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A few weeks ago I drove to Amesville, Ohio to spend a weekend at SuBAMUH (Susan B. Anthony Memorial Unrest Home) as part of a larger oral history project on women-only intentional communities. I will say this: I’m surprised I came home.

SuBAMUH was founded in 1979 as a feminist education center. It’s 151 acres contains a campground, a communal kitchen, living spaces, a (naked)swimming pond and hiking trails. Aside from being a feminist safe space, SuBAMUH serves as a community center and works closely with nearby Ohio University in Athens. They offer workshops on topics such as wild edible plants, feminist parenting, safer sex, car mechanics and cheese making.

I conducted three interviews with two residents and the founder of SuBAMUH, Jan Griesinger, which I’ve included pieces of below. Jan lives in the farmhouse on the land, which serves as both her home and a main space for residents.  It is surrounded by cherry blossoms, a hot tub, and a small garden. It is a small museum of sorts dedicated to feminism and the Dayton Women’s Liberation movement, co-founded by Jan and her partner, Mary. We sat by her fire drinking SuBAMUH’s famous homemade Concord grape juice and eating cherry pie. Her cat lay on her lap, head on her chest, and would occasionally arch her back to knead her stomach. Jan got up occasional to stoke the fire and the interview lasted about an hour.

Cynthia: Tell me where and when you were born.

Jan: The organization that I’m national co-director for which is called Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, we always start our meetings and introductions by saying how old we are. We are very proud to be old, we don’t think old is a four letter word, so we always start out by saying, “I’m Jane Griesinger and I’m 67 years old,” and then we go around and found out how old everybody is. Born October 3^rd 1942. My father’s family is from Ohio. My mother’s family is from Nebraska. My father was in World War II so we were living with my mother’s parents in Lincoln Nebraska. So, that’s where I was born. Lived there during the war then we went to the Chicago suburbs. My father had gone to school there, to law school, and was goijg to practice law there so we lived in the Chicago suburbs all of my growing up years. My father still lives there and my mother just died about a year and a half ago. My father is 94 years old. So one suburb for five years or so and then the other one from there on in and that’s where my parent’s had lived since the 1950s. So, I guess my early years I was raised by my mother and my grandmother and she had a younger brother living at home so it was sort of an extended family.

Cynthia: Tell me about your mother.

Jan: College graduate in business admin. Which I think was very unusual for 1941. However never employed until she was probably in her 50s. She said my father thought that she should not be employed and of course women were suppose to stay home and raise children, so that’s what she did. She was active in things the league of women voters, her church group, community activities, but I think would have fit very well in Betty Freidan’s concept of the housewife, the sort of not a bigger concept of the world and a way to be involved with the world. So, you knowShe did a good job at raising children and doing what suburban housewives were suppose to do but I think had she been born in a different era she would have had a quite different live.

Cynthia: Do you have a specific memory of her than encompasses the type of woman that she was?

Jan: I’m also not a person with a great memory, so my memories are more likely to be of her when I’m an adult. She and my father met at a young Republicans convention, however she got very disillusioned with the Republicans about the time when John Kennedy came along and began to get more and more politically active in a sort of independent way and then a democratic way. She never was in any feminist group or movement, but she sort of absorbed the movement through me, which the group I started with was Dayton Women’s Liberation 40 years ago, and she tickled me sometime probably in the early 70s. She told me she that was at a meeting and she was the only woman there and they asked her if she would take notes and she said, “Oh, women’s liberation doesn’t allow us to take minutes,” which tickled me (laughs) that she came up with that line. When I came out to her as a lesbian, by that time I was age 35 or so, she eventually got involved in PFFLAG (Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). She became a strong ally with a lot of the national lesbian/gay church related work that I was doing. So, very much I felt, certainly as a child generally, but particularly as an adult, that she was very interested in what I was doing. In some ways, she kind of lived her career through me because she had never been able to have one. She did actually end up working for a state legislator running his home office, and so spent some time with he legislator in Springfield, Illinois, but otherwise didn’t really have a chance to exercise all of her gifts and skills.

Cynthia: Can you tell me about the day you came out to your parents?

Jan: My parents are divorced in 1970. I came out about 1977 to my mother. We sat down and talked at the kitchen table I guess. I don’t think it felt at the time that it was going to be particularly traumatic. It wasn’t particularly traumatic because as I say, by that time she had really begun to get involved in various progressive sorts of political things. She certainly knew by that time I had been involved with the feminism movement for eight years already. She certainly saw things I was reading, heard about thing I was talking about, so I think it was probably not a total shock. Probably two or three years later, maybe not that long, but a while, I said, “You know, well, have you said anything to any of your siblings or people about me being a lesbian?” “Well, no, not really.” She had sort of gone through her version of the closet I think and just not said much of anything to anybody. But then, certainly probably, by the mid 80s or so she began to think more about it and I began to pull her into different settings where they were supportive allies, etc. So, she began to get more outspoken later on. My father, you know, hardcore Reagan Republican. Never much about talking about personal things. Never had that close personal connection with him like with my mother, so I really didn’t say anything to him and part of her reason for not maybe saying things is ‘cuz she thought that he would find out about it. I think I came out to him in a letter.

