Author Archive | Martha Shelley

I don’t remember exactly why I went to Max’s house that evening. It was early February, 1977, and my visit had something to do with preparing for the drive from the Bay Area to New York, with getting assistance or information from one of her housemates. Max—whom I’d never met before—listened quietly during a long […]

We feminists were going to overthrow the patriarchy. We poured our hearts into projects ranging from a very middle-of-the-road campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (which still hasn’t passed, 49 years later) to organizing lesbian communes out in the countryside—and, of course, women’s presses. A revolution gets nowhere without some method of communicating its ideology. […]

Unlike my parents and grandparents, I never experienced much anti-Semitism in person. The one incident I can think of now is that in 1959, when I was applying to colleges, the guidance counselor told me not to bother with Cornell as they had a Jewish quota. But I’ve become aware, during at least the last […]

I grew up in a pro-Israel household in Brooklyn. My father’s father escaped the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Russia by jumping in the river and swimming away from the violence. In 1910, when he was 21 and about to be drafted into the Tsar’s army, he fled to the United States. My mother was born […]

I never thought about firearms before I moved to Oakland in October 1974. Growing up in New York City, I never saw a pistol except on the hip of a cop, or a rifle except in the hands of an agent provocateur who tried to entrap me. For all my revolutionary talk, I had never […]

Down by the river near St. Johns, Portland OR My latest poetry book, Released from the Wheel, is hot off the press. You can order it at https://ebisupublications.com/books/. Reviews are coming soon, but here’s what two other writers have said so far: “Like all great poets, Shelley’s poems are about life and death—how imminent and […]

When my mother died, in 1974, and left me some money, one of my first purchases was a VW bug. A novice driver, I remember taking three members of the Women’s Press Collective across the Bay Bridge, and thinking that if I made a mistake I’d wipe out our entire enterprise. All the same, despite […]

I worked at the Women’s Press Collective (WPC) from 1974 until 1977. The WPC was a flashlight battery of an operation powering a dynamo of social change. It gave voice to the genius of women, particularly lesbians, at a time when men owned most print shops and publishing companies and would never let our work […]

I arrived in Oakland at the beginning of October 1974. The communal house I joined, on Terrace Street, had three stories. Each of the other women had a room on the second floor. Mine was in the attic. My new housemates—two couples, Carol and Alice, Judy and Wendy—had their routines, and I tried to fit […]

Recently I was part of a panel discussion with other elders about the last 50 years of feminism, the current state of the movement, our current situation, and what we might tell younger women about our successes and failures. Since then, I’ve done some more thinking and a bit of research, which I’d like to […]