Living Feminist: The Liberation and Limits of Separatist Business and Radical Lesbian Ethics at the Bloodroot Restaurant.

In 1977, Betsy Beaven, Selma Miriam, Samm Stockwell, and Pat Shea—the Bloodroot Collective—opened the Bloodroot restaurant and bookstore in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  Trapped within a misogynistic and homophobic culture, they believed, like other radical feminists, that a head-on confrontation with patriarchy was dangerous and pointless. Instead, the only choice was to build their own gynophilic world. From their strictly vegetarian menu to their communal operations, the Bloodroot Collective intended to live out their radical feminist ethics separately and daily.

Drawing from their cookbooks, interviews, and other materials, my paper aims to paint the full picture of the BC, and the oppositional lives they cultivated inside their counter-institution. The Bloodroot’s history is the history of late-twentieth-century radical lesbian feminism in action. That narrative contains the mid-century awakening of a group of white middle class women, who rejected social convention for the counter-normative unknown. It contains radical feminism’s 1970s/1980s apex, when the Bloodroot restaurant was part of a national network of creativity and communalism. It contains the down-right exhaustion inherent to living ideologically.  It also contains queer and transgender challenges to the house that lesbian feminism built, at the turn of the twenty-first century.

I conclude that woman centered organizations, while certainly politically limited, preserved oppositionality and cultural invention in the post-Sixties era. They have connected feminism’s past to present.  I conclude that lesbian feminist businesses must be assessed as a noteworthy piece of America’s radical history and as object lessons in the possibilities and pitfalls of politics expressed through “living” the revolution.