Reprinted from “Living Herstory” by Judith Schwarz, Off Our Backs, May 1978:

The room seems to be a collection of papers, books, stray pieces of paper…just a library. But the vision behind the room is much larger: the room is an entrance way, a portal that leads both to the past and to the future and for me its existence is the expression of a terrible hunger. I am a 38-year-old lesbian feminist woman. When I first loved women in the late 50’s, I was living the life of a colonized subject. I did not know it then; I thought it was accidental that I found no references in the surrounding culture to Lesbian creations. Sometimes believing the colonizers view of myself, I did not even search for markings because I knew we were not a people, just deviant sad wanderers, meeting in dark places. It is the memory of this time, with its sense of homelessness, that is at the core of my commitment to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The Archives room is a healing place; it is filled with voices announcing our autonomy and self possession. The roots of the Archives lie in the silences voices, the love letters destroyed, the pronouns changed, the diaries carefully edited, the pictures never taken, the euphemized distortions that patriarchy would let pass…but I have lived through the time of willful deprivation and now it is our time to discover and to cherish and to preserve. We ask every lesbian woman to participate in weaving this tapestry of lesbian life. We ask for a sign, a letter, a drawing, a photograph, a voice, a song in all the languages we speak. The women in the Archives collective have undertaken the responsibility of collecting the published material but we know the vast greater power of the waiting words, the voices who think they have nothing to say and yet live the strength and beauty of our culture every day. We ask for moments of self cherishing. How we preserve and share culture will help answer the question of how deeply we were committed to changing our relationship to patriarchy and its death-dealing institutions. Our archives must never be for sale; it must never be housed in an institution created by those who exiled us from generational continuity; it must be accessible to all Lesbian women; it must show its dedication to denying the rule of racism and classism as separators of Lesbian women. The archives must never be a dead place, a worshipping of the past, but it must show its connection with the Lesbian present, with the struggles and glories of each Lesbian generation…We have never had the chance before to listen to a full generational discussion, to argue with or refine the visions that worked for one age but not another. The archives in the deepest sense is a political act. Whenever a despised people say no to their assigned place in time and space and leave the hating world behind to concentrate on creating a culture that shows the possibilities of another life without the master and his rules, they will be watched.