Last updated: September 3, 2024
Place
The Furies Collective
NPS/Susan Ferentinos
Quick Facts
Location:
219 11th Street SE, Washington, DC
Designation:
Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, ref# 16000211
OPEN TO PUBLIC:
No
From 1971-1973, a modest rowhouse in Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood was the home and operational center for twelve lesbian feminists and their lesbian, feminist, separatist group The Furies Collective. During this time, the women of the Furies Collective used their publications to address major questions of women’s identity and women’s relationships with other women, with men, and with society at large.
Publishing
The members of the collective demonstrated women’s independence by living together in the house, sharing domestic work, and publishing a tabloid-size newspaper called The Furies. The group launched The Furies after the galvanizing experience of publishing a lesbian feminist edition of motive magazine, a youth magazine of the United Methodist Church.
The collective’s publications set the terms of debate over the ideology, strategies and tactics, and actual accomplishments of lesbian feminist separatism in the early years of newly militant gay and lesbian activism. Their first issue of The Furies proclaimed, “We believe The FURIES will make important contributions to the growing movement to destroy sexism. As a collective, in addition to outside projects, we are spending much time building an ideology which is the basis for action.”
According to historian Lillian Faderman, “the Furies newspaper, which was sold at the women’s bookstores that were mushrooming across America, inspired thousands of lesbian feminists to form their own collectives in cities, farms, forests, and mountains all over America and in Europe, too.”
Influence
Lesbian feminist separatism influenced lesbian culture for the next two decades, inspiring the creation of a women’s culture and a national network of woman-owned businesses, women artists, and feminist thinkers. Within the LGBTQ civil rights movement, lesbian feminism paralleled gay liberation, with both eventually joining to form the contemporary LGBTQ movement.
The Furies Collective and its publications folded after only a few years, but its members remained committed to lesbian feminist activism. Former Furies members went on to play influential roles in gay commercial media, art, literature, feminism, and gay civil rights. They established several women-focused organizations including the nation’s first independent feminist publishers The Diana Press, and the women’s music production company Olivia Records which later became the LGBTQ+ cruise line Olivia (still in operation in 2024).
Designation
The two-story row house in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC was recognized on the DC Inventory of Historic Sites in January 2016, and added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 2, 2016.
National Register of Historic Places information:
Property Name: The Furies Collective
Reference Number: 16000211
State: District of Columbia
County: District of Columbia
Town: Washington
Street Address: 219 11th St., SE
Multiple Property Submission Name: N/A
Status: Listed 05/02/2016
Areas of Significance: Social History