The Image of the Lesbian: A Slide Show of Lesbian Herstory [paste-up]

New York: New York Women’s School, 1973. Original paste-up collage. 8 ½ x 12 ½ in. Very good. Item #10379

Paste-up for flyer promoting a slideshow of “lesbian herstory” at The New York Women’s School in 1973, a short-lived alternative education project on 9th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Described by Mary Patten, a teacher at the school and a young out lesbian in 1970s New York, as an “unofficial alternative school teaching everything from classes in
auto-mechanics to Marxism to poetry,” The New York Women’s School was a key node in the burgeoning network of lesbian spaces in Park Slope that included La Papaya Bookstore, the Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts dojo, a women’s gym, and later the Lesbian Herstory Archive.

This paste-up was created for a flyer promoting a slideshow presentation at the school, illustrated with a drawing of Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood, one of the earliest novels to portray explicit homosexuality between women. The program benefited The New York Women’s School, June Smith, and the Lesbian Library Collection.

A unique artifact of radical queer pedagogy in Brooklyn.

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