The Age of Furious Women (Again)
We are living through a new era of activism rooted in women’s anger. Alongside the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which coalesced following multiple high-profile murders of nonviolent Black people by police officers, millions of Americans protested the devastating consequences of sexism.
More specifically, activists called out the personal and political consequences of a culture that celebrates masculine domination and disregards the abuse of women. (I use the word “women” expansively to include all people who identify as women and those whose reproductive autonomy suffers when abortion access declines.) Their targets include both singular, powerful men and the political/legal systems that seems merely to shrug when violence against women comes to light. The first Women’s March eight years ago protested Donald Trump’s unbridled misogyny. The #MeToo movement’s demanded accountability for men’s abuses. The Senate’s confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court despite Christine Blasey Ford’s searing testimony in 2018 unleashed more outrage. Activists mobilized to mitigate the entirely predictable suffering caused by the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for abortion. Rage at male violence manifested in mass demonstrations, protests outside government buildings, testimony at official hearings, lawsuits, and more. (That anger persists, but more recently, women who allege abuse by powerful men face brutal smear campaigns. See: the fallout from Blake Lively’s assertions of sexual harassment by director Justin Baldoni.)
More recently, we’ve seen an upsurge in personal narratives about rebelling against domestic tyranny. These stories sometimes detail physical abuse but just as often describe the misery of living with a man who takes for granted women’s unpaid labor and subordination. Lyz Lenz’s bestseller (and now podcast), This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, examines the misogyny she encountered in her intimate life with a husband who denigrated her career aspirations while expecting her to cheerfully tolerate the exhausting slog of housekeeping and childrearing. Amanda Montei’s excellent Substack, Mad Woman, encapsulates many of these themes with astute essays illuminating the myriad ways that Americans punish women for their anger and then label them “crazy” when their rage erupts. These are merely two examples of a burgeoning genre of searing tirades against male chauvinism.
The timing was therefore apt this past September for the National Parks Service to designate the Furies Collective in Washington, D.C. a National Historic Landmark. The Furies Collective was a group of twelve women who lived in a D.C. row house (219 11th Street SE) from 1971 to 1973. All of these women self-identified as lesbian separatists: They advocated women’s total independence from men. Members shared household duties, pooled their resources, and made decisions by consensus. Women’s bookstores carried their newspaper, The Furies, which helped these ideas circulate far beyond 11th Street.
Ginny Berson, one of the founding members of the Furies, wrote a manifesto explaining the group’s ethos on the front page of the group’s first monthly newsletter, published in January 1972:
“The story of the Furies is the story of strong, powerful women, the ‘Angry Ones,’ the avengers of matricide, the protectors of women. Three Greek Goddesses, they were described (by men) as having snakes for hair, blood-shot eyes, and bats’ wings; like Lesbians today, they were cursed and feared. They were born when Heaven (the male symbol) was castrated by his son at the urging of Earth (the female symbol). The blood from the wound fell on Earth and fertilized her, and the Furies were born. Their names were Alecto (Never-ceasing), Tisiphone (Avenger of Blood), and Magaera (Grudger). Once extremely powerful, they represented the supremacy of women and the primacy of mother right.”
Those words appeared in print at a moment when the American women’s movement was increasingly divided over the origins of sexism and the path to liberation. At one extreme, the Furies sought a purist’s version of what a New York group called Radicalesbians called “The Woman-Identified Woman.” There, too, feminists described their politics as an articulation of women’s anger: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” This woman, they wrote, at an early age “has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society—the female role.” Yet the first paragraph of the Radicalesbian statement ended with joy. A woman who defied expectations for feminine submission (“a tortuous journey”), they explained, ultimately enjoyed the “liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women.”
The Furies’ manifesto painted a grimmer picture:
“We call our paper The FURIES because we are also angry. We are angry because we are oppressed by male supremacy. We have been fucked over all our lives by a system which is based on the domination of men over women, which defines male as good as female as only as good as the man you are with. It is a system in which heterosexuality is rigidly enforced and Lesbianism rigidly suppressed. It is a system which has further divided us by class, race, and nationality.”
