From feminism

Links: Poetry, Palestine, and Kafka

Some thoughts and links on poetry, Palestine, and Kafka for the start of summer:

Poetry: 

I recently was honored to give the keynote at LaGuardia’s Women’s Studies Conference on Adrienne Rich and in particular her time teaching in CUNY’s SEEK program. I’m hoping to publish a version of it somewhere soon, including a long section I didn’t get to include in the actual talk about her “Talking about Trees” response to Brecht. In the meantime, here are my two favorite pieces about Rich that have come out lately, in the many great ones that have come out since her death and the publication of her Collected Poems. First, here’s Michelle Dean in the New Republic, who makes use of the archives of Rich’s letters to her friend the poet Hayden Carruth to trace the many transformations of her mid-life: the end of her marriage, her husband’s suicide, and her coming out as a lesbian; her growing activism as a feminist and anti-war activist; her growing love of teaching (unlike many writers, she never resented the time spent with students and seemed to feel younger people had something to offer); the change in her poetry away from the formalism she’d been rewarded for early on; her increasingly difficult health struggles. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, about how dominant the awakening at middle-age narrative was in the stories of women’s lives I grew up with, and how much it applies to those of us today, many of whom grew up with feminism and who are having our children mid-life instead of coming out the other end of the early years of immeshment.

In Dissent, Lidija Haas covers a lot of the same ground, with an emphasis on Rich’s defense of poetry’s political engagement. When I was working on my talk, I was thinking a lot about how Rich approached teaching during the time of the Vietnam war and student strikes, how you do justice to the intensity of the moment while also seeing the classroom (and poetry) as something that should extend our thinking behind the heat of the moment.  And then I realized some of Rich’s writings which are most intensely in the moment are from the ’80s, as the horror of backlash and Reaganism set in; Haas begins with Rich refusing an award from Bill Clinton calling art “incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” The answer for “why write poetry in ‘times like these” is that it is always times of these. I’ve also been thinking a lot about a passage in Rich’s 1981 essay “Towards a More Feminist Criticism” in which she expresses a different side of the issue: of course, activism and poetry mix, but about what is lost when writers are elevated to “spokespeople” above on-the ground activists and how we might look at the causal relationship between these things:   “It’s not that I believe in a direct line of response, from a poem to an action: . . . In fact, it may be action that leads to poetry, the deed to the word.

Palestine: 

We recently marked 50 years since the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It has been a time of heightened activism both here and in Israel/Palestine, where political prisoners recently ended a forty day hunger strike and where hundreds of Jews from around the world recently joined Palestinians and for a series of non-violent actions connected to Israeli celebration of occupation. Two recent pieces point to how, in spite of everything, non-violent resistance still matters:

First, over at In these Times, a good piece by Tamara Nassar about the results of the recent Palestinian hunger strike. Prisoner solidarity is such an important part of the history of liberation struggles, and it’s easy to think there’s no leverage to be had over the brutal Israeli government, but Marwan Barghouthi is one of the most respected figures in the Palestinian community, and we’re in a period where international solidarity can’t be ignored.

And at Jewschool, Jodi Melamed has an interesting piece about the Sumud freedom camp, an inspiring action to help the families of Sumud return to their villages. Melamed talks about something I’ve wondered about a lot – Jews who want to oppose the occupation and Israeli violence but haven’t come around on BDS. A lot of times those of us who support BDS react with frustration to these folks – BDS, we point out, is the international, non-violent solidarity moment liberals claim they had wanted (if only there was non-violent resistance, we would support it!) But Melamed makes a convincing case that if there are actions like the Sumud one (inspired in part by Standing Rock), and organizations like the Jewish Center for non-Violence to organize and support them, people who aren’t there on BDS can take action, and when we come together on non-violent action, it dissipates so much of the rancor that marks the debate. It’s not about compromise or meeting in the middle, but a realization that, as I believe is very often true, action guides our beliefs, not the other way around.

