HOWL Campsite Names
In July 2022, we named our campsites after our favorite feminists. We are proud to share some information about each of these amazing women! Visit our Hipcamp listing to learn more or make a reservation. Our camping season runs from June – November.
Crow Cohen
Carol (“Crow”) Cohen (1943 – 2015) was a fixture of Burlington’s activist lesbian community since the 1970s, and one of the founders of HOWL. Born in Hartford, CT, Crow attended UVM starting in 1961. In 1974, Carol “Crow” Cohen moved to Richmond. That year, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, she dialed the local “Women’s Switchboard,” a hybrid rape crisis hotline and general women’s network. “Because Vermont is so small,” Crow wrote in her 2010 memoir Small Town Revolution, “I asked if there were any feminists in Richmond.” She was directed to the doorstep of “Raven,” a woman well connected with the burgeoning lesbian scene and feminist community that congregated in Burlington. Thus began her process of coming out and self-discovery, one narrative among many that define the women’s movement of the era. Crow had a 20-year career as a medical and hospice social worker for Franklin County Home Health, visiting families in rural Vermont. She was a peace activist, both in the U.S. and in the Jerusalem Women’s Community in Israel. She was a lover of nature, insisting on being outdoors in all weather, riding her bike, skiing, hiking, kayaking, and spending time at her remote cabin near Camel’s Hump. Crow continued to shape HOWL into her later years, asking challenging questions and working to achieve mutual understanding in our intentional community. We are privileged to have known her.
Nawal El Saadawi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawal_El_Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi (1931 – 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist. She wrote many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She has been described as “Egypt’s most radical woman”. Saadawi graduated as a medical doctor in 1955 from Cairo University and attended Columbia University, earning a Master’s in public health in 1966. Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian government, in 1981 Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation. She was imprisoned in September 1981 by President Anwar Sadat, for her criticism of his purported democracy. While in prison, Saadawi formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. This was the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt. In prison, she was denied pen and paper, however, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a “stubby black eyebrow pencil” and “a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper” to record her thoughts. She was released later that year, one month after the President’s assassination. Of her experience she wrote: “Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.”
Octavia E. Butler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler
Octavia Estelle Butler (1947 – 2006) was an American science fiction author. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet reading fantasy, and in writing. As a young adult, she took advantage of opportunities to improve her craft, including the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, PA. Following that workshop, she sold her first short stories. Over the next five years, Butler published Kindred (1979) and the Patternist series of 5 novels. In 1985, her novelette Bloodchild won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. Her Xenogenesis trilogy – Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) was republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith’s Brood. During the 1990s, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
Qiu Jin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiu_Jin
Qiu Jin (1875 – 1907) was a Chinese revolutionary, feminist, and writer. Her sobriquet name is Jianhu Nüxia, which, when translated literally into English, means “Woman Knight of Mirror Lake”. Qiu was executed after a failed uprising against the Qing dynasty, and she is considered a national heroine in China; a martyr of republicanism and feminism. The names that Qiu Jin adopted for herself amidst the fall of the Qing dynasty suggested her desire to play the role of the knight-errant — a prototypically male figure established in the Han dynasty and known for swordsmanship, bravery, faithfulness, and self-sacrifice. Accordingly, Qiu called herself ‘Female Knight-Errant of Jian Lake’, as well as ‘Vying for Heroism’.
Rachel Carson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
Rachel Louise Carson (1907 – 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring (1962) and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. Her book Silent Spring (1962) brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Ursula K. LeGuin (we don’t have a campsite for her yet, but this will be the first new one of 2023)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929 – 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including the Earthsea fantasy series. born in Berkeley, California. She earned a master’s degree in French, began writing full-time in the late 1950s, and achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Her literary career spanned nearly sixty years. She produced more than 20 novels and over 100 short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children’s books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an “American novelist”. Le Guin expressed a deep interest in Taoism and Buddhism, and in 1997 she published a translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Wangari Muta Maathai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai (1940 – 2011) was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a Ph.D. In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental organization focused on tree planting, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. In 1984, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “converting the Kenyan ecological debate into mass action for reforestation”. Maathai was an elected member of the Parliament of Kenya, and also served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources in the early 2000s. An academic and the author of several books, Maathai was both an activist and an intellectual. She made significant contributions in ecology, development, gender, and African cultures and religions.
