COUNTRY♀WOMEN #11: Older Women

from "Ageism in Paradise"

  Caledonia Watson

I live on top of a ridge, overlooking a river, in sheep country. The land around me is still green from the late rains. As I drove hoe from work the other evening, through a light mist, I saw a rainbow with each color clearly, brilliantly standing out against a bank of dark clouds. The rainbow stretched from the river below me, over the road and into the next valley. Above it was another, much fainter one forming a double arch under which I drove, marveling at the sight. I won’t say I found a pot of gold at the end of it. After all, a funky house, two kids, five cats and a baby donkey don’t constitute a pot of gold or maybe even a brass ring. But the fire was going and dinner was started, my son’s latest invention was whirring away and winter is over; it’s time to get the garden in and anyway I’m too tired at night to cry the unshed tears of loneliness behind my eyes before I fall asleep. Besides, I am never afraid of the dark out here. My door is unlocked.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

COUNTRY♀WOMEN #10: Spirituality

Land: Four Views

  by Sam Thomas, Bobbi Jones, Ruth of Mountain Grove

Yesterday I walked to the sea, all downhill and of course all uphill on the way back. It was good to be able to do, to feel that I had that much strength and endurance.

The walk, especially as I came in view of the wide sky and ocean, opened up my spirit, uncramped my mind. The sunset—the sun’s reflection a streak of red—spread its colors all across the rippling sea. The wind was cold.

The walk back up the rise was a challenge. Coming across a gulley in need of a bridge, I was huge old black logs from the seventeen-year-old clearcutting, young pine trees, lilac bushes all up one hill—straight up and down it feels.

This land of ravines and clearcut steep hill, of rushing streams; this land of meandering deer trails and animal holes; this land is a challenge to the body and the spirit. I need this land as much as I need food. It pulls in the back of my calves, it challenges the soles of my boots, it tests my endurance. This land stretches me.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

COUNTRY♀WOMEN #8: The Women’s Movement in the Country

from "Four Voices from Blue Mountain"

  Nada: Looking Forward & Backwards

I was taken by the land; mountains, meadows, woods, no one living up-stream, and the spirit of the people.

I had come from the city. I was just beginning to form a consciousness about women; the possibility of feeling strong with the support of women. I was just beginning to drop my youthful fantasy about the prince charming I would meet who would be everything to me. I was just starting to realize that through the years, the people I was closest to longest were women. Also realizing I wanted a relationship with men more on the level of brother and sister, sharing the work and responsibility. When my friend June and I suggested a women’s meeting to some of the women who were here from the beginning, they said, “Who us? We don’t need women’s meetings. That’s for city women.” It was a threatening idea, implying some separation from the men that no one was ready or willing to make. It was a year later that we had our first women’s meeting.

Now we have women’s meetings sometimes every week, sometimes infrequently. There were times when we would meet at night and spent the night together, a few times when we spent two days and nights together. A time when eight of us lived together at the women’s house. Sometimes we meet at night around the fire. I used to have high expectations and desires for a deep level of intimacy at these meetings. At times it happens, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes I’m disappointed, feeling we haven’t fully explored or used our power as women to change things here. But I’m also aware of our growing connection with each other, a trusting and knowing we are here for each other. Discovering how we can move as a group, as one’s, two’s and three’s, with men and without men, as people whose lives, spirits and work are intimately connected. This winter we have emerged more as who we really are.

It seems important for each of us to come to a higher consciousness in our own way, at our own paces. I mean, four years ago, we could talk about sharing our life, our children, and our work on all it’s different levels. But only now and slowly are the changes really taking effect. We still have a long way to go. Only with time will we be able to sort out what we really want of the old and the new.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

COUNTRY♀WOMEN #7: Women & Land

We are a struggling family of three (one four year old girl) with a January baby on the way and an old ramshackle farm house, in the back fields of Virginia. We’re looking for a woman with kid or kids or a trying to be non-sexist couple with kids to survive the winter with us and help our children out with “hippie-kid loneliness”.
I need you – Love in struggle, Carmen
Bonniechild, 3011 Luxembourg, Norfolk
Virginia 23509

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

COUNTRY♀WOMEN #6: Living Alternatives

A Room of my Own

  by Patsy Sun

I live alone.

I don’t really live alone. Every other week I live with my 3 year old son. (On alternate weeks he goes with his papa.) We can afford to do it this way because we grow our own food, live simply and neither of us has a straight job. A few days each week we all spend together. Half the time I live in the city in a room in the basement of a student cooperative amongst a lot of people I am not very close with. I’m not even a student. The other half I live in the woods in a log cabin I helped build, with trees and a river and little birds and animals I am very close to. I say “I live alone” because that is what I’m struggling with. It’s new to me and alternately exciting and scary.

