Request for Support for (the Amazing) Julia Penelope
Jul 26th, 2008 by admin
Dear Friends,
Julia Penelope needs our help.
For those of you not familiar with her, Julia is a Dyke who has contributed so much to Lesbian culture and community since the 1970’s. She has developed and taught Lesbian courses, written and edited many books which celebrate our Lesbian lives and which explore and develop Lesbian thinking and values. Julia has done all this and much more for Lesbians over the years. And now she needs our help.
Julia is living in her own house in Texas and needs immediate and ongoing help on several levels.
- Financial– to cover the costs of healthcare and medications for mutiple health issues, including Type 2 Diabetes and COPD which seriously affects breathing,
- Financial to help cover daily living expenses since her limited income does not cover her needs.
- Repair and maintenance for her truck and house, both of which have had a range of problems which Julia has neither the resources nor energy to get done.
- Help with ongoing tasks. Specific tasks that may be helpful to offer to her: mow the lawn, walk her dog, arrange for or do truck maintenance and repairs as needed, repair the wall in her house damaged by a water leak, general yard and house maintenance.
Also, offering support and to brainstorm about options– such as selling her house and finding a living situation that would best meet her needs. Of course help as needed to prepare/move, etc…related to whatever decisions she makes.
Please offer whatever you can. This is a wonderful opportunity for Lesbians to pull together, as we do so well, and give back to one who devoted her life to building the very Lesbian community we are so lucky to inhabit.
Through Woman, Earth & Spirit we are exploring possibilities of volunteers to address some of the problems either at Julia’s or from afar. We don’t know at all yet what might be possible if enough of us volunteer time, energy, skills and the money to cover volunteer and project expenses.
What can you do? What do you need to do it? Send your contributions of any kind– ideas as well as what you can offer physically, by phone or email, or financially. Donations are tax deductible.
We thank you for anything you are able to offer.
Jae Haggard & jody jewdyke
CHECKS TO
Woman, Earth & Spirit, Inc
Julia Penelope Fund
PO Box 130
Serafina, NM 87569
www.WomanEarthandSpirit.org
Thanks Heart for posting this. I really liked the way you wrote the piece, and I think many of us don’t really know what happens in these pioneering women’s lives. There are so many groups asking for money these days, but I always wonder about the individuals.
Seems as if a month doesn’t go by when we don’t get these posts.
Thanks for this update on Julia Penelope. One idea I had was to figure out how much per year Julia actually needed. I believe every professor at every woman’s studies and queer studies department can be alerted about this situation. Penelope created the theories that they all now teach after all, and without her and others, there would be no lesbian studies.
Although I do have problems with the lack of specific focus on “lesbian” that is present every time “queer” is used, these professors now have tenue track positions because of the lesbian feminist movement. The thing is, the actual writers and activists may have not been very well compensated for their work.
I know that I used to spend untold hundreds of hours trying to get lesbians to pay more attention to money issues, and this kind of work became more and more financially untenable for me. It was just too hard to get women to listen a lot of the time. There was way too much hostility to money issues in the feminist world, and maybe because my feminism from the get go has always been about women controlling money, and getting “equal pay for equal work.” That was the one issue of feminism that was THE most important to me. So these are good stories to report, because I want our young women to be fully alert, and not disconnected with basic economic issues, that may seem silly now, but have huge results later in life.
I see this huge disconnect in the lesbian world now — we’ve got the old guard activists, we’ve got the up and coming corporate lesbians, we have the gay and lesbian chambers of commerce, we have the lesbian academics at elite universities, and we have the dykes who worked their butts off struggling with situations like this.
In Los Angeles county alone, I’ve calculated that there are about 500,000 out lesbians. Nationwide, I believe about 2% of lesbians are fully out of the closet. In my fortune 500 company, I have yet to meet an out gay or lesbian person ever. Anyway, this huge corporate lesbian base could connect to the old guard lesbian feminists in a meaningful way.
I’ll write to this non-profit and see.
Young lesbians who are on this blog or who visit and comment, I want all of you to begin your retirement planning now! Save 10% of every dime you make, and read some good books out there. If you are 23-27 you are in what I call the jackpot zone for money. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, it gets bigger if the mountain is higher, just like money gets bigger if you start soon enough.
