By aurora linnea

Among the first readings I sought out in preparation for this month’s essay was Keridwen Luis’s Herlands: Exploring the Women’s Land Movement in the United States (2018), described on the University of Minnesota Press site as “a compelling ethnography of women’s lands networks in the United States” that “highlights the ongoing relevance of these communities as vibrant cultural enclaves that also impact broader ideas about gender, women’s bodies, lesbian identity, and right ways of living.” I ordered a copy from the library and dove in straight away when it arrived, eager to learn the history of women’s lands in the U.S. and be energized by accounts of the intrepid, visionary women who’d set off together to build new worlds removed from the crush of male dominion. Alas, I was to find myself disappointed. 

In the introduction to Herlands, Luis warns readers that the feminist and lesbian separatism of the women’s land movement is now something “highly embarrassing to many feminists.” Given that she elected to write a book on the subject, one might expect the author to take up the task of exorcising such embarrassment by defending women’s lands against unfair present-day pooh-poohing. Indeed, I’d been led to believe that she regarded them as “vibrant cultural enclaves” with “ongoing relevance.” So you can imagine my perplexity when, instead, Luis proceeded to devote the bulk of her “exploration” to cataloging the flaws and foibles of the communities she studied, her tone throughout tinged with tacit disapproval. 

The reader of Herlands will discover that the U.S. women’s land movement was pervaded by racism (because most of its founding mothers were white); that it perpetuated settler colonialism (because the women acquired land without taking indigenous land holdings into account); that women’s lands have been holdouts of toxic transphobia and terribly problematic “biological essentialism” (because of an embrace of womanhood understood as femaleness); and that they fostered discrimination against disabled and “fat” women (because of the value placed on female physical vitality and vigor). She will also be made aware of the bubble-bursting fact that sometimes women were ill-tempered and unpleasant to one another, that life on women’s lands was not an extended luxurious dip in the serene waters of sisterly bliss. Slogging through chapter after chapter, ever more morose as the fault-finding extravaganza wore on, it struck me that the author – in spite of whatever fondness may have spurred her initial interest in women’s lands – was herself afflicted with the same squeamishness she attributed to the “many modern feminists” for whom women’s lands, and the utopian visions that gave rise to them, merit only a cringe or a smirk. 

Are we “modern feminists” not more sophisticated than our foremothers and foresisters? Have we not outgrown the unrealistic idealism that galvanized the feminists of yore? Surely we have evolved beyond idealism, and today we have the good sense to recognize that utopia is impossible, that every attempt to realize it will be marred and muddled, invariably, and so, we conclude, quite rightly, quite righteously: why bother trying? Much safer to compromise – no better world is possible – and to criticize those wide-eyed naifs who make fools of themselves questing after the unattainable. Thus the savvy, sophisticated “modern feminist” shrugs off women’s lands and communities as hopelessly white, bougie, hippie-dippie and/or woo-woo, old-fangled, sanctimonious, and politically rigid. As for utopianism? Escapist. Impractical, hence elitist. Best to toss the castle-in-the-clouds fairy tales of feminist paradise to the discard bin, sisters, along with all your other obsolete, absurd ambitions. The time has come to get real. 

Yet the trouble there is that women’s lands, women’s communes, female-only communities are real. They serve a real purpose. To the women who call them home, and as home bases for the feminist struggle to liberate women from patriarchal rule, women’s lands are essential. Though it is true enough that in the U.S., the women’s land movement has been predominantly the undertaking of white, “middle class,” women with college degrees and leftist pedigrees, female separatist communities are an international phenomenon, cropping up not only in North America and Europe but in Kenya, Brazil, and Syria as well. They are not solely the purview of the Western and well-to-do. The history of these communities also stretches far further into the past than just to second-wave feminism’s 1970s heyday. Over 800 years ago, women in Northern Europe found relief from male domination in female-only, independent spiritual communities called Beguinages. Women break away from patriarchal society to live amongst other women in communities of our own because we need to do so. The need is real. We needed these communities centuries ago, and that need remains today, as real and as urgent as ever, everywhere on this earth that men have claimed as their domain. 

