Sandra Butler was raised in a conventional 1940s suburb to become a wife and a mother. After seven years of being unsuccessful at being a proper wife while continuing to be delighted with mothering, a divorce catapulted her and her two young daughters into the turbulent l960s when so much of American life was being challenged, re-defined, and remade. Immersed in the anti-war and civil rights movements, she found her political and psychological foundation in the second wave of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. She began college in her mid-thirties, which led to graduate study, five books, two films, and decades of organizing and community building.
Her first book, Conspiracy of Silence, The Trauma of Incest, was published by Volcano Press in 1978. The second, Cancer in Two Voices, coauthored with her partner Barbara Rosenblum and published by Spinsters, Inc. in 1991, was the winner of the Lambda Lesbian Literary Award. Her third, It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters, was co-authored with Nan Fink Gefen. Her fourth, The Kitchen is Closed: And Other Benefits of Being Old, is a collection of personal essays about life in the slow lane. Butler writes, channeling her inner Erma Bombeck, about the limitations aging imposes and the freedoms it allows.
Her books have centered on the need to move issues relevant to women and girls still on the margins to the spotlight. Conspiracy of Silence brought attention to issues of incest and sexual violation; Cancer in Two Voices illuminated the experience of two lesbians, one facing her death, as Butler prepared for the loss of her beloved. It Never Ends identified the necessary recalibration of authority and independence as both mothers and daughters age.
With The Kitchen is Closed: And Other Benefits of Being Old, Butler claims and describes her new identity as an old woman, one who is not over any hills and still has a lot to say. Leaving Home at 83 chronicles Butler’s struggles to balance her insistence on autonomy and independence with a growing longing to be taken care of, something she disapproves of in herself and has fought against all her life.
Butler served on the founding editorial board of Persimmon Tree: An Online Magazine of the Arts by Women Over Sixty, creating a much needed resource for older women writers.
This site is just a glimpse into what has kept Butler engaged for the past eighty-six years. Welcome.