Kafka: 

This semester in my fiction writing class I taught The Metamorphosis for the first time. I’d had it on there before, but always took it out in the end of semester crunch. To prepare for the discussion, I happened upon something a student gave me years ago: this little book, which, despite appearances, is not a kind of spiffed-up Cliff Notes but is a real book, and a fascinating one at that, co-written by R. Crumb and offering gorgeous visual riff’s on Kafka’s work plus their own take, one which emphasizes Kafka’s Jewishness and the role of the Prague ghetto in shaping his vision. There are lots of telling details I didn’t know, but this is the one I keep coming back to: this account of the details of Kafka’s famous “day job”:

Did everyone know this but me? I mentioned this to J., who said, I don’t know if you want to go there with the political implications of this: was worker protection the model for hated bureaucracy? But I think about it differently: I like the idea that this person who, at least in most versions of him we have, is so apart from others, from comfort, from his own body, that we think of him as barely functioning in the world, let along thinking he could shape it, let alone doing so – – – that this fragile man maybe did more good than all of us robust good citizens? To plagiarize Jamaica Kincaid writing about a different corner of the world and its cruelties, there’s a world of something in that, but I can’t get into it right now.

Today in Feminist History: Pittsburgh Press vs. Pittsburgh Commission

On June 21, 1973, in an opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell, the Supreme Court ruled against the Pittsburgh Press, which had claimed that a Pittsburgh ordinance banning sex-segregated job ads violated their freedom of the press. The court had that local authorities were permitted to prohibit commercial speech advertising illegal services and that descriminatory hiring was illegal under the ordinance.

An appendix of listings from the paper told the story of what this discrimination meant in practice: the first few jobs listed under “Jobs – Male Interest” on January 4, 1970 and their salaries read as follows:

ACAD. INSTRUCTORS. . . . . . . . .$13,000

ACCOUNTANTS. . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000

ADM. ASS’T, CPA . . . . . . . .. . 15,000

ADVERTISING MGR. . . . . . . . . . 10,000

BOOKKEEPER F-C. . . . . . . .. . . 9,000.

“Female Interest” went like this:

ACAD. INSTRUCTORS. . . . . . . . .$13,000

ACCOUNTANTS. . . . . . . . . . . . 6,000

AUTO-INS. UNDERWRITER. . . . . . . OPEN

BOOKKEEPER-INS . . . . . . . . . . 5,000

CLERK-TYPIST . . . . . . . . . . . 4,200

(Full list is found here. The male-female “interest” designation was a modification-without a difference the Pittsburgh Press had taken on to replace the traditional “male help wanted.”)

In theory, job discrimination on the basis of sex became illegal under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was added in under strange and fascinating circumstances – according to some accounts as a joke, to others as an attempt at a poison pill.  As Gillian Thomas’s book outlines, it took many years of case law to make this theoretical right at least something of a reality. The desegregation of the ads in the New York Times was an early victory for the National Organization for Women, which in those early years was populated with many women with experience in journalism and in similarly highly visible but low-paid and highly-discriminatory media industries.  The Pittsburgh case was also driven by NOW, with the Pittsburgh chapter having helped passed the ordinance challenged by the Press. 

As I’ve been immersed in reading feminist history, the role of local NOW chapters during this key years is interesting for a number of reasons.  With its focus on ending formal discrimination in the workplace and the public sphere and the passage of the ERA, NOW is often seen as the embodiment of “liberal,” reformist feminism, as opposed to the radical groups that emphasized utopian reworking of every gendered aspect of society, especially sexuality and the family.

There’s a lot to the distinction in terms of how activists at the time saw themselves and their goals. Today, however, when the history of cases like Pittsburgh isn’t much remembered, the label can obscure as much as it tells us, as associated as its become with elitism. NOW and the ERA movement were both mainstream and grassroots. Talk to women from that generation, and you’re as likely to hear stories about the friends involved with their local chapter or ERA campaign as with a consciousness-raising group.  And not insignificantly, NOW and its leadership were by many accounts more diverse than many highly visible radical movements. With certain politicians who shall remain nameless capturing the mantle of inside-the-system activists, the activist part of that equation gets lost. Whatever causes they espouse, most politicians (to say nothing of celebrities with book contracts) don’t belong in the same category as someone like Wilma Scott Heide, the head of the Pittsburgh chapter and later President of NOW, tireless ERA campaigner and the activist most responsible for the Pittsburgh Press victory.

Last year Jill Lepore had a fascinating piece in the New Yorker about why the nineteenth amendment,  unlike the fourteenth, became a kind of dead branch of law. I’d read a lot of versions of the argument that it would have been better had Griswold, Roe and other reproductive rights cases been made on the basis of equality rather than privacy, but for some reasons I hadn’t really considered the nineteenth amendment as specifically the untaken route.

