Reviews for Assaults on convention

The average rating for Assaults on convention based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-03 00:00:00 Todd Mccallum This book is a marvel of a work, capturing a period of Lesbian Herstory that produced a lifeline to lesbians all over the country at a time when there was not much connection or openness among lesbians. This was a whole new breed of lesbians, who were not ever intending to live in the closet! Lavender Woman captured the essence of the lesbian movement in Chicago in the early to mid-seventies, and shared it with a subscription base of about two thousand women, most of whom shared it with others. This book captures the essence of the experience of making Lavender Woman, and examines it with a clear eye and an honest heart. I was a member of The Lavender Woman Collective. It was a time of great growth and self-discovery for me and many other women. I remember so many things about the group of women we were then, and did yeo-woman's work in the Chicago lesbian community, and others went on to prominence in the Women's and Lesbian movements in communities around the country and the world. I look back and am proud of that. We did build community. It is many decades later, and I still have friends from that time. Some of the most articulate members of the group did not return their questionnaires, but they had reasons, lives. I remember the day my questionnaire about "My time in LW" came in the mail. I strove to be open and honest about myself and my experiences as I filled it out. I mailed it off, then promptly forgot all about it. A couple of years later, I walked into "Women and Children First", Chicago's Women's Bookstore, and found the book on the shelf! I was in my twenties when I was in the Collective, maybe my mid thirties when the book came out, and I am fifty-eight now. I have read the book several times, and remember most of the women with love and compassion. In some cases more compassion than I felt then. There was a LOT of White Privilege in the group. we felt that our education made our views much more informed than that of the women who were not as "Educated" as we were. They were frequently the ones most likely to challenge the status quo. Less afraid of raising a fuss. Generally speaking, much braver and risking much more than our white middle class wasp "leaders." I remember LW. I remember sitting in a circle on the floor, passing around a stone so we would know whose turn it was to be listened to. (For some women, when they got to talk.) I fell in love with a member of the collective, and loved her until the day she took her own life. She was a gifted, if dead, poet. Some of those meetings stole precious hours when we could have been assembling the paper, but the process of deciding who did what, when, and who decided, and how conflicts were resolved, that was the real story, Homemade Consensus Building, 101. Read the book. Learn all about it. Surprise! We mostly survived, and are in our late fifties and early sixties now. I think I may have learned humility at last.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-31 00:00:00 DK REED My partner and I just bought a house together. I don't want to do domestic partnership, but she keeps saying she won't be able to get FMLA when I have surgery and we won't be able to get mortgage insurance in case one of us kicks the bucket. So, I decided to get informed and read this book. There's tons of great information in it. Not done yet, and haven't decided yet what we're going to do...