Cynthia: When did Feminism come along for you?

Jan: 1969. We started this group called Dayton’s Women’s Liberation, an independent feminist group, like most of the second wave stuff. Not affiliated with any national movement. One of our folks had gone to an underground newspaper conference ad there was a women’s caucus there and so she kind of first heard about feminism and came back just totally wired and dragged us al to a meeting even though the rest of us weren’t sure what this was about or that it was a very good idea, but it only took about a week before we all caught the bug. We start consciousness raising groups, speaking groups, and starting asking questions about reality and what we were told.

Cynthia: Can you tell me more about the Dayton group? Start at the beginning.

Jan: That first meeting, there might have been eight of us, ten of us, I don’t remember exactly. It was in someone’s living room. We had many, many, many of our meetings in that same living room partly because the women had smaller children so it was easier to come to her house. Everybody thought there were only movements in California or New York and I used to travel a lot in the early to mid-70s and I would say something and they would say, “There’s a women’s movement in Dayton, Ohio?!” We started meeting weekly, we started before too long putting out a newsletter, we had an education group that developed a program to take to schools and churches and community organizations. We actually sponsored a march and rally against the Vietnam War. We went to the state house in Columbus, Ohio, in January 1970 on the abortion issue. There was a pro-choice legislator in Ohio at that time. We went on one of these days that was probably ten degrees or something very cold and nasty in January. The media did come, interviewed us. Their questions were these: Are you wearing a bra? What does your husband think about you being here? Those were pretty much the kinds of questions we were asked. Never anything about abortion. Pretty disgusting. Oh, we spawned off various other groups. New consciousness raising groups. We met in women’s homes that followed pretty standard consciousness raising procedures, people sharing there story, putting the pieces together, realizing that, “Oh, I thought that just happened to me! Oh, oh, oh, oh…” You know, the ah-ha moments. Putting the pieces together and seeing they was a system that was making us crazy, making us dependent, making us not earn much income, making us feel foolish. The issues came up, of course: abortion, rape, employment, marriage, children, childcare, the bigger picture, racism…There’s an idea somehow that the second wave was mostly white, which was mostly true, but therefore didn’t deal with racism, which was not true. It was always an item on our agenda. In fact, we did have close relationship with black activist groups in the city and individual black women, most of whom didn’t attend meetings, didn’t feel like it was the right choice at the right time. Their political energies went in another direction. I got involved in the spring of 1970 with a national group called the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, which was started out of Judson Memorial Church in the Village. They started, I believe in 1967, a group of clergy and rabbis who were willing to talk to women about abortion and then willing to give women information on where to get one. So I started Dayton chapter of that group. I was at that time finishing seminary and graduated in June of 1970 and got ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ. The Dayton area campus ministry sort of put me on very part time as a staff person to help organize this project. Women would call and get a machine, one of the very first machines, and a different clergy person was on call each week, make an appointment. They were all men except me and maybe one other woman. It was a very different experience for the clergy because they were having women really want to come and talk to them, and the women were blown away that these were clergy men giving them information on where to get an abortion. Part of it was that clergy were somewhat protected, it was confidential; they were not likely to be prosecuted for giving this information. The choices we had for women in June of 1970 were Mexico City, Montreal, and Rapid City South Dakota. Those were the places we could send women to get abortions. Then in July the New York law went into effect, it had been changed, so as of July 1^st abortions were available in New York City. So we pretty much sent people to New York after that.

Cynthia: Can you tell me about the time you realized that you were a lesbian?

Jan: It came through feminism. By that time our Dayton Liberation Group, I think we had an annual retreat once a year, we went to some camp and stayed over night or something, and one year, maybe 1973, 1974,  somewhere in there, two of the women who came to that retreat , as we were sitting around the campfire one night, said that they were lesbians. They came out. I had been reading these publications called the Furies, which came out of Washington D.C. Kind of the first lesbian, feminist, somewhat separatist analysis from a lesbian point of view about a whole lot of things. So, I had been reading a lot of things but I didn’t really know anyone personally, so these women did come out and that was a good thing. 1976, by that time I’m 34 years old, I had made the decision to leave Dayton and come down here to Athens County to take a job. The man with whom I had been living with and had also been married to for four years somewhere in there, we were going separate ways anyway, and he moved to a different place. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I began to enact something was going on inside me. The problem was not leaving this guy at all. The problem was leaving this women friend I had been in this women’s movement which whom I had known since 1968. It was her I didn’t want to leave when I moved.  Went to California to visit one of our friends who had moved out there and was living in a lesbian household and some kind of women’s music came on…I don’t know, I can’t even quite recall, but my friend and I were sitting there and I was listening to this music. Something about that music, I was able to say, “It’s Mary. That’s who I want in my life. Oh my God.” So I came back from California and she was visiting family in West Virginia, so on her way back home I tracked her down and said, “Oh your way home I want you to stop by my house.” So I said, “What I’m thinking…I’d like to spend my life with you.” She was ready to move out of Dayton anyway, so she went for that and moved down here to Athens. I think we were fairly quiet about it for several months. It took probably almost a year before I was ready to come out in any public way.

