217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee

this is the illusionist in which i helen zaltzman stockpile language for the coming winter Today's episode is about a particular genre of restaurant and coffee shop, the words they used to describe themselves, how they signaled to their clientele in overt and covert ways, how they demonstrated their politics and principles, and how they described themselves.

their food content note the episode contains references to anti-trans movements of the past but never forget the illusionist is a show for all genders and i direct you to some past episodes about that like no title Parents, Fiona Parts 1 and 2, and Name Changers. I'm a guest on the new season of the podcast, Making Trouble, hosted by the marvellous writer Molly Naylor.

I was never very into poetry until I read her collection, Whatever You've Got. So I was very excited to get to be on her podcast. We had a big chat about creativity and ideas and career fears and such. And you can listen to Making Trouble in the pod places. You know where they are. On with the show. Bread and Roses Feminist Restaurant Artemis Society Women's Cafe. Mother Courage Feminist Restaurant. Sappho's.

Boulder Lesbian Network Coffeehouse. Susan B's Feminist Restaurant. Crone's Harvest Radical Lesbian Feminist Coffeehouse. Gaia Restaurant. Dapper Women's Restaurant. Peach Street Dining Club for Women and Their Friends. Old Wives Tales Restaurant and Women's Centre. Mahogany Black Women's Club. Women's Coffee Coven.

Any Woman's Coffeehouse. Every Woman's Coffeehouse. Lysistrata Feminist Restaurant and Cultural Centre. Sister Spirit Cafe and Bookstore. Gay Woman's Liberation and Lesbian Coffeehouse. Lavender Prairie Collective. Mama Peaches. The Neon Chicken. Three birds, feminist bookstore and coffee shop.

Lesbian separatist potluck brunches. Red Dora's Bearded Lady Cafe. A woman's place. A place of our own women's bookstore. A place of one's own restaurant for feminists and their friends. Crescent Moon Women's Coffee House. Sister Moon. Sister Moon too.

Full Moon Inc. coffee house and bookstore, Moonrise Cafe. Yeah, there was a lot of repetition of words. It was really that like your local community knew, so it didn't matter if there were a few places called Artemis. There's got to focus on kind of moon imagery, goddess imagery.

Some were a bit more creative with their names, and some of them were really, really explicit. They're like, we are going to mark this space and let you know what we're doing. Whereas sometimes it could be just something that's like a hint of it, and then if you knew, you knew.

Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Alex Ketchum. My pronouns are she, her. I'm an assistant professor of feminist, gender, sexuality, and social justice studies at McGill University, and I'm the author of Ingredients for Revolution, a History of American Feminist. restaurants, cafes, and coffee houses. When are we talking about? From 1972 to 1989. And about how many were there in, I guess, the US we're mostly talking about?

The book is really focusing on the U.S. My doctoral work also looked at Canada, but it meant that I was describing a lot of different tax structures and I wanted to save readers from all of that. We're looking about... 230 or so spaces, possibly 400 if we're allowing for a bit more vagueness. And there was never a directory or database made of these spaces until I decided to make it and I cobbled it together.

by looking through thousands of periodicals and articles and advertisements and travel guides and lesbian travel guides and gay travel guides and women's travel guides and oral histories and ephemera. posters and business cards and stuff. So sometimes all that remains...

from a business's history was an address and a name and maybe like a note or an asterisk that's like feminist in a travel guide, right? So that's a little harder to verify versus for some of the spaces like Bloodroot, they have a lot. more material. Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Connecticut founded in 1977 and still going today with the tagline a feminist restaurant and bookstore with a seasonal vegetarian menu.

So I was really interested in spaces that explicitly called themselves feminist in either their title or their marketing or in their publications or in kind of oral history interviews. I chose this one so the project could be managed. manageable too. So I wasn't defining like, oh, this restaurant counts. This doesn't count just on my own opinion.

And I didn't want to be prescriptive in my definition of feminism, nor prescriptive in my definition of what made a feminist restaurant or cafe or coffee house. But also, I was really interested in what were the stakes of calling your restaurant feminist? What were you holding yourself accountable to? What were you trying to signal to potential customers? What were you trying to say to staff and so forth?

