Thursday, August 28, 2008

Del Martin dies/Swapping information across generations

These two topics are related. I'll tie them together at the end.

You can find the information about Del Martin here:
Feministe � Today We Mourn the Passing of Del Martin

And here is a link to a fascinating post on Feministe by LaToya on Sharing Information Across Generations. I love this post for its upfront and open-minded effort to deal with controversy and division in the feminist movement. Here's a longish sample:

More than just being feminist starstruck though, talking with Alida [Brill] really illuminates a lot of the personal struggles that come out of a movement like feminism. Like what it means to give so much to a movement that your personal life suffers. Or what happens when you realize you made key mistakes. Or what happens when older things you have said, or done, or written, come back to haunt you.

“We got so much wrong,” Alida told me openly. “We got the race thing wrong, and we got the lesbian thing wrong, and we are still getting things wrong. I just hope we have the time to fix it.”

Hearing her say that reminded me that while we tend to think of movements as immovable, inflexible things - not a reflection of all the people who create a movement or participate in one. Sometimes, as she tells me a story, her pain over something long past is palpable.

But most of the time, her tone is hopeful.

For you see, talking with Alida is not like listening to someone who could care less about what you think. Talking with Alida as a young buck is actually an illuminating experience because she doesn’t address me (or us, rather - there are 10 women in the program) as some insolent child sullying up the grand second wave legacy.

She is my elder, but she is also my peer. She is just as interested in hip-hop feminism as I am, asks a lot of questions about the internet (even if she is a little afraid of it) and is always open to the understanding that her interpretation may need an adjustment for the times. It has been a pleasure talking and learning from a feminist who lived through the struggle, and I look forward to more conversation.
But when LaToya said, "The average librarian is about 55-65 where I live, and they are the people that give me the most hope about living a full active life all the way to the end," I have to admit she threw me a little bit. At 52, I am close to the lower end of that age group. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that I have the chance to go beyond 65. And finding myself wanting to know the histories of women who already have--especially lesbians who already have.

Del Martin was 87. She started the relationship with the love of her life, Phyllis Lyon, several years before I was born, and began her activist career the year before my birth when she and Lyon co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis. The organization Old Lesbians Organizing for Change--of which Martin was a member--has an oral herstory project focused on recording the stories of lesbians 70 and older. These are some of the places where I am taking my inspiration.

(This post was originally entered at 7:09 AM on August 28, and expanded and rewritten later that evening.)

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