Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  The president finishes his address—defending gun rights, bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom on (of all people) Rush Limbaugh, loudly celebrating his great big strong border wall, and intoning lie after lie about his record.76 As he spoke, Pelosi, presiding behind him along with Vice President Mike Pence, was shaking her head from time to time, with a small ironic half-smile. But now there is clapping and booing in the hall.

  Pelosi stands, looking severe, and then in a gesture as symbolic and theatrical as it is scandalous, she calmly rips each of the different sections of the president’s speech in half. She is tearing up the text of lies, the text of narcissism and bullying that has sought to divide our country and dismantle its safety nets. Some people might think she is just the “Crazy Nancy” of Trump’s tirades. But she isn’t.

  She is still mad, for good reason. And so are we.

  EPILOGUE

  White Suits, Shattered Glass

  ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2020, at exactly 11:24 a.m. East Coast time, Wolf Blitzer declared to the nation that CNN had projected victory for presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris, ending four years of Trump’s misrule. People in cities and towns around the country danced in the streets. Car horns honked exuberantly. In Rochester, New York, citizens thrilled by the election of the first woman vice president—and the first woman of color to rise so high on the national scene—swarmed to Susan B. Anthony’s grave to leave tokens of gratitude. In some of the Donald’s rural strongholds, rifle-toting emulators of the far-right Proud Boys gathered in savage clusters. And within two days Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sulkily observed that the president, who was refusing to concede the election, was “100 percent within his right” to resist the truth.1 The country, sickened by COVID and diseased by political divisiveness, was both relieved and enraged.

  The night of the 7th, in Wilmington, Delaware—Biden’s home state—the winning candidates mounted a huge open-air stage to speak to a socially distanced crowd of cheering voters. Biden appeared wise and distinguished by contrast with the childishly recalcitrant Trump: President Grandpa was ousting President Toddler. Wearing an elegant white silk pantsuit designed by the Venezuelan-born designer Carolina Herrera, Harris circled the platform as if to display the historical costume she was wearing; she then introduced the president-elect with a beautifully articulated speech, in which she expressed her gratitude to her Indian American mother and to “all the women who worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century: 100 years ago with the 19th Amendment, 55 years ago with the Voting Rights Act and now, in 2020, with a new generation of women in our country who cast their ballots and continued the fight for their fundamental right to vote and be heard.” Most memorably, she added, “While I may be the first woman in this office [of vice president–elect], I won’t be the last.”2

  Nor was she, as we have seen, the first woman to wear the emblematic white suit. Nancy Pelosi had worn it when she tore up the text of Trump’s mendacious State of the Union address. Most of the congresswomen who listened to that speech wore it too, as did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she was sworn into office, and Hillary Clinton when she accepted the Democratic nomination in 2016, and Geraldine Ferraro when she ran for vice president in 1984, and Shirley Chisholm when she entered Congress in 1969.

  Inspired by the white dresses in which women on both sides of the Atlantic marched and fought for suffrage, the white suit was not a fashion statement: it was a political assertion, a point repeatedly made by doyennes of style from Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times to the new website whatkamalawore.com.3 On the day of her installation, Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted forcefully on the subject: “I wore all-white today to honor the women who paved the path before me, and for all the women yet to come. From suffragettes to Shirley Chisholm, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the mothers of the movement.”4

  “White, the emblem of purity, symbolizes the quality of our purpose,” proclaimed a 1913 newsletter published by the American National Woman’s Party,5 but the color was also, as many commentators have pointed out, media-savvy. White-clad suffragists parading down Pennsylvania Avenue stood out in photographs against the grim ranks of dark-suited male spectators. At the same time, because white is the traditional hue of bridal gowns, the suffragists’ dramatic deployment of the color was also, in a sense, parodic: what the yearning for suffrage meant was a yearning for selfhood instead of subjugation, reason instead of romance, sacramental sisterhood rather than sacramental marriage. But white is also the color of spirits, indeed of ghosts. Highlighted by tricolor sashes, were the white-dressed suffragists marching in America and England a kind of ghost army, demanding to be incarnated as material citizens of their countries?

  It is now a century since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in the United States, and more than half a century since the pantsuit became not only a comfortable but a stylish outfit for women. But Harris was a new kind of candidate in this attire. As journalists tirelessly noted, she is not only the first woman to rise to such victorious prominence but also the first woman of color, daughter of immigrants, and graduate of a historically Black institution: Howard University. Harris’s mother, a Hindu Brahman from Tamil Nadu, came to the United States at the age of 19 to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where she became (tellingly, from a feminist perspective) a major researcher of breast cancer. Harris’s Black Jamaican father, Donald Harris, met Shyamala on campus, where he was studying economics; he is now a professor emeritus at Stanford.

