In October 1975, Selma Miriam was 40 years old and had just separated from her husband. For weeks, she was confused and terrified because she had “no sense of what was really possible.” As Miriam recounted in an essay published in Lesbian Ethics, one morning she watched the sun come up and “knew in a rush what to do.” Miriam decided to make her vision of a community where women could thrive and uplift one another into a reality. “Once a week on Wednesday night, in my own house, I would cook supper. A friend could sell non-sexist books for kids. A photographer could show her work,” Miriam said. “It would be a women’s cooperative exchange, and we’d call it Bloodroot.”
Through weekly “women’s nights” in her home of Westport, Connecticut, Miriam brewed the vision that would become the Bloodroot Collective.
In 1977, Miriam, Betsey Beaven, and Samn Stockwell founded the Bloodroot Collective and established Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant and Bookstore in a former machinist shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Throughout the 70s and 80s, hundreds of feminist and lesbian restaurants and cafes emerged across the United States. Like Bloodroot, they sought to create spaces for women to discover themselves and form bonds outside of the patriarchy. Almost all of these sites have closed their doors, yet Bloodroot still stands as a living reminder of the radical politics, tensions, and limitations of carving out these women-only collectives.
Miriam had met Beaven at a lesbian “consciousness-raising” group in New Haven and Stockwell at the National Radical Feminist Collective. Stockwell left Bloodroot after its first year, feeling a “lack of intellectual or emotional intimacy with the lesbian and feminist community.” However, Noel Furie and Pat Shea, who had met Miriam through a chapter of the National Organization for Women and were working part-time at Bloodroot, decided to fully commit themselves to living and working with their fellow lesbians. For Bloodroot, lesbianism was integral to feminism, as to be a lesbian was to consciously reject the patriarchy and embrace the deep, interconnected bonds between women.
Just as the sun was setting, I arrived at Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant and Bookstore, in the beginning of March, at the precipice of spring break. The vast water of the Long Island Sound and the darkening sky engulfed the distinct shapes of the houses until they became silhouettes. But, walking alongside the wharf, I immediately knew which house belonged to Bloodroot: warm string lights lined the backyard, beckoning me to the cozy and lively conversations inside.
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Members of the Bloodroot Collective c. 1978. Left to right: Noel Furie, Pat Shea, Selma Miriam, sitting: Betsy Beaven. Bloodroot Collective Records (MS 1955). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
The name “Bloodroot” comes from an eastern woodland wildflower with an elaborate underground network. Instead of just one root, the bloodroot’s underground system is a horizontal rhizome that continuously produces additional stems and offshoots from its many nodes. According to a statement by Bloodroot in their first published cookbook, Political Palate: A Feminist Vegetarian Cookbook (1981), they were drawn to the plant because its rhizomatic growth resembled “the way we work together.”
The rhizome’s structure was also reflected in the landscape of liberatory politics of the 70s—destabilizing fixed hierarchies by embracing multiple, evolving identities and the interconnections between them. Bloodroot was one of many nodes where different strands of feminist thought intersected. As lesbian spaces like Bloodroot reimagined relationships outside of fixed, heteronormative boundaries, they became connected to fellow lesbians across the world, offering a network of support to live differently.
At Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, Bloodroot’s history lives on through manuscripts and archives, spanning hundreds of documents, photos, and memorabilia. In 2007, Mary Caldera, an archivist at Yale University, asked Furie and Miriam—the only members of the original collective who were still at Bloodroot—to donate their personal papers to the library. According to an article published in the Stamford Advocate, Caldera was working to document “the history of the local gay and lesbian community, as well as feminism and sexuality in general” in Yale’s library collections. Furie and Miriam, needing a place to put all the documents they had accumulated, offered their materials.
“We’re really very, very proud to be part of the Yale Library and the archives there. I think the whole notion of saving materials about feminism and art is a wonderful thing. We need that,” Furie told the Advocate.
On February 19, 2025, I made my first visit to the Bloodroot Collective’s archive, where I encountered 14 boxes brimming with letters, magazines, flyers, photographs, and posters. Sifting through the Bloodroot archive, I glimpsed names like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich—writers who had shaped my understanding of queer history and literature. Their radical honesty and courage to live boldly as lesbians had inspired me to express myself through poetry.
