My goal is to show an intimate view of the 1970's Women's Movement in a way that hasn't been seen before and that speaks to the present moment.
Our visual record of the feminist movement is incomplete. We know what the large East Coast demonstrations looked like and who the national leaders were. But we haven't seen the small protests and private gatherings that were at the heart of the movement. In 1969, I was twenty-one, an undergraduate photography major in Fine Arts at San Francisco State University, and an activist in the fight for gender equality. In addition to working for change, I wanted to create a visual record of who we were and what we did, a record that merged fine art photography and photojournalism. From 1969-1972 I shot more than 1,000 images of the Women's Movement. I also saved every feminist newsletter, flier, journal, or position paper that I obtained, a collection that became boxes of ephemera.
I've preserved this project for half a century, waiting for an opportunity to share it. It's rare to witness the beginning of any new movement, and I felt that this close-up view of second-wave feminism would add to our collective knowledge. I never imagined that now, 50 years later, women's right to control our own reproduction and through that, our own agency, would be under siege. Suddenly the images in my project seem less like a look-back and more like a call to action.
I hope to give this project as a gift to our region, both to preserve what women's collective action looked like in the 1970's San Francisco Bay Area and to inspire women who will shape our future.