What were the consequences? Because there were a lot of upsides and downsides to having feminists in the restaurant's name. For sure. Some of the upsides were that you were signaling to other like-minded folks or curious folks that this could be a space for them to gather. There was an indication of the politics of the space. So it was an indication of... what kind of events you might find, speakers you might find.

artwork and music you might see and hear in this space. There were also ways that people might feel more invested in this space, that they might contribute time or money or energy or be just interested in visiting. Calling it a feminist space oftentimes was also one of the many code words during the 1970s and 1980s to also signal lesbian space or questioning space or a term we might use today but would be anachronistic.

the time as kind of like a queer women's space. So this was a way of marking like, hey, you might be welcome here. Your sexual orientation might be accepted. You might hear a poet you're interested in hearing and so forth. So there were a lot of kind of benefits in building community and interest in the space by indicating the term. And then the downsides could also be...

You know, there's bias against the word feminism. Some people would feel uncomfortable with it or push back on it. There's also a concern from many of the people who founded these spaces that they might be targeted for violence. They might get rocks through the windows and so forth. only that wasn't the case with a few exceptions, but there was also kind of a heightened level of fear in choosing to mark your space so explicitly.

But some of the challenges with using this term is that by saying that you're a feminist space, as folks probably know, there's lots of different types of feminism. There's a lot of different opinions on feminism, as well as branches of Marxist feminism. Radical feminism, liberal feminism, anarchist feminism, etc.

Lots of people have different interpretations of what it means to be feminist and what it means to do feminism and enact feminism. So there could be debates about, oh, you're charging too much for this thing, or, oh, how have you organized your kid?

or your labor practices or, oh, you're not giving enough to these organizations or things like that. There's usually the sense of like, are you doing enough? Are you being accountable to the different communities you're serving and so forth, which can be really, really challenging.

As these spaces were also trying to create this feminist space in a capitalist society, which puts different kind of pressures in running a restaurant or a cafe or coffee house. Some of these places were able to... access particular funding sources because they use the word feminist? Yeah, so by marking it as feminist space, there is investment from different members of the community in this space.

Since many of the people starting these spaces didn't have a lot of disposable capital, and they also didn't have access to traditional banking or loans oftentimes, is they would have different strategies to fundraise. One of the strategies could be hosting events, so they would have women's dances. or some of the spaces were near local colleges or universities. And so the women's studies department might invite like a famous poet or speaker, and then she would give a second talk.

at the restaurant for free and the restaurant could like have tickets or stuff like that, right, to draw people in. And then there was also something that we would today call crowdfunding. They didn't call it that at the time, but they would have people give donations or they would also have microloans and community-given money. That if they weren't marking their space as like a feminist business, I don't think people would have been as invested in giving to. And you're also...

looking at a group of people that are facing a lot of different forms of marginalization. So they're going to be less likely to have access to loans, especially for those founded before 1974 and prior to the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, right? They're not going to be able will get a line of credit in their own name. So there's a lot of economic challenges. So they're not starting with a lot of money up front. Money Matters also influenced who the space could be for.

which I won't get into too much because it might be a little dry, is tax code. So if it was a 501c3 and a nonprofit with club status, they could make it exclusive to a certain gender. So they could say it was a woman-only space. which is how men-only golf clubs persist too. Whereas it had a different kind of code and was a business, they had to be open to people of all genders, but might have like a woman only event or kind of like nights like that. Many of the spaces...

were women-centered spaces. So they really wanted a community space where women's music could play, which was oftentimes coded as lesbian music. They just wanted a space that really centered on the needs of women. But if we look at many of them, like men were welcome if they were respectful. And this idea of non-binary isn't really discussed in the same way, but...

Same thing, non-binary folks would be welcome. Some establishments were more restrictive or specific than others, whereby only women were allowed to be there. And then more questions popped up. Which women were allowed to be there? Only cisgender women? Only lesbian women? Sometimes the place's definition of women was so strict, people couldn't even bring in their male babies.

