had found themselves adrift, Lavender Menace member Ellen Shumsky wrote for Come Out! magazine in 1970 and 1972. So much of the group’s actions, they felt, had focused on the interests and rights of gay men. GLF women had begun to meet separately, and were also joined by members of the Women’s Liberation Movement at some meetings, which fought against patriarchal, social, and sexual norms they felt stifled women’s equality. Together, they would decide to both craft a lesbian feminist manifesto called “The Woman-Identified Woman” and take on the Second Congress to Unite Women. The Congress, which featured an abundance of straight, white, middle and upper middle class women, had excluded any out lesbians as speakers that weekend. Lesbian identity was not incorporated into its programming; women of color and differing class would also take issue with the Congress’ homogeneous focus. “It was time to tell the women’s movement we would not be ignored any longer,” Jay wrote.
“[NOW] was so used to dealing with women’s liberation...from the shelter of their status as educated, secure, white privileged women. Suddenly, they had to consider why other women hadn’t wanted to stay with them, hadn’t want to play their game.”
Lavender Menace members passed out copies of “The Woman-Identified Woman” in the auditorium. The manifesto encouraged readers to rethink their views of lesbians and to work against separating the women’s liberation movement by sexual orientation. Jay wrote later that while the manifesto was radical in some ways, it was conservative in others. It put lesbians, who the Menace felt represented the “primacy of women relating to women, of creating a new consciousness of and with each other,” at the front of women’s liberation and called for the abolishment of gender roles, but it also defined lesbians outside a sexual context. Importantly, it called for lesbians to be incorporated into the women’s liberation narrative, including that which made up the content and assemblage of the Second Congress to Unite Women.
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