If you’re Internet smart and clever, I want you to be money clever too!
((( Heart ))) ((( Satsuma ))) ((( Julia )))
I used to know Julia in the 80’s and 90’s - finest Dyke you could ever know. She and Sarah Hoagland did the Lesbian Separatist anthology. I’ve read everything of hers that I’ve ever been able to get my hands on.
I’ve been thinking about her during the last few months - just getting vibes.
I surround her with the radiance of InterGalactic Lesbian Separatism: it is All Hers, for All Time.
Can you still get a copy of the Mystery of Lesbians? (She wrote it.) Electrifying. Sheer joy.
Mary, I so believe Julia Penelope was the finest Dyke any of us could ever know. I, too, have every book she has ever written, plus if I happen to see her books in a bargain bin somewhere, as I have a time or two, I buy them so I can pass them along. I have also often thought of her this year.
I like it that Jae Haggard and jody jewdyke have made their organization a 501(c) nonprofit. More women will donate this way. I know both Jae and Jody. I met Jae at the Feminist Hullaballoo last year; she publishes Maize, the land dykes magazine, and built Outland wimmin’s land in New Mexico, where I stayed while I was at the Hullaballoo. I have never met a more inspiring, positive, fun to be around person than Jae! Despite her overwhelming responsibilities. Jody used to work with Vancouver Rape Relief; I first met her at a World March of Women event in Vancouver, then later encountered her at Michfest and at the Hullaballoo. She’s a great womon.
Jae took over “Estrogenerations,” Sonia Johnson’s organization that sponsored the Feminist Hullaballoo.
Jae actually wrote what I’ve posted here, I did not. I also really like what she wrote.
I’m starting to better understand what you’re saying, Satsuma, and want you to know that I value it.
Heart
Thanks Heart. Sometimes I feel like the lone radical feminist out there trying to get women to do something as simple as open up a damn retirement account!
‘I’m starting to better understand what you’re saying, Satsuma, and want you to know that I value it. ‘
We’ll have a whole generation of radical feminists out there and radical lesbian feminists with no assets at all, and no plan to pass on wealth. Now if an immigrant Mexican can come to Los Angeles, and get a business going, what in heaven’s name keeps feminists from creating wealth?
I’ve always wondered this, because in every other area of my life, wealth gets created, but somehow within the lesbian world, it’s been a consistent negative rate of return. Now I don’t mean this as a diss of lesbians, it is just peculiar.
It’s why women get so exhausted with this work, and reading about Heart and your troubles with simple requests for money really highlights this.
Since 1980, when I gave my first financial speech to a feminist group, I’ve watched this whole thing progress.
We have a whole group of lesbian feminists out there stuck right where Julia is stuck, and we had an ideology (Separatism) that did not create wealth, and it didn’t grow. I believe separatism has not brought about the kind of prosperity that it should have, and I think one reason for this is the reluctance of “radical” people to deal with money as a tangible common sense thing.
Instead, we think the government is going to solve all our problems. I really hated the treatment I receieved at government offices, and even at a very young age, I thought, I just can do a lot better on my own.
Radical lesbian feminism gave me an excellent blueprint to analyze just “how” to work. I used it to structure a world world that would accomodate and get around patriarchal conditioning, that I believe is hardest for straight women to get. The patriarchal world wants women to be economically dependent on men, and so it can fool women into living on these “handouts” and thus get very trapped.
So here is the situation of Julia Penelope, and no matter how many books she has written, this is how it ends. And this is not a good story. It is a terrible story. I’ve put this appeal out there, and I’m willing to bet that if radical feminists make a concerted effort to change this economic stuff around, we’ll build more viability into radical feminism. Otherwise, we are stuck with the Mary Daly assertion that when radical feminism rises in one place it may fade in another. It rises when things are really rotten for women.
I see this in all the rape victims who come on here, all the women who have been beaten senseless by husbands, the honor attempted killings and on and on it goes. But the thing is, I came to radical feminism not because some stupid man beat me. I have always hated men, and couldn’t figure out why any woman would marry these jerks, and they are all pretty much jerks. Was it me who couldn’t stand the idiots, or were women blinded with having sex with these crappy creatures?
