A Psychological Retrospective on Power in the Contemporary Lesbian-Feminist Community

Abstract

This essay represents preliminary explorations on the history of power within the Los Angeles lesbian-feminist community from a psychological point of view. In our interviews with sixteen Los Angeles lesbian-feminists, began as an attempt to gather current descriptive data about our community evolved into a series of animated discussions of the community had been and much speculation as to why it had changed. The questions what happened? and why? began to surface for us as the major critical focus. Because many of the community issues which have arisen in Los Angeles have been similar to those recounted in feminist publications around the country, we imagine that the interpersonal struggles may also have been similar. We hope that this analysis will aid women in other communities in understanding difficulties in communication, power struggles, and community blow-ups that they, too, may have experienced. It is important to understand these problems not as our personal and unique failings, but as the result of the systematic oppression from which all women suffer in sexist society. This stress on each individual woman is made manifold when she relates to others in the community, all of whom are similarly oppressed. The lesbian-feminist community of Los Angeles is geographically diffuse, though most highly concentrated in the two areas of Echo Park-Silverlake and Venice. A definition of its boundaries comes from