The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Women’s rights demonstration, August 26, 1970, New York City

  Howe believed that women were underrepresented in the academic humanities for two reasons: first, because literary syllabi consistently presented literature as a man’s calling, and, second, because the presence of women steadily decreased as one proceeded to the upper levels of academe. By Howe’s count, at the end of the 1960s, women made up 80 percent of college students studying English and modern languages but only 20 percent of those applying to doctoral programs. Those who did pursue doctoral study found a hard and uneven path before them. Though most women with PhDs intended to produce scholarship—in one study of women scholars eight or nine years beyond their doctorate, 75 percent had published one article, and most had published three or four—there was still a perception that women PhD students didn’t intend to participate in the profession. As a result, many were shunted off to teaching jobs rather than tenure-track positions: women with PhDs were far more likely to teach at two- or four-year colleges, or community colleges, than at research universities. The result was that female doctoral students had only a one-in-nine, or one-in-ten, chance that their professor would be a woman. It was clear, from the numbers, that women were interested in studying literature and languages, perhaps even in professing the subjects, but along the way they were discouraged, rerouted, and dismissed. The future generation of female scholars had few role models before them, not in literature nor in life.

  Though she never finished her doctorate, Howe continued to advance in the profession—thanks in part to her prescience (she was teaching “women’s studies” before there even was such a category). Radicalized early, she resolved to increase the proportion of women writers, scholars, and editors in the academy. She wanted to change the way women graduate students were regarded and women authors read. And Tillie Olsen—ever vocal, newly visible—would be a part of this change.

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  It was an unseasonably warm day in late December 1971 when Olsen, holding fiercely to her second chance at a literary life, arrived in Chicago for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The professional association had been gathering since the late nineteenth century for several days of panels, forums, and job interviews. (The MLA annual convention continues to this day.) The conference took place over the course of three days between the Christmas holiday and the first day of the New Year—a time when most universities were on break, leaving faculty free to travel.

  How did Olsen, a writer averse to the kind of critical analysis of literature that preoccupied most scholars, end up at an academic convention?

  In 1968, as the political concerns of the New Left (civil rights, feminism, anticapitalism) began to penetrate academia, Olsen received an offer to teach at Amherst College, a small, all-male, all-white liberal arts college in western Massachusetts (Amherst went co-ed in 1975). The chair of the English department, Leo Marx, was a left-leaning Harvard graduate—he received both his BA and his PhD from the university—who was concerned by the homogeneity of the faculty at Amherst (Marx himself was one of only a few Jewish faculty). He thought Olsen, a fellow leftist and a woman, could bring the college up to date and prepare its undergraduates for the shifting world they were about to enter.

  At the time she received the invitation from Amherst, Olsen was at MacDowell—her second spell at the colony. She took several buses down from New Hampshire to interview at the college. During the interview, she was her unapologetic, provocative self: she shamed the faculty for their reliance on the typical canon and insisted that students could—must—learn about American inequality through the study of American literature. Her diatribe alienated some of the faculty, but it endeared her to Marx, who advocated for a handsome salary—equal to that of male faculty—and found a chauffeur to take Olsen back to New Hampshire. (In the academic year 1975–1976, the average male college professor earned $17,414 for nine months of work, while the average female college professor earned $14,308 for the same amount of time.) She received an invitation to start teaching in the fall of 1969 as a lecturer on a one-year contract. This was the start of her second, unexpected career.

  That summer, Olsen and Jack settled into a big house on Snell Street, two blocks from the Amherst English department. The roomy house cost them $220 a month in rent (about $1,535 today), more than they were used to paying in San Francisco. Instead of gabbing with the sex workers in San Francisco’s St. Francis Square, Jack took to jogging down the streets of Amherst, lined with beautiful trees and obscenely lovely houses. He also picked up a job at The Wall Street Journal, which had an office in Chicopee, a town about ten miles from South Hadley, where Mount Holyoke College is located. Olsen, meanwhile, tacked up her usual portraits—Tolstoy, Woolf, Sexton—and hung the lithograph portrait of Emily Dickinson, completed by Swan during her years at the Institute. She made another room hers.

  In a photograph from the time, Olsen—dressed all in black—stands in front of the Dickinson portrait, her elbows on the bookshelf and her hands in front of her. The poet makes the same gesture in the image. Olsen smiles, almost mischievously, as if she were getting away with something. She felt charged with some kind of magic living in the same town where her heroine, Dickinson, had spent her shut-away life. Later that year, she took her class on a field trip to Dickinson’s home, preserved as a museum, and cried in the ghostly presence of the poet. But even before she crossed Dickinson’s threshold, she felt moved by the town and by its history. Maybe in Amherst she could achieve something new.

