MS: We announced the course and the students were shy and curious, and so we sat at a table and talked about what it would be like. We also talked to the faculty. I remember the whole faculty attending a retreat at that time. And the woman who ultimately taught the design program for women only—Sheila de Bretteville—explaining what her class would be like. Judy and I talked about what we had planned. I didn’t know at that time, nor did Judy, that we would do Womanhouse. Once we met the students in our class—there were 21—we talked about doing a community project and it turned out to be Womanhouse.

RB: And Womanhouse had a catalog?

MS: Oh, yes. Not only a catalog. Womanhouse was a phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon, not only in California but everywhere.

RB: It was nationally known.

MS: But it was also internationally known. When Womanhouse was finished, we were interviewed by Encyclopedia Britannica. An hour program was done on KPFK. We were written up in Time-Life. We received incredible publicity. And when you think that the young people, students in an art class, made and experienced this event, it was really quite extraordinary.

RB: Womanhouse was a building in which environments were made by each student?

MS: Well, it was an artistic project. And it wasn’t linear in the sense that when you enter my home you enter a vestibule and then you go into the living room. I mean, the sequence was unpredictable. We took over a house, and the house had many rooms. Each student was interested in a particular room, and so they created a sort of happening environment in each of their rooms. One woman painted enormous leaves on the wall. This was her expression of love of beauty and regard for nature. We called it the Leaf Room. It was very beautiful. And near that was a more traditional bedroom, where several students working together created a room patterned on Gigi, a story by Colette, the French writer. The room was the bedroom of a courtesan. It was a very elegant room. The women went to an antiques dealer and talked him into loaning them incredible Victorian furniture. They made a very dense, perfumed room with lace and satin and a vanity, I remember, with all sorts of encrusted silver hairbrushes, and so forth. But the point is that they created an atmosphere, an environment, which was specific to itself and that had nothing to do with the other rooms in the house.

RB: And each room was really separate—the kitchen, the bathroom?

MS: Every room was separate.

RB: And did they sort of draw straws for who got what room, or did it just fall into place?

MS: Well, the radical part of our teaching was based on consciousness-raising. So every day we would sit in a circle in a particular room, and the session I remember best took place in the kitchen. In this old abandoned mansion, we sat on the floor, had our talk time, and then we got our mops and cleaned it up. But the kitchen talk was one hell of a drama; that’s what I remember. Everyone told her story of growing up with her mother and her experiences in the kitchen. And I remember someone saying at some point, “These stories seem to add up to our relationships with our mothers like a metaphor for a bottle of milk. Is it half empty or half full?”

Robin Weltsch, Susan Frazier and Vicky Hodgett, Nurturant Kitchen at Womanhouse, 1972. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts Archive.

RB: Marvelous.

MS: That would ultimately be a description of their relationships with their mothers. It’s really very true, isn’t it? Was she giving or taking away in her nurturance?

RB: And to objectify all of that into an environment must have been quite a challenge.

MS: Well, here is the part where I asked myself, “A teacher? What kind of a teacher can I be?” But ultimately I accepted myself as a facilitator. My growing philosophy of education was based on the idea that they had as much to tell me, as I had to tell them. The only difference was in our ages—that indeed if I had lived longer than they did, which I had, I had more experiences perhaps. But they might have had denser experiences. Remember, those were the days of heavy drugs. And in our separate performances at Womanhouse, one of the groups made a marvelous theatrical piece about drug users, and that certainly wasn’t my experience.

RB: How did the academic deans, how did the management of the school react to all of this? What was their relationship to you? I mean, you were doing something, I’m sure, beyond what had been done before, ever.

MS: Ruth, remember we worked for the Disneys, who were considered not conservative but reactionary people.

RB: Right.

MS: So your question is well put. However, the one Disney (by marriage) who was head of the school had been converted in some way. He became enormously tolerant of this whole weird environment that was CalArts. And no one in management ever said anything. When you came into Womanhouse, to see the performances or went through the rooms, you knew immediately you were in the face of something you’d never seen before in the art world. There was Judy’s “menstruation bathroom.” My room had a dollhouse in it. Everybody made something quite different, and these rooms were all inspired by a woman’s point of view. We made a film of Womanhouse. Danny Selznick, who was on our board, brought the idea of Womanhouse, to the American Film Council, and they gave Joanna Demetrakis a grant to film Womanhouse. We have that as a record.

When we did Womanhouse, we were scared to death because it had never been done before—such a mammoth project, you know, on an idea that had never been set forth before. And the thing I think that impressed me so much, Ruth, and which gave a real backup to my democratic sensibilities was when I saw women walk into that house and just gasp! Some of them crying. Some of them—there was never a word said; it was always the expression on the face, “I know this. This is art, but I know what this is about. I know what this is about. I know what this is about.”

RB: So it was a parallel activity to the establishment, or what is art. It wasn’t really a challenge to what is art; it was another art form?

