International Videoletters: Feminists’ Hope and Our Own Self-Grown Media

International Videoletters was a beloved project of scores of feminist video makers and their media groups in the mid-1970s. Bicycling tapes from community to community was the dream of every video group of the era. More than bicycling, Videoletters was an information and news exchange that lasted two years. Little known today, this dynamic project has been overlooked in major histories of video from this era. 

Between 1975 and 1977, Videoletters connected feminist communities from nine US cities. Other communities would hear about it and spontaneously join in, sending a tape or two. For example, in the deep of winter in 1976, a tape about the Toronto snow arrived. A letter in early 1976 from the Auckland Women’s Video Group asked how their down-under community might participate in the exchange. A women’s prison in California that had an audio-visual club participated for a while. This kind of spontaneity and spunkiness symbolized the pre-internet era when word-of-mouth and sometimes the telephone were our key forms of communication. Videoletters survived on our sheer desire to communicate and the need to strengthen our feminist ties. Lexington Davis sums it up in her article: it was our vision to build a “feminist nation.”¹Lexington Davis, Creating a Feminist Nation: The International Videoletters Network, 1975–1977, Feminist Media Histories 9, no. 4, 2023: 108–134. This is currently the most extensive scholarly article on the project.

Sustaining such energy over time is a gargantuan challenge. Like so much feminist media of the 1970s and 1980s, Videoletters existed solely on unpaid, volunteer labor.²Martha Leslie Allen’s dissertation, The Development of Communication Networks Among Women, 1963–1983 (1988, Howard University, Washington DC), covers an extensive range of many hundreds of feminist media in many forms created in the period around Videoletters. The full dissertation can be accessed at the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press. I was centrally involved in the project and the focal point of most communication between all involved. My one-inch thick file of correspondence – New York City attendance lists, copies of a few flyers, and contacts in the various cities – exists in my archives at the Schlesinger Library. The file is chockablock with tidbits and details about the project. Things like “3-13-76 Boston tape race course with women jockeys,” or “did the logo ever get on T-shirts,” as Just Us asked in a letter in January 1976. The elaborate correspondence is emblematic of both our hopeful visions for the project and the huge limitations we faced. Every time I look through it, even I find a new detail I had not paid attention to before.³Ariel Dougherty Papers, 1946–1993. MC 589. Harvard University, Schlesinger Library

My lived experience with the Videoletters was within New York City, which by the 1980s I came to dub “the most provincial part of the United States.” The dynamics of how tapes were made and shown in Tucson, AZ, or Rochester, NY were different. Production was one thing and attendance another. How did the effort of creating a tape match the viewing of the productions? In NYC, it was hard to grow an audience for Videoletters. In a major media hub, maybe people were over-saturated.  But I also believe that awareness about the need for an alternative, counter-public sphere was limited in our experiences. How this manifested in our different communities is an important part of this collective project and its fuller story needs exploration. The entirety of the Videoletters legacy is ripe for a deep dive of an academic or two, worthy of a dissertation and more. Ideally, it should be done soon while some of us feminist video makers from back then are still on this planet and have our memories (mostly) intact. This hors d’oeuvre of an article is to whet the appetite so that a fuller main course emerges.   

The Structure

At the height of Videoletters, twenty-seven separate women’s media groups were involved in the production of maybe sixty to seventy half-hour tapes over a two-year period. We never did a full count, so we will never really know an exact number. We were busy in the doing and naive to the long-term historical work we were actually creating. We were also constantly recycling tapes to keep our expenses low, which meant we lost track of the number of tapes. 

Videoletters was conceived from a workgroup at the end of the Conference of Feminist Film and Video Organizations. That conference, which took place in NYC, February 1–2, 1975, involved 80 women from scores of media groups from Chicago to the East Coast, with a few representatives from the West Coast, Canada, and Australia. In the document that was produced just after the close of the conference (a part of a concluding packet sent to the list of women’s media groups that we had identified from English-speaking groups).⁴That list includes 78 media groups, 67 of which existed in the United States, 55 of those were specifically women-identified. The eleven groups from outside the country were all from English-speaking countries. While we may have been aware of groups in Latin America, Europe, and other parts of the world, language was a barrier inhibiting interaction. The entire list of groups was published in Access, March 10, 1975, pp. 10-12; 18-19. This short-lived magazine was created by Nicholas Johnson, a former Federal Communications Commissioner. An outline of the project is mapped out, discussing the intent and a series of steps. The initial design was an “experiment” to run for six months. It spelled out both an open-ended creation of tape production and the necessity of local viewing of the collection of tapes. 

