Rural Relationships on the Oregon Women’s Lands

Submitted to the Undergraduate Library Research Award scholarship competition: (2023). 18 p.Residents of Grants Pass, Oregon, may have known their rural community was changing when five lesbians from Montreal settled outside the town in 1974 and established WomanShare, an all-female lesbian separatist collective. Certainly, as time went on, Oregon citizens living in rural communities employed, served, and gossiped about various lesbian collectivist communities existing a stone’s throw away, often in tones of disregard or distrust. And this phenomenon was not limited to Grants Pass: Across Oregon, feminist-lesbians were building collectives that acted as female-only spaces for full-time residents and hosted workshops and visitors, supported publications, and conducted spiritual ceremonies during their operation. Despite tensions that existed with surrounding settlements, thousands of lesbian visitors flocked to these separatist utopias in the idyllic Oregon wilderness