  Kamala was born in Oakland and bused from an apartment in the Berkeley flats to the hills as part of the first wave of integration in California. Yet though Harris spent her elementary school years in a predominantly white neighborhood, and though she herself was biracial, her parents had deliberately chosen Blackness for themselves and their family. They had first come to know each other through their mutual engagement with the university’s Afro-American Association, where, as the flamboyant spirit of the sixties took hold in Berkeley, they met with African Americans from their school and nearby community colleges (think Huey Newton) in a group that birthed both the Black studies movement and the Black Panthers.6

  As Harris herself has commented, growing up in that environment meant being wheeled through protests in her stroller, amid masses of marching legs.7 And once she was older, after her parents divorced and her mother brought her and her younger sister Maya to Canada, where she was teaching at McGill, Harris herself deliberately chose Blackness, opting for Howard University, the star of historically Black institutions, rather than Harvard University, the apex of the white academy.

  After graduation, Harris became both an activist and an ambitious insider. Her relationship in the mid-nineties with the African American Assembly Leader and later San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown may or may not have aided her ascent to the top of California politics, but it did give her a clear view of the establishment she was entering and seeking to seriously reform, if not to disrupt. And as she joined that world, she doubled down on her Blackness, celebrating her “line sisters” from an elite sorority at Howard, as well as the fiercely feminist family she formed with her lawyer sister Maya, her niece Meena, and her grandnieces. Yes, she had visited her elegant Indian family often, as well as her equally elegant Jamaican family, but as a politician she chose to be an advocate of an African American race that was not exactly her own.8 No wonder Michelle Obama, knowing that Kamala Harris was on the presidential slate, told her millions of followers, “We have to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”9

  But in the meantime, Joe Biden had another supporter who also identified as a twenty-first-century New Woman: namely, his wife. Like Harris the offspring of immigrants—one half Sicilian, one half Anglo-Scottish—Jill Biden grew up in a working-class family; and while raising children with Joe Biden, she studied for higher degrees in English and worked as a teacher at local community colleges. She kept on keeping on at that job throughout her hus
band’s years as vice president; on campaign planes, as her friend Michelle Obama noted, “Jill is always grading papers.”10 The couple were regularly introduced not as Vice President and Mrs. Biden but as Vice President and Dr. Biden.

  Dr. Biden wasn’t a stay-at-home Second Lady and she won’t be a stay-at-home First Lady. She plans to continue teaching at Northern Virginia Community College during her husband’s presidency. As one observer has noted, it will “be a real modernizing of the first ladyship . . . to have the president’s spouse live the kind of life that the majority of women live, which is working outside the home professionally.”11

  Inevitably there was backlash against both Vice President–elect Harris and Dr. Biden. Sneering at Harris, xenophobic opponents were fond of mispronouncing her first name: Kamalala—Kamalalalala?12 In Biden’s case, they went after her title. An op-ed writer took her to task for daring to preface her name with the sacred word “Dr.” Titled “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not If You Need an M.D.,” his screed was so vicious in its assault on Jill Biden that it quickly went viral.13

  Here’s how this curmudgeonly misogynist addressed her: “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” Then he went on to snobbishly point out that her doctorate is merely “an Ed.D, a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation” with an “unpromising title.” Worse, he adds, she didn’t receive the degree until she was 55—a fact sympathetic observers might have admired (she had, after all, brought up three children and taught in high school while married to a senator and doing advanced study). But no, as an accomplished woman she must be reduced to a person offensively derided as “kiddo”!

  Misogyny won’t fade and go away like an old soldier. It raises its ugly head both in the worst of times and in the best of times. Nevertheless, Jill Biden persists.

  In Wilmington on the night of November 7, Jill Biden and Kamala Harris enacted an extraordinary transformation of what used to be the world of Good Housekeeping and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Each in her own way had broken the same glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, among others, had begun to crack. They had carved out spaces through which many more could ascend. And though obdurate slivers lay all around them, these two women of a future that has become our present weren’t mad. They were deeply sane and delighted to take their proper places.

  Every shard of glass that had fallen around them glittered with possibility. Yet within two months such fragments would evoke not ceilings broken by women, but windows of the Capitol shattered by marauders.

  January 6, 2021. A day that will live in infamy, as Franklin Roosevelt said about Pearl Harbor.

  “Be there, will be wild!”14

  For weeks after the election of Joe Biden, Donald Trump had been complaining that his “sacred landslide victory” in the 2020 presidential contest had been stolen by the so-called fraudulent Democrats.15 In December, he sent a message to his MAGA followers all over the country. They were instructed to come to a rally near the White House. This last chance to “STOP THE STEAL” would be on January 6, when Congress met so that Vice President Mike Pence could certify electoral votes.16

  Will be wild. Wild, they came en masse, some in army camouflage, some in crazier costumes—Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in full body armor, some loaded with zip cuffs, many bearing guns or bear spray, one raider bare chested with phallic horns on his head.

  The President told them to “walk down [Pennsylvania Avenue] to the Capitol,” that he’d be with them.17 Then he retreated to the White House and watched the television with evident delight.

