Frequently Asked
Questions
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 Who are you?
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I have an, er,
unusual background. I came of age in the late
'60s, graduated in 1969 and went on to attend the
University of Washington during Peace and Civil
Rights Movement days. I became a campus radical
and participated in the civil rights and anti-war
marches and demonstrations of those times. In
1970, as was common with young people of my
generation, I served as a volunteer worker in
Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine district the summer
after the area had been torn by race riots. This
experience deepened my commitment both to human
and civil rights for all people and to nonviolent
resistance, a commitment which endures to this
day. I
am the survivor of two abusive marriages, and I
am the mother of 11 children, all biologically
mine, most of them born during years in which I
and my family were members of conservative,
fundamentalist churches which were originally
part of the "Jesus People" movement of
the 60s and 70s. Over the years, I was part of a
number of grassroots political movements
nationally and locally, as either a leader or
participant, including the
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homeschooling/unschooling
movements, the homesteading/back-to-the-land movement,
the organic gardening movement, the natural foods co-op
movement, the simple living movement, and the midwifery
and home birth movements. I have homeschooled my children
since 1983 and five of them are grown now. My last four
children I birthed at home with midwives. I moved to
rural acreage as a homesteader in 1991, and I continue to
live on acreage on a rural peninsula in the Pacific
Northwest, where together with my family I garden
organically and extensively and raise sheep for wool and
chickens for eggs.
During the years from 1989 through 2000, I published a
magazine, Gentle Spirit; I started the magazine from my
kitchen table, typed on a Selectric typewriter and
distributed to 17 local subscribers; it eventually grew
to become a full-color international publication with a
circulation of 50,000 readers. Most of Gentle Spirit's
subscribers were homeschooling, homesteading women and
most were conservative and traditional. Over the years I
became a regular speaker at homeschooling conferences
across the country, and I was a frequent a guest on
national radio and television programs as well. When I
separated from my husband in 1994 and filed for divorce,
I was publicly excommunicated by my local church and
subsequently "disciplined" by prominent
leaders, peers -- and competitors -- on the Religious
Right and in the homeschooling movement, in particular.
As a result, my magazine was forced out of business and I
was plunged into financial ruin. Unable to rebuild my
life even years later, I finally filed a federal lawsuit
against eight organizations on the Religious Right. I won
my lawsuit by a unanimous jury decision in September of
1998 after eight days of trial.
During the dark and tormented months and years following
my excommunication, feminist women reached out to me, I
began to read the work of feminist women, and finally I
became a feminist myself, returning to an interest in
feminism which I had initially developed during the early
days of the Second Wave, but which I left behind when I
married, had children, and became a conservative
Christian.
Why
this site?
This site is. in part. my attempt to give to other women
something of what so many feminist women -- either
personally and individually or through their writings --
have so graciously given to me over the past eight years.
I long to see all women and girls, including the many
women I loved and still love from my days as a
conservative Christian, free, whole, fully alive, fully
human.
When I returned to feminism, decades had passed since the
beginning of the Second Wave, and the movement had grown
and changed. Many, many books had been written, from many
perspectives and standponts, and it was difficult to know
where to begin, and even more difficult to construct a
historical and theoretical framework for myself so that I
could begin the process of learning all I wanted to
learn. I've included something of the framework I have
created for myself on this site for the benefit of new
feminists who might not know where to even begin.
How
do you define feminism, and what kind of feminism do you
consider yourself to be?
Feminism is, I believe, a movement whose goal it is to
achieve justice and full equality for women, so that
women may at last be recognized as, and may know
themselves to be, fully human. I identify most with
radical feminism, meaning that branch of feminism which
understands male dominance and oppression of women to be
the root and first opppression. However, my views are not
consistent in every way with all of the historic
distinctives of radical feminism. In some ways, I would
consider myself to be a cultural feminist, meaning a
feminist interested in studying, perpetuating, and
preserving the unique history, art, traditions and
culture of the people of women and in preserving the
notion of women as a people in our own right. As to
political identifications, I am a
"decentralist." I identify most closely with
anarchafeminism, with a feminism interested in
nonhierarchical society, culture, families,
relationships, with decentralization, and "small is
beautiful" economics and government as theorized by
economists and philosophers like Vananda Shiva, Ralph
Borsodi, E. F. Schumacher, and Scott and Helen Nearing. .
As an anarchist, I unschool, I practice noncoercive
parenting, and I consider it part of my work as a
feminist to be outspoken as to the destructiveness of all
hierarchies, big government, centralization, and of all
kinds of coercion, especially in intimate relationships,
but in all relationships.
What
do you consider to be the goals of feminism?
I recently came across what I believe to be a fine and
succinct summary of the goals of feminism, as follows:
Feminism aims to:
Enable women to find their voices and tell their
stories, to make themselves heard at the highest levels
of every institution that affects their lives.
Help women to establish authentic identities and
selfhood, to identify their own needs, and to learn how
to meet them.
Help women to reclaim their bodies and desires from all
who would objectify them and demean their bodies, whether
that might be the fashion industry, pornographers, or the
traditional medical establishment.
Create a world in which women can move about freely and
fearlessly, in which they can take back the streets, take
back the night, take back the days.(1)
I am also interested in a woman-centered life,
woman-centered politics, woman-centered feminism, as
Gerda Lerner has defined the term as follows:
"To be woman-centered means: asking if women
were central to this argument, how would it be defined?
It means ignoring all evidence of women's marginality,
because, even where women appear to be marginal, this is
the result of patriarchal intervention; frequently also
it is merely an appearance. The basic assumption should
be that it is inconceivable for anything ever to have
taken place in the world in which women were not
involved, except if they were prevented from
participation through coercion and repression. When using
methods and concepts from traditional systems of thought,
it means using them from the vantage point of the
centrality of women. Women cannot be put into the empty
spaces of patriarchal thought and systems-- in moving to
the center, they transform the system." (2)
Are you still a
Christian?
Yes. Recently a good feminist friend and eloquent writer,
Ginny Hunt, described her own Christian faith as
something which continues to cling to her, more than she
clings to faith. This is also true for me. Hurt by the
church, I wanted to leave my faith behind entirely but
found I could not. I am now a feminist woman engaged in
the revisioning and re-creating of a woman-centered
expression of the Christian faith.
What
are your plans for the Margins?
I would like to reach as many women as possible, in as
many ways as I can imagine, with the best information and
news I can provide for them as a matter of my own
feminist activism and work, as my free gift to the people
of women. I have a special interest in survivors of
domestic violence, like me, as well as poor women, single
mothers, and women who are or have been oppressed in
relationships, families, or religious groups or in
oppressive cultures. I also have a special concern for
feminist mothers; I just don't think motherhood has
received enough attention, in all of its ramifications,
from the feminist movement as a whole.
Why
do you call the website, "the Margins"?
Because feminists continue to be marginalized in the
world, and we speak "from" the margins and out
of our experiences of marginalization which gives us a
unique and vitally important perspective and point of
view.
Who
pays for the Margins?
I do, as my gift to
the people of women. There is no paid
advertising.
Is the Margins
affiliated with any group or organization?
No. It's my individual project, but I've
received and will continue to receive help from good
feminist friends.
What is your
name?
My name is Cheryl
Lindsey Seelhoff. Online, no matter where I
post, and on the Margins as well, I go by the screen
name, "Heart".
Footnotes: (1) Adapated
from Carol Flinders in her book, At the Root of This
Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger with a Feminist
Thirst. (2) Gerda Lerner, from her book, The
Creation of Patriarchy. Top photo is of me
taken in Summer, 2000.
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