Name Our Campsites! – 2021
Background: HOWL Campsite Name Ideas – December 2021
Spring is a few months away, but it’s not too soon to start thinking about camping at HOWL. We need your help! You see, we came up with an idea to name our campsites after women who have made a difference in the world, particularly feminist women. Our problem is, we have too many names! We need your help to select 10 names for our campsites from a total of 14 possibilities. Your responses will be anonymous. Click here to take the survey.
We will also be naming one campsite after our beloved Crow. You can read about her and all of the potential other names right here:
Crow
Carol (“Crow”) Cohen (1943 – 2015) was a fixture of Burlington’s activist lesbian community since the 1970s, and one of the founders of HOWL. Born in Hartford, CT, Crow attended UVM starting in 1961. In 1974, Carol “Crow” Cohen moved to Richmond. That year, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, she dialed the local “Women’s Switchboard,” a hybrid rape crisis hotline and general women’s network. “Because Vermont is so small,” Crow wrote in her 2010 memoir Small Town Revolution, “I asked if there were any feminists in Richmond.” She was directed to the doorstep of “Raven,” a woman well connected with the burgeoning lesbian scene and feminist community that congregated in Burlington. Thus began her process of coming out and self-discovery, one narrative among many that define the women’s movement of the era. Crow had a 20-year career as a medical and hospice social worker for Franklin County Home Health, visiting families in rural Vermont. She was a peace activist, both in the U.S. and in the Jerusalem Women’s Community in Israel. She was a lover of nature, insisting on being outdoors in all weather, riding her bike, skiing, hiking, kayaking, and spending time at her remote cabin near Camel’s Hump. Crow continued to shape HOWL into her later years, asking challenging questions and working to achieve mutual understanding in our intentional community. We are privileged to have known her.
- Adelaide Casely-Hayford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Casely-Hayford
Adelaide Casely-Hayford, MBE (1868 – 1960), was a Sierra Leone Creole advocate, short story writer and feminist. Casely-Hayford was committed to public service and worked to improve the conditions of black men and women. A pioneer of women’s education in Sierra Leone, she played a key role in popularizing Pan-Africanist and feminist politics in the early 1900s. She established a Girls’ Vocational and Training School in Freetown in 1923. Promoting the preservation of Sierra Leone national identity and cultural heritage, she created a sensation by wearing a traditional African costume in 1925 to attend a reception honoring the Prince of Wales.
- Beate Sirota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Sirota_Gordon
Beate Sirota (1923 – 2012) was a naturalized U.S. Citizen, born in Vienna and raised in Tokyo. She was the only child of Ukrainian Jewish parents. At age 15, Sirota attended Mills College in Oakland, CA , where she graduated in 1943 with a bachelor’s degree in modern languages. She supported herself through her collegiate experience as a teenage War Department radio operator because America had put nearly all its Japanese speakers in internment camps. In December 1945, Beate Sirota, a spirited and worldly 22-year-old naturalized American, returned to Tokyo and became the first female civilian staff member of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. When the U.S. began drafting a new constitution for Japan in February 1946, Sirota was enlisted to help and was assigned to the subcommittee on civil rights.. Two key Articles, drafted by Sirota, articulated equal rights for women for the first time in Japanese history. Sirota, as interpreter on MacArthur’s staff, was the only woman present during the negotiations between the Japanese Steering Committee and the American team. The final draft was negotiated fiercely by the Japanese government in a marathon 32-hour translation session, and the new Constitution has survived unchanged for over 70 years.
- Elizabeth Blackwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell (1821 –1910) was a British physician, notable as the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council. Blackwell played an important role in the United States and the United Kingdom as a social awareness and moral reformer, and pioneered in promoting education for women in medicine. Her work remains celebrated with the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal, awarded annually to a woman who has made significant contributions to the promotion of women in medicine.
- Gloria Anzaldúa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_E._Anzald%C3%BAa
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942 – 2004) was an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism.
- Qiu Jin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiu_Jin
Qiu Jin (1875 – 1907) was a Chinese revolutionary, feminist, and writer. Her sobriquet name is Jianhu Nüxia, which, when translated literally into English, means “Woman Knight of Mirror Lake”. Qiu was executed after a failed uprising against the Qing dynasty, and she is considered a national heroine in China; a martyr of republicanism and feminism. The names that Qiu Jin adopted for herself amidst the fall of the Qing dynasty suggested her desire to play the role of the knight-errant — a prototypically male figure established in the Han dynasty and known for swordsmanship, bravery, faithfulness, and self-sacrifice. Accordingly, Qiu called herself ‘Female Knight-Errant of Jian Lake’, as well as ‘Vying for Heroism’.