Less than two months later, the first showing of International VIDEOLETTERS was held at the Feminist Eye on March 29 and 30.  This sister conference brought 125 women together in “film, video and television” in Los Angeles at the Woman’s Building. This remarkable center was the focal point of feminist creativity in many art forms in Southern California from 1973 to 1991. Charlotte Bunch gave the keynote address. She envisioned the possibility of women moving smoothly between mainstream Hollywood and the independence of a more radical feminist-created media.⁵To date, I have not found a written copy of this speech. Her idealism of flowing in and out of Hollywood, I believe, was never realized.

There was great excitement about seeing the first set of tapes, including one from Los Angeles about a show at the Woman’s Building; in one of the interviews, an artist talked about the recent arrest of Zsuzanna Budapest for doing a Tarot reading. The screening encouraged four more communities to sign on to the project. That brought the number up to a total of nine communities, all from major cities. The nine groups were then divided into three constellations of three communities each: Washington DC, Rochester, and San Francisco; Boston, Chicago, and Santa Cruz; and New York City, Tucson, and Los Angeles. Tapes were produced and exchanged bi-monthly, with the central exchange taking place within each constellation. This ensured that each community screening would have a 90-minute program every other month. In New York City, to keep our screenings going on a monthly basis, we did a complete exchange of our three tapes every other month with the three tapes from the DC group Spectra Feminist Media Project. More often than not, we used the hourly bus system between these Eastern hubs to shuttle the tapes – the same system used by the major television studios at the time. Otherwise, we relied on the US postal system to get our tapes to and from the myriad of our communities.⁶It is important to remember that media has a special reduced rate through the US mail. This stems from the American Revolution when newspapers were essential to get news to communities. The Postal Act of 1792 “spawned the first communications revolution” when roads were built to deliver the mail, stated Juan Gonzáles and Joseph Torres in News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (New York: Verso, 2011) 5.

Production

In New York City, where I worked at Women Make Movies, we had a Portapak to document events and to record community stories. However, we used the Media Equipment Resource Center (MERC), then uptown on West 53rd Street, for editing. MERC was established by the Young Filmmakers Foundation, with support from the New York State Council on the Arts to provide a pool of media equipment and editing bays for the burgeoning independent film and video community of New Yorkers. Editing half-inch reel-to-reel videotapes in the mid-1970s was no picnic. The equipment was imprecise. To make an edit, you had to backwind three-and-a-half revolutions by hand, faced the challenge of starting both machines precisely at the same time, and then finally had to punch a stiff record button at the exact desired moment. It was neither science nor art, but sheer luck. For Videoletters, we had a new ally, participant, and friend with video editing equipment, Tracy Ward at Open Video. I remember sitting in her St. Clements church editing room, confounded by the two decks in front of me. One, on the left, had my original material, and I was puzzling through the awkwardness of the technology to get a clean edit onto the machine on the right. Repeating, again and again, an edit with full knowledge that each new attempt foreshortened the tail shot of the previous cut, creating a backward motion problem in the entire edited tape. This confoundedness of the editing process looms large in my memory. I have no recall, however, of the content that I was editing. To keep our expenses down, duplicate copies of the edited tape were infrequently made to keep as a stored archival record. We were constantly recycling tapes.  

Viewings 

In New York City, the most developed women’s video program was at the Women’s Interart Center. The program was run by the video-savvy teacher Susan Milano. She was also the central organizer of the annual Women’s Video Festival that had first started at The Kitchen under the vision of Steina Vasulka. Margot Lewitin, an actor and later theatre director and one of the founders of the WIC, had attended that first Women’s Video Festival held September 14–30, 1972, at The Kitchen in their original Mercer Street home. Lewitin’s forethought to expand the inter-art aspect of WIC to include one of the newest art forms, video, brought Susan and the annual video festival to WIC.  

