The Personal Is Historical: the Impact of Lesbian Identity on the Sonoma County Women's Movement and Beyond

Until recently, historical narratives of the contemporary U.S. Women's Movement have focused primarily on urban centers such as New York or San Francisco. This scope obscures the nuances of the movement throughout the nation. In addition, the narratives tend to portray lesbian participants as separatists or cultural feminists. This is, in part, because lesbians did not always proclaim their sexual identity in every action they took. As a result, historians often label the past as 'feminist' rather than 'lesbian'. In order to re-frame the narrative, this thesis examines the margins of the past by using oral history to illuminate the lesbian impact on the women's movement in Sonoma County, California. From 1970 until the late 1980s this non-urban geographic location was a hotbed for feminist culture and activism. This thesis explores the role that lesbians played in the county and focuses specifically on moments in time and space where their definitions, articulations, and negotiations of identity fueled the movement. This thesis draws on personal narrative to argue that identity is a fluid category that, when explored historically, reveals the impact that individual and communal conceptions of meaning had on experience and action