Aside from the legal implications, this feels like an interesting analogue to what has happened with historical memory.  During the 1970s, many feminists wrote about the demobilization of the feminist movement after the achievement of suffrage as a cautionary tale. Tragically, more than any of the many victories, it was the loss of ERA that played the largest role.   The fact that so many victories from this period came through cases like Pittsburgh perhaps speaks to why the movement is more often remembered through a handful of celebrities and cultural tropes than through its actual significant accomplishments.

At the same time, however, it’s a mistake to see these victories as evidence for the efficacy of insider strategy at the expense of street action and agitation. Without Heide and countless activists like her, there would have been no court cases to win. Behind important cases like EEOC vs. Sears were the activists who organized, shared information, selected targets, and shifted public mores to such an extent that these victories were possible. Whatever opportunists try to sell us, even to be an inside agitator, you have have stepped far enough outside to know what needs agitating.

Novels and Children

When I was in college, one of the first books of “theory” I read was Roland Barthes Mythologies. It’s a lovely book that I hope people still read, even though many of its reference points were already pretty obscure twenty years ago. It’s one of those books that was called “theory” because they didn’t know what else to call it, although just plain criticism, or better yet, essays, would have done.

One of the little essays is called “Novels and Children.” It starts like this:

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Two Virginia Woolf Passages in Search of an Essay

In two weeks I’m heading up to the “happy valley” in Western Massachusetts for my 20th college reunion at Smith College. I’m working on an essay about this – not about me or being forty-one or about the turning of the generations, but about the place, its history and what, if anything, it still means to spend time in a place dedicated to women’s education, history, experiences.

When I’ve visited recently, especially when there are no students there, I keep thinking about its beauty – it’s such an obvious thing, the beauty of the place, but you forget it, and it has to mean something. And the quietness when the students are not there, but that everything is waiting for them, the care that is given to help us believe we are cared for:

“A. Williams – one may read it in the moonlight; and next to it some Mary or Eleanor, Mildred, Sarah, Phoebe upon square cards on their doors. All names, nothing but names. The cool white light withered them and starched them until it seemed as if the only purpose of all those names was to rise martially in order should there be a call on them to extinguish a fire, suppress an insurrection, or pass an examination. Such is the power of names written upon cards pinned on doors. Such too the resemblance, what with tiles, corridors, and bedroom doors, to dairy or nunnery, a place of seclusion or discipline, where the bowl of milk stands cool and pure and there’s a great washing of linen.”

Virginia Woolf, “A Woman’s College from Outside,” 1928

In Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy writes she was grateful for her Catholic education, in spite of everything because it was a history, a narrative, that she could reject and modify but it got her into the story. Looking at the world Smith gave me, I think something like that – it was not perfect in all sots of ways I want to give proper attention and space to – but it was a history. For many of us, you could be ambivalent or reject assets of the history, the traditions, but few were apathetic to it. It didn’t make a utopia, it may or may not have made a counterculture, but it was an experience, it was something, it wasn’t a place you went to pass the time. And so I go back to Woolf:

she lay in this good world, this new world, the world at the end of the tunnel, until a desire to see it or forestall it drove her, tossing her blankets, to guide herself to the window, ad there, looking out upon the garden, where the mist lay, all the windows open, one fiery-bluish, something murmuring in the distance, the world of course, and the morning coming. “Oh,” she cried, as if in pain.

Today in Feminist History: Speaking of Jewish Socialists . . .

Speaking of Jewish socialists: on this day in 1882, Rose Schneiderman was born in Savin, Poland. After her family immigrated to the United States, her education was interrupted by her family’s poverty. When the more “respectable” job of salesgirl didn’t make enough, she turned to the factories. After successfully organizing her fellow workers into the United Cloth and Cap Makers, she became the first woman elected union official.  She helped lead the great shirtwaist strike of 1909-1910, led New York Women’s Trade Union League, ran for Senate on the Labor Party ticket, worked on labor legislation with the FDR administration, and resettle Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.  Read more

Today in Feminist History: Flo Kennedy, 1916-2000

February 11 is Flo Kennedy’s 100th birthday.  A lawyer who defended the Black Panthers and was instrumental to winning abortion rights in New York State, a founder of the Feminist Party that nominated Shirley Chisholm for President, a long time star of the speaking circuit that spread feminist ideals and supported feminist work, who built coalitions with a range of organizations and activists ranging from Adam Clayton Powell to Gloria Steinem. She was famous for her quips and style and she was incredibly effective.  Kennedy breaks down all the lazy categories people rely on to separate idealists from pragmatists and talkers from doers, and reminds us that social justice coalitions across race and gender lines are possible whatever their challenges. I just ordered the recently published biography by Sherie Randolph which I’ve heard wonderful things about. I’m especially looking forward to an account of the protest mentioned in her 2000 obituary, of leading a “mass urination” to protest the lack of women’s restrooms at Harvard.