At any rate, I never saw radical feminism as “disaster feminism” but I saw it as a very viable way to freedom for its own sake. If we could create good alternatives for women so they wouldn’t get stuck with men footing their bills, what would happen then?
But now, we’ll hear all kinds of appeals, all kinds of money starvation, and it frustrates me, because when I was talking about this with feminists for the first time in 1980, I got jeered. They made fun of this stuff and gave me a consistent hard time, and I wondered back then, as I do now, “Who the heck did you think was going to pay the bills when you got older?” Why I thought this as a young kid of 22 I cannot say exactly. But to me, feminism was about being completely economically free of the power of men, the power of the state and out of the orbit of people I didn’t want to be around.
I can tell this forever, and yet, we’ll still be hearing about a whole generation of feminists and lesbians who are stuck yet again.
We don’t need negative rate of return, but we have to look at this.
Why should Heart’s simple request for donations or her agonizing over getting a few ads on her site cause such a stink? Now I’m not picking on either Julia or Heart here. It’s just examples based on what I’m reading here. But really! Are we so far above just making a good living that we have all this agony over an ad or two? And just what is our collective net worth as a movement?
Ads are not wrong, getting paid and funded is not wrong. Women have struggled for ages doing unpaid work, and feminism to me was always about not doing this. If the canard is women work twice as hard to get the same wages as men, then common sense dictates that you don’t want to go into salaried work. You want to look toward creative entreprenurial solutions.
Now I don’t read the word “entrepreneur” here, and I don’t see the phrase “rate of return” and I don’t see that we can all leave legacies, and we can talk about how we intend to do this.
In the 80s, I saw hundreds of lesbians sending in money and doing AIDS marches etc. etc., and hardly any lesbians were getting this disease. There were lesbians who didn’t have health insurance, and there are lesbians and other women who don’t have the money for proper dental care that I’ve read about here too, but hey, we have to give to these stupid national things that have nothing to do with the fact that the bartender at the neighborhood lesbian bar DOES NOT have health insurance!
What does community mean?
Labor unions started in the cigar rolling industry. The men would roll cigars while one man was designated the “reader.” They all worked harder so that one of their number could read aloud, educate the group, and that man would be paid by his comrades for this “work.”
BTW (by the way), I talked to my dentist in Los Angeles, since I never got over the dental posts awhile ago. My dental hygenist said the doctor did a lot of pro-bono work, but that often his offer of assistance was turned down by parents who just let their children suffer with rotten teeth. Anyway, they told me dentists do do pro-bono work, and that university dental schools offer care with a minimal charge.
When we get to the point where we can build a viable community the equal of some kook polygamist sect, or get women to show up at one “mega-feminist” gathering, and get money flowing big time, then I think radical feminism might have a real shot at changing more in the world.
Sorry for this lengthy writing, and I hope people can read the sincereity of my words, and not get mad at all this. I often sense pure hostility in feminism towards money, when it’s such a basic thing. And I often think the anger at capitalism is not really about an economic system, it’s simply about women’s failure to really figure out how to do well with money, very well.
When you can go to any country in the world and see male supremacy, I don’t think we can blame the status of women on capitalism. And that is the flaw of radical feminism — its wedding with downward mobility, and its hatred of the very wealth we need to make sure that every radical feminist writer and activist is well cared for when they need it the most.
This matters women, and we need to find out what women need, how to get them all connected, and how to make sure that we in are more solidarity with the next generation, because I believe if we don’t, we’ll have the pro-porn feminists and the pro-sex work feminists, and the pornification of lesbian nation getting contaminated beyond repair.
Something has to give and get real, and I believe the time is now to talk about the transfer and creation of wealth long term, so that women who want a real viable non-male option “lifestyle” or life available to them.
Maybe I should write a book about money and feminism, but it wouldn’t make any money! So I’m putting it out here, and I hope people can gain benefit from this. It’s meant to protect feminism, not to sell out.
