1936 – February 2, 2022
Alice Molloy was a lesbian anarchist feminist best known for cofounding two long-running feminist bookstores in San Francisco, A Woman’s Place and Mama Bears. She had a deep history in the militant side of the feminist movement, including editing the groundbreaking radical feminist newspaper “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
Carol Wilson and Alice Molloy opened their feminist bookstore A Woman’s Place in 1972. It was meant to be a collective that operated on anarchist principles, but the project ended up riven by acrimony in the early 1980s, accelerated by a split within the collective after Molloy and other hardline separatists refused to allow men into the store’s lounge.
In 1983 Molloy and Wilson opened a new feminist bookstore, Mama Bears, which they operated until retiring in 2003.
Back in 1997 when the San Francisco Chronicle reached out to her for comment on a puff piece about Beat literature, she didn’t play along.
“[T]he Beats were as misogynistic as the society they condemned, said Alice Molloy, owner of Mama Bears, a woman’s bookstore in Oakland. She knew the Ginsburg-Kerouac-Burroughs crowd during their early days in New York and holds no fond memories of that connection.
Malloy dismisses the literary Beats as ‘an old macho gay culture’ and considers important Beat works like Burroughs’ Naked Lunch to be ‘adolescent boy literature.’
Malloy said the Beats didn’t like her because she was a lesbian and not ‘gender-appropriate’ in her manner and dress.”
Legacy.com has an unusually spirited obituary in which Moore is described as “a lesbian outlaw, and proud.”