The series of programs were located on the ninth and tenth floors of an abandoned manufacturing building on the far west of 53rd Street. Numerous artist groups had taken over the building for a modest annual rent to the city. This is where we held the monthly screenings of International Videoletters amidst WIC’s several monitors and large, sprawling floor space. A downside was the location, which was a hike from public transportation. An upside was that Susan’s video classes had developed a range of skilled women in video production. They came from the established media industry, women’s community organizations, and a newly formed Lesbian media activist group. 

So, through the amalgamation of seven different women’s media groups participating in Videoletters in New York City, we and our communities of friends formed a budding audience that viewed the monthly tapes.⁷The New York groups were Feminist Videotape Collective, L.O.V.E. (Lesbians Organized for Video Experience), Open Video, St. Clement’s Video Women, Women Make Movies, Women’s Interart Center, and Video Commune. As the documentation in my file folder shows, we also made periodic press releases for the mainstream media to build attendance. At screenings, I also collected attendance lists, a practice we had established at Women Make Movies for screenings and events. It is remarkable to read all these years later that at the June 14, 1975 screening, we had a large crowd that included staff of Women Alive and AM America. Women Alive was a short-lived, women-oriented public television show that ran for only two seasons.  

I have two memorable moments when viewing Videoletters. One was the very first tape that came from Tucson. It was summer. They fried an egg on the sidewalk, proving how hot it was. Next, they took us to a corral on the edge of town, where a woman in jeans and donning a cowboy hat, casually propped her boots up on the wrung of the fence. She had just been elected to the city council and discussed local politics. The other tape was a one-time Videoletter from Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida. It was about a strike by women at a shrimp factory. In the tape, women discussed the working conditions at the plant and why they had gone on strike.⁸In spring 2024, Carol Anshien donated a handful of tapes she held to Media Burn in Chicago. International Videoletter: Tampa/St. Petersburg was one of those tapes. In our audience was an affirmed vegetarian. All she wanted to lament was about the poor shrimp – which, needless to say, was not a concern at all of the women on strike. These are examples of the variety in scope, approach, and content of the stories we shared in these monthly exchanges. Hot-button issues for women, art exhibits, and music events were recorded. All of this, news and activities, was a budding, growing women’s culture.  

Beyond Experiment 

The experiment went way past its originally projected six months. We did not stop at that juncture to evaluate or build a fundraising effort. Too often, the necessary outreach to fundraisers is a distraction from the actual doing. As someone who served for many years in the capacity of artist administrator, I find the double or triple hats one wears difficult. One or another aspect of a project suffers. The correspondence in my file is jam-packed with ideas for growing the project. The vision and hopes we had were grand. The Just Us Video women in San Francisco were especially keen on this. Almost at the start, they hoped to expand Videoletters into an ongoing Feminist News Service. They sent everyone an ambitious six-page questionnaire.  

By mid-1977, the project had begun to fissure. Our lives were ever-changing, so maintaining the same level of volunteer involvement became a stretch. I am not sure how audience attendance and interaction went in other cities. This is a critical part of the research that needs to be explored. In New York City, it never grew beyond a handful of us dedicated makers and some of our friends. The larger women’s community never supported a women’s video network and made the trek down West 53rd Street to 11th Avenue. The dominant mainstream media was too all-pervasive. To envision the possibility of an alternative system that actually recorded your voice and spoke to your concerns was hard to imagine for most people. The publicity, location, and frequency of viewing venues for these alternatives were far too limited. Hence, they had little or no impact even on a community that would be receptive to seeing women’s lives on the screen.  

The sad reality was that far too few feminists were media savvy and simply did not see or understand the necessity of building our own media systems. The vast majority, instead, were working to open doors within the existing male-dominated social and political structures. The creation of a system where a feminist vision reigned was not a common goal. In 1975, in the middle of Videoletters’ first productions, Red Stockings held a news conference about Gloria Steinem’s ties to the CIA. They contacted the mainstream and alternative print media, but it never occurred to these highly political women to let us makers of feminist videos know about their press conference so that a moving-image record of the event would exist. It would not be until the early 2000s that a cadre of new feminist media activists would come out with this clarion call: “If media is not your first issue, make it your second.”⁹Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a media justice leader and founder of Third World Majority, brought that vision to the 2007 Women and the Media Conference in Boston. This succinct call for media action was used as an introduction to a new Feminist Media Policy approved by the National Organization of Women in November 2011. This reflects the silos and provincialism of New York City. In contrast, Tucson Feminists in Media took a far different role and frequently showed up at press conferences.  