The women who founded The Furies sought separation from men to the fullest extent possible because they believed that sexism was the most fundamental form of oppression. They intended to forge a revolutionary political ideology and overthrow male oppression. (Membership in the collective was fairly homogenous. All of the women were white. They ranged in age from 18 to 28.) As the manifesto explained, “the base of our ideological thought is: Sexism is the root of all other suppressions, and Lesbian and woman oppression will not end by smashing capitalism, racism, and imperialism.” This sort of argument frustrated socialist feminists who interpreted sexism as a result of capitalism, Black and Latina activists who argued for the compound oppressions of racism and sexism, and many other feminists who refused to reject their sexual desires for men in order to achieve ideological purity. For the Furies, any relationship with a man was off limits and a betrayal of the women’s movement.
Importantly, the Furies called for “political lesbianism.” As Berson’s statement explained, “Some of us have been Lesbians for twelve years, others for ten months.” This was possible for the Furies because political lesbianism meant choosing to build one’s life around relationships with other women, whatever directions one’s desires pointed.
“Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy. Lesbians, as outcasts from every culture but their own have the most to gain by ending race, class, and national supremacy within their own ranks. Lesbians must get out of the straight women’s movement and form their own movement in order to be taken seriously, to stop straight women from oppressing us, and to force straight women to deal with their own Lesbianism. Lesbians cannot develop a common politics with women who do not accept Lesbianism as a political issue.”
As I wrote in Slate soon after Donald Trump’s election for a second term, I hear echoes of this ideology in the “4b” movement that originated in South Korea.
… As the Instagram user @4bworldwide put it a few weeks ago, “Life begins for women when we start to center women.” The account’s name references the 4B movement, which is so named for followers’ commitment to the “4 Noes”: rejecting heterosexual marriage, sex, childbirth, and dating. (The Korean word for no begins with a b sound.) The movement started in 2019 in South Korea in response to an increasingly misogynistic culture that South Korean women feel constrains their rights and devalues their personhood.
Abroad, 4B is more of a lifestyle choice for a small group of women than an official, organized movement, but interest in it stateside has skyrocketed nonetheless. Since the U.S. presidential election, Google searches for 4B have risen dramatically, its subreddit has doubled its membership, and young women on social media are urging each other to recognize its principles as a matter of survival. “If you want to live a long time, stop dating men,” one TikTokker explained. Others are more blunt: “Don’t have sex with men,” another woman wrote. “If you get pregnant and there’s a complication, doctors will simply watch you die. Any man who even wants sex with you wants to knowingly put you at risk of pregnancy and subsequent death.” …
But the 4B movement’s call for women to withdraw from all intimacy with men is less about punishing men and more about keeping women safe. It probably has less in common with Lysistrata than with the lesbian separatists of second-wave feminism…
Lesbian separatists included many women who desired sex with women, but it also led some to subordinate their desires to their politics, much as 4B women do now. Throughout the 1970s, many of these feminists began to self-identify as “political lesbians,” women whose preference for sexual intimacy with women arose not from their erotic desires but instead from a concerted decision not to share their bodies with men. Some of these women described their coming out as a kind of “conversion experience” and lived the rest of their lives in the company of women. Some of these feminists, like Ti-Grace Atkinson, argued that sex was far from the most important item on the agenda for women’s liberation and should not be overemphasized. They portrayed Americans’ fascination with sexual pleasure as a vestige of patriarchy, and they accused women who willingly had sex with men of literally “sleeping with the enemy.” In the name of women’s liberation, they had seriously repressive standards of sexual behavior.
The Furies Collective was short lived, as radical separatist collectives often are. Yet its influence shaped the women’s movement. Berson founded Olivia Records, the first women-only record label. (Notably, the talented sound engineer at Olivia Records, Sandy Stone, is a transwoman who found acceptance in women-only feminist spaces.) Rita Mae Brown, another member of the Furies, became a bestselling author of lesbian memoir and fiction. Coletta Reid co-founded Diana Press, which published essential collections of feminist poetry, fiction, journals, and theory.
The Furies’ narrow vision found few adherents in the 1970s, and a similar attempt now would also likely falter. But the intemperate passions of Greek and Roman gods seem ever-more relevant to our increasingly extreme political conditions. The authors of those ancient stories depicted women as both the victims of rapacious men / male gods and as the personifications of rage. If the solution the Furies reached did not have wide appeal, their frustration and outrage still resonate.
Sources:
Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Goldstone, Bobbie. “The power in loving.” off our backs 2, no. 5 (Jan. 1972), 4-5.
Valk, Anne M. Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.