Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  By the time Steinem arrived at the eagerly anticipated 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, reactionary opponents of feminism had begun exploiting not the divisions among feminists but, ironically, their unanimity. A “high point of liberal feminism,” the convention was inaugurated by a relay of female athletes who carried a torch lit in Seneca Falls and a new Declaration of Sentiments written by Maya Angelou.31 Some “20,000 women participated, 35 percent of the delegates were nonwhite and nearly one in five was low income.”32 Along with Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin, Billy Jean King, Margaret Mead, and Coretta King, First Ladies Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, and Lady Bird Johnson appeared at a bipartisan event that the anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly was to identify as the moment when she knew that she would defeat the ERA: specifically, when the “libbers” voted to extend the feminist platform to include lesbian rights. In later years, Schlafly used films of the vote to damage feminism, even showing the footage on television in advertisements against the ERA. “In her view,” the educator Sheila Tobias has noted, “the display of feminist solidarity with lesbians that day in Houston clinched her victory.”33

  In Houston in 1977, Schlafly also staged a counter-conference that brought together thousands of men and women opposed to the ERA and abortion with those antagonistic to gay rights. “God Made Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve” waving placards declaimed.34 What Schlafly represented as an unholy trinity—feminism, women’s control of reproduction, and homosexuality—would soon consolidate the New Right.35 To the various religious denominations assembled, she emphasized “their common belief in the primacy of divinely created gender roles and familial structure.”36 The STOP in STOP ERA meant Stop Taking Our Privileges.

  Other prominent women prefigured the preachings of Atwood’s Serena Joy. The former beauty pageant winner Anita Bryant started her “Save Our Children” campaign against gay men who, she weirdly argued, set out to molest “our children” because they cannot produce children of their own.37 And a character based on the teachings of Marabel Morgan—the best-selling author of the anti-feminist seduction manual titled The Total Woman (1973)—appeared on the TV show Maude, greeting her homecoming husband attired in nothing but plastic wrap.38 But Phyllis Schlafly outdid them all, which may explain why Donald Trump eulogized her at her funeral. A lawyer, political candidate, author, and orator, she castigated feminism as an assault on the privileges enjoyed under the law by stay-at-home wives and moms.

  AUDRE LORDE DISMANTLES THE MASTER’S HOUSE

  Despite right-wing backlash, hopes for the passage of the ERA remained high throughout the seventies. And if anyone could confront head-on the divisions within feminism, that person was Audre Lorde. Sister Outsider (1984), the title of Lorde’s collected essays—most of which were delivered as lectures in the late seventies—captures the role she played in addressing fractures in the second wave, as do the talks themselves. An oxymoron, it reflects her commitment to the sisterhood of the women’s movement as well as her insistence on positioning herself as an outsider questioning its boundaries.

  After a marriage during the sixties to a closeted homosexual and the births of two children, Lorde found her vocation when in 1968 she went to Tougaloo College in Mississippi as poet-in-residence: “I began to learn about courage, I began to learn to talk.” Suspecting that the marriage was going nowhere and that her next partnership would be with the academic Frances Clayton, Lorde realized that “teaching was the work I needed to be doing.”39 Back in New York, she embarked on a career in the SEEK program at City College and at Lehmann and John Jay Colleges.

  Throughout the subsequent years, Lorde grappled as a lesbian with homophobia in the Black community. As an African American, she denounced white feminists’ eurocentrism. As the mother of a son as well as a daughter, she scolded gay separatists. As a Black woman who had married a white man and was parenting with a white woman, she chided racial separatists. A poet, she excoriated economic injustices too often ignored by privileged academics. When she became a cancer patient, she reprimanded medical authorities. By tapping the anger of an outsider, Lorde became a quarrelsome sister. Not an easy person to get along with, she courageously mined “the crucibles of difference” that shaped the prose writing she crafted to gain a larger audience than the readership garnered by verse.40 Her talks and essays, drawing on her earlier experiences, encouraged twentieth-century feminists to guard themselves against the racism of nineteenth-century suffragists and learn from their painful disagreements.