So there are a lot of debates about who these spaces were for, depending on the kind of community. And one of the things that was really exciting in my research was some of the... Coffee houses actually put a tape recorder in the room to tape their meetings. So I could actually hear some of these debates. So there are debates about like.

How can we make this a space that's more accessible for Black women? How can we make it more accessible for different women of color, for disabled people, for working class people? And there are debates around the role of trans women in the community. want people to think because I think sometimes this is the narrative that all spaces in the 70s and 80s that were feminist were trans exclusive because that's not the case. There were many that were trans inclusive and were

open to different gender expressions as well. But there were also some that were unfortunately and very violently, very trans exclusive as well and banned trans women from the communities, which is... unfortunate and sad part of this history so this idea of woman is like a really like challenging one sometimes women's space was used to mean lesbian separatist space

Hard to know, though, if you didn't know that. Yeah, for sure. I think the word woman also gave some shielding from potential violence or targeting too. Like if you were an insider, you knew. And if you weren't an insider, you didn't know. I think that's always a challenge. within queer communities is this question of visibility and invisibility, right? Visibility means that other people can find you, they're part of your community.

but also it can put a target on your back. So I think some of them were navigating that. And also there were a lot of straight women and bi women and lesbian women working collaboratively. Many of them would use the word woman to describe the space, but they did different spellings like W-O-M-Y-N. That takes like the man out of woman or W-I-M-M-I-N or. womb in it, also like woman and stuff. Part of this indicated

to some communities. And you have to be really particular to what geographic space and time and sub-community. But some of them are doing this to indicate kind of like lesbian space. Some of them want to use the word woman because it also allowed flexibility for people who might be questioning or didn't necessarily fit under the lesbian label. And some of them also were just kind of like allowing for an exploration.

Some of these spaces were also political experiments in a way, started by some folks who were just like, we have a lot of excitement, a lot of energy coming out of the feminist movement, and we want to put our politics into action. they thought this was one way of doing that yeah it feels like they they had more obligations than most restaurants would to like be run in anti-capitalist ways to have ethical food production at their heart things like that There's this diagram of a triangle.

and how I define feminist food. They were trying to make sure that the people working in the space were paid properly for their labor. They wanted to make sure that the farmers and the people creating the raw ingredients were properly paid. But they also knew that many of their customers were a lower income. Women today and especially then are paid at a lower rate.

is a group of folks who oftentimes have less access to disposable income. So you're trying to make sure that people can afford to go in this space, but you want labor to be paid well. You want there to be good ingredients, right? That's a really difficult triangle to balance. And so in trying to balance that, oftentimes the people running these spaces would just not pay themselves enough. And that would lead to burnout and infighting and a lack of sustainability.

Some of them tried to compensate for this by having maybe some dishes sliding scale. There are some things that at different rates or having like mitzvah walls where people can kind of pay it forward for other folks to have a meal or letting someone buy one cup of tea and sit there all day. So there are different kind of strategies so that the space could be accessible. But again, that can kind of push up against that

capitalist need to constantly like make money and grow. Right. And that wasn't really what these spaces were trying to do, but they also still had to like keep their electricity on, pay their vendors and so forth. Did they have different. names for the jobs involved if they were trying not to replicate capitalist structures and hierarchies.

Yeah. So in terms of like trying not to replicate some of the hierarchies within restaurants themselves, many of them challenged this idea of like waitresses or waiters. So they had people busk themselves, especially a lot of the ones started in the earlier.

70s, experimented with collective models, which sometimes led to kind of infighting and dissolution after 18 months. That was kind of the time period that I saw. 18 months is really where like... things hit the fan but but other collectives founded later and ones today have really thought through like okay we're going to have an accountant we're going to have a lawyer we're going to have someone to kind of lead us through like group

therapy or consultation and counseling so we can like talk about our grievances so they don't bubble up and boil over. But yes, there was this move away from like using language like waiters and waitresses. There was a focus on cooks rather than chefs also, and actually celebrating the role of like learning how to cook and the role of the cook, because there's a lot of gender language around who is a chef.

