"Shout It Out Loud": Grace Paley and the Radicalization of Maternity

This essay argues that Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) reflects her opposition to the war in Vietnam via a formal and thematic ethics of understanding. Such an ethics includes various modes of indeterminacy and represents a counterpoint to discursive and epistemological habits Paley codes as masculine. This essay further claims that Paley's commitment to possibility for both readers and characters is informed by a maternal subjectivity defined by moral obligation. The dialectical utopianism of Herbert Marcuse, which was immensely influential with the period's counterculture, provides critical context for Paley's juxtaposition of activism and maternal care.