Through the archives, historically suppressed narratives and actors can survive, persist, and be rediscovered. Yet institutions like libraries have been historically responsible for forcing voices back into the margins––the subject heading “lesbianism” was not recognized by the Library of Congress until 1954, and it was classified under the category “sexual perversion” until 1972. Without any way to make themselves seen, the archives become a space where these histories merely exist––trapped in the time period they came from. Through situating, questioning, and reconciling the tensions between the static documents and the dynamic stories they represent, it is up to the people who uncover these departures from mainstream historical narratives to bring them into public witness. Even if the movement itself has passed, it lives on through the people—of both the past and present—who dare to challenge the prevailing narrative.
A month after my first visit to Sterling, I entered the restaurant and felt like I had stumbled into the archive once more. Only this time, the papers were no longer hidden away in dusty boxes, but rather pasted onto every surface of the restaurant’s walls. Unlike the organized files back at Sterling, where I had to comb through each document one by one, I was greeted with a collage of photographs, flyers, artwork, news clippings, and slogans that reflected Bloodroot’s commitment to feminist principles. There were graphics depicting ancient goddesses, posters of poems written by women, announcements for teach-ins and community actions, and bumper stickers with messages like “I’ll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy.” Even though Bloodroot had donated most of their papers to Yale, the physical space of the restaurant remained the source of the collective’s continued life and joy.
Inside the Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant and Bookstore. Taken by Angel Hu.
The warm lights, patchwork of wooden chairs, and tapestries hanging from the ceiling created an immediate feeling of comfort. The signature look of the interior had changed little throughout the years, yet the posters on the wall and the people who passed through Bloodroot’s doors reflect the dynamism of the space. Groups of people, mostly returning customers, chatted at the tables. The open kitchen allowed customers to converse with the women preparing their food, breaking barriers between customers and staff. The wall lining the restaurant’s seating area was covered in framed, vintage photographs of women. According to Noel Furie, now the sole member of the original Bloodroot Collective who still works there, these photographs depict relatives and friends of Bloodroot. Here, women can look back on the generations before them, imbued with a newfound desire to live and resist.
Inside the Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant and Bookstore. Taken by Angel Hu.
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Bloodroot’s bookshelves were filled with a large collection of books written by and about women, along with issues of lesbian magazines like Lesbian Connection and Sinister Wisdom. The genres listed on the shelves—lesbian fiction, feminist theory, women of color/international women, ecofeminism, spirituality—offered a glimpse into the multifaceted ways women sought to connect in their shared struggle.
The women of Bloodroot were more than just friends and business associates; their lives were deeply intertwined. “Each flower and each leaf of this plant grows separately from the others. But the leaves touch and the roots are interconnected,” Furie wrote in a manifesto titled “Bloodroot: Brewing Visions.” The women of Bloodroot—“individual yet interconnected”—were united by the thread of lesbian feminism, yet brought their different upbringings, experiences, and values to the table. Miriam’s landscaping and gardening skills shaped the restaurant’s exterior, while Furie used her camera to capture the intimate relationships within the interior. Some women cooked, while others dealt with the finances and operations.
Women came and left Bloodroot at various times—as mothers and wives, disoriented, hopeful, seeking to grow and change. In the archives, I discovered personal essays written by Miriam and Furie, which reveal their lives before Bloodroot and how their lives were changed afterwards.
Selma Miriam was once Selma Bunks, married for 19 years, a mother of two kids, and a landscape designer. Her marriage had led to a period of severe depression. After divorcing her husband, Miriam found a community within Bloodroot, taking up gardening and knitting as an expression of feminism. She planted flowers like love-in-a-mist, potentilla, and delphinium—obtaining the seeds and knowledge of the plants from fellow lesbian gardeners.
Like Miriam, Noel Furie—previously Noel Giordano—was a wife and mother of two in her mid-30s. She had previously worked as a waitress at a restaurant in New York City and then at a Playboy Bunny Club—an experience that left her “acutely aware of the humiliation I felt.” As a housewife, Giordano sought “something of meaning in my life,” so she joined the National Organization for Women and became exposed to the language and politics that allowed her to grapple with her experiences of being objectified as a woman. Furie launched herself into anti-pornography movements, embracing radical feminist analyses by theorists like Andrea Dworkin. After divorcing her husband, Noel Giordano changed her name to Noel Furie and became a full-time member of Bloodroot.
