Building a Feminist Farm

T’ai Farm and the Albion Nation, 1969-present 

Albion, Mendocino County, California 

In the late 1960s, women-only rural collectives started emerging in the U.S. They stood at the intersection between consciousness-raising groups in the women’s liberation movement and the rejection of patriarchal politics in the radical environmentalist back-to-the-land communes. Feminists in the environmental movement rejected sexist hierarchical power dynamics and traditional gender roles. They proposed fundamental changes in social lifestyles and interpersonal politics, attempting to restructure their relationship with the natural environment. 

Intentional communities have a long history in California. The mild climate, long rainy winters, fog vistas between see cliffs, and redwood forests, together with the cheep prices and relative distance from big cities, made the Pacific coast between the Bay Area and Oregon a perfect enclave for hippie communes. An archipelago of communes emerged, starting with Table Mountain, the first commune in Albion Ridge. In 1971, Robert Greenway, a Sonoma State professor, his wife River, and their collective seven children, settled at nearby Salmon Creek Farm on Middle Ridge. Trillium, a lesbian commune, and T’ai farm were just down the road; Lord’s Land and Spring Grove, which are still shared, are close by, on the Navarro Ridge. 

T’ai farm was a women-only rural collective open to lesbians and women who identified as bisexual and straight. It was founded by Carmen Goodyear, who still lives there, and her partner, Jeanne Tetrault. Goodyear named the farm after the I Ching hexagram for peace: the balance between heaven and earth, yin/yang, female/male, etc. The women in this collective learned how to farm the land and soon shared their learned skills through the magazine Country Women. The periodical included practical notes on country life, spirituality, and the sexual politics of homesteading. The collective later published the Country Women book.

Illustrator Leona Walden and River, two collective members who did not identify as lesbian, but were part of the T’ai farm consciousness-raising group, and the magazine, collaborated on the illustrations of women's houses shown here. The drawings of the houses River was analyzing express deep questions about how to live harmoniously with the land, weighing the real environmental cost of decisions about building in and with nature. 

The model of the goat barn in this section is based on Goodyear and Tetrault’s original idea for a circular structure, that was eventually built as an octagonal barn, based on the architect’s suggestions. They contacted Seven Sisters Construction, a Bay Area lesbian carpentry collective, who moved to the site and built the massive structure in seven months. The barn later became a symbol of female empowerment and a reference for female self-sufficiency in the countryside, influencing women who built other non-hierarchical structures all along the I-5 highway across South Oregon, which came to be known as The Amazon Highway.

Boal, Iain, Janferie Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow, eds. West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. Illustrated edition. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.  

Coleman, Kate. “Country Women: The Feminists of Albion Ridge.” Mother Jones Magazine, April 1978, 23–32.  

Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Orenstein, eds. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.  

Flamant, Françoise, and Veronica Selver. Raising the Roof: Constructing a Sisterhood. Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, 2005.  

Herring, Scott. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: New York University Press, 2010.  

Meeker, Martin. Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s. Revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.  

Sturgeon, Noel. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. New York: Routledge, 1997.