Getting the room was something did for myself. It is mine, no one elses. Getting the room was very hard. For a year and a half we all lived in the cabin. After living with Bob for nearly 8 years in communes it was really fun at first. We had never before lived as a family. The 3 bears, the mama, the papa, and the little baby in their cabin in the woods. We have always lived doing things together and enjoyed our work. At night we’d sit around the fire reading to each other or plying guitar and autoharp. A few days each week we’d hitchhike to the city to see friends, work at the food co-op or on the underground newspaper. We grew our own food; cut our wood. Watched the seasons change. Our life was simple and holy and sane. Only after awhile we started going crazy. More and more there were tensions, fights, emotional outbursts and guilt about Kiya having no kids to play with.

And then some how I got this idea of a room of my own in town. It’s the first room of my own I’ve had for 8 years. Once I began to fantasize about the idea there was no turning back. I felt I had to have physical and emotional space. It was not just the pressure of the last year living so closely without day to day relationships with other people, but the whole 8 years of accommodation to US, to Our Life Together, which in my case meant so often doing what he wanted because I didn’t really know what I wanted. Getting the room was something I wanted. It was full of implications. For me it meant not just a place of my own, but a life of my own. Bob was both threatened and supportive. I was torn but determined. I felt I was “destroying the family” cutting off my only source of love and security, hurting my dearest friend, giving birth to myself and committing suicide all at the same time.

Now four months later none of what I feared has happened. Our alternate week child care system with planned family days is providing us both with precious time to be responsible only for ourselves as well as time to really tune in to little Kiya and each other when we’re together, in a new and more intense way. Kiya has not flipped out but seems to handle the situation with the kind of cool that only a kid has. Bob is no longer threatened but digging his new independence. Though there is still a lot of shit between us that I don’t understand, we’re working on it and sometimes we feel close and more excited about each other than we have for years. Most important, slowly, very slowly I am finding new sources of emotional security and nourishment.

The hard part is something I didn’t really anticipate, the loneliness. The people I am really close to, except for Bob, are all 1000 miles away in New Mexico, Kentucky, Connecticut, India, Alaska, and California. I had never spent much time alone; family, school, college, communes. I had always set things up so that I was well supplied with companions, if not friends. Consequently I find myself now, very shy and uptight and unskilled at getting it on it a regular social way. Most of the people I work with on projects don’t know I’m shy. I appear confident and friendly. If I don’t reach out, it must be assumed I choose not to, my life must already be full. A lot of people don’t know of the change in my relationship with Bob. I go home to my room alone, or out to the country. It’s strange, in the woods I can be alone, but I’m somehow filled up. In the city I fill myself up, fill my time writing, meditating, drawing, organizing myself, relishing those solitary things that for years I’ve not had enough time for. I work amongst people, I live around people, but it’s not uncommon to pass several days without a meaningful personal conversation. That’s when I begin to get scared. I lose my confidence to meet my own needs. I begin to withdraw more and more into myself. I withdraw and then I hit bottom. The panic comes in the city. I begin to think of the future. It’s not that the present is so intolerable, but I begin to think… “What am I going to do? I can’t go forever like this. I’m too lonely, I’ve got to do something! Go to my friends in Kentucky. Find people somehow around here that I want to live with. Make up my mind to e alone for a long time…”

I touch bottom in the country. I touch bottom and what I find there is me, and the god in me and everything is fine and I understand that this struggle is necessary and good, that I have grown and am growing; that this is something I have never had to do before and that even my pain is a kind of gift that is strengthening me. I remember then, an old Chippewa Indian saying. “Sometimes I go around pitying myself and all the time I am being carried on great wings across the sky.”

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

COUNTRY♀WOMEN #5: Homesteading

Fencing

  by Jeanne Tetrault

Setting Posts:

You can dig your postholes in the fall and set the posts in the spring. It’s fairly light work to clean out an already-dug hole. There are lots of methods of setting posts, extra time tamping them in will give your posts long-lasting strength. Tamping is the packing of earth in around the post. It is best done with a heavy pole or pipe whose weight will join with your strength to pack the earth. We use a 5′ piece of old iron pipe with a cap on one end. The pipe has more weight than a shovel handle which we used to use, won’t give you slivers and its small diameter lets you tamp really tightly. First put a little gravel or sand in the hole to create good drainage. Set your post in and straighten it by eye or using a carpenter’s level. When you have some earth packed in, recheck the post for straightness. We usually mix gravel and earth, putting in 2 or 3 inch layers of each (earth first gravel next) and tamping well. The more care you give to tamping the earth solidly, the stronger your post will be. Another method is to fill all but the top 5-6″ with sand, put in a layer of grael and tamp well. This takes more physical strength and a much heavier tamper but is said to last longest and stronger. After tamping this, fill to the top with sand and pack again. Our gravel-dirt method also works if your soil is muddy.

