During the past fifty years, a number of privately-owned tracts in the U.S. have been designated “women’s land,” meaning that their owners made them available for some set of uses by a wide lesbian or feminist community. Usually these experiments have involved a socialist or pacifist purpose. Two examples that come immediately to mind are a property in upstate New York that has been used as a base for staging protests at a nearby military installation, and a property in Mississippi whose owners intended to help poor people in the vicinity but ended up having to seek protection from the Justice Department. Then there is the annual round of women’s music festivals, notably a week-long event in Michigan [see Bonnie Morris’s piece in this issue], which attracts an audience that’s almost entirely lesbian and largely left-wing. Some of the women’s music festivals are held on “women’s land,” some on leased land. Almost any person who has attended such an event will be aware of various committees that have sprung up around the country to discuss or plan “women’s housing,” referring to housing projects intended exclusively for lesbians and/or feminists. The problem in such committees is that no individual has enough capital to initiate a real project, and no more than two people seem to agree on a detailed concept.
In this article I discuss a suite of RV parks (recreational vehicle parks) that have successfully attracted all-female populations, mainly lesbians but always including some women who define themselves as heterosexual. For the sake of the residents’ privacy, I refer to them as Parks A1, A2, W, and F. Parks A1 and A2 are in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona; Park W is on the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington; Park F is in Florida, near the Gulf Coast. Similar projects may be underway in Virginia and Colorado.
In the early 1990’s Zoe Swanagon and Loverne King, a lesbian couple, founded an organization known as “RVing Women,” and over the course of three years enlisted several thousand women who owned motor homes, travel trailers, or camper vans.
No bank loans were involved, but a few women from outside RVing Women made loans. Swanagon told prospective lenders that she expected to sell all the unsold lots within six months of opening the park. In fact, she sold them in three months. Women from all over the country would appear at the park saying, “We heard about this place; we’re not interested in buying but we just wanted to take a look.” If the visitors spent one night there, they were likely to get up in the morning, race to the office, and ask “What’s for sale?” Demand outran supply so quickly that in 1995 Swanagon opened a similar park (A2) across the street from Park A1. Park W was started by another couple, friends of Swanagon and King, a year or two later. Park F followed, with lot prices and sizes about twice as big as those at Parks A1 and A2.
In my view, one key to the initial viability of these projects was their freedom from ideology. If anything, the principals assumed a conservative posture. Swanagon and King did their best to make themselves popular with the local city council while the conversion of Park A1 was in progress. It was converted from an ordinary commercial rental park to a condominium association with some fairly peculiar rules. Swanagon and King had personal ties to most of their initial customers, and encouraged these women to interact positively with the established institutions of the surrounding town. Women moving into Park A1 volunteered at the local library, gave money to the policemen’s benefit fund, baked cookies for local youth groups’ fundraising events, and so on. Thus, while there were a certain number of petty incidents of friction with the neighbors, there was never a need to call Janet Reno’s office. Occasionally a young man would drive by the entrance, hurl in a beer bottle, and shout “Dykes!” The more common troubles with the surrounding community were criminal intrusions that had nothing at all to do with the sexual orientation of the residents, and probably more to do with their age than with their gender. The average age of Park A1’s residents during its first years of operation was over sixty.
Swanagon told the major daily newspaper in Phoenix that the parks were meant to serve “widows, divorcees, and old maids”—a description that cast the mission of her business far into the closet. The project received favorable coverage, but perhaps her caution was unnecessary: More recently, The Arizona Republic has printed at least one editorial supporting gay marriage.
The central facility in Park A1, including a swimming pool, a billiard room, a ballroom, a laundromat, an office, and a library, was deemed a private clubhouse for RVing Women. As a club, it excluded men except between the hours of noon and two PM. The object was to deter men from buying in without breaking the law. Eventually, both Parks A1 and A2 came under Housing and Urban Development (HUD) scrutiny, and now both loudly assert their fair housing practices. Rules discriminating against men per se have been dropped. Neither the owners nor the inhabitants of these parks have remained exclusively female, but the men one sees walking around are likely to be employees.
Parks A1 has 226 lots, Park A2 has 225. Parks W and F have fewer. A1 and A2 are fully occupied during winter holidays and nearly full during all of December, January, February, and March. A majority of lots are owned by couples. A number of Park W’s lot owners are winter residents of the Arizona parks, and they summer in Washington. Moves from A1 or A2 to Park F, or the reverse, are not uncommon, even though Park F was organized by an entirely different group. How many more of these institutions can prosper is unknown. Although all but Park F were intended mainly for RV’s, not for tied-down mobile homes, the reality is that most lots in Parks A1 and A2 are now occupied by “park models,” a type of mobile home that fits within a square-footage restriction to squeeze into RV park zoning. In Parks A1 and A2, lots without permanent structures sell quickly, because there aren’t many left. Lots in Park W languish on the market for a year or two, and prices there have fallen somewhat. The difference may be due to the lesser development of common recreational facilities at Park W. Park F targets a different income group, has newer and more extensive common facilities, and continues to fill up.