The owner of a photography business prior to Bloodroot, Furie brought her photography work to the collective. Capturing the women of Bloodroot in raw, intimate ways, Furie sought to defy the “degradation and pain” inflicted by men and oneself. Furie used the camera as a way to find “pride and joy in our lesbian sexuality and female bodies,” as she recounted in an essay that accompanied Furie’s photograph collection “Mes Amies, Les Amantes.” The collection depicted Furie’s friends “making love together.” Unlike the exploitative and destructive lens of pornography, Furie sought to capture the deep and intimate connections that united lesbians through their sexuality. Many additional photographs of women, taken by Furie, lined the walls of the restaurant. While eating vegan macaroni and cheese, I glanced at a photo of a woman smiling slightly and looking away from the camera; their candid expressions show what it means to merely exist as a woman, instead of performing for another’s gaze.
Wall of photographs by Noel Furie. Taken by Angel Hu.
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As the women navigated changing relationships and values, their stories persisted to propel political change. The bloodroot was a symbol for the women’s stamina—even as members Pat Shea and Betsey Beaven left Bloodroot out of disillusionment and boredom with long-term feminist living, testing the strength of the collectivity. Yet the remaining women found new ways to nourish their hope and reimagine bonds that “made our revolution and our world,” as Furie described in “Bloodroot: Brewing Visions.”
Lesbians were often at the forefront of feminist and queer liberation movements of the 70s and 80s. Facing homophobia from mainstream women’s movements and sexism from queer spaces that usually centered the struggles of gay men, lesbians theorized even more radical ways of defying patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial structures. One emerging solution was lesbian separatism, the idea that women must separate themselves from male-dominated institutions and build a community where women could thrive. Bloodroot, like many other separatists, viewed lesbianism as a political identity and a conscious choice to reject men.
However, even these efforts resulted in divisions within the movement. Witnessing the women of Bloodroot in conversation with feminists of color revealed the limitations of separatism without analyses of race and class. Lesbians of color and working-class lesbians often felt excluded from predominantly white, middle-class spaces and sought to challenge mainstream feminism through an intersectional framework.
For instance, the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists, organized between 1974 and 1980, to develop analyses of interlocking systems of oppression. The Bloodroot Collective’s archive contains traces of these alternate histories—tucked away behind files, I found correspondences with Combahee founder Barbara Smith and member Audre Lorde as well as poems and anthologies by other activists of color like Chrystos and Gloria Anzaldúa. For many feminist and lesbian activists of color, writing—especially poetry—was a political act that enabled them to defy fixed structures and transform their lived experiences into a collective consciousness.
Within the writings I encountered in Bloodroot’s archive, there were numerous references to
This Bridge Called My Back, a feminist anthology that centered on the experiences of women of color, especially in the context of the Combahee River Collective’s theory of intersectionality. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, editors and leaders of the Chicana movement, wrote in the introduction: “We want to express to all women—especially to white middle-class women—the experiences which divide us as feminists; we want to examine incidents of intolerance, prejudice and denial of differences within the feminist movement.” Contributors to This Bridge Called My Back interpreted feminism as an interconnected struggle and solidarity, where difference could still exist—a notion of plurality that Bloodroot would eventually embrace as they learned more about women’s movements outside of their demographic. “We use the term [radical] in its original form stemming from the word ‘root’—for our feminist politic emerges from the roots of both of our cultural oppression and heritage,” wrote Moraga and Anzaldúa.
Bloodroot’s activism, however, was not limited to the national network of feminist politics. Their awareness of intersectional feminism extended beyond borders and languages. Posters announcing Bloodroot’s local community events—anniversary celebrations, women-only nights on Wednesdays, and live performances by female artists—were interspersed with feminist and lesbian periodicals worldwide, newsletters on international women’s revolutions and resistance movements, and writings in non-English languages. Bloodroot kept reports on the unjust working conditions of female sweepers in northern India, the intersection of socialism and women’s liberation movements in China and Vietnam, and women’s participation in unions and guerilla armies in El Salvador and Eritrea. As Bloodroot created a separatist haven for women in their quiet suburbia, their records upheld that feminism was a tenet to the global struggle against imperialism, and their roots became intertwined with many avenues of women’s liberation.
