Meet the Women Who've Served Up 40 Years of Feminist Food

Selma Miriam and Noel Furie of Bloodroot. Photo: Jacqueline Raposo

Bloodroot, a vegan, feminist, activist restaurant, owned by lesbians Selma Miriam and Noel Furie in Bridgeport, Connecticut, has thrived for 42 years. But Can Their Restaurant Survive?

for Shondaland, words and photos by Jacqueline Raposo

In the late 1960s, Selma Miriam attended the party of a well-known art teacher. The man talked on about how teachers could help stop racism and why he thought that was such a good thing. "Then, he started telling Polish jokes," Miriam remembers, eyebrows arching in wry disbelief. "I didn't say anything. I never invited him to my house, but I know he didn't know why. And I thought, I'm never going to let that happen again."

Her restaurant, Bloodroot, put that promise into action.

One evening, an employee delivering alcohol to a celebrating group returned to the kitchen shaken: a man was (again) telling Polish jokes, and this woman was Polish. Miriam marched to the table and told them they couldn't do that. They mocked her lack of humor. She doubled down: "You can't do that here; this is a feminist place." The man warned that with that attitude, she'd be closed within a year.

This was 1977. Bloodroot's doors stand open today.

"It's not everywhere you can do that because you don't have that power," Miriam reminds me. "But we have that here. It's ours."

We did not want a new piece of the pie. We wanted a new recipe altogether.

Miriam grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut with parents who were Jewish, but atheist — they found no comfort in how separatism compounds racism over generations. "They wanted to make clear that this was bad. Evil. And to be conscious of it," Miriam says. She studied biology and psychology at Tufts and spent Sundays exploring varying religious services in an almost anthropological sense. When pregnancy from improperly placed birth control led to marriage, she built a landscape design business and explored cooking international cuisines. "It just seemed important to know about other people's religions, food, and culture," she says. "As a Jew, I know how badly people can be treated. No way do I want to be part of that. I'm going to do everything I can and if I fail, I feel terrible. Because that's what feminism is for me."

Noel Furie was also a mother in a heterosexual marriage in the mid-'70s. A former model, second-wave feminism awakened in Furie a rejection of Andrea Dworkin's brothel/farm analysis of the patriarchy, where the only positions offered to women are prostitution or reproduction. Meeting at their local National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter, Miriam and Furie came out as lesbians and radical feminists — those who call for a thorough reordering of society which eliminates male supremacy in all contexts. Newly separated, Miriam starting hosting weekly women's nights to discuss feminist issues. She called them Bloodroot.

"Feminists were really angry," Miriam reflects of the time in an essay for Lesbian Ethics. "We thought that we'd suddenly discovered something that we'd explain to men and everything would change."

Bloodroot’s Bookstore. Photo, Jacqueline Raposo.

Women breaking into fields dominated by men were exceptions to the rule — and those fields protected inequality and sexual abuse. Homosexuality, race, or future motherhood could take any job off the table. Patriarchal social customs encouraged mating competition amongst friends. "It was practically illegal to be a lesbian," they say. Women rarely dined out alone because the brothel/farm model dissuaded them.

"We did not want a new piece of the pie. We wanted a new recipe altogether," they write in their Best of Bloodroot Vol 1 cookbook.

By the late '70s, around 150 feminist bookstores nationwide offered community spaces. Women's collectives sought to remake society: Afrocentric black feminists of the Combahee River Collective challenged racism within the feminist agenda. See Red Women's Workshop combated negative images of women in art and media. College groups like the University of Connecticut's Free Women's Collective opened women's centers. "We are different from what is out there, so we are a haven," Miriam writes in that Lesbian Ethics essay of creating a lesbian feminist space with a focus on collectivity.

She looked to extend Bloodroot as a business that would wholly incorporate their feminist beliefs and personal pleasures. "We wanted to have a business that put ourselves—all our energy, our money, everything — where our values are," Furie tells me of this intentional endeavor. "Where our heart was," Miriam adds. A restaurant-cross-bookstore could do all.

Miriam bought a waterfront building at the end of a residential street — it would not inspire walk-in business, but it a had room for a garden and patio, and a breathtaking view. They built a kitchen with a window open to the dining room, set down heavy wooden tables, and hung antique photos of women on the walls. They filled bookstore shelves with the feminist books they most wanted to discuss. Believing in subliminal messaging, they played music only by (mostly lesbian) women. They reserved space for knitting and weaving, enjoying the weaving of feminine shapes and the feminist history of such work.