Most of these spaces weren't run like a French kitchen hierarchy with the like chef and sous chef and, you know, the brigade and all that. Exactly. It wasn't really a brigade model that we were saying. So. That was some of the major change with the terminology. But these...

Terms were also reflected in the design of the spaces themselves. So many would have open windows onto the kitchen so you would see the people doing the labor. You could interact with the folks and so forth. And there's also a move away from tipping culture. So rather than having people tip, they would oftentimes have jars giving to local causes or groups such as women's softball teams, community organizations, shelters, and so forth. It's kind of striking that a lot of those ideas are still...

talked about as if they're new now when they're like, oh, this kitchen has got rid of tipping or all the cooking is visible to the customers. Yeah, definitely. Or trying to make sure that everyone can have a living wage that works within this space. These ideas aren't new, but they're oftentimes forgotten or erased or misremembered or misattributed.

And the other thing is that it's not just feminist restaurants who have done these things. There's social justice restaurants, anarchist restaurants that have done these things. But I think it's like a key part. of this history that has been forgotten. Women, and particularly feminists specifically, were doing a lot of this work in challenging restaurant structure. With regard to anti-elitism, they would avoid

certain terms like gourmet. Yeah, there's a really interesting discussion with the menus of these restaurants in terms of what they had on the menu and how they described it. Now, there were some folks who were like, oh, it's gourmet food, but it wasn't like... gourmet food they're using it more in the colloquial adjective way of saying like oh it's like nice to eat rather than like true gourmet

Gourmet has had a bit of an etymological journey. For the past couple of hundred years, it's meant a food connoisseur. Prior to that, it was a French term for a wine dealer or wine taster or the servant thereof. because gourmet probably derived from a word for a boy, a lad. Unrelatedly, The word and notion gourmet throughout the 20th century and particularly from the 1970s onward had a growing association with gay men. There was this idea of gay men and fine food being linked.

But that's not why some of these feminist establishments preferred not to use the word, nor is it the little lad etymology. Rather, it was because of the exclusiveness conveyed by Gourmet. navigating that idea of like cost and food is always tricky. I would say that most of them, because they wanted their items on their menu to be. financially accessible for most of their customers were having things like a lot of like soup or sandwiches, things that were more readily available.

like there were places that were soup focused because you could make a big pot of soup and the profit would be a bit higher while you could still have like a cheap dish for the day and oftentimes for vegetarian foods

There's the stereotypes of lesbians and lentils or lesbians and the soup at the potluck type of thing. But also many of the customers were vegetarian already. Women at higher rates are vegetarian in the U.S. context, especially in the 70s and 80s. Also, they're saying that this is like maybe perhaps a countercultural space because depending on where the restaurant was located, vegetarian restaurants may or may not be that accessible normally in the 70s or 80s.

But I think it signaled like this is a space that might reflect your values, especially for spaces like Bloodroot. which were really tying the oppression of women to like the exploitation of the land in this eco-feminist way. And we're really focused on eating seasonally. But even when they first started, so they opened in 1977 and their first cookbook, The Political Pallet, came out in 1980. in that cookbook there are fish recipes because for many communities in the u.s in 1970s

fish was considered part of the vegetarian diet. So that kind of understanding of what is vegetarian also transformed. And over time, the restaurant has become more and more vegan. But it's not to say that... Every feminist restaurant was vegetarian. There's also this way of...

how eating hamburgers and meat was a way of kind of like pushing back on masculine stereotypes of meat eating. There's this book by Carol J. Adams called The Sexual Politics of Meat that really explores meat and eating and gender. The definition or the idea of feminist food varied from place to place.

It could be in terms of the labour involved, in the procurement of the ingredients and the making of the food. It could be in the ethos of the food itself with seasonal ingredients or low environmental impact foods. It could be about the people cooking it. or the venue serving it, or the people eating it. Yeah, and also like what type of feminism and what cultural context and what time, and also how the food is labeled too, because...

