#karla jay

Karla Jay

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 22 February 1947

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

- Reading: Tales from the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay.

Karla Jay experiences consciousness-raising meetings through membership of Redstockings.

“[R]epresentatives from Redstockings talked […] Women, they insisted, needed to learn, through a process they called “consciousness-raising”, or “C-R,” that they were oppressed as a class.” p. 40 *

“Though the representatives [from Redstockings] claimed C-R wasn’t therapy, it sure sounded like therapy. Would C-R just be endless sessions in which everyone sat around complaining about the pain of being a woman? I wasn’t sure, but C-R stuck seemed worth looking into. If I made some friends and allies within the Women’s Liberation Movement, that would make C-R worthwhile. ” p. 41

The contempt in Karla Jay’s writing when it comes to women voicing their pain is a symptom of internalised misogyny. As if women had nothing to complain about, as if women were not oppressed and disrespected every day. And women have a need to discuss their pain. No good can come out of bottling it all up. If we stay silent, if we pretend everything is fine, we end up with unresolved trauma, with crippling depression, with an inability to function under misogynistic oppression. Pain is a natural reaction to our circumstances as women, and we need to speak it aloud to realise that we are not alone and that there is something systematic about our pain. How can we come to the understanding that men are oppressing women?

Upon attending her first C-R group:

“Our first C-R meeting took place in the late spring or early summer […] there were only ten women present.

We sat in a circle and listened eagerly as Kathie [Sarachild] gave us instructions. Once we had chosen a topic, we were to start with anyone who wanted to speak first as long as we avoided always beginning with the same person. Each woman was to speak on the topic and to narrate her personal experiences. The listeners were allowed to ask questions to clarify each account, but we were not to challenge the truthfulness of any statements, nor were we to psychoanalyse a woman or her motivations. In “Notes from the First Year” (1968), Redstockings Pam Allen termed this approach creating a “non-judgmental space.”

After each woman had spoken, we were then to seek the common core of our oppression as women. […] As Katie Sarachild wrote in in the 1978 Redstockings collection Feminist Revolution, “The aim of going around the room in a meeting to hear each woman’s testimony … is to help stay focused on a point, to bring the discussion back to the main subject after exploring a tangent, to get the experience of as many people as possible in the common pool of knowledge.” The idea was not to be “nice” or to provide “therapy” or to “change women.” The whole point was to develop knowledge to overthrow male supremacy.

Before we started speaking, Katie and Alix [Kates Shulman] gave us a quick history of consciousness-raising. Redstockings did not really invent C-R; the group borrowed the concept from Che Guevara and other Marxist Cuban revolutionaries who were organizing peasants in South America. They, in turn, had adapted a Communist Chinese strategy called “speaking bitterness.” When the Communists first attempted to organize the peasants in mainland China, they asked the peasants to speak about their own experiences as oppressed individuals. In the process the peasants understood that they were oppressed as a class, that their suffering was widespread, and that the masters profited from their pain. These understandings galvanized the peasants to revolt.

The same technique, Redstockings assured us, would liberate women. When the world’s majority realised the degree to which we were enslaved, we would rise up and overthrow the patriarchy.” p. 50-52

The basic idea of consciousness-raising meetings is to share personal lived experiences as women and then reflect on what the common thread, the common denominators are. It ensures that theory is not dry and based on lofty concepts, but on the contrary that it is directly derived from the lived reality of women.

“One of the idea of consciousness-raising was to give power and space to the “quiet woman”.” p. 52

And as women we are more likely to speak up in an environment of only women who have also shared their experience with the topic at hand. We know we will be listened to and heard, which is already a great step compared to other environment we are usually confronted to.

“But the changes wrought by C-R went well beyond my name. C-R totally altered my vision of who I was and where I was going. It gave me a political tool, a class analysis through which I could (re)view and come to terms with my Dickensian childhood. I trusted C-R in a way I would have never been able to accept psychoanalysis as a process for understanding my own life. Psychiatry had failed my mother, in part because she was a woman.” p.57

In short, consciousness-raising meetings are a way to bring women to a deeper understanding of the root causes of their pain and experience. It allows women to come personally to the conclusion that male oppression is indeed strangling their lives. As such, it is a very valuable tool, as it does not antagonise the participants with presentation of feminist theory as dogma, but invites women to draw their own conclusions. And the methods learnt during consciousness-raising meetings can later be applied to all walks of life, taking testimonies from writings and arts made by women, exploring subjects not broached in meetings, …

* Note that this passage goes on as follows: “Although Redstockings defined men in Marxist terms as a social class that oppressed women, they seemed bent on struggling with men rather than abandoning them”, definitely marking Redstockings as a reformist group.