Friends with Books: Class War by Megan Erickson

There are books we seek out and books we discover by accident. And once in a while, if we are lucky, there are books that seem like they were written just for us.  When I first read a description of Megan Erickson’s Class Wars, which discusses education issues by way of a socialist/feminist analysis of care work, family, and the public sphere, I had that feeling: here was something for every piece of my own socialist/feminist/mother/teacher soul.  Read more

Today in Feminist History: Martha Griffiths, or What Is “Liberal Feminism” Anyways?

Today is the 104th birthday of Martha Griffiths, a ten-term congresswoman sometimes dubbed the “mother of the ERA.” Her most significant contribution, however, came as a key figure in the inclusion of women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a hugely important and fascinating story that understandably isn’t much known – understandably because it was purposefully done behind the scenes, so as not to induce the ridicule of an establishment who by and large still saw women’s rights as a joke at best.

I’m interested in people like Griffiths right now for a lot of reasons, partly because of the way “liberal feminism” or “bourgeois feminism” are sometimes used to describe people who really really really want to see a woman President or Sheryl Sandburg pontificating at Davos.

Having been immersed in the feminist archive from the 1960s and 1970s for a better part of the last year, I think this is unfair: not to HRC of Sandburg but to liberal feminism. In the activist history of the period, there were, by and large, clear divisions between the liberal and radical wings of the movement. Liberals wanted to integrate the public sphere, the professions, and end not just job and pay discrimination but the complete job segregation that existed at the time. It’s found in figures like Griffiths, journalists like, Marlene Sanders and Judy Klemersrud, who snuck sympathetic coverage into the mainstream, and organizations like the National Organization for Women and many local and national organizations that fought for the ERA. And they fought for the reform of abortion laws – an issue on which liberals and radicals were united.

This wing was criticized by radicals who thought not only the public sphere but the family, sexuality and all human relations needed to be reconsidered. They rightly targeted figures like NOW founder Betty Friedan for their homophobia. Many saw the ERA as a distraction and the demobilization that followed its defeat suggested there was much to this. Certainly, the remarkable cultural, social and political changes could not have occurred without the radicals pushing at the wing of the possible.

At the same time, the liberals achieved a lot, starting with NOW’s huge win right at its founding when the Times desegregated its job ads. And it was a real movement – Griffith’s work was supported by a real grassroots network. Given how many forests have died over whether it matters to call oneself a feminist, I don’t have too much invested in these terms either, but if you’re interested in the real “inside/outside” dynamics of change, disingenuous claims about “making change from the inside” shouldn’t take away from the legacies of those who actually did it.

Today in Feminist History: Carolyn Heilbrun, 1926-2003, and Amanda Cross

Carolyn Heilbrun, author of many books including the classic Writing a Woman’s Life, and the first woman to get tenure in Columbia’s influential English department, was born ninety years ago this week.

Taking as its starting point Virginia Woolf’s remark that “very few women have yet written truthful autobiographies,” Heilbrun moves through the work of writers like Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Eudora Welty, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and others to explore how self-perception, nostalgia and romanticization shape the stories women writers tell in different forms: “she may tell it in what she chooses to call autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.”  Read more

Today in Feminist History: Johnnie Tillmon

Twenty years ago this week, Johnnie Tillmon, activist and chairperson of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), died at the age of 69. It’s a particularly bleak commentary on the nature of backlash that Tillmon died a year before the passage of Clinton’s welfare reform bill. I was in college at the time and learning about feminism pretty intensively. I knew the bill was bad news, the consolidation of Reagan’s disgusting scapegoating of  poor women, a cynical attempt to “beat” the Republicans by selling out key members of the Democratic coalition who had no where else to go. But I didn’t realize just how cynical and disgusting until I came across Tillmon’s classic essay, “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” I think through its reprint in Ms. which I was reading religiously.*  Tilmmon cast all that pap about the “dignity of work” and indignity of welfare aside and memorably laid down the real indignity: a system that made people submit to invasive controls to prove themselves worth of sums woefully inadequate to care for children:  Read more