Introduction

“LADIES FIRST!” This phrase today, perhaps more than the custom it refers to, sounds off, ill-advised, antiquated at best. One can hardly imagine a native speaker — and it would be a man, wouldn’t it? — uttering it at all, except humorously or with thinly veiled hostility. On “ladies,” the OED is loquacious — a very good read, and endlessly instructive. This word dates to the Middle Ages, and among its oldest senses are those that attribute some form of authority, to either a “woman who rules over subjects, a queen” or to the “female head of a household; a woman who has authority over servants, attendants, or slaves.” Chivalrous, religious, and courtly meanings follow in later centuries, with the more general and enduring usage — a mark of respect or courtesy — toward the end of this arc. The pejorative, sexist, and misogynist content implicit in nearly all such forms of address, not surprisingly, seems roughly coeval with the privileges it pretends to bestow. This is the master’s house, after all. The OED notes as well how the word appears, “In later use also (chiefly N. Amer.) in less formal contexts, sometimes with overtones of brusqueness or hostility.” Others may not agree, but I find this comment particularly revealing. The lexicographers cite a Canadian newspaper: “He said, ‘Look lady, you can deal with me or you can deal with the police’” (London Free Press, Nexis 15, July 4, 2007).

Even more striking, perhaps, is the etymology of the term: “lady,” it turns out, comes from the Old English “hláfdige,” or “loaf-kneader,” with “lord,” correspondingly, from the Old English “hláford, once hláfweard,” namely, “loaf-keeper.” On the nature of the loaf, little is said (or needs to be). The through line uniting all these senses, etymological and lexical — the rope woven from each varied strand — is vocative. Throughout history, patriarchy has called women into assigned places and roles for them.

These days, we often hear idle talk about our postfeminist or postracial society; in such moments, I generally think to myself, Well, clearly we’re not yet postidiocy. Certainly the two stories that open this issue, by Elizabeth Denton and Amy Collier, put the lie to that postfeminist fairy tale; both explore creative female lives framed in a world that still prefers its women procreative. Elsewhere, though separated by continents and cultures, Siobhan Phillips and Zaher Omareen (in an ALTA Award–winning translation by Alice Guthrie) map the mystical relations of production and reproduction, demonstrating that the ingestion of food may well be our most deeply political act. And here the psychodelirotogenetical art of Dorothy Iannone — also featured in this issue — can lend a hand: one look at her cookbooks and you’re hooked.

Similarly, in praise of the Folly Cove Designers, Jennifer Scanlon recovers a story from modern feminism’s pupal stage, showing us once again that all real progress is collective. Or perhaps I should say “teneral,” as Taije Silverman puts it in her poem “Grief,” one of this number’s lyrical highlights. The OED tells us that Silverman’s adjective is used to describe “the imperfect imago of a neuropterous insect, when it has just emerged from the pupa state, and is still soft.” We are none of us, ladies or otherwise, there yet: as Christa Romanosky’s second-person recipe for disaster suggests, knowing better is never enough. Such suffering is voiced also during Tim Seibles’s “Walk”: “the suspicion / that life would not / save us, that love itself / was little more than a hook / for the mouth.”

Set inside the force field of feminism, this issue’s most memorable tales by men also stress the chains that still bind us. René Char’s dream of a drowned child, admirably rendered by Nancy Naomi Carlson, tells a tale of womb-envy. And we also note that Daniele Del Giudice’s fable of buying time, translated by the dynamic duo of Liz Harris and Louise Rozier, concludes in a vision of women’s temporality first coined by Julia Kristeva. Martín Espada’s revelation of one of Roberto Clemente’s greatest moments, long confined by racist commentary to...