A Life in Motion

10. Practicing Feminism at Home and Abroad

— 249 — 10 Practicing Feminism at Home and Abroad It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement to history? Calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name. . . . Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Within a few years after 1969,I became a public person, no longer the invisible worker in the office, finding and renting the hall, advertising the event, arranging and printing the programs, working out transportation as well as housing and food, raising the money, and keeping the accounts. When my husband was speaker, I’d go along to listen and hand out sign-up sheets or sell literature. Beginning in 1969, I was invited to speak on feminist topics. From the first, I had two problems, one of them physical. Just before I was to speak, hives appeared, sometimes around my wrist as though I were wearing a violent red bracelet and sometimes in other even more uncomfortable places. Eventually, they began to appear on my lips so that I couldn’t speak without great pain. At that point I began to take cortisone: a tiny pill would take the swelling down immediately. In Pittsburgh, just before I was to speak at the first East Coast women’s studies conference in 1971, I took a — 250 — pill and could see the swelling disappear. When I told Joanne Gardiner , the director of KNOW, a small feminist press in Pittsburgh, what pill I had taken, she told me that cortisone had recently killed her mother—all her blood vessels had collapsed. True or false, the story frightened me sufficiently so that I tossed the remaining pills into the toilet and was never troubled again. My other problem was that I was too insecure to speak without a text.And from the earliest invitation somehow I decided that,just as I could not teach the same course twice, I could not also speak the same text twice unless it was not to be published. I wrote my first feminist talk, “Should Women Read Fiction?” in response to an invitation from a member of the English department at Eastern Michigan University. I wondered as I entered the small classroom crammed with faculty and graduate students whether others in the room heard my heart beating as I did. I had written my talk out in full and had only to read it aloud. Even so, I was breathless, as though I had been climbing a hill. Once finished reading, I could answer questions with ease and without nervousness, as if in my own classroom. For the people in the room, mine was a shocking text: my response to the question was,“No, women should not read fiction, if they were reading it as a model for their lives, since in all the fiction I had read or taught, women ended in marriage or death or both marriage and death. The antidote of the moment for me,” I added,“is Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in which divorced women preferred to live alone.” During the question period, several men spoke, sometimes in great anger. Was I recommending the discarding of great world literature ? Didn’t I know that that was the way things were? Women did marry and die. Literature simply reflected what was. In response, I was modest and disclaimed any recommendations , noting that I was simply thinking of my students who said they read fiction to figure out what to do with their lives. But my disclaimer didn’t calm anyone who had taken the talk as provocation . Their responses were hostile. They felt threatened; I panicked. I still wanted to be liked. I did not enjoy the experience. — 251 — Though I was able to state the text of my talk—that the literary curriculum was harmful to women—I had not yet grasped the subtext to come: that there might be another,perhaps a“lost”literary curriculum. In 1969, I could not make that claim, for the process lay before me. In 1969, I could not imagine an alternative curriculum, for I assumed,along with all my colleagues,that what we were teaching was the best that...