I also encountered the Stockholm-based feminist magazine Kvinnobulletinen (Women’s Bulletin), which published feminist artwork, comics, and poems in Swedish, including a translated excerpt from The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde. Kvinnobulletinen wrote a letter to Noel Furie asking for permission to reprint a photo in their next issue. The photo was part of a series depicting women’s scars. I was touched by the simple intimacy of capturing a woman as who she is––not who she is expected to be. In a 1982 letter to The Blatant Image—a feminist photography magazine where Furie’s photos were originally published—Furie wrote, “There is a need amongst us for pictures like these, so that we can look at ourselves and each other with directness. That we should look at each other’s scars and our own is to break one more taboo which imprisons us.” The scar resonates with the method of feminist presses, which carved out a community—and perhaps also like Furie––discovered in the process ways of representing women as subjects of political change, rather than objects of desire.
Feminist presses, I had discovered, were also responsible for mobilizing action, as seen in the political flyers and pamphlets decorating the archive. Bloodroot was devoted to political organizing within their local community: marches to “take back the night and end violence against women,” a women’s conference with the United Nations Association of New Haven, support for 1984 presidential candidate Sonia Johnson’s advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, and collections of resources on abortion and gynecological health. A more recent flyer from 2011 announces a talk at Southern Connecticut State University given by Dr. Ericka Huggins, the founder of the New Haven chapter of the Black Panther Party. Political change had to begin at the local level, and through these community events, feminist thought could be accessible to anyone.
“Women March to Take Back the Night.” Bloodroot Collective Records (MS 1955). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
Accompanying the many flyers in the archives were even more photographs depicting the women who reveled in a community that allowed them to love and exist freely. Women were smiling in front of the ever-growing collage papering the walls of the restaurant and laughing over shared meals—the same places I would find myself years later. The photos spanned decades, some in black and white, others in color. Women crossed generations to hug. Some were identified with a name, others remained unknown—the crinkles in their eyes and the lines in their cheeks preserving fleeting expressions. I was in a state of perpetual motion, witnessing Bloodroot evolve and its members grow older, while the physical space remained the same. Even in these transient moments, Bloodroot’s community within the archive was timeless.
Women of Bloodroot with Adrienne Rich. Bloodroot Collective Records (MS 1955). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
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Bloodroot prided itself on political living and engagement. Cooking was an act of rebelling against the patriarchy, forming a collective effort where women could learn from and teach one another. “We have our daily work that we do together, talking, laughing, sometimes fighting. We cook the food and serve it and then eat together and at last go home with our books, read a while and then sleep,” Miriam wrote in “Bloodroot: Brewing Visions.”
This process of building a community of women extended beyond the walls of the restaurant. Bloodroot, like many feminist organizations of the time, also used the press to raise political consciousness worldwide. Over the years, Bloodroot published a series of cookbooks that explored the intersections between cooking and feminist thought: The Political Palate (1980), The Second Seasonal Political Palate (1984), The Perennial Political Palate (1993), and Addendum to the Political Palate Series (1997). Excerpts from poems, essays, and songs written by lesbians and feminists are included within the pages of recipes. Even though these excerpts are positioned in the margins, they allow women’s voices to escape the political margins they had once been confined to, situating every page with a call to action. At the end of the cookbooks, there were lengthy bibliographies that listed dozens of authors, books, journals, periodicals, and publishing groups. Despite mainstream pushback, these communities developed their own ways of representing themselves.
Bloodroot’s correspondences contained dozens of letters and postcards to lesbian and feminist writers, songwriters, and activists requesting permission to include their words in their cookbooks. Many of these women passed through Bloodroot’s doors, eating meals, performing songs and poems, and giving talks, and each excerpt offered a glimpse into the nuanced experiences of being a woman or a lesbian. For example, Anita Cornwell wrote an account of being a “Black lesbian in white America,” while Alix Dobkin’s lesbian folk music imbued listeners with strength with a song called “The Woman in Your Life is You” (2010).