Setting posts is a nice two person job. Take turns tamping and putting in the dirt, gravel or sand. The rhythmic circling of the tamper, the touching of earth, metal, stone and wood can become a beautiful ritual. Another part of farm work that blends music an purposeful work.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

COUNTRY♀WOMEN #4: Work & Money

Homemade pie & publications, girls & handmade gifts & gifts for Em Gift, that’s where it’s at! My chances of finding the time to make holiday gifts this year feel slim at the moment, so as a head start, I’d like to share some readymade gifts of bodacious knowledge that were made by the hands of women I admire very much. Please re-gift!

My plan is that each December day, I’ll share information and illustrations from some of my favorite lady resources that are otherwise available only in print. All share a certain calligraphy + typewriter style and are sisters to the utilitarian, anecdotal, mimeographed publishing that is most basically described as “access to tools” by its mother hen, The Whole Earth Catalog, and might also be described as DIY hippies disseminating their ideas before there were blogs for that. There are many, many other authoresses who worked in this style throughout the 1970s, and we often try to stock their books at our shop (honorable mention to Alicia Bay Laurel and Caterine Milinaire), but I’ve decided to limit myself to publications that take on, not just back to the landing, but ladies on the farm.

First, I’m going to take us through Volume 1. of Country♀Women to the extent that I am readily able. I’m missing a few issues, but the ones I have are incredibly rich. For each issue, I will share some images and illustrations and transcribe one article that seems especially nice to be able to read. Then I’m going to do a week honoring the work of Bay Area author and illustrator Anne Kent Rush.

COUNTRY♀WOMEN

On a visit to Teddy Kell‘s home in Rough and Ready last summer, a place of many moony gatherings, I was given her copies of Country♀Women by her daughter Meg. Published in the early 1970s in Albion, CA, edited collectively and costing 60¢ each, the hand-illustrated and typed journal carried this mission:

We see Country♀Women as a feminist country survival manual and a creative journal. It is for women living with women, with men, and alone, for women who live in the country already and for women who want to move out of the cities. We need to learn all that women can do in the country and learn to break out of oppressive roles and images. We need to reach out of our isolation from one another, to know that we aren’t alone, that we aren’t crazy, that there is a lot of love and strength and growing to share. Country♀Women can bring us together….

Each issue took on a particular theme, from Living Alternatives to Foremothers, and women across the country contributed written articles, poems, images, and illustrations. The front section of each issue addressed the chosen theme and the second half offered instruction on practical skills like adjusting brakes, goat healthcare, and, often, shirt-free self defense moves. It is such a delight to feel the urgency of their reports from the feminist field and to take note of what’s changed in 40 years, and what has remained the same. Good thing there’s a film for that! Women on the Land: Creating Conscious Community, produced by Mendocino Coast Films, was released earlier this year.

I’m going to start us out with Vol. 1, Issue #4: Work & Money. I hope you enjoy the series!

Bartering

   by Leona

Alternative life style and creative living: these two themes motivated 16 people living in an isolated community in the Santa Cruz mountains. After doing a couple of faires selling funky hand made things and good homemade bread to raise cash, Diana struck on the idea of bartering with local farmers.

Setting out early one morning high on the idea and with 35 loaves of freshly baked whole-grain breads, two women wound their way down into nearby farm lands. Knocking on doors or calling across fields, they proposed bartering of breads for surplus fruits and vegetables. Their reception was some disbelief and distrust, but mostly pleased acceptance as if some primal sense was awakened. By noon five farms had traded bread for vegetables and agreed to do so each week. The women returned joyously, with an abundance of truly fresh vegetables and fruits.

This marked the end of produce purchases and the beginning of high energy bread baking days and adventures into the country to talk and harvest with the people who till the land.

So successful was this first attempt at bartering as a viable alternative to money that when our medical problems were going unattended for lack of funds, we decided to try it again. Visiting a local doctor, we offered whatever talents we had in trade for his professional services. Skeptical that a horde of long-hairs could carry through, but wooed by the sincerity and obvious need, he agreed.