  Living with her daughter Beth, her son Jonathan, and Clayton on Staten Island, Lorde could publish her third collection of verse, From a Land Where Other People Live, only by acquiescing to the editor’s insistence that she delete “Love Poem”: “And I knew when I entered her I was / high wind in her forests hollow / fingers whispering sound / honey flowed / from the split cup.” 41 The male editor of a prestigious Black book series couldn’t imagine the poem being spoken by a woman.42 Yet “speaking up was a protective mechanism” for her—a way of fending off antagonists—so she published “Love Poem” in Ms. magazine in 1974 and tacked it up on the wall in John Jay’s English department.43

  Lorde’s essay “Scratching the Surface” tackles the “lesbian-baiting” in Black communities that undermines the bonding of Black women with each other and with non-Black women. She accuses Black men of creating environments that discourage Black women’s sense of solidarity and program them instead to compete for male approval. The energy wasted in the Black community on “anti­lesbian hysteria” scapegoated people like her and her colleagues in the Combahee River Collective.44 In poetry and in other essays, Lorde argues that “Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional” because “they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia.”45

  While the homophobia and sexism of the Black community horrified her, the racism of white feminists did too. “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” urges the post-Christian feminist theologian to deal with the “history of white women who are unable to hear Black women’s words.” When reading Daly’s account of the goddess in Gyn/Ecology (1978), Lorde was baffled at the “white, western european, judeo-christian” images: “Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan?” 46 These are the muses invoked in the poems she was producing.

  Lorde had long worn a dashiki and head wrap, but now she regularly donned them for readings and signed her letters “In the hands of Afrekete.” 47 According to Lorde, Daly’s book presents non-European women “only as victims,” specifically by focusing on genital mutilation and ignoring positive aspects of African culture. Even Lorde’s own words seem misused by Daly: “Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?” 48

  That the letter to Daly degenerates into threats—“I would like not to destroy you in my consciousness”49—seems especially odd in view of a fact supplied by Lorde’s biographer, Alexis De Veaux. Although the letter opens with a note that Lorde published it after receiving no reply, De Veaux quotes Mary Daly’s polite response, which Lorde did receive, and goes on to speculate that the obfuscation arose from “Lorde’s love-hate-competitive relationships with white women”: “There was an element of ‘sibling rivalry’ in her view of the sisterhood between Rich and Daly that Lorde found herself outside—insecure and intensely jealous.”50 De Veaux associates Lorde’s possessiveness with her “sexual aggressiveness”—in affairs she kept secret from Clayton and in sexual overtures rebuffed by friends like Barbara Smith, Adrienne Rich, and Rich’s partner, Michelle Cliff.

  Collaboration or competition: Lorde veered back and forth. When in 1974 she was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry, as we have seen, Lorde joined Rich and Walker “in refusing the terms of
patriarchal competition.” And Adrienne Rich facilitated Lorde’s connection to the editor John Benedict at W. W. Norton, the publishing house that issued Coal in 1976. But a list of Rich’s books advertised at the back infuriated Lorde. Their dialogues about gender and race could not alleviate her edginess about a better-known rival. Yet Lorde knew that Rich was herself deeply committed to antiracist work as a teacher and thinker, so their disputes functioned for her as symbolic debates “in a space of Black woman/white woman where it’s beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we’re two voices.”51

  Lorde’s anger informed her most gnomic maxims. In “Power,” a poem excoriating a white policeman who was freed after shooting a 10-year-old in Queens, Lorde unleashed her fury at racial injustice: “The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.”52 Her most famous saying, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” appears as the title of an essay provoked by her appearance at a conference otherwise devoid of Black women and lesbians. According to Lorde, white feminists were using “the tools of a racist patriarchy . . . to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy.” They ignore different forms of oppression at their own peril. By not dealing “with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences of feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color,” they produce “racist feminism.” She ends by asking each member of her audience to “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.”53

  In 1977, at Rich’s suggestion, Lorde reached down to touch her own terror and produced a talk called “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Fear of cancer had overwhelmed her during a scare that proved to be unfounded: the biopsied tumor turned out to be benign. During her three-week confrontation with “the final silence” of death, what Lorde regretted most were her silences. Her personal discovery—“My silences had not protected me”—morphed into a more general message: “Your silence will not protect you.” Fear “of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death” makes us vulnerable, but free speech also furnishes “the source of our greatest strength,” for words “bridge the differences between us”: “it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”54 Like Tillie Olsen, whose essay “Silences” appeared in 1962 and whose book Silences appeared in 1978, Lorde spoke for the empowerment of the dispossessed through language.

  Extrapolating from her childhood experience with verse writing, Lorde’s essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” sees poetry as “the way to help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” and especially as a way to give name to emotions. If the “white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am,” the “Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.” In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” eroticism is defined as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and uses of which we are now reclaiming in our language.”55

  On the tenth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Audre Lorde gave a speech at the huge National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights that her longtime friend and sometime lover the historian Blanche Cook called “galvanizing.”56 By 1979 she had become a charismatic spokeswoman, even though the year before, at the age of 44, she had undergone a mastectomy. In the words of her son Jonathan, “her life took on a kind of immediacy that most people’s lives never develop.”57

