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the years of suppression.
Grisly tales of maltreatment and inhumanity emerged from these sessions including those from art school students whose professors classically discouraged them by historical and sexual denigration. This treatment was even handed out by well-meaning men so conditioned that it never occurred to then that they were making it impossible for many women to continue working. The survivors became understandably reluctant to identify with other women's art, thus encouraging the isolation which, xxxxx until recently, made so many women artists accomplices to their own professional murders. Others simply retired from the art world competition and worked in total isolation. The most exhilarating single aspect of the early days of the women's art movement was the re-emergence of and communication between these "invisible" people. They included women who were already in the art world by marriage or friendship but who had rarely profited from the studio visits, bar talk and discussions of their work which the men had limited primarily to their "peers" (other men). Slowly women artists came out of the woodwork, and slowly a real community was formed.

One meeting I attended early in 1971 seems in retrospect to be particularly significant. Some 35 women artists sat in a large circle and described their work, with no visual aids. Time after time, objects of an acceptably ambitious art world nature and scale would be described. Then there would be a curious pause and the artist would add hesitantly something to the effect of "then, in my private time (or in the summer, or at night), I make these little collages (or journals, or work with dolls, or paint on pebbles)." One woman made large hard edge color canvases, but in her spare time was photographing friends in the nude against mylar hangings, creating a strange, intimate but fugitive world which seemed in direct conflict with her "public" style. When it was my turn, I "confessed" to writing fiction in my [[strikethrough]]spare[[/strikethrough]]leisure time. This "closet [[strikethrough]] art,too vulnerable and private and by implication "minor" for public [[/strikethrough]]