The major political crisis of the first few years occurred when a minority of Park A2’s condo board initiated a lawsuit against Swanagon and against the previous owner of the property. The suit was about allegedly undisclosed defects in the property, but many of the residents chose sides according to their perception of some ideological divide. Curiously, the most radical feminists were initially the ones most supportive of Swanagon. They recognized a tremendous value in her having brought “women’s housing” to life. Never mind what they may have thought of her conservative posture, or of the smooth style of an experienced real-estate saleswoman. Similarly, radical feminists have remained on good terms with the biggest individual lenders in all the parks, seeing in their services a value to the cause even though the lenders aren’t especially progressive in their thinking. In the final analysis, the suit was more expensive for the condo association than for the defendants.
Few women now living in these parks are political activists of any kind. A handful have been prominently active in the past, but peace and seclusion seem to be the desiderata that draw people to live in these environments. A woman who summers in Provincetown speaks of P’town as a “zoo,” and then in winter (not without self-mockery) complains that the RV park is a “bore.” Publicity is not wanted, and I received some advice not to write this article. I was unable to enlist any resident to collaborate in its writing. On the other hand, the residents are delighted to welcome celebrities of the lesbian world. Margarethe Cammermeyer, the former colonel and congressional candidate, came to visit one of the parks, and large numbers of women wanted their picture taken with her. Cris Williamson, a singer famous in these circles, has a mother living near one of the parks; the concert she gave was sold out almost as soon as the tickets went on sale.
Diversity in these communities is limited. Women of color among the owners and residents are almost as scarce as men. Few women under the age of fifty can be seen, but some of the aged and infirm manage to remain in the parks until death, particularly if they have partners to take care of the details of daily life. Some affluent women own lots that they use for occasional getaways, but most of the lots are used as primary residences, at least on a seasonal basis. The requirement to rent or own sets a lower boundary on residents’ economic status, but the threshold is quite low. A single lot and a used RV can be had for $25,000 or less and can be financed without a bank-worthy credit rating. Typical occupational backgrounds are nursing, teaching, administrative assistantship, and military office. Graduate degrees aren’t uncommon but appear to run towards the usual “female” disciplines such as social work and library science.
The residents’ geographic origins are diverse but clustered. A group of women from New Jersey, all previously acquainted, bought lots in Park A1 at the same time, several on the same street. For Parks A1 and A2, the “locals” would be the Californians. Only a tiny handful of women who already lived in Arizona have ended up in these parks. I have limited information on the population of Park F, but have seen persons there who had long lived in Boston or Virginia. This distribution probably follows the normal pattern of retirement from the east and west coasts of the U.S. Since Park W is more of a seasonal resort, its condo association consists of women who live outside the park, but mainly nearby.
The largest bloc of residents in the three southern parks is comprised of retirees. Some women pursue part-time business interests or have jobs connected with the parks’ operations. Many live solely on pensions, some on disability allowances. Except among short-term renters, the fraction with full-time outside jobs is small indeed.
In any condominium association, a certain amount of energy goes into bickering over rules, budgets, and vendors. In these parks, the effect is augmented by the fact that most residents’ social lives are also centered in the park. Even those who seem to spend most of their time talking about their condo association’s administrative issues, or their neighbors’ bad habits, will be heard to complain that nobody talks about anything else. I have observed exactly the same phenomenon in mainstream retirement homes. By reducing mobility and outside obligations, old age concentrates the focus on the home front. A common gender and prevailing sexual orientation are almost incidental.
They are not incidental to younger women who have no previous exposure to such a community. Newcomers are enchanted as much as long-time residents are disillusioned. Many buyers end up reselling within a few years, so a cohort of new customers arrives each season. Some sales are due to a death, but more are due to break-ups, to a lack of suitable employment opportunities in the low-end service economies that surround all four of these parks, to simple boredom, to the decision that a dream of retirement cannot be soon enough realized, or to the insight that these properties, while rentable, are not a good investment for non-residents.
Swanagon sold her properties in Park A1 during the course of the lawsuit against her by A2. She is regarded with affection or even reverence by some but with contempt or bitterness by others. She still acts as a lender in connection with these parks, as well as with other real estate in the area. Her friends who started Park W are also out of that business and live in Arizona near Swanagon. The organization known as RVing Women still exists but no longer has any formal connection with Park A1.
Other models for “women’s housing” might have worked equally well. I don’t know of any that have. Given this example of success, other entrepreneurs have been copying it rather than pioneering. In addition to the four to six projects mentioned above, I am aware of proposals that have circulated among potential lenders for the development of several similar projects that got nowhere. Perhaps it is the lenders’ conservatism that prevents novel approaches. When the opportunity to invest in a proven method is ever-present, nobody wants to risk investing in an offbeat solution.
One might then ask why investors in the original project had any confidence. Swanagon’s vision, business experience, and personal capital had something to do with it. Another important point is that before Park A1 began operation, there was a lot of pent-up demand for “women’s housing.” Now the demand is largely satisfied. Will there be a call for “women’s nursing homes” in the future? This seems fanciful, since most nursing homes are inhabited mainly by women.
F. (Mimi) Gerstell is a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology.