MS: It was a reinforcement for women also.

RB: Of those 21 students, how many stayed in touch with you? How many moved into the art world?

MS: About half of them. Robin Mitchell, Faith Wilding, Suzanne Lacy, Mira Schor—oh, a number of them stay in touch.

RB: Right, and are they still in California and still working?

MS: Faith and Mira are in New York and doing very well. Faith and Mira would always do well, in my opinion, but their journey was so different from that of David Salle and Eric Fischl, who were their colleagues at CalArts, because theirs was a woman’s point of view in the art-making process and that was not something that was really acceptable then. When you walked into my house earlier, did you see that piece on the wall that was like a dress? That’s Mira’s piece. It looks like a dress, reads like a book, and has secrets.

RB: In California, you were teaching at CalArts for five or six years?

MS: No, four.

RB: Four years. And you—Judy Chicago came down from Northern California. She came from Fresno for about two years and left.

MS: Two years and left. And I continued the Feminist Art Program in my own manner for two years after she left. I concentrated more on publishing. We published Anonymous Was a Woman, and we published another wonderful publication called Art: A Woman’s Sensibility. The cover of that publication was reproduced in The Village Voice, because we showed Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, and up to that point, Ruth, almost everybody—

RB: Nobody knew she was a woman, right?

MS: Right. Which in a way was the point also of Anonymous Was a Woman, which
 was a poster, a book, and a celebration of women’s creativity at CalArts. As a book, it was a gathering of letters. The women in our Feminist Art Program sent letters to a variety of established women in the art world—critics, poets, curators, artists—and they asked, “How’d you do it? We’re young. We’re students here. We want to know.” And then this beautiful collection of replies came back, and we published them.

RB: Under the quotation from Virginia Woolf.

MS: Exactly.

RB: And was it Virginia Woolf’s life or just the quote that made you choose the title?

MS: Virginia really is a heroine to creative feminists, in the sense that her life is so instructive to us. Her devotion to her art. The fact that she was so original. Also the tragedy of her life. You know, these things belong to us. Like Sylvia Plath’s life or like Frida Kahlo’s life. It’s always somehow inspiring to think of someone who had great suffering and yet great achievement at the same time. We are inspired by their redemption. These women are all heroines. Certainly it was Virginia Woolf’s life as well as her work. And also her attitudes toward society and her particular way of being a feminist. For example, she had a lot of trouble joining groups. A lot of women have trouble joining groups. But that doesn’t stop you from expressing your point of view in whatever manner you choose to do it. That’s what she did. She made her little pamphlets, and she was a journalist. She published books, and she wrote her own books. She and her husband were a partnership; they published together. And ultimately she took her life. And all of that made for a genuine kind of myth for women who were at that time being so conscious of the fact that they were women and that they had a history. We needed to have role models. Everything came together at the same time: art and consciousness, myth and reality. You asked me before, and I don’t think we went into it, why did I think that California was a particularly fertile ground for all this to happen? I don’t think it could have ever happened in New York. New York is hell-bent on separating one person from another because of the competition. And in California there was some chance for us to get together. And it was as simple as that.

My life would never have been what it is today if I hadn’t had that eight years in California. My life changed there. The difference between the California women and the New York women was that the New York women were “head” women, and in California they were “body” women, which is not to say that the New York women weren’t involved with their bodies, but not in the same way. Because in California people are sun worshipers who live in a climate which emphasizes involvement with their bodies.

In New York that doesn’t happen. In the intellectual community or in the artistic community, the concentration is on what is mental. To give you an example, Judy Chicago would be a wonderful example of a “head-body” person and Lucy Lippard would be a wonderful example of a “head” person. And they were both important figures in the woman-artist movement.

RB: And when in this decade did the idea of making a special publication, Heresies, come up?

MS: Well, I brought that idea back from California, a continuation of the publishing ideas we had tried at CalArts.

When I left New York in 1967 and had a new development in my life—in my thinking, in my art—when all this happened, some people who had been my New York friends before California couldn’t quite handle it, and I lost a lot of friends. But one friend was faithful, Joyce Kozloff. So when I came back to New York with Paul—Peter, our son, remained at San Francisco State—I said I had a few ideas that I would like to present to the women artists of New York, and Joyce called a meeting and we presented the idea of a school or the idea of a magazine, and the idea of a magazine was the one that really caught on. Although there was a school, the Feminist Art Institute, which subsequently opened. I organized it with a group of women, including Betsy Damon. I worked there only six months.

Miriam Schapiro, Personal Appearance #3, 1973. Fabric, paper, collage, and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Flomenhaft Gallery.

But it was the magazine, Heresies, which caught on like wildfire and became one of the most interesting small publications in the seventies and eighties. It’s about to have its tenth anniversary. It is one of the best philosophical statements of feminist thinking. You know, the popular image of a feminist is as a bra burner, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.