The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women

Ten. Desires for an Ideal Community of Women

Ten desires for an ideal communit y of women The eighth week of Women and Organizations is titled on the syllabus “Circles within Circles: Dilemmas of Belonging in a Women’s Group.” Here I begin to pale, for I know what is coming. We are going to read my book about a lesbian community. From experiences of past years, I know that the students approach this book with high expectations that, within its pages, they will ¤nd an ideal women’s community. If women are good, then lesbians, they now expect, must be exceptionally good in their relationships with one another. An important part of the students’ experience in reading The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community will be coming to terms with the fact that a lesbian community is primarily real.1 It is not a social expression of ideal female sensitivity and responsiveness, but rather an expression of many of the women’s ways we have been reading about all along in the course, with the added dimension that its members are lesbians . These are women who are willing to be intimate and erotic with other women, and who are more acknowledging of the depth of their emotional needs for other women than straight women often are. 2 1 8 The lesbians in my book formed an informal self-help community in a midwestern town. The book presents a collective portrait of their community through the voices of its more than sixty members. The Mirror Dance is written in an unusual way, I tell the students. Reading it is like being taken into the community. The book focuses on con®icts between merger and separation, between an individual’s feeling part of a group and feeling apart from it. homophobia in the classroom I am often impressed with the work the students do when they read The Mirror Dance. Inthe¤rstfewyearsItaughtthecourse,Iwasmoved when students who had initially been biased against lesbians would come to a different conclusion after reading the book and writing a paper about it, and they would be proud of having changed their views. The assignment I give on The Mirror Dance asks the students to trace their feelings as they read the book and to write about these feelings in a paper. In the end, they draw conclusions about the import, to them, of their own responses . What insights do they gain by considering their feelings? The ¤rst two times I gave this assignment, I asked the students to add to the end of their papers a paragraph identifying characteristics of the lesbian community described in The Mirror Dance that were those of a women’s organization. To my shock, each year, several of the students said, “I just cannot see this lesbian community as a women’s organization . It is the opposite of what I think a women’s group is.” To these students, it seemed, lesbians were not women. After receiving such responses in the second year, I decided to delete the extra paragraph from my assignment. I was not ready to take on the problem of rejection of lesbianism that the students’ views pointed to. In their papers about The Mirror Dance, the students reveal a range of emotional responses:2 I could really identify with the women in The Mirror Dance who were searching for their own identity within the group. (Yoko) a n i de a l c o m m u n i t y o f w o m e n 2 1 9 I saw many parallels to my own experience. (Rose) I found myself very emotionally involved. . . . I felt confused and frustrated. I also felt fascinated by the complex workings of the interactions of the women. (Julia) I was disappointed by the community examined in The Mirror Dance because it was far less noble and infused with political meaning than I thought it should be. (Kim) As I progressed through the book, my feelings switched from surprise to acceptance, because all of a sudden the community didn’t seem that weird. . . . The chapter on children really hit home with me. (Peggy) I was sad because so many of the women felt they could not tell their parents. (Arlene) In general, I feel the students appreciate The Mirror Dance and its multivoiced style, and they use it to come to valuable recognitions about lesbians and about themselves. The problems that arise concern...