Cynthia: Can you tell me your earliest memory of Mary?

Jan: I think we met in the fall of ’68. She had been at Columbia for the year and had come back. It was at a meeting of a community organization called Citizens for a Democratic Society. I think not too long after that she decided to run for the Dayton City Council. I helped a little with her campaign, but not much, so I didn’t know her very well at that point, but once the election happened, that she didn’t win in the fall of 1969, once the campaign was over she was able to get more involved in Dayton Women’s Liberation. From that point on we worked on committees and consciousness raising groups and meetings and projects and various things together from about 1970 to 1976. So, six years of a close working relationship by that time. She was married for many, many years. Her husband got cancer and died in the summer of 1976.

Cynthia: Can you tell me about the beginnings of SuBAMUH?

Jan: Mary invented the name. She’s the creative one, the good story teller and the one with the memory. She had moved to Athens County and we decided to start looking for land. She had said several times she wanted to play farm. She had grown up in a pretty rural area and really wanted to do the country thing, so we started looking for land. That went on for a year or two and eventually this land went up for auction. It was a silent bid auction. She did all the research at the court house, what property was selling for and what would be a good bid, so we put in a bid. Low and behold, our bid of $44,000 was the highest bid. The goal was to not have it way higher than anyone else, and in fact, someone else in this area had bid $42,000 for it. So then we had this property and there was a sense, certainly out of our feminist history, that we did not intend it to just be for us. We wanted it to be for women somehow. So we put together an advisory committee. The unrest circle was the advisory committee’s name. Ok, there’s this land, what are we gonna do with it? So we put together ideas how the land could be used. Some people felt having a campground would be good, some people felt having workshops and programs would be good. It was purchased in the year of ’79 and it was probably ’82 that we had our first programs here. At that time there were women’s peace walks all over the country. We had a group here that hosted the plan that we walk from Athens to Columbus which is about 75 miles. At that time, I mean, Athens is what we call a company town. The company is Ohio University. That’s where people have their social networks, so there was a campus based lesbian and gay based group, but not much community stuff. So this place became a base for community activities. We helped start a women’s coffee house, a women’s center, a women’s bookstore, which was true of many communities in the 1980s, almost all of which are gone now. So, we would have a fourth of July picnic or swimming and eventually we began to sponsor programs and put together the campground. A group from Columbus in 1984, a group in recovery, lesbians, would stay all of memorial and all of Labor Day, in a safe space where no drugs or alcohol are available. It was not easy for women to throw off everything in their lives to come and live here, so they would visit, but we didn’t attract residents until the early ‘90s. We have three purposes: intentional community, feminist education, and rest and recreation. That later one served more women ever than the intentional community itself. What we got was a lot of letters, and when we eventually started a newsletter, a lot of support from women who wanted to live in one but couldn’t, had never intended to live in one and didn’t want to, but just wanted to know there was such a thing.

Cynthia: What do you see in the future for SuBAMUH?

Jan: Our biggest disappointment has always been that more women don’t come here to live.  For whatever reasons, all those things that sparked in the 70s and 80s about women going back to the land and living together and having collectives, whatever has happened it has gotten tougher and tougher. The future? I don’t know. We don’t have land payments, the land is paid for. The rent people pay is just fees for our budget. Athens itself, I think, has a lot of advantages. It’s rural and gorgeous, but it’s also twenty minutes away from the city of Athens. It supports a lifestyle that a lot of people are looking for. We have 150 acres and ¾ of a mile of road frontage and plenty of spring water, which provides water for us all. So, we have a lot of advantages that way.

This scholarly attention is a giant step forward for Riot Grrrl as a movement, and to read about this news on The New Yorker’s blog The Book Bench was a real brain bomb. Author of the blog entry, Macy Halford, posits that archiving these papers means Riot Grrrl has passed into history, bringing sad news with the good news. I beg to differ! Something’s been aflutter in the girl punk scene, especially in our very own Brooklyn, NY, for sometime now, as collective bird Kate writes in her article Girls Germs: A Brooklyn Scene Report, printed in the October Issue of Maximum Rocknroll.

As if NYU hadn’t already won our (speed) hearts with this important archival, NYU Press also recently published Alison Piepmeier’s book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. The book is the first of its kind to fully explore the connection between zines and feminism for the past two decades as well as their joint role in our future. Piepmeier is the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.

IN BIRD NEWS: We will be tabling with our distro at the Anti-Valentines Riot Grrl Cover Band Show!

No, seriously, we’re not going anywhere.