Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  In real life, the catastrophe of the election drove Hillary Clinton back, at least for a time, into the privacy she claimed to cherish. Yet as she emerged, once more, into the public eye, observers wondered what she thought, how she felt. In her 2017 book What Happened she did address the disgust and hatred of “sexism and misogyny” that she considered “endemic in America.”27

  We focus so intensely on the vexed fate of Hillary Rodham because the paradoxes of the young Wellesley graduate’s brilliant career dramatized on an international stage the tensions and conflicts of seventies feminism. We were trained to succeed. We were scorned for succeeding. We were urged to marry. Marriage obstructed our aspirations. We were taught to fulfill ourselves. We were instructed to support our husbands’ ambitions. We resolved to be authentic, to forget about makeup and making up to the world. We were constructed to be inauthentic, to dress up and dress well. When we experienced “sexism and misogyny,” we bit our lips, clamped down on our rage—and then ran for office, for the editorial board, for CEO, for president of the United States.

  THE CULTURAL CHAOS WE FACE

  The years directly before and after the Trump triumph made it clear that we are entering an era when it will be more important than ever to examine women’s lives, dreams, hopes, and despairs. Although at the turn of the century some thinkers declared the second wave over—there was much talk then about “post-feminism”—feminism and the need for feminism would no more fade away than did the state under communism.

  Today, a deeply entrenched feminization of poverty means that a disproportionate number of women around the globe continue to struggle with economic hardship. Millions of women worldwide are trapped in the sex trade, receive no formal education, and are treated as property. Here at home, the glass ceiling remains mostly intact, despite Sheryl Sandberg’s advice to “lean in.”28 For middle- and working-class mothers needing to earn a living, childcare is still an enormous challenge, and repeated legislative efforts, often fueled by Christian conservatives, have gradually eroded women’s reproductive freedoms.

  After the first Black president and his charismatic wife exited the White House, a cabinet dominated by conservative white billionaires was installed in office. Before and after his election, Obama’s successor insouciantly admitted to groping women. And just before his inauguration, the New York Times reported on a survey on gender; of the women polled, 82 percent “said sexism was a problem in society today.”29

  Amid these conditions, feminism achieved a new cultural popularity. By August 2014, when Beyoncé performed at MTV’s Video Music Awards while the word “FEMINIST” glowed behind her, celebrities had begun rebranding the movement. Emma Watson, the actress who played Harry Potter’s Hermione on-screen, spoke at the United Nations about the need to understand gender as “a spectrum” rather than “two sets of opposing ideals,” while Miss Piggy, of Muppet fame, declared “Moi is a feminist pig.” Contemplating the #YesAllWomen movement, the feminist thinker Rebecca Solnit celebrated 2014 as “a year of feminist insurrection against male violence,” in which women began speaking out in record numbers and “the whole conversation changed.”30 To be sure, many of the problems feminists addressed went unsolved, but at least our comediennes—Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and Samantha Bee—could help us laugh when we watched them on YouTube or television.

  In 2015, the TV critic of HuffPost welcomed “the feminist Golden Age” of television as she considered such shows as Orange Is the New Black, The Mindy Project, Scandal, Grace and Frankie, Transparent, and Jane the Virgin.31 The popularity of T-shirts with the logo “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” soared. And at the 2017 women’s march Senator Kirsten Gillibrand declared that all were participating in “the revival of the woman’s movement.”32 The Washington rally—and others—did have the air of a revival meeting: a sense of dedication, of almost religious renewal and recommitment, as the marchers set out on a new journey toward the centers of political power. What roads do they—do we—see ahead for feminism? The growing realization that there would have to be many roads became a certainty during the following months.

  For as the misogynistic Trump administration took office, we seemed on the brink of entering the nightmare world of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which started reappearing on best-seller lists and which was serialized in the spring of 2017 in Hulu’s television adaptation. Both the book’s resurgence and the television series illustrate the growing relevance of second-wave feminism in the twenty-first century. An Orwellian fantasy, The Handmaid’s Tale portrays the triumph of theocratic patriarchy in Gilead, a totalitarian state established in the ruins of a polluted America by Commanders who exploit rampant fears of foreign terrorism. Enslaved, women in Gilead cannot divorce or hold jobs, bank accounts, or political offices. Neither can they control their own bodies. Because of a poisoned planet, birth rates have plummeted. Abortion and birth control have been outlawed, and the Bible has been perverted by Commanders who manage to procreate despite the sterility of their wives by invoking Rachel and Leah, two barren wives in the Hebrew Bible who used their maids as surrogate mothers.

  Atwood’s Handmaid heroine Offred has been turned into a two-legged womb, wearing the red cloak and the white blinder bonnet of the fertile women who will bear the offspring of their Commander-owners. Her name signifies that she has become the chattel “of Fred.” It also hints at a human being “offered,” Atwood has explained, as “a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice.”33 During the monthly “ceremony” enacted when she is ovulating, Offred must lie between the spread legs of the Wife as the Commander inseminates her. Anatomy has become destiny for all the women of Gilead, who are assigned rigid roles.

