Sonia Johnson
Wren and Robin built the octagon together on long, hot afternoons. Soon enough, Wren wasn’t afraid of the nail gun or the chop-saw.
“Kelsey said Sonia Johnson is coming to town next week.” Wren climbed down the ladder to get more roof shingles. “I might vote for a president this time, since I can vote for a lesbian.”
Robin chuckled from above her. “Did you know Susan B. Anthony visited Santa Cruz?” Robin was on the roof, despite her fear of heights, but they wanted to finish the roof today. “She traveled here in support of a local woman who tried to vote. The case went to court, but she lost. We had to wait forty more years before men let us vote. Like Sonia says, fighting them just makes them stronger.”
“I should have known you were a suffragette.”
“That’s where I found the lesbians.” Robin winked.
This scene in A Circle Outside takes place in the summer of 1984. That summer Ronald Reagan was running for a second term, and one of his opponents was a radical lesbian feminist, Sonia Johnson. I voted for her.
This video recording is not from her presidential campaign but a few years later after she had written her book about the campaign and how it changed her, Going Out of Our Minds.
I kept reading Sonia’s later books, but they became progressively unreadable and irrelevant. I never lived in a woman-only commune, but in a real city, Santa Cruz, worked at the university, and lived my life and striving to be either a good example or horrible warning.
Before I was a feminist, Sonia Johnson became famous when she lead a group of women fasting in the Illinois State Capital while that legislature debated the Equal Rights Amendment, which would make all US citizens equal under the law on the basis of sex. These women were willing to die for women’s legal equality.
Their campaign was featured in a 2018 PBS program called We’ll Meet Again that you can watch here. The program interviews Zoe Nicolson who was one of the hunger strikers. Zoe says now that she was willing to die for equality. “I wear it like a sword.”
Because the ERA failed, women’s rights proceeded on the basis of privacy, and we’ve seen how well that lasted.
I recommend the video; it’s only 30 minutes. I dare you to watch it without weeping, weeping for the strength of women who want all women to be free, weeping for our friendships, weeping for how far we have come, and how far we must go.
