The Woman-Identified Woman

When a women’s liberation organization fears being called lesbian, whose recognition does it seek, and whom will it leave outside? Radicalesbians’ The Woman-Identified Woman appeared in 1970 and was published in the May issue of Come Out! It begins with lesbian exclusion within the women’s movement, showing how sexual stigma can also discipline women whose lives do not revolve around men, regardless of their desires.

Stigma polices a boundary

Lesbian names actual desires and relationships, while the text also examines its punitive use against independent, successful or disobedient women. The issue exceeds tolerance for one category. It concerns refusing male approval as the measure of who can represent women’s liberation. Distancing an organization from lesbians for respectability can restore the very gender order it intends to challenge.

The manifesto further questions arrangements through which women acquire value from men’s status, achievements and protection. Centering relations among women means encountering other women beyond competition for male attention, recognizing their capacity to create self-understanding and political life together. The title concerns an orientation of identification and solidarity; it should not be confused with a contemporary classification of gender identity.

Political meaning cannot replace desire

The intervention also creates a tension. If lesbian existence is reduced to a political refusal of men, where do erotic attachments, varied relationships and bisexual experience fit? Refusing heterosexual norms does not mean everyone can or should choose the same desire through political will. Reading a situated organizational intervention preserves its force better than making it a compulsory relationship model for all women.

A shared female identity also cannot abolish race and class relations automatically. Solidarity still requires asking who speaks, who has resources and whose experience becomes the default. Joint resistance to stigma begins the work; it does not certify an absence of internal domination.

Rich’s account of compulsory heterosexuality develops an institutional analysis of relationship norms. The Combahee River Collective statement centers Black lesbian organizing and interlocking oppressions. These texts can question each other without being assembled into one disagreement-free lesbian-feminist position.