The WOMEN’S CAR REPAIR COLLECTIVE was one of several initiatives organized by the Lesbian Alliance of St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 1970s. The collective was a “service by and for women” that offered repairs of foreign and American cars, workshops, and rentals of garage space, books, and tools. The Lesbian Alliance, formed in 1972, also opened a coffee house, offered counseling and legal services, and published a lesbian-feminist newsletter called MOONSTORM through their imprint Tiamat Press. In a 1973 issue of the local independent radical newspaper THE BRIDGE, the collective wrote that “we must create our own lesbian-identified structures.”
This ...