Ruth Mountaingrove
Ruth Mountaingrove was an American radical lesbian feminist photographer, poet and musician, known for her photography documenting the lesbian land movement in Southern Oregon.
Early life and education
She was born Ruth Shook on February 21, 1923, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Edith Shelling and Herbert Daniel Shook. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Kutztown State Teacher's College in 1945, majoring in science with minors in English and Spanish. In 1946, she published a book of poems, Rhythms of Spring, and married Bern Ikeler. After nineteen years of marriage and five children, they divorced in 1965. Mountaingrove joined the Philadelphia chapter of NOW in 1966, and worked to change abortion laws. She helped found Women in Transition by writing for the newspaper, assisting battered women, and helped facilitate the first lesbian group in the city.''[WomanSpirit]'' magazine
She met her future partner Jean in 1970. When she met Jean, realized that she is a lesbian, and started to make a living with writing for a magazine, Country Women, and newspaper, the Women’s Press, in Eugene, Oregon. Because of being lesbians, she and Jean were expelled from their Mountain Grove home. Country Women supported their search for a place to settle around the West Coast. In 1971 they moved to Southern Oregon, taking the name of the intentional community where they lived for two years, Mountain Grove. They moved to Golden, Oregon, which was a gay commune and founded WomanSpirit, a lesbian feminist quarterly published collectively near Wolf Creek, Oregon, from 1974 to 1984. The magazine was established, inspired by the experience of writing for Country Women. It was the first American lesbian/feminist periodical to be dedicated to both feminism and spirituality. Their vision for the magazine was "international and radical feminist. We wanted a cultural revolution—a total reordering of institutions and values. It was to be a modest magazine with grand goals." One of the goals is "to validate that it's okay to be wherever you are in your own development". Ruth and Jean wanted all women to feel having many other people who shares the same spirit and experiences. The contents of this magazine are pliable as they are what readers supplied and dealt with by anyone who could help at that time, so that the magazine's spirituality is not firm.Oregon Women's Land Trust
In the spirit of removing "man" and "men" from her descriptions of her work, Mountaingrove and Tee Corinne led "ovular" photography workshops instead of "seminars" on photography, where "women could learn photography in the context of the women's movement, providing a means for the women to examine the differences between the way men pictured women and the way the women saw themselves." The Blatant Image grew out of the ovular workshops.Ruth took the pictures included in the materials Phillis Lyon and Del Martin collected for their magazine called Lesbian Love and Liberation.
The Mountaingroves purchased land in 1978, called Rootworks, where Ruth Mountaingrove published the book Turned on Woman's Songbook and a book of poetry, For Those Who Cannot Sleep. Between 1974 and 1986, Mountaingrove spent a 12-year period photographing women in the lesbian community in Oregon and other parts of the United States. She photographed meetings of the Oregon Women's Land Trust, documenting their lives at OWL Farm, a southern Oregon lesbian land community providing "access to rural land in order to be able to live outside of mainstream patriarchal culture".
The Mountaingroves separated in 1985.