Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  Recall, if you are old enough, or Google, if you are younger, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s Womanhouse exhibition, Marlo Thomas’s record Free to Be . . . You and Me, Billie Jean King’s victory in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, and Nancy Friday’s best-selling book about women’s erotic fantasies, My Secret Garden. Consider, too, that the lawyer later famous as the “Notorious RBG” began arguing against gender discrimination before an all-male Supreme Court; the first Black congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, ran for president of the United States; and Barbara Jordan became the first African American and first woman to give a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.

  Despite such advances, remember that until the twenty-first century, as the distinguished historian Ruth Rosen recently reminded us, no one thought that a woman could actually run for the presidency (and gain a majority of the votes) with the sponsorship of a major political party or that a woman could be elected Speaker of the House of Representatives.10 Chisholm’s attempt at the former accomplishment, fully backed by Gloria Steinem, proves that it was imaginable; but since the odds of success were so low, it was a symbolic, theatrical, and deeply utopian undertaking, a harking forward to some better, future time when such a campaign would seem perfectly realistic.11 In the House, after all, the men’s gym was not open to women until 1985; the swimming pool remained exclusively for the use of male members until 2009. As for the Senate, the first woman without familial political connections was not elected to it until 1980. And a bathroom facility was not provided for women senators until 1992; it wasn’t up and running until 1993 (with only two stalls, expanded to four in 2013).12

  Nevertheless, women’s hopes for equality continued to rise in the seventies. Just as the National Women’s Political Caucus emerged to support female candidates, the National Women’s Studies Association was formed to sponsor feminist academics. Professional publications flourished;13 notably, many of these enterprises, along with the activism that energized them, were situated on college and university campuses, where they had been founded by feminist academics who were as eager to investigate women’s past as they were to redefine women’s future. For the supposedly insular ivory tower housed revolutionary ideas that would change all our lives.

  Newly arrived at Indiana, we had never studied women’s history or women writers before. Nor had hardly anyone we knew, for such categories were only beginning to be defined.14 Neither one of us had been taught by a female professor in undergraduate or in graduate courses. Yet our generation was on the brink of integrating a feminist perspective into the humanities. We were also on the verge of discoveries that not only established the fields of women’s history and women’s literary history but also undertook equally important investigations into the roles of women in anthropology, religion, psychology, art, sociology, law, ethnic studies, business, and the sciences, along with analyses of the concept of gender itself and long-held views of sexual orientation. Together, all these rapidly emerging inquiries profoundly reshaped the political, legal, and medical environments of twenty-first-century Americans.

  We have come to believe that such major changes occurred because our cohort lived with and through contradictions that produced the need to analyze our situation, paradoxes that women today also face. Our own public exploration of gender began in 1974, when we team-taught a class in literature by women. We knew nothing about this field—indeed, it was not then “a field”—but we were drawn to books we had always loved and put together a course that, after much debate, we decided to call “The Madwoman in the Attic.”

  Teaching the class was transformative. Our syllabus included women writers from Jane Austen to the Brontës, from Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath—authors whose works we read as girls and young women but whom we had never studied in college or graduate school. Reading and discussing them with twenty-five responsive undergraduates, all of us were “changed utterly,” as William Butler Yeats (a man we had studied) would put it,15 as were the texts of the writers we analyzed.

  This was a conversion experience, the scales of what seemed to be a scaly masculinist past falling from our eyes, day in and day out. An awakening was upon us, our own awakening to a history we had never known, even though it had always been there. Kate Chopin had undergone a comparable experience while writing her novel The Awakening at the end of the nineteenth century, but the book had gone out of print; we did not know it. Zora Neale Hurston had too, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, but her work had also gone out of print; we did not know it. Ditto Charlotte Perkins Gilman: neither her celebrated story “The Yellow Wallpaper” nor her feminist tracts on women and economics were easily available. One memorable occasion, though, made us understand the obstacles that stood in our way.

  We had invited the well-known poet Denise Levertov to visit our class. We met her at the Indianapolis airport and brought her to Ballantine Hall, where one of the students had made large-scale, abstract paintings to illustrate Levertov’s verses. The chairs were arranged in a semicircle. Purple paintings lined the walls. Another student placed a tribute, a soft sculpture, at the poet’s feet. We read some of her poems aloud, and the undergraduates discussed them as an expression of women’s anger at confinement. “That’s not what I meant at all,” Denise Levertov said. The students nodded politely. We thought, She does not know anything, but her poems know everything. We thought, It has always been there, as was its denial. Later, quoting D. H. Lawrence, we told the students, “Never trust the artist, trust the tale.”16

  Denise Levertov did not want to be identified as a woman writer. She preferred to be recognized as an American writer, though she was born and raised in England. We encountered the same resistance when we sought to include Elizabeth Bishop in our co-edited Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Indeed, her estate stipulated that we could include her verse only if we also reprinted a statement in which Bishop declared: “Undoubtedly gender does play an important part in the making of any art, but art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art.”17 Of course, Bishop, like Levertov, can be studied in multiple traditions: the history of twentieth-century poetry, American studies, lesbian history, travel literature, and trauma studies, among others. Still, why this resistance to the category of woman writer?