- Reading: Tales of the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay

About her outings at Kooky’s, a lesbian bar:

“But no matter what I said, I just didn’t look as if I fit in. I had given up wearing a “flip”, along with the hair spray that held it in place, and instead had grown my hair down below my shoulders in a thick wavy mass, under which dangled silver earrings. I often wore pants with boots, but I also like loose A-line dresses or mu-mus with a pair of sandals, attire that clearly had “flower child” or “hippie” written all over it. This was not traditional femme-wear, which in those days consisted of dresses or tailored outfits. The femmes teased their hair, wore lots of makeup, and carried purses that matched their shoes. Some of them looked as if they had escaped from a bad beach blanket movie starring Annette Funicello. Since I looked so different, the first question I was often asked in Kooky’s—sometimes with hostility and sometimes with simple curiosity—was, “What are you—butch or femme?” I wished they would ask my name first! To fend off these undesirable suitors, I would answer: “Gee, I’m butch Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and femme Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. On Sundays, I’m kiki [a woman who played both roles]. What day is this?” That would send most scurrying off for another drink as well. The more I looked around the bar, the more I thought that maybe I really was straight. There were few people I could identify with there. I never got the hang of the rules”. p. 25

Is there a lesbian look? What gives you up instantaneously? A universal lesbian style? Practical clothes, flannels, men’s shirts, boots, unshaved legs and underarms, short hair, these are recurring themes. But how do you look lesbian? I mean, short of wearing a t-shirt stating “I’m a lesbian”, you could be heterosexual or bisexual wearing those exact same clothes. By its very definition, a lesbian look is an ensemble of clothing and accessories worn by a lesbian. That’s all, the bar is pretty low.

So why do we aspire to look lesbian? Because we feel invisible? Because we feel like one of a kind? Because unless explicitly stated we are the last lesbian on earth and so, so lonely? Because we want other lesbians to see us and gather round? Because we want to communicate to men “leave us alone”? Because we are proud of being lesbians? Because we just are rebellious and “lesbian fashion” is despised by the world (unless it’s coopted and emptied of its substance)?

What draws us in, in those stereotypes? Why do we try to fit some lesbian archetype? Are we still oppressed by sexist and lesbophobic expectations? Are we expressing ourselves? Qui tire les ficelles?

- Reading: Tales of the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay

“After she discovered that she was pregnant, Sally had few choices. Abortions were legal in New York State only if two doctors certified that a woman was too mentally unstable to bear a child. Alternative home remedies usually involved trying to abort the fetus by using a coat hanger, which might puncture the uterus. Some women took drops of pennyroyal oil until they aborted — or died a hideous death — whichever came first. Only one drop too many of pennyroyal separated the two outcomes. Sally opted for jumping off the bed onto the floor a lot. She took very hot baths, trying to induce a miscarriage. Finally, she went the most expensive route — a weekend trip to Puerto Rico for an abortion.” p. 8

This recollection reminds me of the abortion tentatives in the Portait of a Lady on Fire, by Céline Sciamma, in which Sophie has to go through many unfructuous tries before she finally goes to an abortionist, an old woman full of knowledge, to get rid of the unwanted fœtus. Here, it is all the more poignant because the reader can feel that Sally was likely only helped in her first tentatives by Karla, the narrator. The boyfriend is not part of the picture of this hardship, except as a creator of the misfortune Sally suffers. It’s an experience of female solidarity, and Karla likely could not do otherwise than help her roommate, because of her budding values as a feminist.

The homemade abortion techniques are crude and extremely dangerous, as underlined, and what was the alternative? Unwed, Sally would have had trouble supporting and raising a child. Her college degree would also have been in jeopardy should she have decided to go to term, as “most colleges expelled unmarried, pregnant coeds” at the time. So it seems Sally had little choice if she wanted to have a decent, somewhat independent life.

