The Story Of The Lavender Menace: The Protest For Lesbian Inclusion

In 1969 at a meeting of the National Organization for Women (NOW), NOW leader Betty Friedan, the author of the feminist classic "The Feminine Mystique," made a serious misjudgement. It was a mistake that would have huge repercussions for the organisation. And it was one that would help to catapult lesbian inclusion to extraordinary new heights. 

The meeting was held to discuss the upcoming NOW conference, but it quickly turned contentious. Friedan had, for some time, been attempting to distance the NOW organisation from lesbian causes, claiming that including “man-hating” lesbians, as she described them, as part of NOW would create problems for the women's organisation and hinder their progress. Her most aggressive decision had been to remove the lesbian activist group The Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress To Unite Women in 1969.

As the meeting turned to discussing contributions from some of the lesbian activists Friedan denounced them as a "lavender menace" that threatened to undermine the feminist movement.

The activists in attendance, including Rita Mae Brown and Barbara Love, were incensed. Brown had already resigned from her admin job at the NOW organisation after the Daughters Of Bilitis exclusion. Now she was determined to make an even bigger stand. And so, inspired by Friedan's attack, she and a group of radical lesbian feminists decided to form a group to fight for the inclusion of lesbians in the feminist movement. They adopted the term "Lavender Menace" as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Friedan's comments, reclaiming the term as a badge of honour rather than a slur.

And so was born the informal Lavender Menace group, which included several prominent lesbians, Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo. Many of these women were also members of the Gay Liberation Front, an organisation born out of the momentum following the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

The group’s primary goal was to challenge the exclusion of lesbians from mainstream feminist organisations, such as NOW. It may have only been a relatively short-lived group, but its impact on the feminist movement was huge. They argued that far from lesbians being a threat to the feminist movement, they were in fact an integral part of it, as gay women faced many of the same issues as heterosexual women, such as discrimination in the workplace and reproductive rights.

Lavender Menace was also committed to challenging societal attitudes towards homosexuality more broadly. They believed that the stigma surrounding homosexuality was a major barrier to achieving gender equality, and that feminists needed to be vocal in their support of gay rights in order to create a more inclusive movement.

If they needed further motivation to act they got it in March 1970 when an article was published in the New York Times magazine by heterosexual feminist Susan Brownmiller. The article alluded to Lavender Menace being a reference to the phrase “Red Menace” that was used as a way to describe the Russian threat during the Cold War. On top of that she suggested that the lesbian group wasn’t a danger and was in fact just a distraction, a "lavender herring".

Brown, and many other lesbian feminists viewed this as “a scathing put down,” and dismissed lesbians as insignificant. It put a fire under them, and as Karla Jay later said: "one thing that you were not going to tell Rita was to shut up.”

So Brown started to work on ways to respond to both Friedan and Brownmiller’s attacks. And it was decided that the best way to do this, and to gain much needed awareness, would be to do something at the Second Congress To Unite Women in New York on May 1st 1970.