In this memoir, Martha Shelley charts her early life in Brooklyn and her crucial activism as a lesbian feminist in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The book is divided into forty-three short vignettes, several of which recall Shelley’s family history. Her mother left Poland for Cuba in 1921, then moved to Florida and eventually landed in New York. Her father was born in Brooklyn after his family emigrated from Russia. Shelley recounts spending her childhood summers in the Catskills, attending Science High, and matriculating at City College of New York when it was free.
During the 1960s, Shelley was in circles that subscribed to “Sullivanian” psychoanalysis, which critiqued the nuclear family and offered a space for alternative lifestyles — and then tipped into the realm of a cult. Shelley’s accounts of this community provide insight into how the group’s mode of thinking helped her understand her incipient lesbianism prior to the liberation movements that emerged at the end of the sixties. In these early chapters, Shelley describes the challenges that young women faced prior to feminism: pressure from parents and families to marry, struggles to secure meaningful work, encouragement to have rhinoplasty, and the perils that existed for women who wanted to live outside these strictures.
We Set the Night on Fire is most illuminating when Shelley recounts her experiences with the women’s and gay liberation movements. She played an important role in lesbian feminism in New York City and, later, in the San Francisco Bay Area. She witnessed the Stonewall Rebellion and then encouraged the Daughters of Bilitis to protest the treatment of gay people at the Stonewall Inn bar. She was involved in the Gay Liberation Front in New York, the RAT Newspaper, the Lavender Menace protest, the takeover of the 5th Street building by feminists, and the lesbian feminist radio program at WBAI. Shelley’s vignettes of these experiences are detailed and engaging.
The memoir concludes in the early 1980s, with stories about the Women’s Press Collective — a vibrant lesbian feminist publishing organization that operated in the Bay Area during the 1970s — and an extensive road trip that Shelley and the author Max Dashu took across the country to research Indigenous and Jewish history. Shelley and Dashu then left the Bay Area for northern California, near Oregon, to write. In the years following, Shelley would go on to pen a trilogy about Jezebel, an oft-vilified Phoenecian princess who married the king of Israel in the ninth century BCE.
We Set the Night on Fire joins a spate of memoirs by women about the early years of women’s liberation — a heady and exciting time. Shelley’s book adds texture to our growing understanding of feminism, lesbian feminism, gay liberation, and the role of Jewish women in these movements.
Julie R. Enszer is the author of four poetry collections, including Avowed, and the editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier, The Complete Works of Pat Parker, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974 – 1989. Enszer edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