  Quickly determined to break the conspiracy of silence surrounding breast cancer, Lorde refused to wear a prosthesis and began writing essays about cancer. Her 1979 account of her mastectomy in Sinister Wisdom is a draft for what would become The Cancer Journals (1980). Lorde describes the pain she endured, the community of women who healed her, and her determination to confront “the whole terrible meaning of mortality as both a weapon and power,” for she wanted “not to turn away from the fear, but to use it as fuel” to find herself “furiously empowered.”58

  She would go on in the next decade to become a pioneer in patients’ rights as she questioned the procedures of breast reconstruction and addressed the environmental causes of cancer while setting the standard for a genre of patient memoirs that continues to challenge medical assumptions and practices. Facing schisms within the women’s movement, Lorde believed that “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”59 Because she is perceived to have “own[ed] anger the way that Monet owns water lilies,” her vigorous spirit continues to inspire contemporary feminists.60

  MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’S GHOSTS AND WARRIORS

  Far from the seething center of feminist politics on the East Coast, West Coast feminists too were struggling to convert silence into language and action. Tillie Olsen was a grande dame, but she was joined by Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Dorothy Bryant (The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, which Alice Walker pronounced “one of my favorite books in all the world”),61 Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her), Ruth Rosen (The Maimie Papers), Angela Davis, and many others, eventually including such fugitives from the East Coast as Alice Walker and Adrienne Rich.

  In 1976, just as the concept of “identity politics” was starting to surface, a new kind of feminist text was published by a West Coast writer. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts added to seventies conversations about the differences between women and men and the differences among women an appreciation of a host of other differences—geographical, linguistic, culinary—that mark what it means to grow up female.62 Although at the time the book was published Kimberlé Crenshaw had not yet developed her theory of “intersectionality,” the experiences of Kingston’s protagonist, simultaneously resisting misogynistic Chinese traditions and long-standing American prejudice against Chinese immigrants, dramatize the dynamics that Crenshaw was to delineate in the eighties.63

  The Woman Warrior is compulsively readable: it won a National Book Award, became a best seller, and was one of the most frequently taught contemporary works throughout the eighties and nineties. But despite its riveting style, this memoir—or rather these memoirs—are fragmentary, constituting a tale told in theatrical flashes rather than a straightforward narrative. Yet when read carefully, The Woman Warrior is a Künstlerroman, recounting the girlhood and education of a literary artist who just might be Maxine Ting Ting Hong Kingston. Certainly there are many parallels between the narrator of this book and its author: both grow up in a close-knit Chinese immigrant community in Stockton, California; both come from large families whose parents never learn English;64 both have mothers who “talk-story”; both experience the ambivalence toward the “home” country that is characteristic of first-generation Americans; and both are talented in all their studies.

  Perhaps because of these parallels, even Kingston’s title is ambiguous. Much of the book is a kind of collaboration between the narrator’s mother, who “talks-story” to her daughter, and the narrator herself, who “talks-story” about her mother.65 Who, then is the Woman Warrior after whom the book is named? The figure is a blur, both mother (whose name is “Brave Orchid”—italics ours) and daughter (who reimagines herself/her mother as a version of the famous Chinese woman warrior Fa Mu Lan). Both women are warrior women; however, some of their most significant battles are against each other, suggesting that “Maxine,” or Little Dog (as she is sometimes called in the book), is suffering from an ambiguous case of matrophobia.

  And what about the subtitle—Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts? Again, the book is not a single cohesive memoir, but rather memoirs of both mother and daughter. Among Ghosts? This crucial word may be the most resonant. For Chinese immigrants, Americans/white people seem to be “ghosts”—not really, as the
narrator’s mother hints, “human beings”: “America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts. . . . Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe.” 66

  The White Ghosts are terrifying not just because they appear to be inhuman creatures but also because they are oppressive, openly or subtly showing contempt for the immigrant Chinese. But those American ghosts aren’t the only phantoms haunting this book. Back in China, Brave Orchid encounters monstrous ghosts, both in her own experience and in stories through which she learns the nature of her culture. Are they ghosts of real people, as in traditional Western lore? Mostly not: more like diabolical spirits continually transforming themselves.

  The most significant ghost, though, appears in “No Name Woman,” the monitory opening tale in the book. “You must not tell anyone,” Brave Orchid tells her daughter (who betrays her mother and tells us), “what I am about to tell you”: the horrifying story of a young sister-in-law who became illegitimately pregnant as the consequence of a coupling whose origins are shadowy. The woman’s husband had left for America; was she raped? or did she drift into an affair? She became pregnant; then the family was assaulted by enraged “villagers” just as she was about to give birth; then she bore her child in the pig pen and drowned herself and the baby in the well. “My aunt haunts me,” the speaker confesses. “I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide. . . . The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost . . . waits silently by the water, to pull down a substitute.” 67