Penni Mitchell

Deborah Holmberg-Schwartz

DONNA: Herizons began on a regional basis. What was the transition to a national focus like?

PENNI: First, the transition to magazine format was made while we were still a Manitoba publication. We weren't making enough money off the newspapers and we knew our content was more magazine style, more in-depth, philosophical and focusing on individual experiences.

DEBBIE: I think we'd always dreamed of being a national publication but the transition came when we looked at our subscriber list and found that about half of them were from outside Manitoba. We realized there was a great need for what we were doing and we seized the opportunity. We got a very positive response.

DONNA: What controversial issues occurred during the publication of Herizons?

PENNI: Well, because we were considered such radical feminists we were criticized by extremes on the other side, like the socalled pro-life organizations. They identified us as an enemy and boycotted and harassed our advertisers locally which meant we lost some of them. There were letters sent to the federal government demanding our funding be cut because we were anti-family, lesbians, and we killed children and all that kind of bullshit. But those were also the kinds of things that mobilized support for us. People would come by or phone us just to say they were on our side. One controversy was our distribution in Safeway stores. One day our distributor told us that Safeway decided not to keep us on the shelves because we weren't selling enough issues. We believed that. But at the same time the "pro-life" movement in Manitoba took credit for having the magazine banned in the stores. I still don't think that's true.

DEBBIE: No. I think the people who were the magazine's enemies from day one were very opportunistic and butted in where they could to make controversy. It took a tremendous amount of our energy and we didn't need that. We didn't have the time or the staff to be always putting out fires. For me it was typical of what happens to most women's organizations. We fight for our funding to begin with so we barely have enough energy to do what it is we wanted the money for, and once we are doing it there is a constant harassment for us to prove our credibility by standards that we don't accept and answer to people who would never support us in a million years. We didn't care what the Archbishop thought about Herizons for goodness sake! But we found ourselves having to respond to his comments. The lesson for me, and I know this is not a decision of our collective, is that I would respond as little as possible to that now. Even if it brought us support, I'm not sure it was an efficient or emotionally healthy way to go about it. And it's hard to say if those controversies influenced the government and our funding, because even when you do everything right your funding may not continue if you're a feminist organization.