Henry, the boyfriend, accuses Sally of murdering “[his] son” when they return from Puerto Rico, to which Sally responds: “Your son! How the fuck do you know it was a boy anyway, you conceited asshole? she screamed. What about my college degree?” The male entitlement is laughable. The boyfriend dares to use the possessive for a foetus that he barely contributed to. He didn’t offer to marry Sally or to support her, so it looks like he expected her to do all the work, so he could reap the benefits. He also assumes that she was expecting a son, a typical symptom of misogyny (read between the lines: his powerful seed could only generate a son, a male heir, a being deserving of respect /s). His last words to her are “Fuck you and your education!”. In his opinion, as a woman, Sally is only good for breeding him sons. She doesn’t deserve an education nor any sort of respect.

When she returns from Puerto Rico, Sally is apathetic and lies in bed all days. She bleeds for weeks, and when the bleeding finally stops, she resorts to drugs. To forget? To ease the pain? To feel better for an instant? The taboo on abortion, the shame that was associated with it at the time prevent Karla from asking her about it, from discussing it. Support is only fleeting, in the thick of it and then nothing. Sally is left to her pain and lack of energy. No wonder she turns to drugs.

A later mention of abortion occurs during a consciousness-raising meeting: 

“Unlike a typical legislative hearing, there was no panel of white men sitting in judgment, no “experts” to tell women what we really needed and wanted. Instead, after Redstockings told us that we could each speak—or choose not to speak—about our own experience with abortion, testimonials began. They were moving and gut-wrenching. Some women confessed to having had more than one abortion. No woman declared that she had had one as an alternative to birth control. Some of the women spoke angrily about what they had gone through; others wept as they recounted their pain, suffering, and sense of loss. No one had taken her experience lightly. I felt lucky to have been spared an unwanted pregnancy. But as I listed, I knew that each woman’s story could have been my own. If I forgot to take my birth control pills, the gulf between us would dissolve: One rape or one unplanned sexual encounter would put me in their painful place.” p. 41-42

In this memoir, published in 2000, Karla Jay retraces her life and experiences between 1968 and 1972 in the light of the rising movements for women’s right and homosexual liberation, with some explanation as to what the people she mentioned became later on.

Karla Jay was born in 1947 in the United States. She describes herself on her website as “the award-winning author of ten books, an acclaimed scholar, and cultural critic. [Her] presentations about the LGBTQAI+ movement after the Stonewall Riots and about the Second Wave of Feminism have taken [her] all over the United States, as well as to Canada, England, Scotland, and Continental Europe. [She has] been an activist for Civil Rights, Peace, Women’s Rights, and LGBTQ rights for over a half century. [She is] still fully engaged in organizing, writing, marching, and volunteering.“ Though she doesn’t explicitly state it on her website, she is a lesbian, at least from what I can gather from reading her memoir. Although she seems to have given in to the current gender non-sense and more or less covert misogyny and homophobia, her account of the Redstockings consciousness-raising meetings and other feminist meetings is enlightening. She also was very vocal in these spaces as to the place reserved for lesbians in the women’s liberation organisations.

Now that I have read her whole memoir, it seems to me that few things have changed since these summers of rebellion against established sexism and homophobia in the United States, and in Europe. Women are still oppressed by men through the works of an extremely sexist society: be it make-up culture, dressing requirements, the shame that comes with sex, the patriarchal expectations linked with matrimony and housework, the repartition of chores, the stigmatisation and treatment of mental illness, … Women have made some gains, when it comes to abortion, to divorce, to economic independence, but these gains are still under threats from economic circumstances, conservative court challenges, and the general misogynistic backlash that never, ever dies down. And what have the gains been for same-sex attracted people? The legalisation of marriage—in some countries—and protection against discrimination—again only in some places, some states in the USA are still not protecting homosexuals against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

It’s a very sobering read, because the points of contention are still the same. This memoir is subtitled “A Memoir of Liberation”, but the only thing that might have been liberated during the events it recounts are the minds of women engaging in the women’s liberation movement, and of lesbians and gays engaging in the gay liberation movements. The rest fizzled out.

I’ll be adding links here to some chosen extracts and to some personal commentaries on specific sections or topics in the book:

An abortion experience

Rampant sexism in political organisations

Making love to women

Hal, the Illustrated Woman

Even in lesbian spaces, you can’t escape the men

Looking lesbian

The pervasiveness of male violence

Consciousness-raising

The place of lesbians in women’s liberation and lesbophobia (part 1 // part 2)

On names and naming

The Lavender Menace