In 1978, with the advent of the Comprehensive Educational Training Act (CETA) and anticipated CETA funds, Carol Anshien wrote a proposal to revive International Videoletters. Elizabeth Garfield, who took on a position at WIC, wrote a form letter seeking input about the new initiative that was renamed Video Exchange. This letter also sits in my Videoletters file. Even at the start of Videoletters, feminist ground was shifting, though we were unaware at the time. By 1978, our media and feminist energy had moved elsewhere, and this newer iteration of Videoletters never materialized. 

Decades Later  

The desire at Just Us Video in San Francisco to expand Videoletters was especially strong. I am thrilled to report between an initial draft and this final copy the whole group has reported.  They, too, are looking for an archival home for their material. Several of their tapes have survived. One is in my collection at the Schlesinger Library. In 2016, I put a two-page sheet together about the project and posted it on Scribd.¹⁰Scribd was a great and free document posting site. This is the 2019 updated version of INTERNATIONAL VIDEOLETTERS 1975–1977: Learn/View/Document/Study, which is now sorely out of date. Next, I went on Twitter to “speak” about the project. Within 24 hours, I got a response from Alexander Keefe.¹¹Keefe wrote a stellar article about the video wanderlust, Shridhar Bapat and Aleph Null, “Shridhar Bapat’s Undergrounds in 2011.” Bapat was the third, and still largely unrecognized, founder of The Kitchen. Oh, how technology has evolved since the mid-1970s!  

Keefe announced there were Videoletters at Media Burn. Susan Milano and I reconnected. Helena Shaskevich started her study of New York City feminist video artists. Lexington Davis, a media studies student, conducted interviews. A few scholars are uniting with us elder media activists from the past to help preserve and study our collections.  But we need more action.  During professor Alexandra Juhasz’s closing media party at the CCNY Graduate Center of the VHS Archives working group (May 2019), she called for Videoletters ephemera. 

In their Fall 2023 issue, Feminist Media Histories published Lexington Davis’s article, “Creating a ‘Feminist Nation’.” Her article brought back old memories that I had forgotten. A tape in my audio-visual material at Schlesinger Library is labeled “Darts,” but I remembered it was actually a feedback session from a Videoletters screening. I alerted Davis of this discrepancy. Her article mentions where the session took place. I had completely forgotten that this feedback happened at Mother Courage restaurant. This feminist eatery, located in SoHo, was a critical gathering spot for women in the movement. We were actively doing outreach for Videoletters to connect with more feminists. Davis’s mention of this underscored another dimension of the project that needs deeper investigation. I immediately wrote Davis to ask if she would continue to delve into the project. She is not.

In March of this year – planning takes so much time – Media Burn hosted a live, one-hour discussion on International Videoletters. I did extensive outreach to as many people I could think of and for whom I had contact information. These were people who were either involved with the project in some way or had an interest in it. After screening the Santa Cruz tape on the Socialist Feminist presentations from the fall of 1975, the less than thirty minutes we had left for discussion barely gave us enough time to delve into the dynamics of the project. Many of us on this Virtual Talk with Video Activists:  International Videoletters had not seen one another since the 1970s.

Evolving Developments

Since then, more tapes have emerged. Two Videoletters and a feedback session, all from New York City, have come to light, been digitized, and made available online. There is something touching and sweet about the dynamics that unfold in these almost one-hour-and-a-half of video reminiscing. Lesbians Organized for Video Experience /L.O.V.E. posted online a Videoletter that Doris Lunden put together and a feedback session in which she discusses how she joined the project: “I committed myself to work on one…part of the reason was that it was a very defined project so it was not a lifetime commitment.” Her tape on the St. Marks Lesbian Health Clinic follows. Several doctors and patients are interviewed about how the clinic started, its services, and future plans. Towards the end, one of the wonderful things is that one of the doctors talks about how they need a pamphlet about health services. She looks out directly to the national audience, asking if such a thing already exists, please send them a copy that they can adapt. 