- Nawal El Saadawi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawal_El_Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi (1931 – 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist. She wrote many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She has been described as “Egypt’s most radical woman”. Saadawi graduated as a medical doctor in 1955 from Cairo University and attended Columbia University, earning a Master’s in public health in 1966. Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian government, in 1981 Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation. She was imprisoned in September 1981 by President Anwar Sadat, for her criticism of his purported democracy. While in prison, Saadawi formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. This was the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt. In prison, she was denied pen and paper, however, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a “stubby black eyebrow pencil” and “a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper” to record her thoughts. She was released later that year, one month after the President’s assassination. Of her experience she wrote: “Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.”
- Octavia E. Butler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler
Octavia Estelle Butler (1947 – 2006) was an American science fiction author. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet reading fantasy, and in writing. As a young adult, she took advantage of opportunities to improve her craft, including the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, PA. Following that workshop, she sold her first short stories. Over the next five years, Butler published Kindred (1979) and the Patternist series of 5 novels. In 1985, her novelette Bloodchild won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. Her Xenogenesis trilogy – Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) was republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith’s Brood. During the 1990s, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
- Pauli Murray
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_Murray
Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray (1910 – 1985) was an American civil rights activist who became a lawyer, women’s rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author. Drawn to the ministry in 1977, Murray was the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest, in the first year that any women were ordained by that church. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was virtually orphaned when young, and she was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. At the age of 16, she moved to New York City to attend Hunter College, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws.
- Rachel Carson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
Rachel Louise Carson (1907 – 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring (1962) and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. Her book Silent Spring (1962) brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
- Shirley Chisholm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Chisholm
Shirley Anita Chisholm (1924 – 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, representing New York’s 12th congressional district, for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate to run for a major party’s nomination for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Born in Brooklyn, Chisholm studied and worked in early childhood education, becoming involved in local Democratic party politics in the 1950s. In 1964, she was elected to the New York State Assembly. Four years later she was elected to Congress, where she worked for expanded nutrition programs for the poor and rose to party leadership. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- Ursula K. LeGuin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929 – 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including the Earthsea fantasy series. born in Berkeley, California. She earned a master’s degree in French, began writing full-time in the late 1950s, and achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Her literary career spanned nearly sixty years. She produced more than 20 novels and over 100 short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children’s books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an “American novelist”. Le Guin expressed a deep interest in Taoism and Buddhism, and in 1997 she published a translation of the Tao Te Ching.
- Vi Hilbert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_Hilbert
Vi Hilbert (1918 – 2008) was a Native American tribal elder of the Upper Skagit, a tribe of the greater Puget Salish in Washington state, whose ancestors occupied the banks along the Skagit River, and was a conservationist of the Lushootseed culture and its language, of which she was the last fully fluent heritage speaker. She taught Lushootseed at the University of Washington for 17 years (1971 – 1988), where she also transcribed and translated Lushootseed recordings from the 1950s. This work is preserved in the University’s audio library. She received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. She co-wrote Lushootseed grammars and dictionaries, partially with linguist Thom Hess, and published books of stories, teachings, and place names related to her native region, the Puget Sound.
- Victoria Woodhull
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull
Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838 – 1927), was an American leader of the women’s suffrage movement who ran for President of the United States in 1872. An activist for women’s rights and labor reforms, Woodhull was also an advocate of “free love”, by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference. Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin became the first female stockbrokers, and in 1870 they opened a brokerage firm on Wall Street. In 1870, they founded a newspaper, the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Published for 6 years, feminism was the Weekly‘s primary interest, but it was notorious for publishing controversial opinions on taboo topics; advocating, among other things, sex education, free love, women’s suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, vegetarianism, and licensed prostitution. Woodhull learned how to infiltrate the all-male domain of national politics and arranged to testify on women’s suffrage before the House Judiciary Committee. Woodhull argued that women already had the right to vote — all they had to do was use it — since the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteed the protection of that right for all citizens. The simple but powerful logic of her argument impressed some committee members. Although her Constitutional argument was not original, she focused unprecedented public attention on suffrage.
- Wangari Muta Maathai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai (1940 – 2011) was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a Ph.D. In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental organization focused on tree planting, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. In 1984, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “converting the Kenyan ecological debate into mass action for reforestation”. Maathai was an elected member of the Parliament of Kenya, and also served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources in the early 2000s. An academic and the author of several books, Maathai was both an activist and an intellectual. She made significant contributions in ecology, development, gender, and African cultures and religions.
HOWL 