A Paper of Our Own

Vermont Woman newspaper
November 2019

by Kate Mueller

I met Rickey Gard Diamond, Vermont Woman’s founding editor, and her then future husband, Stephen MacArthur, at Goddard College in 1980, when we were all enrolled in the adult degree program. We were there at very different points in our lives. Rickey was a recently divorced mother of three, intent on finishing her college degree and creating a new life. I was a confused and often depressed young woman, scraping by in New York City, where I’d drifted to, after dropping out of high school in Newport, Vermont. I’d lived until then a life of unfocused rebellion, finally enrolling in Goddard in an effort to take myself seriously, my stabs at poetry and painting.

The years went by and I left Goddard, eventually graduating from Johnson State College, after many missteps and drama, in 1984, my freshly printed English degree in hand and vague writing and editing ambitions in my head. After graduating, I chose to live In Montpelier because I could afford the rents (Burlington was too expensive). I would have to get a job in town, or maybe nearby Barre, because I had no car, only a motorcycle. I tried and failed to get a job tutoring English and wound up as a cook at a Mexican restaurant and at a senior meals program site, making minimum wage, which then, in 1984, was $3.25 per hour.

I reconnected with Rickey and Stephen just as Vermont Woman was being launched. In November 1985, my then new husband and I rented an apartment in Montpelier from Stephen’s dad, who owned a building in town, and I heard from Stephen about this groundbreaking new publication and about the launch being feted at the State House, with Governor Madeleine Kunin in attendance.

I confess to twinges of longing and envy. Being a writer or an editor seemed like some distant Olympian goal to me—while I slogged away at my low-paying jobs, first as a cook then working for Washington County Mental Health and a halfway house in Plainfield, caring for people with Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy, with schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome. Editing and writing seemed glamorous to me, and working for a politically relevant and important publication added to the cachet. In retrospect I would say that the work I did then, that underpaid people-caring work that so many women wind up doing, is, of course, entirely relevant and valuable.

Fast-forward nearly three decades. I’m a published writer, a freelance editor, a divorcee, and a mom. My work as a book editor had faltered a bit and I was looking for something to fill the income gap, when word filtered to me that Vermont Woman was looking for an editor.

I now had plenty of credentials, in design and layout as well as editing and writing; I even had some journalistic experience. In the mid-1990s, I was on the first board of the Montpelier Bridge (now just The Bridge) and was one of the many who toiled on that nascent publication, during those early difficult years. I wound up on that board almost by happenstance—and unexpectedly fell in love with journalism. Unexpected because I had never had journalistic ambitions, only literary ones. This little community newspaper, focused on Montpelier, opened up the town for me: so much going on, so many stories to tell. We were providing an exciting and important service. I loved inteviewing people and working hard to craft an engaging and accurate story. I wrote many articles and both edited and did the layout on a number of issues and loved the creative process of pulling it all together—and then holding the final printed product in my hands. That smell of fresh newsprint.

I was deeply invested in the paper; it was on some level my paper, and I felt I had a great deal to offer. But rightly or wrongly, I always felt on the outside—like I was jumping up and down, trying to get attention, some recognition, which seemed to perennially elude me. That paper, beloved by many, carries on, now remarkably in its 26th year, still performing its crucial community service. But out of frustration, I drifted away from the paper and out of journalism.

When I applied for the editorship at Vermont Woman in 2014, Sue Gillis was semilegendary to me. She was the founder, after all, of Vermont Woman, and I knew she’d cofounded a second paper, Vermont Times. I’d heard she was “a force of nature.” I was half-expecting to sit down for my interview opposite some intimidating powerhouse of a woman, maybe in a business suit, who would be crisp and no-nonsense and to whom I’d have to prove my feminist cred.

Instead, she was effusive and enthusiastic, warm and talkative, with a heart as big as a house. I got the job, and I was back in the journalism game again, rekindling that early passion for stories, for making connections and informing.

But this time was different. I didn’t have to prove anything. I wasn’t knocking fruitlessly on the door. The door swung wide open, and I had instant respect and recognition. I also found myself in a work environment I especially love and thrive in—more collaborative than hierarchical. Few power struggles or ego wrangles, just a tight little team—Sue, Jan Doerler, the creative director, and me, with Chris Reilly helping during those last difficult production days—working hard together to get out the best paper we could muster. I’d first experienced this way of working in Japan—a culture that is undoubtedly patriarchal and hierarchical but also has an Eastern perspective of the whole being greater than the parts. It was my first job in publishing, and I worked in a big open room with my Japanese colleagues, a beehive of activity, no individual offices. It was collegial and focused, and job descriptions constantly blurred. People did whatever had to be done, from the menial to the exalted, to get the project done.

As with my days with The Bridge, I was once again happily discovering and shining the spotlight on important issues and remarkable people—in this case women. I had entered a magical queendom. I learned that women loved writing about women. And women loved reading about women. There was a great hunger and need and a delight in sharing stories and connecting.