One thing I’ve been wanting to say — kind of a huge topic — is, one reason women act as they do around money, have a defunct relationship with it is, they grew up seeing their fathers use money to abuse their mothers– things like, from a young age, watching their fathers scream at their moms (or worse) for overspending, going ballistic if mothers asked for a little extra, watching their fathers withhold money from their moms, all the way to watching their fathers spending the rent or food money on alcohol, drugs, “toys” (cars, boats, golf, gambling) and abusing their mothers if they confronted them about it. There are a million and one ways men can abuse their wives with money. Girls who grow up in that kind of environment end up experiencing tremendous anxiety around anything having to do with money, and particularly around asking for it. They feel unbearably guilty when they spend money, if anyone criticizes what they do, they feel triggered, they do magical thinking kinds of things that usually are self-destructive but that help them cope with their feelings. Of course, the same is true for women whose male partners have abused them with money. It’s really hard to overcome what amounts to traumatic experiences like this. Rejecting capitalism and wealth can be another way to deal with anxiety around money while feeling good about it, sort of self-righteous, when in fact, you have simply found another way to cope with being triggered after years of abuse.
This is a really complicated issue, I think.
Believing that capitalism oppresses women is a reason to work toward women’s economic independence, not a reason to give up on it.
I can see why Satsuma is having trouble with that logic; I do too.
Nevertheless, there is indeed middle space between wholesale endorsement of capitalism (of which pornography is the utmost expression, btw) and living on the margins.
Thanks Funnie and Heart. I get both your points. I have never endorced wholesale no holds barred capitalism! No! But I do endorce and support proper use of the business world so women become owners, so that women create new industries and services, and so that women learn the art of money. And for the record, I believe all porn should be outlawed and violators thrown in jail or made to do hard labor on lesbian collective farms! A secret fantasy of mine!
Heart’s explanation made a lot of sense. Funny how this caused me to remember my family and my Dad’s sister’s family. My Mom was the acknowleged master of finance, and tax expert. So I didn’t see math, women or money as anything to get anxiety about. However, my Aunt was another story, and her husband was cruel and creepy! I overheard my Aunt one day begging him for grocery money! They didn’t see me in the other room, and so I overheard my Uncle’s abuse of my Aunt, and was really freaked out about it.
I vowed then and there (at age 5 or 6) that I would never depend on men for money ever! It was a real epiphany as a small child.
Women get mixed lessons with money that’s for sure. But I am hoping that together we can support the economic growing power of feminists worldwide. I am especially moved by that generation of lesbian feminists who so gave us everything, and now suffer so much like Julia Penelope. So Heart’s post on this will really help alert all feminists that we have to get better at this, we have to be motivated to pass on assets, get life policies whatever it takes, so that when each of us dies, lesbians or feminist organizations inherit the money! I mean it. We all need to be getting at least $1million dollar life policies, so that this money goes to the groups we want to last. It dosen’t take much to do this, but you have no idea the number of lesbians I’ve met who have no life policy at all. So they are not thinking about how to get wealth to flow just like it does within hetero family structures. We have to make this mental leap, or the porn people/pod people will take over!
Since I have traveled and observed other economic systems at work, I don’t really connect capitalism to everything bad for women. Just read the women who escaped China and wrote books about it. Saw women in China washing clothes on wash boards in an ally! Mexican barriors are no picknic either, and we all know about the middle east. Other parts of the world are just as woman hating as the U.S. And like porn, it has nothing to do with the economic system you are in, it is all about male abuse of power and male tyranny worldwide. It is the MEN who are the problem, not a particular economic system.
The capitalism I support is largely small businesses (small being $2 million to $30 million dollar businesses), and this is a huge improvement over Fortune 500 domination. My experience with these companies has been very positive, and often husbands and wives share the running of these shops. I’ve been able to help them add benefits to their employee’s plans — things they didn’t think they could afford, and actually could. I’ve helped women apply for loans, and I know where the easy routes are.
I don’t support Marxist solutions to economies, because I want to be compensated more if I work more cleverly. I don’t like average or the lowest common denominator, and so I am a little suspicious of economies that are too centrally run and controlled.
I’m a big fan of micro-loans and the Gameen bank, which has done wonders for women in India and Pakistan. I know for a fact that when women have access to independent income, they rise above the control of men. This has happened in Mexico, among other places.
