200 unaccompanied women!!! OMG!!!

More fun in the microfilm room for today!

So for my Queer Studies class, I decided to look up some of the LGBT student groups of the 1970s. Since radicalism is somewhat fascinating to me (I might not identify as a radical feminist anymore, since I am now a material one, but I still find 'em cool), I decided to look up the really wildly extreme ones. So what did I find? Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis started as somewhat moderate but then began to get strong and powerful. But the one that really held my attention was the Lavender Menace. Named for a terribly derogatory term for lesbians (coined by Betty Friedan when she tried to limit NOW membership to hetero women), the Menace was a radical lesbian group. And they apparantly had a following on the U of I campus.

Now here is where the fun begins. So I found an article about the Lavender Menace in the Courier newspaper of Urbana, and it dealt with a conference they held for feminists and lesbians at the U of I. I kept reading, I attended a women's conference soph year, was the entertainment at the LGBT conference last year (woohoo! go monologues!), and have presented papers at conferences before. Tres intersante, to be sure...

Then I saw it. The editorial.

Some guy (presumably a student wrote in), shocked to discover "two hundred unaccompanied, unchaperoned women on the U of I campus!" He was going on and on about how shocking it was to find so many women there! He closed the letter by saying that "soldiers to the cause are needed." Poor poor unenlightened soul. Apparantly he doesn't know:
(1) They're college age. They can take care of themselves.
(2) Girls exist. Yes, they are real and in great numbers.
(3) Most of those women wouldn't want a man in the first place! Lavender Menace is a group for lesbians.

That just about cracked me up.