Loving Lesbian Land

WomanShare Collective, 1974-present 

Murphy, Josephine County, Oregon 

WomanShare was established by a lesbian feminist collective, some of whom had ties to T’ai farm and participated in Country Women festivals, in 1974 on a 23-acre-land in Murphy, Oregon.   Influenced by the lesbian separatist movement of this period, collective members wanted to escape patriarchy. This meant isolating themselves in the countryside, developing traditionally masculine roles for self-sufficiency, and dissolving gender hierarchy.  

WomanShare lesbians owned the land collectively by pooling resources together, blurring class differences. This kind of solidarity extended to consensus-based decision-making politics. They engaged in the ethics of minimum necessary consumption by practicing subsistence agriculture and abandoned capitalist accumulation by avoiding using the land for profit. Separatist ecological culture promoted a particular kind of awareness of the landscape because country life brought women to contact with natural processes, opening new possibilities of living gender and nature differently and transforming the land itself into a tie that binds community members together. By experiencing their interrelations with cycles of nature, they got to know the land as well as they knew their bodies.  

Country lesbians challenged normative heterosexual monogamous models by experimenting with open relationships, removing ownership over partners. This organization translated into the built environment: each woman had a single-use tiny cabin with her own working space on the ground floor and a sleeping loft. They established a kinship with the forces of nature by changing their names and devising names for their cabins drawing from the natural world. Both these practices are illustrated both in Billie Miracle’s drawings and in the cabin called Rattlesnake, photographed by Carol Newhouse.  

As the WomanShare map illustrates, they shared communal areas including the living room, kitchen, outhouse, and garden. Collective living subverted the traditional family unit by practicing communal child-rearing, where the children shared their own house. By blending feminist aesthetics with natural processes, they took seriously what it meant to engage with nature as with a friend or partner. Their amorous affinity with the land allowed them to envision an alternative cosmology that embraced an animated nature.  

To share their skills, they invited women who were willing to teach carpentry and built new cabins where they could decide collectively about the distribution of space. As a drawing and set of photographs shown here demonstrate, they started by building a hexagonal-shaped cabin, likely influenced by the octagonal barn, that symbolized the non-hierarchical interests of country lesbians in women’s lands. They used recycled lumber, reused windows, and sixteen thinned, skinned, and dried trees for the structure.