A Life in Motion

Prologue: Memory, History, and the Missing Creative Bone

— 11 — As a book editor, I have usually urged writers to begin by explaining why they have written their books. What was their goal? Who was their inspiration? And, at the same time, I have also suggested that, in a concluding piece, perhaps they would like to explain whether they have accomplished their purpose. No matter that I knew the formula, I could not at first clarify the ingredients of my own book. No matter how I shook the contents, I could not then pull out a narrative line that moved from one year to the next. When I hired a professional consultant who had once been a notable editor, she said that I had to write either an“autobiography ” or a“memoir.” Since I was in my late seventies when I met with her, she thought I didn’t have time enough to write an autobiography , for that would entail years of research, but perhaps I could write a memoir simply from memory. That is, if I could write. There, then, was the nub: Could I write? Was I a writer? But setting aside that question for a moment, as I explained to the consultant who knew nothing about me, I had two quite different kinds of stories to tell, and for one of these I did have rapid access to “research”—in my files of correspondence, records of meetings, and forty years of lengthy journals typed often daily at home and written in notebooks when I was traveling in the years before computers. Thus, for the story of the Feminist Press, I had historical documents in hand along with my own contemporary perceptions, year by year, day by day. I could write an account of the forty-year history of an institution I had helped to found and Prologue: Memory, History, and the Missing Creative Bone — 12 — had stayed with to the present moment. And I had many reasons for wanting to write that history. So, why not simply write a history of the Feminist Press? Because there were other questions I longed to name, to unravel, even if I could not always answer them neatly. One might call this the“backstory”: Who was this person who helped found the Feminist Press and then stayed with it for forty years? Why did I have a few very sharp memories and so many blanks? Why was my life so affected by moves—from school to school, from home to hospital, from a working-class Brooklyn household to an Upper East Side Manhattan high school, from plebeian Hunter College to waspy Smith College? Why could I not part with my childhood desire for a loving family? Why, though I left my first three husbands, did I not want to lose the fourth, though I knew he was not always as loving as the others? What motivated my life? Like many young women of the 1950s, I wanted marriage and a family. The first mystery, therefore, is why I heeded my Hunter College mentors whose advice sent me away from those goals. My uneducated father understood that when he told me I would never have“a normal life.” Though I didn’t believe him at the time, I never forgot his prediction. He was right, of course. Janet Zandy, my dear friend and the first reader of this book, a professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, saw as inspiration for my life the motto of Hunter College: mihi cura futuri—the care of the future is mine. As a wise theorist of working -class life, Janet saw that the experience at Hunter fortified my childhood battle against my mother’s insistence that nothing can be changed and her certainty that a woman had to “get used to” living in some measure of misery. My mother had endured misery , and, she was saying, so would I. From my earliest drafts, Janet surmised—and I acknowledged—that Hunter opened my eyes to the world and all of its possibilities for movement and change. In the early 1990s, Janet wrote to ask me whether I’d like to contribute an essay to a volume she was preparing called Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness. She wanted me to write about my origins and how they were connected — 13 — to the Feminist Press. At first, I was dubious about her theory— and I told her there was no...