Midway through the afternoon I tried to get a sense of what women wanted to do in the "loose ends time before supper. Without any input from the others, women in each of the different rooms were engaged in the same discussion:

Somehow, we have to learn how to take care of ourselves or we will be of no use to anyone, including our students.

Watching the skit rehearsal I realized they were acting out a very funny story about how so many of us at the workshop resisted accepting our right to work in the beautiful surroundings of the Inn.

All four discussions had arrived at the same point. As a researcher, I felt the excitement of having our work validated not only by each other, but by triangulation - coming to the same conclusions through a variety of processes! We felt like a community of women who, despite our many differences, could work in independent groups yet arrive at conclusions that indicated how, in fact we were interdependent. We needed each other's support and encouragement to take care of ourselves, to meet our physical and emotional needs, so that we could continue our work. As one woman wrote in her evaluation of the workshop:

I've had time during discussions to inquire and reflect and to realize very clearly my own issues of safety and to take seriously how I need to take care of myself and my own boundaries - rules that need to be articulated and supported through my work and co-workers.

For the rest of the afternoon, women attempted to talk about how we can take care of ourselves. It was a struggle. Another woman later wrote:

The workshop on "How to take care of ourselves " was very difficult. We kept going back to how we take care of others, but eventually we did talk a lot about ourselves. We realize that for us to take care of ourselves we have to say "no" to our bosses and organizations, but not to our learners.

That evening, we laughed and applauded each other. Kate Nonesuch (Malaspina College) presented a monologue about being a lesbian out in the world and inside this project.

I was feeling that I was too much in the closet in the group. Many of the participants knew I was a lesbian, but I didn't know if everyone knew. In any case, no one was mentioning it in casual conversation, and I wasn't mentioning it either. I knew that at least one woman in the project had been confronted with the word " dyke" back at home, and I figured it might be happening to others. So I talked about three things: first I told Kate Clinton's joke about coming out to George Bush because her mother had said, "Don't tell your father, it will kill him."

Then, I talked about "flaunting." It seems to me that whenever lesbians push the edges, when they neck in public, or wear outrageous slogans on their T-shirts, or insist on coming out at times and places where it might seem irrelevant they make it safer for other women to make some choices in their own lives. When lesbians say we can live our lives without men, we make it possible for women who choose to be straight to be more independent in their relationships with men. All this aside, flaunting is fun and empowering.