"This is Womenspace": USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983-86

Two digital channels that became the site for women's sociality on USENET: net.women and net.women.only. Together they tell a story of gendered contest and elaborated digital norms in the 1980s. Though subscribers to net.women considered these topics from a gender perspective, the forum was a testing ground for selective sociality on the Net, free speech, supportive infrastructure, intimacy, exclusion, and new affinities. At the height of "cultural feminism" when political feminism had already peaked, these users were nostalgically remediating Consciousness Raising Groups and women's solidarity activities associated with radical and political Second Wave Feminism. This article takes up a newly available USENET archive to complicate feminist digital historiography, which frequently draws a direct line from the 1970s offline to the 1990s online (to the start of the Third Wave), and to argue that these forums strategically looked backwards while moving into new media spaces.