Susan Wiseheart (1941), Paula Mariedaughter (1945) and Jeanne Neath (1951) are the founders of XX Amazons. Sally Tatnall (1937), long time resident of Cleveland Ohio, and Puck (1948), nomad living in her van, have joined Susan, Paula and Jeanne in the planning group of XX Amazons. We are XX Amazons! We invite like-minded women to think of yourselves as XX Amazons too! We need as many women as we can get in the fight to end patriarchy, end the transactivist assaults on women only spaces and radical feminists, celebrate womanhood, and re-create the female-centered world.

Susan Wiseheart
I was born in 1941 and became anti-racist at age five when I observed the racism in my own community. My life followed middle class tradition for women in my family (go to college, work a bit, get married, have kids) until my male husband and I became involved in the hippy and anti-war movements. I was also a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s in whatever way I could be while raising two small children (daughter and son).

In the midst of my divorce (I was not cut out for the sex roles I was expected to follow) I discovered feminism (1970) and soon came out as Lesbian. During the 70s and 80s I worked for Women’s Liberation and continued my anti-racism and peace activities. I worked on newsletters and to support a Women’ Center, a Feminist Center, and women’s bookstores, and I obtained a women’s studies degree. I helped found a women’s organization that held many events and I became a Lesbian Separatist.

The Michigan Women’s Music Festival was a very deep part of my life because of my passion for women’s music and drumming. I attended all forty of the Festivals. In the late 80s, trying to get my life as much like Michigan as possible, I moved to Lesbian land in the Missouri Ozarks and spent the 90s settling in, breaking up, adopting singlehood with great joy, and working with Paula and Jeanne and others to hold events for Lesbians and feminist women. I also practiced Dianic witchcraft, though when I moved into the midst of nature instead of living in a city, I discovered that I did not need the outer ritual of it as much as I had when still urban. Despite not much desire to be religious, I consider myself strongly Goddess and Earth related always and forever, just as I consider myself female, anti-racist, against all forms of oppression, strongly feminist, and totally Lesbian.

Paula Mariedaughter
At twelve years old, I first became acutely aware of discrimination against girls when I was denied the chance to be part of the school “safety patrol” because I was not a boy! Girl Scouting was a central part of my girlhood growing up in segregated south Florida. Girl Scouts encouraged us to be “a friend to all, and a sister to every other girl scout”. My family of six embarked on long camping trips together as we explored the US. After college, in 1969 at age 24, I began my sixteen year career as a flight attendant for TWA choosing Kansas City, Missouri as my home base.

In 1973 when I came of age as a young adult, the Women’s Liberation Movement was thriving. I was an active member of the Kansas City Women’s Liberation Union in the early 1970s and for many years. At that same time, I was a union activist working for true union representation in dealing with our life-dominating, corporate employer. I learned more during those years than I ever did in college. Falling in love with other women equally excited about challenging the patriarchal culture made choosing to be a lesbian a life-affirming choice.

Jeanne Neath and I moved to northwest Arkansas in 1987 to build a cabin and a big garden. During the next three decades we organized a variety of feminist and lesbian feminist events locally and regionally.

For the last twenty four years I have been making quilts—many of which express my strong feminist views. This creative outlet was one of my motivating dreams for leaving city life. To see my website on creativity go to paulamariedaughter.com.

I have been honoring the Earth and the life cycle of birth, death and regeneration and claiming myself as a Dianic witch, or wise-woman, for the past four decades. The Goddess of 10,000 Names is one of the many designations used to identify the female life source honored by all our ancestors around the ancient world.

In the fall of 2017, at age 72, and diagnosed with a serious cancer, I undertook a two week Goddess pilgrimage to Crete, Greece. Crete abounds with undeniable evidence of the ancient female honoring culture that lived in harmony with nature. I returned reinvigorated and ready for the next challenges of my life as a woman resisting patriarchy and ready to build our female-centered world.

Jeanne Neath
I have been a feminist since I was in high school in the 1960s and experienced job discrimination and sexual harassment at the horse stable in Chicago that was the center of my life at that time. I came out, rejoicing and raging, into the lesbian-feminist movement of the mid 1970s. In the 80s I was part of the all lesbian collective (mostly separatists) that ran Spinsters Books and Webbery, a feminist bookstore and women’s resource center in Lawrence, Kansas. In graduate school, and for a short while afterwards, I taught Women’s Studies classes (Psychology of Women, Introduction to Women’s Studies, a seminar on the Lesbian Experience: Personal and Political) at the University of Kansas.

In 1987 I moved with my partner, Paula Mariedaughter, to homestead on lesbian land in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. With the guidance and help of lesbian carpenters we built an 800 square foot solar house. We also created a big organic garden. We lived without refrigeration for eight years. I have a deep interest in the wildlife around us and study nature awareness and primitive living skills (which I believe may become necessary given the path patriarchy has put us on).

In the 1990s I worked as a researcher and teacher at the University of Arkansas in the Department of Rehabilitation (working for and with people with disabilities). I taught a class on Multicultural and Gender Issues in Rehabilitation. Around that same time I edited and published the feminist journal, At The Crossroads: Feminism, Spirituality and New Paradigm Science.

Paula and I have had micro-businesses as web developers and now a native plants nursery. We share an ecofeminist blog (ecofeminismblog.org) about our lives, our homestead, and ecofeminist politics. Paula and I continue to live together (34 years!) in the house we built.

I started doing political work as a team with Susan and Paula in the 1990s when we were all part of a collective creating a series of regional and national Radical Lesbian Feminist Uprisings. The three of us continued to work together giving radical feminist workshops at women’s events. After we were de-platformed and prevented from giving our workshop on “The Disappearing L: Lesbians Rise Up” at the 2017 Goddess Festival in Fayetteville Arkansas we responded, in part, by creating the XX Amazons web site and the XX Amazons’ Uprising.

I am desperate to stop patriarchy and its assaults on women and the earth.