Joyce Farmer on Feminism

Comic books didn't cost much to print back then and we gave away lots of them and we got either no reaction back or, ‚Yes, I read it‚, end of story and people weren't prepared for the kind of radical thinking that we were doing about women at that time. We did what we thought would be funny and feminist and acceptable to women. We were really writing for women more than men but women are not generally comic book readers and we thought we were doing feminist humor but the feminists thought we were horrible for being politically incorrect. At that time - and I'm learning more about this as I go to these places and talk - but at that time, women who were feminists had to pretty much stick to a feminist line of theory and you could talk about finances and job discrimination and how men treated you but you couldn't talk about sex. You didn't talk about sex. Nobody talked openly about sex back then. Now the things we were mentioning were birth control, menstrual periods, worry about pregnancy, all different things, all mixed with sex and orgies and who knows what all; just a big mix of things. Our work was getting reactions from people that we never intended in a million years and we thought that Ms Magazine would love us and that we could print in the women's publications because we thought what we were saying was unique to women and interesting and the fears of women. You know, it's just silly, it's just crazy stuff but women, if they thought about it, they got it; but just an awful lot of people didn't like what we were doing. WHAT WAS THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT LIKE IN THE 60S AND 70S? Well, you know, back then - this is a touchy subject for a lot of people and it hasn't really been talked about but feminism as we know it from the, I guess from the early sixties with Betty Friedan, she wrote a famous book which you'll forgive me for not recalling it just this moment; but Betty Friedan was an educated woman who saw the inequities for women and wrote all about it in a long book and then later she came out as thinking that lesbians should not be included in this. Are you aware of her history? Well, she thought feminism was basically a housewife thing where housewives and women in general should be able to hold jobs. She hadn't really thought it through but a lot of the feminists from the seventies were gay. And so there was a dyke separatist movement and if you weren't a dyke you had to sort of prove yourself, that you were an okay person with the lesbian community. We were in the lesbian community to a large degree even though both of us were heterosexual - Lyn and I - because the women in publishing had to be fair and include us because we were known publishers and women. And they had a conference a couple of years in a row and when Lyn and I went to that conference, we were kind of passed on and excluded a little bit by the people who were running it but the people who accepted us became lifelong friends. I think as the women's movement has matured, it changed and became more accepting so that people being of one persuasion or another didn't bother people - didn't bother the women as much as it did. I think we all had a learning curve and it's what we were starting to do in the sixties with racism and I think the same thing has gone for men and women and sexism and, you know, just everything.