  The television series, like the novel, emphasizes societally enforced divisions between women: domestic servants and wives, Aunts and Jezebels, Econowives and Unwomen wear distinctive costumes and assume specialized roles.34 Neither Atwood’s novel nor the television series blames these rigid divisions between women entirely on men. The Wife in Offred’s household named herself Serena Joy in the period before the Commanders took over, when she scrapped singing for making speeches “about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.”35 Another collaborator with the patriarchy, Aunt Lydia—who uses clitoridectomy to punish rebellious handmaids into submission—spouts platitudes that once were feminist propositions: about pornography leading to rape and about women needing to preserve their maternal powers.

  The Handmaid’s Tale reminds us that ostensibly liberatory rhetoric can be lassoed by reactionary forces and that women have played significant roles in a succession of backlashes. We will see various feminist agendas hijacked by female opponents. We will also encounter real-life versions of Serena Joy appearing on the national stage from the fifties throughout the following decades, sometimes under the aegis of feminism itself. This deeply ironic and perplexing phenomenon is worth tracing; the problem of the anti-feminist woman remains a key conundrum for future activists and thinkers to tackle.

  But the televised remaking of The Handmaid’s Tale also speaks to another facet of feminism’s long second wave: the recycling of earlier touchstone texts. The “feminist Golden Age” of television may have come into being in part because of the consciousness-raising of earlier feminists. In the early eighties, Alison Bechdel, the prize-winning author of the graphic novel Fun Home, started publishing a comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, recounting the everyday lives of a diverse cast of lesbians. In an installment from 1986 titled “The Rule,” one character establishes three basic tests a movie must pass to get her approval: “One, it has to have at least two women in it, who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.”36 By 2010, the website bechdeltest.com was listing movies that passed the test.

  While the Bechdel test cannot evaluate either the femini
sm or the excellence of a work of art, it certainly tracks the presence of women. For men and women today, Virginia Woolf’s statement “we think back through our mothers if we are women” may sound somewhat retro;37 however, the recycling of Atwood’s novel as well as the appearance of protesters garbed as Handmaids at twenty-first-century demonstrations prove that we think back through our feminist predecessors when we aim to grapple with the persistence of gender trouble.

  KEEPING THINGS GOING

  In Gilead the Handmaids are not allowed to read and write. Like the slaves of the nineteenth century, they must be denied literacy because reading and writing always hold out the promise of liberation. It is no accident that the education of girls remains a crucial marker of a thriving democracy. University buildings in Gilead’s Cambridge have been taken over by the Eyes of God (the secret police). Salvagings (public executions) occur in Harvard Yard.

  That colleges and universities would have to be eliminated or colonized in a tyrannical regime based on Christian fundamentalism hints at another historic truth, at least in America during the second wave: campuses have served as incubators of feminism. Not all activists were academics, of course. But virtually all of them received degrees from institutions of higher education and contributed to or relied on the debates, languages, and approaches developed by the first generation of women to enter higher education not as tokens but as a sizable group capable of networking.

  Many women of Hillary Clinton’s generation went to college.38 National defense scholarships and public institutions of learning boosted the numbers of young women receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in a range of fields. Just as Hillary Clinton helped establish her reputation when in 1973 she published an essay in the Harvard Educational Review addressing the rights of children, so her cohort in the humanities produced works that would provide the methodologies to analyze discriminatory practices. At the same time, women who became creative writers sparked the ideas debated in critical conversations. Rarely, in fact, had the arts and the humanities played such a major role in a social movement. In the chapters to follow, we will discuss the cultural history underlying a contemporary feminism that is “still mad” today, a half century after the second wave of feminism named itself the women’s liberation movement at the end of the sixties.

  Our chapters proceed chronologically, from the stirrings of feminist revolt in the fifties and the eruptions of feminist protest in the sixties to the awakening of feminist thinkers and artists in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. But this is not a story of feminism progressing as it gets stronger and better. By the turn of the century, a number of the debates within feminism threatened to deteriorate into internecine squabbling. As in the far future of The Handmaid’s Tale’s conclusion—Atwood’s novel ends with a satire of scholars dithering over Offred’s taped testimony—by the nineties feminists sometimes seemed to be caught up in grandstanding or infighting. But this is also not a story of feminism’s decline and fall or, for that matter, its death and resurrection, though we conclude with hope about the revival we witness today. Rather, Still Mad is an account of how generations of literary women tapped the enigmas of their own lives to shape visions of cultural transformation.

  Why have we chosen to focus on literary women? For one thing, we’ve spent our lives celebrating their achievements. For another, the second wave was mightily influenced by women poets, novelists, dramatists, journalists, songwriters, essayists, memoirists, and theorists. For these thinkers, the capacity to imagine otherwise—to envision the possibility of alternative models and then what those alternative models might be—remains a prerequisite for generating more equitable social and political arrangements. Their contributions clarify the problems with which we will continue to contend.