For Bloodroot, their feminist principles were intertwined with the need to maintain ethical food consumption through vegetarianism. Bloodroot viewed the “exploitation, domination, and destruction” caused by killing animals as a parallel to patriarchal oppression and attempts to control women’s bodies. In the 1980s, as ideas surrounding vegetarianism began to change, Bloodroot stopped serving fish on their menu. Their food also became increasingly more vegan—now entirely so—to counter overconsumption in the dairy industry.
Serving exclusively vegetarian food, Bloodroot rotated their recipes on a seasonal basis to reflect their belief that women’s bodies were in tune with the natural cycles of the Earth. Additionally, their menus began to incorporate recipes that reflect the diverse cultural backgrounds within Bridgeport. Examples include Jamaican jerk chicken, Szechuan noodles, and Vietnamese summer rolls.
Despite Bloodroot’s commitment to radical politics and change, the collective could not completely escape from gender essentialist ideals of femininity, associating their commitment to vegetarianism with women’s “innate” connection with nature and “nurturing” qualities. I had to grapple with the uncomfortable implications of their adherence to the gender binary. In a 2010 interview with Caldera, Miriam had rejected gender reassignment surgery as “anti-feminist.” A new fear emerged: the loss of a distinct definition of “woman” that informed feminist politics. Bloodroot, as a physical space, has changed little in recent years, and their existence within an archive confines them to a fixed point in time. However, an essential part of a movement is to adapt, learn, and grow—like Bloodroot had done in the past, and must continue to do so.
Program of Bloodroot’s events. Bloodroot Collective Records (MS 1955). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
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In a letter written in 1980, Adrienne Rich thanked the women of Bloodroot for the most “satisfying, clarifying, soul-as-well-as-body-delighting” cookbooks she had ever come across. “It’s an achievement of such obvious caring, commitment, and love that I want to share it with all kinds of women––some who are not feminists yet, some who are but might not have access to it,” she wrote. Rich also expressed her wishes to have lunch or dinner at Bloodroot with her partner Michelle Cliff and meet the women of the collective in person.
When I visited Bloodroot, Rich and Cliff’s presences lingered profoundly. There was a corner where Rich’s letter to Bloodroot was framed and hung on the wall, along with a picture of Rich with the women of Bloodroot, a framed poster with Rich’s poem “Dreams Before Waking,” and New York Times headlines featuring Rich and Cliff.
Noel Furie pointed to a New York Times clipping tacked to the wall titled “Michelle Cliff, Who Wrote of Colonialism and Racism, Dies at 69.” Above the headline is a photo of Cliff sitting with her chin resting on her hands and smiling into the distance. “After Michelle died, Adrianne’s children went to sort through her things. This photo was wedged in between some papers and fell out. It was a picture I took of her, and it was the only picture she ever liked of herself,” Furie told me.
Photo of Michelle Cliff, taken by Noel Furie.
As Bloodroot expressed in its introduction to The Political Palate: “We need new ways to live. As we and others begin finding these ways, we must remember that women have done this before and that much of the history of it has been ignored, not recorded, or destroyed.” Through the simple act of preservation and recollection, I can revel in the work that generations before me did to create these revolutionary acts of living—a testament to what we must continue to do so that their stories can be remembered.
On February 6, 2025, Selma Miriam passed away weeks before her 90th birthday. Even the amount of material she collected, wrote and preserved in the archive cannot capture the collective’s impact on generations of lesbians and feminists. I am saddened that I never had the chance to meet her, but through my visit to Bloodroot and my dive into its physical materials, I am able to hold onto a fragment of her spirit.
As I walked out of Bloodroot, I was reminded of a fragment by Sappho—the first recorded lesbian poet: “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.” Her words, written in the 6th century BC, reverberate in the 21st century. The roots of a bloodroot continue to withstand and grow even as its flowers die during the winter, and similarly, the Bloodroot Collective allows me to envision new methods of survival through building collectivity in the face of struggle. After the roots grow from the seeds of joy, love, and resistance, flowers bloom into the numerous lives that I am able to witness and remember.