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It was the FSW that provided the day-in, day-out womanpower for renovating first the original (ex-Chouinard) premises, and two years later the current North Spring Street structure. When a show is going up, when a poetry reading needs to be videotaped, when someone has to sit at the front door and collect money for a play or a concert, when the bathroom has to be cleaned and the floors swept -- it's usually the FSW not only does the work, but organizes it.

The philosophy behind this is that, as feminist artists, we must both make art and be responsible for getting it out into the world. In the course of doing this, at the Woman's Building, we learn administrative and organizing skills which are just as important to us as our skills in writing, performing, painting.

Our original notion of how the Woman's Building would function was that each participating group (the FSW, a bookstore, a local NOW chapter, several galleries) would be represented on a managerial board which would assume collective leadership for the Building. For the first two years, we used that ideal model as our actual operating structure -- or rather, tried to. For the groups represented on the board were not peers. The FSW had signed the lease; FSW women were active in and around the Building far more than women from any of the other groups. By 1975, when we lost our lease and moved to Spring Street, we admitted formally what had long been a reality: that the FSW is the responsible group within the Woman's Building.