  “Whoever is in power takes over the noun—and the norm—while the less powerful get an adjective,” Gloria Steinem once observed.18 To be a woman writer, from the point of view of Levertov and Bishop, was to be relegated to an inferior status as a less significant writer. Great authors, as literature syllabi had established for more than a century, were men. While we continued teaching and celebrating the genius of women artists, such moments led us to meditate on some women’s resistance to gender identification and to feminism, as we will do in the pages to come.

  Still, as we review our own history, we understand that our conversion experience in the seventies was hardly singular or unprecedented. It was one in a sequence of feminist lessons that women over the centuries have learned, and one in a sequence of feminist lessons that our generation had begun to learn in elementary school, maybe even earlier. Some of the problems that feminists confront today differ from the issues they or their mothers faced yesterday, but contradictions have always played a productive role in the second wave as women confront the paradoxes that shape their lives.

  THE SCHOOLING OF HILLARY RODHAM AND HER GENERATION

  Though she was often controversial, the woman who was called Hillary Clinton became a pivotal player on the public stage of feminist history and for us serves as a paradigmatic representative of her generation. How did a girl named Hillary Rodham, from a conservative midwestern family, come to embody the tensions of second-wave feminism in a twenty-first-century political campaign that became as much a battle of the sexes as a conflict of ideologies? At least one answer can be found in the crucial years between 1969 and 1979, when the wo
men’s movement was flourishing and Hillary Rodham was making life-altering decisions.

  An honors major in government at Wellesley, the 21-year-old Rodham was the first student chosen to give the school’s commencement address. And interestingly, she was one of four student speakers around the country whom Life magazine profiled in its June 20, 1969, issue. Though she had started college as a Barry Goldwater supporter, she had been radicalized in her undergraduate years. Now here she is in the pages of Life: long straight hair, no makeup, granny glasses, and an expression of frank determination. She could be one of countless revolutionary young American women in the heat and heart of campus protest.

  And indeed, her confidently delivered commencement speech enacted an impromptu protest against the ideas of the Republican Senator Edward Brooke, the speaker who preceded her and whose remarks focused on what he considered frivolous student protests. As he spoke, a friend reported, she had scribbled a response in the margins of her text: “I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said,” Hillary Rodham then announced, adding that “the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”19

  Making the impossible possible: this is what young women of Clinton’s generation—and ours—were brought up to believe we could do. “The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago,” she declared, explaining that “we arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot.” Then she went on to expatiate on what she still, four years later, considered possible, or at least ideal: instead of “our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, . . . more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living”—and, most important, “human liberation.”

  What mode of living would this idealistic young woman have to accept as she grew into her twenties? Hillary Rodham had already made close African American friends in her college years; with them, she mourned the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed of a better future, and transformed admissions protocols at her school.20 In the seventies, she continued to meet with the kind of successes she had achieved at Wellesley. She decided to earn her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973 partly because “there was a professor at Harvard Law School who looked at me—a bright and eager college senior, recently offered admission—and said, ‘We don’t need any more women at Harvard.’ ”21 Then she went on to work in Washington (on the Nixon impeachment process). In 1975, with some ambivalence, she moved to Arkansas and married her law school boyfriend, Bill Clinton, soon to be that state’s attorney general and, in 1979, its governor. In Arkansas, she continued working as an attorney, becoming the first female partner at the prestigious Rose Law Firm.

  Fast-forward now, from 1969, with its seemingly unmitigated triumph, to that crucial year of 1979, when a 31-year-old Hillary Rodham—yes, still Hillary Rodham—is being interviewed about her new role as the First Lady of Arkansas.22 Her self-presentation at this point seems quite different from that of the vaguely hippieish graduating senior. The governor’s wife is dressed in a pink full-skirted suit, a frilly white blouse, and knee-high crimson boots: super feminine pink and white, and super serious boots, the kind that were “made for walking.”23 As she’s grilled by a clearly hostile male interviewer, she maintains her calm, responding articulately to repeated questions that emphasize her radical difference from the Arkansas image of a governor’s wife.

  Does she even care about her duties as First Lady? the interviewer seems to want to know. What possesses her to keep not only her own name but her own professional career? She shifts a bit in her seat but is otherwise poised, as if she were humoring a fretful child. “I’m interested in social and civic events, but also in my professional life. I don’t see any reason to be an either/or person,” she patiently explains (italics ours). In a sweetly reasonable tone she notes, “I didn’t want to mix my professional activities with [Bill’s] political activities. . . . Keeping my name was part of that.” In fact, she adds, “I came to Arkansas of my own free will,” and she hopes that the state will accept someone who arrived “on her own terms.”