The barter agreed upon—our group labor was tithed to the Catholic church in town to paint and varnish a new wing. We went en masse, 7 to 12 or us, and worked for 5 to 6 hours for four days—accruing some 200 plus hours of labor in the most pleasant of ways by working together.

Although the doctor was somewhat overwhelmed by the $250 that the father had evaluated our work to be worth, he made good his half of the bargain and provided medical care and medicine for the group of us over a five month period.

Two men in need of extensive dental care “paid” for it in the same way—only now the work-force became gardeners.

The contact that comes from bartering goods or labor adds new or forgotten dimension to what would otherwise be an unimaginative exchange. It can mean an economic benefit all around.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

1966

Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé, 1966

Liberty fabric: silk, sequins, plastic beads
Dreaming up our future fabrics….

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

Women Dying Yarn in Groups

Then!

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

Lady Power Knitters

Shit. Ok, just southeast of the beard, is that? Could it be?

Yep, that’s definitely a lady power fist motif among the torch bearing devils, sly foxes, and arcade game fellas adorning these incredible Swedish ladies’ sweaters. I know it, you know, they’re willing to stand in the mud all day to defend it:

Yeah, life looks good on their farm.

Note the dachshund in all this. Also, they seem to enjoy nice tropical vacations, where the heat don’t stop them.

Then, after very careful consideration, the ladies decided to allow men among them. All they had to do was wear awesome knits and like it. They knew how good they had it.

To enjoy seeing another powerful, unafraid of the cold Swedish lady taking control, look to Lukas Moodysson’s film Tillsammans  (which in the US was called Together). This bit doesn’t have subtitles going, but former residents of Bolinas and even those unfamiliar with radical group living should be able to follow the well worn conflict happening here. UPDATE: It's on Netflix.

All these awesome images are from Hönsestrik – ett sätt att sticka fritt by Kirsten Hofstätter, published in 1975. Stockholm used book stores, watch out!

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

Franco-Japan-Oh!

Kumi Solo / Shobo Shobo via Ensuite
Why settle for one Marimekko-ish print?

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

Hannah Waldron

Amazing weavings and illustrations by Hannah Waldron. Also really admire her blog, with lots of detail shots and inspirations. Found via Lena Corwin’s blog, which is always surefire.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

Vestirsi è facile

1972, Italy, architects, all still concerned with simple clothing systems. And now, there’s a kit for that:

A kit! You shouldn’t have, Archizoom! But is this diagram nightmare really necessary to start making simple clothes at home?

Yes because it’s worth it:

Vestirsi è facile, or, Dressing Is Easy, was another tantalizing clothing system made by Archizoom Associati. I have no idea why the absurd aesthetic of the earlier Nearest Habitat System gave us American Apparels on every corner, but this system, which is to me infinitely more stylish and actually adaptable, seems to be available to us now only through limited supply chains such as Miyake Plantation, Kenzo Jap, Flax (kind of), and certain more discerning purveyors of world beat trimmer garb.

Please, allow me to present that for you again:

Assumed here as a basic element is a square piece of cloth. This first logical use of the raw material eliminates waste, enabling one to operate on a geometrically defined element with which one can plan, rejecting imitative operations of any anthropometrical importance.

Indeed, it is only by abandoning traditional sartorial methods still so ubiquitous in industrial production that we shall be able to cope with and correctly utilize productive technologies and methods, drawing planning criteria directly from the nature of the productive process.

In this case the first fundamental operation is to consider the fabric and the cloth to be like a continuous ribbon of unvarying width, and not an indefinite surface from which portions are haphazardly cut out.

And so forth, and so on, published in Casabella, December 1973, and Zaaaaang.

The best news is that there is also a film for this, also called “Vestirsi è facile”. A film! But I can’t seem to manage a way to view it….And I’m having trouble finding sufficient information. This deal is so rad. I came across mention of it in a book, Italian New Wave Design, by Andrea Branzi, 1984, one I recommend. So this is a shout out–if anyone has some more information, please share it!

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog. 

Dressing Is E-Z

The year is 1971. You’re an American hippie with heavy concern about your clashing bathing cozzie. The good news is a perfectly reliable guide to making clothes out of simple shapes has just come out in paperback:

Don’t they look stoked in their homesewn! Tell me more–I’ve always wanted to know how to construct a sarong.

Mahalo Aimee for passing your copy on to me.

This post originally appeared on the Gravel & Gold blog.