We do need to heal our fear and loathing of money. It’s what we desparately need as a movement now. We need to prosper and to show visual prosperity in service to radical feminism. A shabby feminism does not look attractive, and I’m not wedded to appearance, but it does get me down at the shabbiness of it all sometimes.
Women need to have the best, not the meagre scraps from the table.
I once asked Carter Heyward, the lesbian Episcopal priest, why she didn’t wear her fanciest vestments and use the gold jeweled challaces for celebrating communion at lesbian christian events. Instead, we’d have that awful pottery cup, and jeans and t-shirts.
It bugged me that the male churches got all the good stuff with Carter, and we got the shabby clothes and pottery. She looked astonished when I said this. She had never thought of it that way.
Radical to her meant NO gold, no fancy vestments and no lovely lion headed chairs! But to me, it meant we were settling, we were giving less to ourselves than we would to the non-lesbian world.
People might disagree with all of this and that’s ok, but I long to see the day when we have a list of 15-30 lesbian millionaires, who are able to create more wealth, pass it on, and help women gain economic security. It’s why no pioneering feminist should ever have to eat on a paper plate at a pot luck again!!
Sorry again for this long post! I get so impassioned about this issue. I believe I was “called” to tell this message to lesbians and feminists out there in radical land, because I get so upset when our own suffer and don’t have enough money. I so revered these women and these stories just get to me. If only….
Carter Heywood! Lesbian, radical feminist Episcopalian priest! I bought her books “back in the day.” Thank you for reminding about her and her ministry to women, Satsuma!
And your story about your aunt’s being abused with money by her husband explains a lot to me about your attitudes about women and money. No wonder you feel as strongly as you do.
My (late) father abused my (late) mother with words and money during all of my child- and young adult-hood until she died. He was afraid to beat her, because she told him outright she would kill him in his sleep if he ever did that (go, Mom!, for drawing that line in the sand). What he could do is tell her she was worthless to him as a woman because her cancer had left her with one breast and only give her enough money to pay incoming bills and buy groceries; oh, and he ridiculed her for not having socially acceptable clothes as a result of his being a miser to her. For years and years she bargain-hunted just to have a little money laid by. He found the cash and burned it outside in a trash pit as she cried. But she saved again. . .so she could give me $2000 dollars on her deathbed.
Men, women, and money. . .the memories burn me.
Yes Level Best, I got an early warning about what happens when men control the money! It was a lesson that fueled my study of finance and business. It was an uphill battle, because very few radical feminists were ever interested in this stuff. They’d say YUCK stocks, yuck I hate money, I hate capitalism, I want an end to money… blah blah blah
Kind of like the women who now want lesbian marriage and they were the ones chanting “smash monogamy” back in the 70s. Even Gloria Steinem got married. My Mom was totally disgusted with her about face, and my Mom isn’t a feminist. She doesn’t like people who flip flop like that. Don’t know what to think about lesbians and gays going ga ga over marriage in CA. Don’t know what this means???? Another topic….
But anyway,….
I’ve been working harder at my job after reading this blog. It put the fear of god of poverty in me yet again. Notice I used god to describe a negative situation, whereas we can all focus on the goddess of wealth!
By the way, this site makes you wealthy with inspiration and real news, so being here is a form of wealth. Time for a nice cup of hot tea and a good book! Ta la…
Only 9 post for Julia so far, and over 50 for pornography. It’s not a complain, it’s just an “I wonder” moment here.
We’re all surrounded by porn. We”re not all surrounded by Julia Penelope.
That’s why it’s still a patriarchy.
Interesting thoughts here. I’ve never read any of Julia Penelope’s work- one more for the list! I’d like to contribute something, and will, when I get back from MichFest. Same with Off Our Backs.
I can’t help but think that a part of why women (and the Women’s Movement) have this almost instinctive dislike of money and money systems, has to do with the exploitive nature of much of capitalism. Capitalism is largely based on exploiting workers, yes? (not saying that being compensated for work performed is necessarily inherently exploitive, mind, just that that’s the way it’s being going down for <i>so long.</i>) Women know all too well what it’s like to be exploited. We’re exploited all the time, by men, by other women too sometimes. Exploited sexually, yes, as in funnie’s “utmost expression” of capitalism, but also house/all-work wise, emotionally, psychologically. I wonder how much of that dynamic, that exploitive, unfair, “I’ll make bags of cash ordering you around and making you do the grunt work for very little” dynamic is just a major turn-off for women, and for feminists in particular?