Women’s lands provide necessary sanctuary from male violence. Umoja, a women’s village in northern Kenya, was settled in 1990 by survivors of gang rape by British soldiers. For thirty years, the village has been a refuge for women and girls fleeing child marriage, female genital mutilation, abusive husbands, and rape. A river rings the perimeter of the village, a protective circle the women have reinforced with a cobblestone wall covered by thorny brush, to keep out lions and the men who have repeatedly attempted to invade the village, to steal back women who ran from them or to murder Umoja’s matriarch, Rebecca Lolosoli. The original, hand-painted sign for the Oregon Women’s Land Trust, or OWL, one of the longest-running women’s lands in the U.S., welcomes women to the “OWL Sanctuary for Women and Animals,” open to all “lesbians, light skin, middle class, working class, young, strong, caretakers, travelers, sick, old, middle, crazy, spaced out, straight, dark skin, mothers with girl children.”

In medieval Europe, loosely organized communities of religious laywomen known as Beguines invited prostituted women and girls into their homes to support them in escaping sexual exploitation. The 16th-century Italian Beguines Adriana Contarini and Helena Priuli established a safe house in Venice for young girls sold by their families into prostitution. Shelters and infirmaries especially for poor women were another regular feature of Beguine communities. Jinwar, a “female-only ecological commune,” was founded in Syria in 2016 to “provide an alternative, peaceful place for the coexistence of women, free of any and all violence.” The name “Jinwar” translates to “Women’s Land” in Kurdish. Many of the two-dozen women living in the village are survivors of arranged marriages and domestic abuse; all are survivors of the massive male violence that is the Syrian civil war. Women and children make up 75% of the Syrian refugee population. “In the war conditions that we have been through, every woman suffered. Every woman was hurt. Every woman was lost, but Jinwar brought them together,” says Fatma Emin, a 30-year-old Jinwar resident. 

Women’s lands make possible the economic independence necessary for female self-determination under patriarchy. Prior to forming the Woman’s Commonwealth of Belton, TX in 1867, the women who called themselves the Sanctified Sisters were middle-class housewives and mothers, reliant upon husbands and fathers for their livelihoods. But by 1879, every Sister was financially independent of her male relatives. In addition to demanding payment for the domestic work they performed as wives and mothers, these entrepreneurial women began a laundry business; sold eggs, milk, and butter; chopped and sold firewood; wove and sold rag carpets; ran a hotel for travelers; and grew vegetables on the several farms they ran outside of the city. One Sister practiced dentistry, another repaired shoes. By working together communally and rotating roles, the women attained financial autonomy while enjoying greater free time than they’d ever had laboring under their husbands. The Beguines were so successful in the budding textile industry of the middle ages that (male-run) artisan guilds lobbied for laws that would bar the women from using spinning wheels or limit their access to spindles. Undaunted by male competitors’ hostility, the Beguines mentored poor women in their trades so that they, too, could become self-supporting. In Umoja, the women make beaded jewelry that they sell to tourists. “I have learned to do things here that women are normally forbidden to do. I am allowed to make my own money,” an Umoja resident named Nagusi explains, “and when a tourist buys some of my beads I am so proud.” As testament to the threat women’s economic independence poses to patriarchal power, when the Umojan women first began selling jewelry, men reacted by storming the village to beat the women and steal their money. 

On women’s lands, women cultivate the subsistence skills necessary for cutting ties with manmade industrial civilization—skills women are typically discouraged from learning. 