One of the things with feminist food was sometimes it was what the items were called. So sometimes they'd be named after someone. For example, there are a few feminist restaurants that name their omelets about women in their community that they wanted to celebrate. Brick Hut, which was a feminist restaurant in Berkeley, California that existed for 21 years. They had a Sister Marian omelet.

for the Marathon Running Nun, they had a Ruth Reed for an early 20th century lesbian poet and activist, the Seven Sisters for the Berkeley Feminist Constructing Collective, and the Mendocino Omelette for the herb blend that the owners ordered from a woman-owned business.

Another bit of vocabulary that was used by quite a lot of these venues Alex is talking about is the term chemical free. Usually chemical free meant alcohol and drug free, but not... caffeine-free and oftentimes not nicotine-free. So it depends on the space and the time. And also sometimes it's like, oh, this is the chemical-free table. There is a coffee house in Iowa City.

The signs still exist in the archive, actually. They're like, this is the marijuana smoking table. Like this is for people who want to smoke pot. And it's like a small room and you've got like the pot table and the like tobacco table and then the chemical free table. I mean, you could smell everything, right? Like you're in a tiny enclosed space. Yeah, it's a floor of smoke. Yeah, exactly. But some of these spaces also existed to be an alternative to the bar culture.

to be spaces where the focus wasn't on alcohol. Some of the restaurants did serve alcohol. That created another economic challenge because for restaurants, usually alcohol is like a pretty good way to build profit within a restaurant. because of the profit margins on alcohol. Some of them were BYOB, but many of them didn't serve any alcohol because they wanted to be this alternative space. Some of them wanted to be a space that was...

friendly for children to go. Chemical free gets interpreted in different ways. But you see in the 1980s, they're starting to be like more pushback on like, no, we can't have cigarettes. Whereas before that wasn't as big of a part of it.

But there was nowhere I ever saw people pushing back on having coffee. So there wasn't like that caffeine. So it wasn't straight edge in how we would understand it today. A lot of these characteristics of the spaces were practical, but some were matters of principle too. Some of the restaurants really, really explicitly wanted to push back on food negativity and diet culture because they saw it as tied to the exploitation of women.

And keeping women down and this kind of idea of like riots, not diets. Bread and Roses was in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts. In their original business proposal, they talk about pushing back on diet culture. They don't want to emphasize calories. They want it to be about nourishing people. Blutteroo also had a kind of similar principle.

Above the counter at Bloodroot was a sign that said, because all women are victims of fat oppression and out of respect for women of size, we would appreciate your refraining from agonising aloud over the calorie count in our food. And we can see the way that diet culture impacts people of all genders, but they were really focusing on how it was.

explicitly impacting women within their spaces, many of them wanted to push back on that. But there were some spaces that also said, we also don't want women who are dieting to feel bad about themselves for dieting. So we'll just have a wide variety of items on. our menu and people can make decisions. So the whole point was to make people feel welcome and included while also encouraging people not to use harmful language that could make people feel excluded or targeted.

it because there's no escaping dark culture it gets to everyone everywhere pretty much yes yes yes it infiltrates all of society

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And now back to Alex Ketchum, talking about the feminist restaurants and coffee shops in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. Were many of the places you studied still open no A lot of them closed within kind of the first 18 months. Some lasted longer, four or five years maybe. The restaurant industry is really hard in general, so it's quite punishing to make restaurants close within a year, no matter their politics.

Blood Root's the only one that still exists today that was founded in the 70s. That's wild, right? Like how many restaurants last that one? Yeah. It's pretty rare. True. They were the longest. Brick Hut was 21 years, which was quite significant as well. The Brick Hut Cafe in Berkeley, California, was a big enough business to have 35 employees. But after insurmountable financial overheads, it closed in 19...

But for some folks, too, this was an experiment through one part of their life, and then they moved on to different kinds of work after. There were a lot of folks who went into academia. Some folks started catering businesses. Some of them were journalists beforehand and then went back to journalism. So kind of like a mix of different approaches.

