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C HAPTER 3 1 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Women Writing about Women Writing about Women I TOOK THE JOB OF CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICER AT A WOMEN'S COLLEGE IN Baltimore, fallen on evil days after a century ofeducating YOtmg ladies from up and down the east coast, and now about to become coeducationaL It had to make that change to stay alive. So few young women would choose an all-female college by the 1980s that the marginal women's institutions were W1dergoing sex-change operations in droves. The school that hired me had existed on the fringe of the famous Seven Sisters ofwomen's colleges, the Smiths and Vassars and Wellesleys, but ifit was a sister, she was an ugly duckling, small and slow-witted and a tad overweight. But as the president at Southwestern at Memphis had annotlllced when asked why he had taken the job at that college, I took the offer in Baltimore because they made it to me. I learned immediately that the faculty of a single-sex institution was a different breed from what I was used to at coed colleges. There were lots of female faculty, but they had a commitment to being female that was pronotlllced. They often declared themselves to be of that sex, as though they were being accused ofmasquerading as something else. Any fool could l(X)k at them and tell they were female, whether they wore makeup or not, or the ordinary dress of women or seaman's oilskins, but many of them were uneasy about being misidentified. They never laughed. They never joked. They never flirted. By default, the male faculty members had the responsibility of carrying out these acts of cultural behavior, and most did that welL Both sexes ofthe faculty were suspicious ofme, coming from Texas originally as I did, and having spent my entire career in coeducational institutions. I did little to as.ruage their fears, I confess. Once an older member of the female faculty, a professor of political science who had spent some years in London and therefore pronotlllced the word 131 132 HOME TRUTHS issue in a manner never before heard in the English speaking world, told me about a coming conference. "It is a gathering of those interested in women writing about women," she infonned me, her mass of gray curls and her many necklaces a twitch and a jangle. Trying to joke, 1 pretended to misunderstand. "Women writing about women writing about womenr' 1asked, and the old professor of IXllitical science jumped back as though she'd seen a rattlesnake or its human equivalent. "I beg your pardon," she said, and 1made things worse by using the word she pronounced so well, issue, but said it in a broad Texas drawL "I hope 1haven't created an issue," 1ventured. Oh, welL There were good things about working at the newly coeducational college , though, including the fact that no one came to work before 9:00 AM but me, and that there were so few students and such low expectations for faculry perfonnance that 1had little to do. 1had plenty of time to write in my office, and 1did so, completing a novel about the BluffCiry called Memphis Ribs, one set on the Alabama-Coushatta reservation in Texas named SnaJre Song, and another set on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Coasters. After finishing the third year and seeing the number of men at the college rise to only thitty-three in four years, 1decided 1had done all the damage 1 could do in that locale, and 1 resigned. 1 began teaching writing classes at Johns Hopkins Universiry, where my wife had a faculty appointment in the School of Medicine, we took advantage ofwhat Baltimore offered and the fact that everything is so close together on the East Coast, and we lived in Charm City for ten years. Memphis Ribs, my genre-bending hard boiled comic mystery, as the flap copy describes the book, 1 wrote while living in Baltimore, a city 1 have attempted to put to fictional use in only one shott story to date. E Scott Fitzgerald once said of Baltimore, "I belong here where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite." Fitzgerald was Fitzgerald, though, and 1 have not yet tried to get my anns arotllld more than twenry-five pages of fiction about the city. But 1don't live there any more, and 1may want to attempt it some day now that my perspective is cooled...

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