Enlightened by NOW friends and animal rights activists Priscilla Feral and Jim Mason, they transitioned to intellectual vegetarianism: Feminists should not enslave or abuse (largely female) animals in the same model the patriarchy enslaves and abuses women. Being that seasonal harvests also tune into women's agricultural and religious histories, they decided to serve only seasonal vegetarian cuisine. But well-seasoned and satisfying, it would not be "health food." A sign still hanging above the kitchen warns calories are not to be counted; all bodies are welcomed and equal.

Ownership would always reflect Collective members' equal participation of 60+ weekly working hours. (Members have varied over decades; now only Miriam and Furie remain.) No one in the kitchen would ever hold a title of chef. They estimate around 200 women from Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Ethiopia, The Congo, and elsewhere have worked at Bloodroot, mirroring Bridgeport's diversity. To level power between staff and customers, guests pick up their food from the kitchen window and bus their tables.

Furie points out that the sign over their door — Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant and Feminist Bookstore — acts as both a welcome and a sieve. Guests know what Bloodroot is about.

In the early years, women would line out the door for women-only Wednesdays despite sleet or storm "because it was the only place to come to," Miriam reminds. Then Thursdays, the dining room would fill with single men. Miriam had dealt with sexism when securing the building: she was rejected for mortgages and had salesman constantly asking for her husband. But the men who dined at Bloodroot surprised her: "I thought, 'Oh gee, I guess there're more nice men in the world than I knew before,'" she says. "We hear terrible things that men do. But the guys who come in here are not like that." "Many men have a softer side that heretofore was not acceptable, and some had a certain kind of loneliness," Furie explains. "We treated them warmly."

Inside Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant. Photo: Jacqueline Raposo

They hosted cooking and weaving classes, and feminist book talks. In 1980, they published their first Political Palate cookbook. Constantly expanding their menu, five more followed. They found ongoing pleasure in what feminist Mary Daly describes as the "presence of absence," foregoing entertainment of the patriarchy in favor of gardening in the summer, knitting quietly in deep winter, and discussing ideas in the kitchen year-round. But they recognize this life might be too insular and physically demanding for others.

Fellow feminists started experiencing burnout in the '80s: The Combahee River Collective disassembled in 1980, the See Red Women's Workshop in 1990. Those who had sought community now had greater social access, and the economic boom implied things weren't that bad. Recognizing dwindling attendance, Bloodroot ended women-only nights in the early-'90's: "It got to a place where that just wasn't necessary," Miriam says. "But we still needed this place for us."

Around Bloodroot's 30th birthday, pamphlets still advertised regular events. But now they don't: A general lack of interpersonal interaction greatly threatens their bottom line. "Just the other day, I was so deeply conscious that four or five humans were enjoying each other's company. You could feel the energy!" Furie says. "That's what's being lost. That's how you learn about each other, how you communicate, and there's great joy in that."

When I question adjusting their business model, they're quick to correct: Theirs is a model of values, and potential changes often work against those beliefs. They barely use the internet because it discourages genuine conversation. They've won't sign up for a delivery service. "If we can't get people to come here, then just forget about it. That's what we want," Furie says. Community and collectivity is the point.

One recent evening, I observed two women at least three decades apart in age confidently dining alone. There was an older couple welcomed by name, and a fresh-faced young couple in for the first time. Over the years, I've observed boisterous friends and deep winter hushes. A new wave of feminists is finding them, too.

"We call them our granddaughters," Furie says of the young women activating their feminism and newly exploring their homosexuality. "It's very exciting for me to see young women as angry as they are, and electing people," Miriam adds. Both are excited by the wave of diverse women recently elected into office. "These young women very much feel the way we used to feel in the '70s. A lot of that went away. But we didn't change, you see. We didn't change."

The restaurant looks much as it always has. The bookstore is practically an antique; their niche collection can't compete with online sales. If practical, they would close — they're partially subsidizing the restaurant as it is. "But we've never been practical," Miriam says. They cook daily, curiously exploring new regions and ingredients. At night, they're welcoming guests and filling orders. They get tired, but neither feel burnt out. Staying home does not interest them.

"Our daily lives have to be a satisfaction in themselves, for us to continue, as we do," they wrote in their first cookbook. That statement holds. Bloodroot is their everything. And so the feminist model of values remains open for service, six days a week.