"I have a fifteen year old daughter and all her friends, male and female, come every Saturday night to my house - movie night. We're all squashed into this apartment until eleven pm. I know where my kid is. She can go to other homes, but she has to stay in screaming distance of home." Everyone nods. Yes we know what you mean.

The strong feeling I got from the first few meetings of the women's group was that I was in a new place, or even a new space. The idea of shared wisdom is often used to describe the coming together of like minds, but what was revelatory to me was that I felt I was receiving so much - the simple gifts of openness and a remarkable absence of tension. I was unprepared for the rewards the meetings were beginning to yield. When I was going about my normal routine I would find myself getting a little boost of pleasure when the group would unexpectedly pop into my mind.

As the project continued, I realized my ideas were changing about how to be more woman-positive. I had always thought that if I was going to do something that would assist women, it would have to have a big agenda - doing something that concretely moved toward solving violence, incest, housing problems. It had to be organizing a Take Back the Night march, or setting up a transition house, or hiring a counsellor to deal specifically with childhood sexual assault memories. I hadn't thought that woman-positive might mean something less political, less active and organized. I hadn't thought about the ordinary reality of going to movies alone because somebody might assume you are a prostitute looking for company or feeling belittled around men you lived or worked with.

I had said early in the project that I thought woman-positive -like feminist - had to be about "the important work that has to be done." I discovered that something extremely valuable and woman-positive was really very simple to do. It was also right under our noses but we had never seen it. We had always, as properly trained facilitators, planned for activities and set objectives and desired outcomes. We viewed each activity from a problem-solving stance so that we could say at the end, "Did we accomplish our goal?" "Were our objectives met?" Now here we were arriving at meetings without agendas and plans, literally as though we had never known how to do things the other way. And Mary, my co-researcher at the program, had the same kind of revelation:

All I ever saw [before the project] was the problems and the negative [aspects of women's lives] . . . my idea of this woman-positive thing really broadened from being just the crisis thing to what women need in general to make them happy and their lives productive and satisfactory to them.

While the women's group was finding out one way to be woman-positive, I was finding out a great deal about myself and about other women's lives. By keeping a journal, I was able to explore my own thoughts and reactions. Inevitably, I would think sometimes about the differences between my life and those of the women learners. Their isolation from other women was strange to me. I had not realized that this is a serious problem for women politically. When I wrote about men being the social conduit for these women, I was realizing the hard fact that women could be accused of being agents of their own disempowerment. Socialized to believe they don't amount to much without men, they stand by and watch men talking to each other like old buddies.