I was really interested in what were the stakes of calling your restaurant feminist? What were you holding yourself accountable to? What were you trying to signal to potential customers? What were you trying to say to staff and so forth?

HZ: What were the consequences? Because there were a lot of like upsides and downsides to having 'feminist' in the restaurant's name.

ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, for sure. Some of the upsides were that you were signalling to other likeminded folks or curious folks that this could be a space for them to gather. There was an indication of the politics of the space. So it was an indication of what kind of events you might find, speakers you might find, artwork and music you might see and hear in the space.
There were also ways that people might feel more invested in the space, that they might contribute time or money or energy, or be just interested in visiting. Calling it a feminist space oftentimes was also one of the many code words, during the 1970s and 1980s, to also signal lesbian space or questioning space; or a term we might use today, but would be anachronistic at the time, as kind of like a queer women's space. So, this was a way of marking like, "Hey, you might be welcome here, your sexual orientation might be accepted, you might hear a poet you're interested in hearing," and so forth. So, there were a lot of kind of benefits in building community and interest in the space by indicating the term. 
And then the downsides could also be, you know, there's bias against the word 'feminism'. Some people would feel uncomfortable with it or push back on it. There was also a concern from many of the people who founded these spaces that they might be targeted for violence. They might get rocks through the windows and so forth. Generally, that wasn't the case with a few exceptions, but there was also kind of a heightened level of fear in choosing to mark your space so explicitly.