  At Amherst College, Olsen taught two literature classes: one on what she thought of as the literature of poverty (writers who wrote about poverty, either as something they’d witnessed or as something they’d lived through), and one that she called “The Struggle to Write,” a course based on her Harper’s piece, “Silences.” (Authors included several of those quoted in the article: James, Hardy, Conrad.) Students were especially intrigued by her poverty course, though Olsen found it odd to teach the literature of inequality to some of the country’s most economically privileged students. As her daughter Julie remembered it, Olsen’s first experience with academia brought out her radicalism: teaching at Amherst “really heightened her understanding of class distinctions. I remember her just being horrified at the differences between the adjuncts and the full-time faculty, and the male faculty and the few females that were anywhere around.” It wasn’t that she begrudged the Amherst students and faculty their good jackets or their nice houses. Indeed, she formed warm relationships with her students, who forgave her scatterbrained nature because she was so fervent in her belief that reading and writing matter. “There’s nothing wrong with privilege,” she used to say, “except that everybody doesn’t have it.”

  Olsen in front of Swan’s Dickinson

  Olsen’s courses were revolutionary for their eclecticism and for their representation of women, working-class writers, and writers of color. These were the defining features of her teaching: in one course, titled “Literature of Poverty, Oppression, Revolution, and the Struggle for Freedom,” the syllabus included W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth. Students loved the course in part because it spoke to the turbulent times—students cited the Kent State shooting in May 1970 and the war protests as their reasons for taking the course—and in part because it introduced them to new writers, those outside the mainstream. It diversified their reading.

  Faculty and scholars admired Olsen’s work as well. Paul Lauter, an activist scholar, recalled how teachers passed Olsen’s “influential” poverty course syllabus among themselves, as if it were a secret blueprint for a better university. Lauter and his wife, none other than Florence Howe, were new admirers of Olsen’s: they had met her in the lobby of an apartment building in New York City, just before Olsen started teaching at Amherst
. Olsen was in New York to take care of some health troubles, and a mutual acquaintance had arranged the meeting. Olsen handed the couple a photocopy of Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills. She suggested that they read the novella during the day so they would be able to sleep at night. Both found Davis’s work quite moving and couldn’t believe it was out of print. Life in the Iron Mills proved that Olsen’s suspicions were correct: the literary past contained plenty of impressive, important works by women.

  Olsen’s syllabus, with its women and writers of color, would go some way to changing the canon and, as a result, the composition of the English classroom. Howe believed that one reason few women pursued doctoral study compared with the number of women who majored in English as undergraduates was that they didn’t see themselves represented in their readings: the female characters they encountered were either scorned or sexualized. The scholar and critic Elaine Showalter, then a professor at Douglass College (where Bunting had been dean), agreed. At the 1970 Modern Language Association conference, held in New York City, Showalter delivered a talk titled “Women and the Literary Curriculum” (later published in College English). Reflecting on her time at Bryn Mawr, Showalter observed that in the twenty-one English courses for sophomores through seniors, students encountered no fewer than 313 men and only 17 women. Writers like Edith Wharton and Christina Rossetti were nowhere to be found. The effect on would-be female scholars, she argued, is devastating. “Women students will therefore perceive that literature…confirms what everything in society tells them: that the masculine viewpoint is considered normative, and the feminine viewpoint divergent.” Women are minor, men major. The classroom is a male space, full of male writers and a male professor. Women students are asked, therefore, to identify with men, to distrust their own life experiences and perceptions. “Can we wonder,” she asked, “that women students are so often timid, cautious, and insecure when we exhort them to ‘think for themselves’?”

  Showalter’s solution was simple: teach literature by women. At Douglass, she taught a freshman course called “The Educated Woman in Literature.” Not only did her Douglass students read women, but they also related what they read to their own psychological and social development. Showalter referred to her class as a kind of consciousness-raising. At Goucher College, Howe did the same thing: she asked her female students to identify with women in novels and respond to literary dilemmas as if they themselves were faced with an unintended pregnancy or a diffident husband. Howe’s course was featured on the front page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which claimed that she was teaching not literature but “consciousness.”

  This form of teaching was indeed radical—not only because it was expressly political, but also because it trampled over some of the central principles of the New Criticism, the practice of reading and teaching that had dominated university English departments since the 1950s and that had been pioneered by I. A. Richards, the professor who hosted the educational television show that taught Sexton about the sonnet. New Critics held that the text was a coherent work of art, cordoned off from the world. The student, or scholar, should analyze the text without recourse to history or to the author’s biography. New Critics argued strenuously against allowing one’s emotional response to a text to override one’s rational assessment of the text’s value. The method was scientific, a perfect fit for the Cold War university. But Howe and Showalter were encouraging students to respond emotionally, to take these responses seriously, and to break down the barrier between the work of art and the world at large. They believed that lived experience was as good a basis for assessing literary value as a keen understanding of metaphor and metonymy. They believed, in other words, that literature affected lives.

