It's like an Airplane

Are feminists being selfish AGAIN?

There's a piece on TAP (The American Prospect) online by Keely Savoie about state's Equal Rights Amendments being used to bolster arguments for gay marriage.  Savoie thinks that feminists might be hoarding ERA to themselves and refusing to help out their pro-marriage gay kin.  She references early feminist selfishness, when feminists were ready to sacrifice blacks voting rights for women's voting rights for the 19th amendment in the 1920s. 

But there's no argument in her piece about feminists may have reasons for blocking gay marriage.  Maybe gay marriage (gasp!) isn't necessarily a feminist issue!  I'm not sure this is true, but I do think that feminist organizations should think twice about supporting gay marriage.  Marriage, after all, is still a profoundly sexist institution under the law.  I don't think the feminist Savoie quotes is thinking along those lines, it sounds like she's just hoarding, but still, this is something to consider.

If I ever get to Brooklyn

Well actually, this is Washington Heights and the subway. 

Real Handwriting

Recently my colleague at the Bryn Mawr Bookstore gave me a present: a copy of the letter that Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her in 1978. When Jess told me that she knew Bishop and that Bishop had written to her, I hoped for something meaty. Instead, the letter is basically a pleasant rejection of further contact. There is the beautiful signature in the characteristic cramped and unreadable handwriting. But that's basically all there is:

          Dear Jessica, 

Warren House has forwarded your note to me. As you probably know, I am no longer teaching at Harvard, and this year - from now until September 1979, at least - I am not teaching at all. I want very much to spend all my time on work of my own, so I am not doing any advising about writing, reading manuscripts, etc. I am sorry I can't help you but I'm sure there are other people in this part of the world who can.

         To have had a poem in The New Republic is very good at your age. So, congratulations - and just keep writing.

With all best wishes,
Elizabeth Bishop

 At first I felt sad for Jess that this was it. No invitation for tea, or to go to the New York Zoo? (That was where Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop had one of their first dates). But the word of encouragement about The New Republic was a nice touch. And you know what? Sometimes it's OK to be ignored--it makes you feel scrappy.

For some reason, reading this letter and seeing Bishop's signature in the flesh reminded me of Barbara Johnson's comments on my disaster of a final paper that I wrote for her poetry seminar senior year. The paper I handed in was 4 pages shorter than the minimum page requirement, didn't have a thesis, and accidentally I left two pages of notes trailing at the end. God help me. BJ has a serious neurodegenerative disease and was then already pretty frail, her handwriting was shaky, and she had trouble speaking for long periods of time. She returned the paper and her comments in a manila envelope with my name scrawled on the front. On the comments sheet there is a drop of something brown and it looks like I cried tears of blood when I was reading it.

I've kept the comments partly because I loved BJ, and also because because of some self-flagellating need to remind myself that in college I was lazy and dumb and that I can never allow myself to be that way again. Since I've already gone this far, I will include an excerpt of the comments here for your delectation and my further self-flagellation.

Dear Beccah,
                    The enclosed must be a non-final draft--there are some obvious signs of unfinishedness. I think what you say about essentialism and the image of the androgyne is very good [I was writing about Adrienne Rich's poem "The Stranger"]. But then you conflate a vision of what might be with the perspective of what is, and that seems to me to combine two things that don't go together....She may imagine transcending gender in too essentialized a way, but it is irrelevant to this vision what is realistic or what most people think.

And then there's more about the paper that I won't subject you to, and it ends with: "I'd like to know how this would be finished. Best, Barbara." Except the "Barbara" part is in that careful frail handwriting.

It's funny because reading this over now, 2 years later, I realize that these comments are not that bad. She acknowledges that the paper is unfinished--but what was I expecting? Did I somehow think that she wouldn't see the pages of notes at the end that say things like MUST RESPOND TO MESSIANIC UNDERTONES and WHY PEOPLE ONLY IN THE SECOND STANZA? Despite the paper’s wretchedness, she is actually almost encouraging. It's nothing short of a miracle.

More on Judith Herman

Wait a second.  After I linked to this interview with Judith Herman in my previous post and didn't talk about it at all, I'm going a little bit crazy over her.  Have you ever noticed that, when it comes to feminism, not enough people are naming what they see?  We don't trust our own experiences, or at least, we don't feel that our experience is enough to build theories around.  As Ani says, "I would make such a good statistic, someone should study me now."  And the nice thing about political movements, like the women's movement of the '70s, are that they provide a community of thinking where your experiences seem to be commonly understood.      

Anyway, here's what Herman says about this:

"What we observe and how we conceptualize what we observe is so embedded in the context of what we're looking for. And how we name it. [Psychology] isn't physics. So that even the paying of attention, the selection of what it is that we're going to consider interesting and significant in human behavior is formed by the social and political context that we're embedded in. And I think that's particularly true about the emotions related to power and control, the emotions related to one's place in society, one's place in the family, the emotions of shame, of resentment, of pride, of a sense of legitimacy or illegitimacy. So, even to pay attention to what women say about sex, motherhood, relationships, depends so much on what one thinks a woman ought to be saying, ought to be feeling, on what is legitimate to express. Unless you have a political movement that says, "Forget what everybody else thinks you ought to be feeling, what you ought to be saying. Get down to it. Tell the truth. What did you actually think and feel and notice in your body." You need a safe space to be able to do that. You need a political context to be able to do that.

But it's nice that she doesn't lead us to believe that nothing can happen in between feminist waves:

Organizations come and go. Intellectual theories come and go. The power to change the way people think and what people do comes out of small groups of people who care enough about something to try something new. And that can be done any time.

More on fathers

I came across this today from Judith Herman's book Father-Daughter Incest.  Read it and weep:

As long as fathers retain their authoritarian role, they cannot take part in the tasks or the rewards of parenthood.  They can never know what it means to share a work of love on the basis of equality, or what it means to nurture the life of a new generation.  When men no longer rule their families, they may learn for the first time what it means to belong to one.

Booyah.