Alex's study of the feminist restaurants and coffee shops concentrated on the period from 1972 to 1989, not because that's the only time these kinds of places existed in the US, but it was their peak era. Well... So far. The reason I had stopped the initial kind of study in 1989 as kind of like the main emphasis.

was you see kind of a pushback on a lot of feminist ideals in the late 80s and early 1990s in this kind of idea of post-feminism, this idea that, oh, feminism has succeeded. But there's also some feelings of like, do we need to... necessarily mark this space as explicitly feminist. While the project itself is looking at the places that explicitly call themselves as feminists, there were many restaurants who enacted kind of similar...

policies or formats as the feminist restaurants but didn't use the word feminist. And that's not to say what they were doing wasn't important. Many of them used kind of social justice terms or anarchist terms or other kind of community terms. What have you noticed with the evolution or not of terminology between restaurants like this 50 years ago versus the ones this century? The restaurants themselves have changed quite a bit. Part of it has to do with the changing.

economy that we live in and who's able to open these spaces many of the restaurants are also like cafe bookstores so you have multiple streams of revenue kind of like how bloodroot is also a bookstore they tend to be run by more of a diverse gender group so they can be collectives with people of all genders involved.

They're oftentimes marking themselves as queer spaces and very trans-inclusive spaces as well, like explicitly trans-inclusive. And there also tends to be a lot more women of color and people of color involved in running them. Obviously things are different maybe now because rent is so punishing in a lot of places. Yeah, in 1970s because of lower rents.

it did open up a lot of possibilities for people to experiment. Where some folks that I talk about in the book had never worked in a restaurant before starting one. They had no restaurant experience. And there's even one story of... Susan B's in Chicago, where the night before they opened, the person was like, wait, this is supposed to be a soup restaurant. And I don't know how to make soup. Google trying to do that in the 2020s when you're trying to get all this like financing.

the lease is $20,000 a month. It's just such a different scale. I was just wondering if there was anything that particularly surprised you when you were studying all of this? I think... I was actually first surprised at how many restaurants I found. I had gotten pushback early on during my master's from some folks that's like, oh, are these even significant? What? It was like one or two places. Who cares? And so part of that.

encouraged me, I'll say that in a kind way, encouraged me or inspired me to then try to take a quantitative approach of trying to create this directory, which is available publicly online at thefeministrestaurantproject.com and encourage people to let me. no spaces I was missing. And I still update it. So if any of you all find any spaces, please let me know. I'm happy to add more. But it really surprised me actually how many I found. In a good way.

Yeah, in a good way. The thing is that there's a lot of different ways to talk about the challenges around labor, around sexism, misogyny, racism, classism. Anytime that I'm doing my research, I'm always looking for something...

that inspires me, I always want to showcase and uplift the work that people did in trying to make the kinds of worlds that they wanted to see. It doesn't mean that they did it perfectly. The people I talk about in this book, they made a lot of mistakes, and any of them learned and grew from them. Some of them didn't learn and grow from them, but other people did. And some of their strategies they tried didn't maybe work in the 70s, but work better today.

And so that for me is what keeps me going in all of my work and my projects. Yeah, I think that was why I found it hopeful. It was really cool that people were doing this and that people do things because they think that's... important and right yeah even if it is kind of ruining their own lives yeah i love that description of it i'm laughing because it feels so real what you just said yeah

Alex Ketchum is an academic and the author of the book Ingredients for Revolution, a history of American feminist restaurants, cafes and coffeehouses. She continues to update the directory of those at thefeministrestaurantproject.com. So let her know if there's another to add. And she is co-editor of the new book, An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food with Recipes, representing the diversity of queer food from seed to potluck.

It's out on the 7th of October, 2025, and you can pre-order from Arsenal Pulp Press and request that your library gets it. There are also some virtual events happening around the book. I will link to them at theillusionist.org. And Alex is one of the organisers of the Queer Food Conference. The next one will take place in May 2026.

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