I think that that is a good part of what goes into what my old friends used to call “the poverty ethic.” We just really didn’t want to be a part of that shite. And, come the Revolution, we won’t have to be. But until then we need to get by. We need to work from within the system as we struggle to pull it down and inside out. So I hear what you’re saying, Satsuma. Feminism as a movement needs to find ways to create wealth, in order to be able to afford a new way of doing things, and to be able to look after our own.
I’m very sleepy and I hope I’m making sense.
I wonder how much of that dynamic, that exploitive, unfair, “I’ll make bags of cash ordering you around and making you do the grunt work for very little” dynamic is just a major turn-off for women, and for feminists in particular?
Yes. Capitalism is a Ponzi scheme - that fact is pretty much in the name capitalism, if you take it seriously. It’s the Amway of economic systems. It’s requires a major suspension of disbelief: those with the capital have it because they work both harder and smarter.
If you really do see through to what capitalism IS, it’s hard to say “yes, I’m excited to work my way to the top of the Amway pyramid.”
At the same time, we’re IN it. It affects every person on the face of this planet in a very personal way. Even if we were able to drop completely off the grid, our ability to breathe air and drink water and put our feet on dry land depends upon an assessment made by some capitalist near the top of the ladder. It just does.
There has to be some place between falsely denying that you’re involved with capitalists like it or not, ignoring them and hoping it will work out (it doesn’t, as far as I can tell), and trying to win at the game, knowing the whole time that regardless of how hard/smart you do in fact work, you’re perpetuating a fraud, one that hurts other people.
I don’t know what it looks like, how it’s livable, whatever. But I do think it’s absolutely a respectable point of view to believe that long-term economic security for women is invaluable and a worthy goal, starting on the personal level, and simultaneously that capitalism is specifically, purposely structured such that it will NOT provide long-term economic security for all women.
Satsuma the woman who’s name comes to mind when I read you talking about money and women is Mary Kay Ash. I think you were separated at birth, or something.
Mary Kay Ash indeed. She’s a pretty interesting woman, and there are a lot of women like her out there. It’s just that feminism rarely connects with these self-made women, and I’ve always been a little disturbed by the disconnect.
I think what feminism did was open the door to lots of careers that women were blocked from entering decades ago, and a whole generation of women has gone into these fields. But radical feminism kind of got lost and fell behind somewhere along the line, and the women who went into business had no way to meet the radical feminists anymore.
Either that, or women are still really frightened of radical feminist, and still really frightened of lesbians. I meet really nice successful straight women all the time! They are very nice, will take you for a ride on their nice big boat, and they’ll spend $24,000 on a face lift. These women are afraid, afraid of the radical, afraid of feminism… and I don’t know what bubble they seem trapped in, but they are in it. I’m meerly the rare out lesbian who wanders into these strange worlds, trying to figure it all out.
So when you go everywhere, you kind of wish we could get the big picture, or just why radical feminism is just as dirt poor today as it was in 1972. We have a problem women, and I have seen this contradiction for a long time, and still I see the siren song of patriarchy just keeping women from doing more. It’s a mystery.
I call it the Condi dilemma. Condi got to be secretary of state because of feminism, but look what she did! She’s just one example. Feminism opens the doors and does the hard work, and then the opportunists just move in and could care less. When older women are trashed by younger women, we will lose again.
Clearly women collude in patriarchy all the time, and get easily scared, yet at some moments in time, women march in the streets and fight back….
So I must be the really odd duck, perhaps the only radical feminist financial person and business person who writes here. I keep wondering why business is so taboo, and I wonder where are the business lesbian feminists are…. and well, I guess I’ll be this weird little contradiction.
:-)
<i>For years and years she bargain-hunted just to have a little money laid by. He found the cash and burned it outside in a trash pit as she cried.</i>
Ugh, that just pisses me off. What an asshole.