I, myself, would never have conceived of such a woman-only publication, and in some ways, I may be an odd fit because I have never overly identified myself as female. By that I mean I feel wholly and comfortably female but prefer to go around the world just seeing people and to think of myself and others as embodied consciousnesses. This goes way back, starting at about age 8. I weirdly disliked the words girlfriend and boyfriend. For me, everyone was just friends and I was nobody’s girlfriend. Being some boy’s girlfriend seemed silly and me having girlfriends seemed silly too. Couldn’t we all just be people, each magical and different, valued for our talents, for ourselves, beyond sex, race, and nationality? Couldn’t my friends, all my friends and my lovers too, just be friends? (My aversion to those words continues to this day!)

But, of course, my personal vision of me, my sense of who I was and could be, did not match at all the society I had been born into, which was telling me my primay path was marriage and motherhood and my favorite color had to be pink. Having a female body was fraught, dangerous even—such as my becoming pregnant at age 19, even though I used birth control, and needing an abortion, which fortunately was safe and available. As a young woman, just walking down the street was perilous. I was seen only as a sex object, it seemed, and it was confusing and demeaning and scary, and it made me very angry. I would not be limited, and so I pushed myself out there, traveling alone at age 21 through Southeast Asia, which meant nearly getting raped on a Malaysian beach, but I survived and toughened.

Second wave feminism had a huge impact on me as a girl and teenager, and I became an activist for a woman’s right to choose—along with my environmental activism. But being a cranky individualist and an anti-institutionalist, I still resisted all-women groups or activities, any kind of “we women” narrative. I wanted that big divisionless whole, that happy beehive of beings. What I didn’t fully realize is that though the distant goal is for an egalitarian society—to get beyond tribes, every single version of “them” and “us”—those of us who still toil under the radar need to share our stories. Sharing those stories is empowering because we are otherwise in danger of thinking our struggles are just our own when it’s really systemic. We are kept separate and powerless. MeToo is a glaring instance of this. I think women themselves were shocked to learn how pervasive sexual intimidation of various kinds—from an unwanted butt pat to rape—continues to be, how every single woman has a story to tell, still, as we close in on the mid-21st century.

There was a point not too long ago when some said the need for a woman-only publication was past because women had gained sufficient recognition and power. Young women felt equal and valued. Why even feminism? It was anti-man and fuddy-duddy—your mom’s feminism. And now with gender fluidity, being female has become, apparently, a choice. Woman is a kind of category, a fluid, shifting state, and being born with a female body and “choosing” to remain female is a category of its own, that of cisgender. Interestingly, I find this slicing and dicing of identities (some posit there are as many as 63 genders) both aligned with my “embodied consciousness” POV and counter to it—because it means a proliferation of subgroups, many more “them’s” and “us’s,” and a real danger of people splintering into factions that work against one another.

The MeToo movement and the current anti-woman administration show that women can’t rest on their laurels, not even for a moment. Battles that were won now need to be fought all over again. And however you identify, being born with a uterus and ovaries is still going to present one with unique challenges, from pregnancy and all that it entails (from terminating it to ensuring a safe pregnancy and birth and good childcare) to cancers peculiar to women (breast, uterine, ovarian) and to bodily threats that primarily women endure, along with the ongoing struggle for social equity. It is dangerous to cease recognizing that a group, namely women, have struggled and continue to struggle for rights—from property ownership and equal pay to voting and reproductive rights. So yes, there is still plenty of need for a woman-powered publication or certainly for some media mechanism for informing and organizing.

It’s a mad mad world out there, where truth has become fungible. There has always been deception and propaganda, but now it’s easily amplified, refracted endlessly in the funhouse mirrorland of the internet. The media, bashed repeatedly by Trump, in some quarters is struggling. Newspapers, both small and large, have, over the years, folded or laid off people to survive and continue to do so. But even the digital media, once seen as the future of news, is struggling to stay afloat. It’s obvious a new Vermont Woman must live on the web, but how that can work is unclear in this challenging environment. Meanwhile, there has never been a greater need for fact finders and checkers, for investigative reporting, for speaking truth to power.

Being in this business it’s inevitable that mistakes get made and toes are stepped on. I had to navigate some tricky situations a few times and was glad to have the guidance of Sue, an old newspaper hand. Fortunately, those situations were few. Many more were the moments of Jan and I realizing we had by some miracle, once again, nailed the cover and put the paper to bed by the deadline, of an organization or a person we had profiled  thanking us for our great coverage, of a writer thanking me for bringing her story into better focus, and of folks telling us what a great issue it was or what a moving editorial I had written.

I feel fortunate to have first inherited and then expanded and developed a cadre of talented and enthusiastic writers, who often brought me great story ideas and leads and who were willing to tackle a challenging assignment. I’m thankful for the great working relationships I had with everyone.

I thank you, Sue, for boldly conceiving of this publication, for bringing it into being and keeping it alive through great personal sacrifice. I came to the party late, but I’m so very grateful to have had this opportunity—another paper to love and a place where I could shine. A paper of our own.

Kate Mueller, sadly the last editor of Vermont Woman, is a freelance book editor and visual artist. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her partner, Keith, and her son, Iain.