Media Burn now holds more International Videoletters than any other archive. It is all online. That is where the other more recently available New York City tape is located which was shot in December 1975. It is the essence of what we were building in New York City. It starts with some feedback, then shifts to Tracy Ward’s Open Video editing room as she tries to edit different city feedback. We never see her; we just hear her voice. Suddenly, she “run[s] downstairs [to] record a hassle in New York” with a landlord. Later, a fire. And there is more about housing difficulties. She signs off. In a car ride through the city, Stevie Wonder sings, “Living for the City.” The camera shifts to Christina Nochese, in Brooklyn, at the National Congress of Neighborhood Women. She interviews one of their members. The tape ends with a bit more feedback. Next, Carol Anshien shows the Women’s Interart Center space where she has just edited this collaborative Videoletter as she signs off.  

It is important to note that Media Burn has taken the tapes and made them publicly available. They also have no means to collect the ephemera. This is a critical dilemma. The tapes tell only half the story. 

The Getty Archives has a few International Videoletters. One is a tape from the Spectra Feminist Media Project. It critically needs to be more accessible. Several tapes exist from the Tucson Feminists in Media at the University of Arizona Queer Archives. Lydia Breen and Leslie Carlson also conducted a great half-hour interview about why they formed Tucson Feminists In Media and how being aligned in Videoletters with New York City and Los Angeles was a hoot.  The L.O.V.E. Collective has a Vimeo channel. Visual Studies in Rochester has a few Videoletters. My audio-visual material at the Schlesinger Library must be requested to view through a private channel.   

Conclusion

With the immediacy of video today and its massive range of material on a multitude of online platforms, it is hard to imagine the limited accessibility of emergent video fifty years ago. Back then, such a cycling of tapes was the dream of every alternative video group of the era. I am sure it happened from time to time by numerous groups. I know, however, of no other program of half-inch reel-to-reel video exchange in the US that sustained itself for so long in the mid-1970s with such a large community of participants.¹²By the early 1980s, VHS became available, and tape decks became commonplace. The Solidarity movement in Poland widely shuttled VHS tapes among groups, enlarging their community with information and activism. In the mid-1990s, Miranda July’s Joanie4Jackie women’s video exchange brought Riot Grrl media to a cadre of participating young filmmakers. Stay tuned for the 2024 version, MissVideo4u, a video exchange via USB.

This sustained exchange of International Videoletters from 1975 to 1977 is significant in itself. As women, we needed to communicate because of the sheer absence of knowledge, views, and perspectives of women that were completely missing in mainstream media. Many of the more male-oriented video groups in this period – identified as Guerrilla Television – were thumbing their noses at the mainstream media, such as the famous Cadillac drive into a bank of TV monitors shows as it burst into flames. We women were delving into a very different kind of storytelling. Our media was, in part, an evolution of consciousness-raising (CR) we had practiced in small groups at the start of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The term Guerrilla Television, in my opinion, never applied to the feminist video of this era. Maybe that is why it is so little documented, studied, and shown. 

With a collection of 16 tapes (maybe more now that Just Us Video has weighed in), a remarkable picture of the feminist community from the mid-1970s exists. I know of no one who has yet been able to view all these tapes. A study of all that is depicted, what people said, and the issues and manner in which concerns were raised could be a study in itself.  There is background work to gather about each group and how they operated. The mechanics of operations and audience development and interaction could be another study. A harder level of work might be to reach out to some audience members and how Videoletters affected them as viewers.     

In the L.O.V.E. feedback tape I say: “Maybe, really what we need to do is have a Videoletters between us in New York City.” Already, I recognized the silos we all lived in within New York City and a certain provincialism of the metropolis that we were struggling against. Oh, how I miss that long-gone activity in New York City. But now, a few glimpses exist of “our New York.” With the burst of newly found Videoletters this spring, I have lost count of how many tapes have come to light. Let’s hope still more tapes are found that show the exuberance and hope we feminists held in the mid-1970s, not just in New York City, but elsewhere across the country.  

Ariel Dougherty

Ariel Dougherty is an independent filmmaker and feminist media strategist. Her work is grounded in fifty years of media advocacy for women’s cinematic storytelling, encouraging it unleash from patriarchal domination. Co-founder of Women Make Movies, now in its 52^nd year, she has mentored hundreds of women filmmakers, produced dozens of works, and directed nine films of her own. She writes about the intersection of feminist media, women’s rights, and funding. From rural New Mexico, she is completing a book about community-based, girl-centered community film teaching programs.