In Umoja, Jinwar, and U.S. lesbian-feminist communes like OWL, women build their own houses – out of mud, manure, scrap wood, or salvaged roadside debris – and grow their own food. Long-term residency at the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in Seneca Falls, NY – established in 1983 to protest nuclear weapons – obliged the women to teach themselves to winterize a bar and install plumbing. The Beguines brought in medical practioners to teach them basic healing techniques, so that the women could care for patients at the infirmaries they operated. At the Jinwar academy, women study natural healing with plants and herbs. Village residents also rotate jobs, in order that every woman has the opportunity to develop as many different proficiencies as possible, so that each can meet her own basic needs. A wall within the village has been painted to bear a Jinwar proverb: “Until women educate and empower themselves, there won’t be freedom.” Unlike much of what is touted by modern feminists as “empowering” – e.g., bold lipstick, platform boots, marketing oneself on OnlyFans – there is nothing unrealistic or escapist about the down-to-earth competence and self-sufficiency nurtured on women’s lands. 

Most necessary of all is that precious rarity that women’s lands and communities alone can offer, something almost beyond imagining: real, palpable mental and physical release from the ubiquitous pressures of male domination. As Batya Weinbaum writes, female-only communities allow women to “cleanse themselves” of the negative energies and habits of mind//body inflicted by lifetimes of patriarchal oppression. This is out of reach for women locked into manmade, male-dominated spaces and institutions. Women who have lived in women’s communities are emphatic on this point. Discussing women’s communities in Denmark, a woman writes, “[w]omen are living in collectives to get the strength which most people, both male and female, deny them. When men are around, women often slip unconsciously into roles of dependence, physical and mental.” A U.S. women’s land “land dyke” quoted in Herlands argues that female-only space is essential because whenever there are men present, “women defer to them… [a]nd until women stop deferring to men, we have got to have our own space, in my opinion.” And in the words of Seita Legima, a long-time resident of Umoja, “Outside, women are being ruled by men so they can’t get any change. The women in Umoja have freedom.” Female freedom does not exist within patriarchal society; it is not permitted. Because women who have known freedom do not return from that experience cooperatively submissive to male tyranny. The stated mission of the village of Jinwar is to “be a place for woman to collectively rediscover, re-establish, and reclaim her inherent freedom.” If we ever hope to know freedom, we must create it for ourselves, as women, together. “In Jinwar, I’ve seen that women can stand alone,” says Barwa Darwish, a 35-year-old mother of seven. She continues: “This is the first time I am free, nobody tells me what to wear or what to do.” It is unthinkable, to give up freedom once one has been free. “This is living,” a young woman living as a Sanctified Sister at the Women’s Commonwealth told a reporter who visited the community in 1903. Every day the Sisters received letters from women wishing to join. And although the women of Umoja are welcome to leave the village and return to their husbands whenever they wish to, many women interviewed by the journalist Julie Bindel during her 2015 visit to Umoja said they could not imagine living with a man again after their time in the women’s village. It is common for young women raised in Umoja to “have sworn off men completely.” They would prefer to remain among women and preserve their freedom. “We don’t have much,” says Mary, a 34-year-old woman who came to the village after being sold as a child bride to an 80-year-old man, “but in Umoja, I have everything I need.” 

It is not a fantasy: in another land, the women are together. Living in homes they’ve built by hand, simple, unassuming structures but sturdy and well-tended—for the women take pride in what they can create. Working together, sharing what they earn, so that no woman or child goes without. The women cook together, eat together, read together and teach one another, for each woman’s knowledge is invaluable. Every woman’s contribution is valued. No woman or child is turned away, for this land will offer refuge to all in need of it. Together the women run infirmaries, schools, art centers, shelters, farms. They grow strong together, strengthen one another, celebrate each woman’s individual strengths. And together, the women protect one another from the violence of men. Through the night the women patrol the village, vigilant, ready to defend their sisters. This land may be a utopia, yes, but it is real, it exists, because women have summoned it into being. In Umoja, in Jinwar, in the Beguinage and the lesbian farming commune. Because it is what we need. 

Editor’s note: If you are enjoying this WLRN discussion of women’s intentional communities, take a listen to our Edition 68 podcast on the topic with commentary from Sekhmet SheOwl and listen to this interview with Nancy Manahan and Becky Bohan, a lesbian couple living in an intentional community in Florida. Thanks for staying tuned to WLRN.

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.