WORKING TOGETHER

As each young woman arrived in Eugene, she found her way to communal housing and collective work through the growing network of lesbians. Some first landed at Trudy’s Ranch or Fitch Camp in Lorane that offered cabins to traveling lesbians. Others found Mother Kali’s bookstore where a bulletin board advertised for lesbian housemates in houses clustered in the Whitaker neighborhood or off River Road in Eugene. Refusing to replicate the oppressive social systems they had left behind, they created and maintained an extraordinary array of innovative and successful collective lesbian-run businesses and cooperatives. These included pioneering services such as natural food distribution, garbage recycling, and feminist bookstores. Shut out from male-dominated areas of work,  these defiant women created their own women-run construction, car repair, and tree-planting cooperatives.  Many of these businesses showcased the women’s remarkable and effective political commitment to non-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal, and egalitarian practices and procedures. They experimented with equal pay scales across jobs, women-centered training, on-site child care, and sweat equity. They developed alterative economic relationships such as the Energy Bank where women bartered services and expertise. In their interviews, the narrators describe the challenges and the joys of working together to create a way of living that aligned with their feminist social and political visions.