  What inspires Atwood’s Offred to survive is a line of writing etched by her predecessor in the closet wall of the cell she inhabits in the Commander’s house: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” The faux Latin phrase means “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” When the Commander hands Offred a forbidden writing instrument to copy the phrase, she thinks, “Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say . . . warning us away from such objects.”39 Many readers will get the Freudian joke—penis envy—understanding that the power of the pen, which women have effectively wielded for centuries, has historically and wrongfully stood for the mythical power of the phallus. Although the girl who had preceded Offred committed suicide, Atwood’s heroine escapes, inspired and strengthened by her precursor’s motto.

  Ironically, these faux Latin words were framed and hung in the Washington, DC, office of Barry Goldwater—the 1964 Republican candidate for president who criticized the Supreme Court ruling mandating school integration in Brown v. Board of Education, supported the witch-hunter Joe McCarthy, and was in turn supported both by the Ku Klux Klan and by the rabidly anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. But Atwood proves that just as conservatives can co-opt liberatory rhetoric, so too feminists can sabotage reactionary rhetoric. The same sort of dynamic was at work after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell protested against Senator Elizabeth Warren’s reading of a letter from Coretta Scott King with a phrase that soon began appearing as a logo on all sorts of feminist regalia: “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

  We will complicate the idea that the second wave of feminism peaked in the seventies and eighties, receded at the turn of the century, and then resurged before and after the 2016 election, although there is some truth to that story. Yet as in individual lives so in the stages of social movements: periods that look quiescent or even retrograde may subtly produce tactics necessary to deal with future challenges. In the chapters that follow, feminism is a desire, a vision, a yearning, a fantasy, or a dream sometimes tragically at odds with reality but sometimes comically opening up the improbable possibilities of an alternative reality. Throughout its evolution over the past seven decades, we will argue, feminism sustains itself as a profoundly imaginative endeavor that includes a range of imaginings.

  Without completely telegraphing our narrative about how seventies feminism came into being and what happened to it, we can disclose our claim that during every decade from the nineteen fifties onward, the contradictions in women’s lives spurred the need for learning and relearning sophisticated ways of formulating the strategies needed to keep things going while things are stirring. Like their successors, our predecessors and contemporaries rarely agreed. They quarreled with and qualified each other, but they nevertheless persisted. By exploring how they managed to keep things going, we can devise ways to counter the shocking legitimization of misogyny in our time. Together we can now read the writing on the wall: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

  SECTION I

  STIRRINGS IN THE FIFTIES

  1

  Midcentury Separate Spheres

  THE PARADOXES THAT SHAPED the second wave of feminism were rooted in the neo-Victorian sexual culture of the era that the poet Robert Lowell famously called “the tranquillized Fifties,” a decade that espoused iron-clad gender conformity for women: girdles, stockings, bullet bras, and crinolines.1 Like Hillary Rodham, most seventies feminists went to school in the fifties, and we experienced the dizzying contradictions that marked the early lives of such literary women as Sylvia Plath, Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde.

  Dizzying contradictions, and sometimes sickening ones. For even the fiercest among us seem at some point to have been complicit in the mores of the era, especially young women raised in the white middle class. Adrienne Rich, who was to become the poet laureate of seventies feminism, recalled the delight with which—in rebellion against her father, who wanted to be “Papa Brontë” with geniuses for children—she “spent hours writing imitations of cosmetic advertising” and “mercifully . . . discovered Modern Screen, Photoplay, Jack Benny, ‘Your Hit Parade,’ Frank Sinatra.”2 Sylvia Plath, raised from the age of 9 by a widowed mother who encouraged both academic excellence and gender conformity, was even more passionate about t
he popular culture of her day. Presenting herself as a perfect all-American girl, she began her career impersonating a sort of intellectual pinup and ended, after her death, becoming (in the words of one critic) “the Marilyn Monroe of the literati.”3

  Monroe was of course the iconic sweetheart of the decade—voluptuous, whispery, and “blonde all over”—though she’d started her adult life as a busty brunette working in an airplane factory.4 If she was the antithesis of the “good” girl that middle-class fifties girls were pressured to be, she was the incarnation of the desirable woman whom they knew their boyfriends wanted and whom they themselves secretly longed to impersonate.

  Sylvia Plath vs. Marilyn Monroe? Sylvia Plath as Marilyn Monroe? Plath herself once recorded a dream in which

  Marilyn Monroe appeared to me . . . as a kind of fairy godmother. . . . I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.5

  Strikingly, Plath had this fan-girl dream when she was an accomplished resident of the artists’ colony Yaddo, in 1959. Yet like a teenager, she was still hoping to be helped along by Marilyn Monroe. Her other fairy godmothers were more suitable to her literary aspirations: among living poets, “Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore, the aging giantesses & poetic godmothers . . . May Swenson, Isabella Gardner & more close, Adrienne Cecile Rich,” although “Phyllis McGinley is out—light verse; she’s sold herself,” and Plath planned to “eclipse” Rich.6