"Collective: How Lesbian Feminists Reimagined Society"

Annelise Heinz, History, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. For two decades after radical feminism and gay liberation emerged as influential movements in the 1960s, a subculture of “lesbian feminists” created dense networks across North America. They sought political, sexual, and personal liberation by building alternative communities enabled by economic self-sufficiency. I plan to write a national history of lesbian feminism through spatial and textual analysis, titled Collective: How Lesbian Feminists Reimagined Society. I argue that the idea of the home—of dismantling a patriarchal private sphere—became a focus for a lesbian feminist reimagining of liberation.