  A kind of splitting, one senses, is beginning here. The starry-eyed girl who dreamed of “human liberation” is being forced to confront the impossibility of the impossible. Does a part of her, steely with anger, stand apart from this demeaning encounter? She would seem to be someone who “has it all”—a handsome, successful husband and a gratifying career in the field for which she was trained. But she’s jumping through hoops, performing, and on television, as if such public cross-examinations were merely what a person who “has it all” really ought to expect. Is the impossible really impossible? She doesn’t seem to think so, at least not yet. She sits for this subtly hostile interview amiably, as if she is continuing to expect the great things that will come of her precocity as commencement speaker, as Washington insider, as practicing lawyer and law school professor, even as governor’s wife. Why shouldn’t all the parts of the puzzle come together?

  Clearly Hillary Rodham, like so many other young women who were to dive into the second wave of feminism, had been raised to believe that she deserved a significant place in the world. Girls in the generation schooled in the fifties and sixties were the first to go to college en masse. As they—we—pored over our textbooks, we encountered the contradictions that were to shape Hillary Rodham’s 1979 interview in Arkansas and the rest of her career—and many of our own careers too. Our books and teachers (especially at women’s colleges but even on some coeducational campuses) urged us to excel, to win prizes, to graduate with honors, to become commencement speakers, to edit student newspapers, to go to law school, to publish poetry and fiction. Directly subverting all this encouragement, advice columnists, magazines for teenage girls, fashion stylists, and often enough our own parents admonished us to be decorative and demure, bosomy and domestic.

  Even while we sat around seminar tables, eagerly interrogating the dialogues of Plato, many of us wore the long, full, ladylike skirts of the so-called New Look glamorized by Dior or the skimpy miniskirts that came later, along with bright red lipstick or dark black eyeliner, and (if necessary) padded bras, to assure others of our femininity. Yes, some of us did go to college not to win honors but to earn what used to be called “MRS degrees.” But others—and Hillary Rodham was one of them—seem to have thought that one needn’t be “an either/or person.”

  As the Arkansas years wore on and the subtle nagging about her name intensified, Hillary Rodham became Hillary Clinton. She had become convinced that one of the reasons her husband lost the 1980 governor’s race “was because I still went by my maiden name.”24 Then she became Hillary Rodham Clinton, even as her hairstyles famously metamorphosed, no doubt in response to all too much public commentary. Meanwhile, Hillary herself—for now she began to be identified only by her first name, as if she were a pop musician or a princess—became increasingly secretive and, given the modesty of her husband’s gubernatorial salary, increasingly anxious about money. She entered into confusing “deals” in and out of the Rose Law Firm that were to lead to much public trouble. And also, given her husband’s sexual fecklessness, she was frequently forced to cover for him, to adopt a serene façade that did not come easily to her.

  Once Bill Clinton became president, so deeply backed by her energy and intelligence that he and she became simply “the Clintons,” what had been a constant low-level background of Arkansas nagging turned into an almost Wagnerian international chorus of disapproval, directed mostly at “Hillary.” She grew more defensive than ever, yet her ambitions intensified. Eventually, she moved into an office in the West Wing rather than staying in the East Wing, where the First Lady and her staff are usually housed. And from then on, she was almost more a practicing politician than she was a First Lady, until, after her husband left the White House, she became first a senator and then a secretary of state.

  As she morphed into a deeply guarded pub
lic figure, the former Hillary Rodham also became more compromised by the “prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life” she had once deplored. She bought into the Iraq war and was herself bought as a speaker, for stunning sums, by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street sponsors. Beautifully groomed by an attentive staff and attired in Ralph Lauren pantsuits designed for her, she traveled the world to the point of utter exhaustion. Her message—“Women’s rights are human rights”—must still have been a driving motivator, yet the distinctions on which she had once mused, between “authentic reality” and “inauthentic reality,” began to blur. By the time of her first presidential campaign, when she was defeated in the primaries by a young Barack Obama, she downplayed her own feminism as a shaping force. “I didn’t want people to see me as the ‘woman candidate,’ ” she explained later, noting that our country would not have cheered but instead would have jeered at the narrative she badly wanted to tell: “My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation.”25 In 2008, that tale was apparently untellable.

  The ultimately calamitous campaign of 2016 returned her, willingly or not, to the arms of feminism. With the scandal-plagued Donald Trump bizarrely deriding her as “Crooked Hillary,” she seemed determined to grin and bear it. She must still, in part of herself, have remained Hillary Rodham, the triumphant commencement speaker, a young woman who would make the impossible possible. After all, as one of her classmates had revealed to the New Yorker in June 2016, “we predicted Hillary would be the first female President of the United States.”26 And recently the best-selling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has elaborated on that prophecy in the page-turning plot of Rodham (2020), a narrative that subverts a dismal reality with a fascinating fantasy in which Hillary finally becomes her “true” self.