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  Olsen agreed.

  On that warm day in December, Olsen gave her MLA conference talk, titled “Women Who Are Writers in Our Century: One out of Twelve.” The talk was later published in College English. In “One out of Twelve,” Olsen connected the central themes of her 1963 Radcliffe seminar talk—inequality of circumstances, lost writing, her own personal and professional struggles—to contemporary politics. “It is the women’s movement,” she began that December morning, “that has brought this forum into being; kindling a renewed…interest in the writings and writers of our sex.” Like Howe and Showalter, Olsen had done her own (admittedly unscientific) count of women on syllabi for college English courses and found that there was roughly one woman writer for every twelve men.

  What could account for this difference in achievement and recognition? True to form, Olsen argued that women’s historical disadvantages, particularly the burden of child rearing, had either prevented them from producing literature or ensured that their literary reputations never took off. Challenging some prominent contemporary women writers, like the critic Diana Trilling—who believed that the achievement gap between men and women reflected biological difference—and Elizabeth Hardwick—who discounted the idea that female artists struggled more, or differently, than male ones—Olsen spoke of injustice and oppression, of the ways that the circumstances into which one is born determined one’s fate. Alluding to Woolf, she discussed how the “angel in the house”—the nurturing feminine ideal—thwarted creative ambition in women. Not everyone could kill that angel. Some women ended up killing themselves.

  Oppression, in other words, was everywhere: in the world and in the mind. Even the women born into the privileged class, she noted, struggled against sexism: “Isolated. Cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d; the private sphere. Bound feet: corseted, cosseted, bedecked; denied one’s body. Powerlessness. Fear of rape, male strength…Shut up, you’re only a girl…Roles, discontinuities, part self, part time.” “Only in the context of this punitive difference in circumstance, in history,” she argued, could we understand why only “one out of twelve” women have achieved literary recognition. She repeated that statistic—one out of twelve—throughout the talk, as if these were the incantatory words of mourning and her talk a dirge.

  The solutions Olsen proposed were at once simple and revolutionary. “You who teach, read writers who are women,” she challenged her audience. She encouraged biographical criticism: “Teach women’s lives through the lives of women who wrote the books, as well as through their books; and through autobiography, biography, journals, letters.” And she encouraged them to read and listen to “living women writers”—including herself.

  Listen they did. The talk made Olsen’s academic reputation—not quite because it was unprecedented (Showalter had made similar points in her 1970 conference talk), but because it was timely, impassioned, and powerful. More than that, Olsen herself was a living example of the underrepresented woman writer and working-class writer. The personal was still political, and unlike some other scholars Olsen could speak of a struggle she had lived. That evening, after the panel was concluded, attendees crowded into Olsen’s conference hotel room, where they discussed how to diversify syllabi and faculty. They were drawn to Olsen like parched travelers to water; tireless, passionate, she gave them the courage and energy they needed to continue on their independent journeys as college educators around the country.

  Over the next few years, Olsen began to travel, too. A few months after her teaching appointment ended, in August 1970, she and Jack went to Vermont and climbed to the top of Putney Mountain. Laurie, now studying education, held a wedding ceremony in the same mountains. Olsen loved love but hated the cultural practice of spending a lot of money on an overly formal wedding ceremony; she was happy to send a newspaper clipping about Laurie’s cheap, bohemian wedding to the Institute. In the months and years that followed, Olsen accepted speaking engagements, fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, and short-term teaching positions at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at MIT. She lectured widely and gave readings: in New York, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Maryland. In later years, she made her way overseas, to China, to Engl
and, to Italy, among other places. No matter where she was or what specific text she read, she presented a version of the message she’d so memorably delivered at the MLA conference in 1971: “The greatness of literature is not only in the great writers, the good writers, it is also in that which explains much and tells much; the soil from which greater writers burgeon.” She would plant the seeds for women’s studies in soil across the country. Admirers started calling her “Tillie Appleseed.”

  In 1978, Olsen published a book titled Silences. It comprised “One out of Twelve,” an adaptation of her 1971 MLA talk, her Harper’s article “Silences,” her reading lists from college courses she’d taught, and other writings and “jottings.” It is a messy scrapbook of sorts; essays are linked by theme and voice, but there’s no real structure or overarching argument. This was in some sense the point: Olsen wanted to show what a writing life looks like when it’s happened in fits and starts, on buses and before doing the ironing. Much of the work in Silences had been published before, but once again Olsen needed to publish something, and so she turned to past work to provide her with a new publication.