9. Silences helped prompt Paul Lauter to organize through the Feminist Press the Reconstructing American Literature project in 1979, which led to the publication in 1983 of a volume of syllabi, course materials, and commentary under that title (Lauter 1991). The Heath Anthology (1990) was an outgrowth of that project.
10. Olsen 1988. Silences has also been translated into Norwegian and Dutch.
11. Schoedel wrote, “Finally, I want to help overcome what my favorite writer, Tillie Olsen, calls ‘women’s silences of centuries.’ Accounts of women’s lives, in particular working class women’s lives, have not been viewed as worth recording” (xiii).
12. Other critics not previously mentioned for whom Silences has been important include Elizabeth Meese, Dale Spender, Valerie Trueblood, Alix Kates Shulman, Helen MacNeil, Sandra Whipple Spanier, and Adrienne Rich, who commented on the significance of Silences for criticism: “Tillie Olsen’s Silences will, like A Room of One’s Own, be quoted wherever there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible” (Rich 1982).
13. Silences “offered a lot of solace and inspiration” to Lim, who found it “very exciting. It encouraged me to do the work I often doubted doing.” Plays of Lim’s such as “XX,” which deals with the oppression of women from ancient China to the contemporary United States, have been produced in San Francisco. She has published her poetry and a collection of her plays, which she characterizes as “hard-edged feminist” drama (Lim 1989).
14. Citing Olsen’s recognition of the importance of “foreground silences,” Sondra Zeidenstein writes, “In breaking the silence imposed by their culture, [the writers in A Wider Giving] have had to give themselves time and permission, seek out training, face rejection and self-doubt, fight the negativity sometimes ingested from their own mothers, begin to develop their craft and, hardest of all, summon the strength again and again to continue” (Zeidenstein xiii-xiv).
15. I am indebted to Carla Peterson for the concept of a “rhetoric of arithmetic” (Peterson 1988).
16. Olsen was not the first to use the concept of “counting.” Indeed, she readily credits both Showalter and Howe with having sparked her awareness of the value of this technique. In the essay Olsen cites Elaine Showalter’s article, “Women and the Literary Curriculum” (College English, May 1971) as a pioneering precursor. (Olsen 1982, 28) Olsen notes: “I have developed this almost compulsive what I call the Florence Howe Test, after the person I first saw do it. You take any anthology, any list—look at the contents of a magazine, or at who is being discussed in a book of criticism, a textbook. . . . You run your finger down and you count the number of men who are in it and you count the number of women, and you discover that in the second century in which women have come to writing at all, usually you will find one woman in about every nine to ten men. It is astonishing that you find this disparity even in the fields of poetry and story—which women have been more likely to write in the past because they presumably do not take as much time, or rather, they fit in more easily between other things, better than forms that require long, concentrated attention—it is astonishing that is, if you assume that human beings are born with similar capacities when it comes to thinking, to dreaming, to creating. I am of those who very strongly believe that this capacity to create is inherent in the human being and has not to do with the body, with the sex into which you are born. I believe that there is the strongest relationship between circumstances and actual creative production” (Olsen 1972). Olsen’s distinctive contribution was introducing a larger audience to this valuable tool.
17. These complaints were raised by several graduate students, both women and men, in my American Studies graduate seminar at the University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 1990. Two years earlier I heard similar comments from a prominent feminist critic I had interviewed who did not wish to be cited by name.
18. In an article on campus trends, Time Magazine, for instance, noted with disapproval the fact that “a University of Texas professor of American Studies has constructed a course on 19th–century writers to alternate between famous white men one week and obscure women the next, in part to illuminate ‘the prison house of gender.’” Time’s assumption, of course, was that the women writers were obscure because they deserved to be obscure—not because social or political factors might have helped deny their work the attention it deserved (Henry 66). See also D’Souza 51–79. For two cogent and eloquent challenges to the position embodied in the Time article, see Paul Lauter’s Canons and Contexts and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars.
19. “[We write] because we have more fear of silence than of speech.” (Direct translation: of words) Rosario Ferré, “Porque Escribe la Mujer.” Variant on this quotation contained in “Entrevista breve con Rosario Ferré,” conducted by Krista Ratkowski Carmona, supplied by Ferré. Stanford speech (which was in Spanish) replaced “I” of Carmona interview with “Women.” Ferré spoke of the importance of Silences to her own work in an interview (Ferré 1988).
20. Two related areas of concern are the ghettoization within women’s studies courses of material on women of color (see Zinn and also Alarcón, 1990) and the ghettoization and exclusion of gay and lesbian writers from a range of academic enterprises (see Beam et al., 1988; Poulson-Bryant; “As Quiet as It’s Kept”; McDaniel). Unfortunately, homophobia in academia has led to a rise of self-censorship on the part of a number of gay and lesbian scholars (Zimmerman 1988).
21. Gates noted that he arrived at this statement through consultation with historian John Hope Franklin.
22. Statistics gathered by Norma Alarcón (personal communication).
23. I am indebted to Roe v. Wade attorney Sarah Weddington for sharing with me her clipping file of hundreds of articles on this subject, documenting instances of harassment, violence, and intimidation in every section of the country.
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