  Outside the Senate and the House arose great bangings, boomings, and shouts. The MAGA mob was breaching the seat of the legislature, smashing windows, crashing through doorways, overwhelming the undermanned and underprepared Capitol Police. Later, when Trump was impeached for inciting this unprecedented violence, the House prosecutors wrote that he had “exhorted them into a frenzy” and “aimed them like a cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue.”18

  Inside the halls of the Capitol, even in the suites of Speaker Pelosi, they hunted down the enemies of “their” president. During the second impeachment trial, a traumatized nation was to watch a Capitol policeman screaming as he was being crushed between two doors, a rioter shot as she tried to climb through a broken window into the House chamber, Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer narrowly escaping massacre when the Capitol Police turned them away from the mob.

  The nation was to hear AOC confide, in an hour-long Instagram live, that “I thought I was going to die” as she hid in her office’s bathroom.19 The nation was to hear the raw craziness of a lynch mob splintering the gravity of the Capitol as they chanted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” Viewers were to gaze, horrified, at a gibbet the mob had already set up in their lust to lynch.20 The nation was to watch as a single, sinister miscreant strolled down the hall outside the Speaker’s offices, calling out a taunting elongation of her name: “Oh, Naaaaaaancy!”

  Commented a Washington Post columnist, “Oh, Naaaaaaancy. A woman who hears it thinks of a specific kind of danger, and a man who says it thinks of that danger, too. That’s why he says it. To make clear that he is the hunter, and guess what you are?”21

  Donald Trump kept on watching the events on TV, refusing—despite repeated pleas from his aides and family—to call off the crazed mob.

  The battle costumes, the stolen legislative artifacts, the breakage and the filth the rioters left behind (they smeared shit on the marble floors), and the five people who died in the attack on the seat of government—did all this portend an unbinding of the social contract? This furious crowd seemed at first to have come from the underbelly of America—from shacks and mudflats, backwoods and lonely prairies. But it turned out that many were “respectable” middle-class citizens, policemen, retired army officers, even though yes, they were also Proud Boys and Three Percenters and Oath Keepers.

  Was theirs a backlash not only against democracy but against the equal rights that feminists in white suits have for so long sponsored? Throughout these pages, after all, we have traced the historical link between white male violence and the dominance/submission structure of patriarchal culture. The white supremacist insurgents at the Capitol—with their Confederate flags and Camp Auschwitz T-shirts—dramatized the toxic masculinism and proto-fascism of Trumpism. Had the lunatic crowd been maddened by the maddening accomplishments of feminism itself? Must madwomen necessarily create madmen?

  Within two weeks, however, at the January 20 inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it began to look as though the feminist imagination might prevail. The peaceful order of those seated on the inaugural platform—ex-presidents, ex-candidates—strikingly contrasted with the chaos of January 6. Among former leaders, only Trump was absent. In the accomplished poem that twenty-two-year-old African American Amanda Gorman recited on the inaugural stage, she contended that such a catastrophe could not and would not go unanswered, that she and those she represented could not march backward but would move forward, for “We will not be turned around / or interrupted by intimidation.”22

  All the women of the feminist movement who met, marched, struggled, fought, and brought a new order into being helped teach her those words—and now would echo them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN THE PAINFUL AFTERMATH of the 2016 election, it was bracing to resume a collaboration that had paused at the start of the twenty-first century. Over the years, the two of us have developed in somewhat different directions. Yet in the process of putting this book together, we found that our separate interests inspired and enlivened each of us and then melded.

  We tried throughout to capture not only the pioneering achievements of second-wave feminism but also the sometimes edgy dialogues, disagreements, and divisions w
ithin feminism, most of which ended up enriching the collectivity that feminists seek to foster and promote. For those who want a more capacious social history of the second wave, we recommend Ruth Rosen’s excellent 2000 account The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, a book whose broad sociocultural vision enabled us to focus on the unique contributions of poets, novelists, dramatists, memoirists, and literary theorists.

  We have been encouraged to persevere by many guides in our lives. Sandra is grateful for the help of her research assistants, Rebecca Gaydos and Laura Ritland, and also indebted to advice and counsel from Gayle Greene, Susan Griffin, and especially Ruth Rosen. She is also thankful for support over the years from many friends, including Marlene Griffith Bagdikian, Wendy Barker, Elyse Blankley, Dorothy Gilbert, Marilyn Hacker, Diane Johnson, Marilee Lindemann, Wendy Martin, Eugenia Nomikos, Joan Schenkar, Elaine Showalter, Martha Nell Smith, and Anne Winters.

  Susan would like to thank her three research assistants—Patrick Kindig, Brooke Opel, and Rory Boothe—as well as friends and colleagues: Matt Brim, Judith Brown, Shehira Davezac, Ellen Dwyer, Dyan Elliott, Mary Favret, Georgette Kagan, Jon Lawrence, George Levine, Stephanie Li, Julia Livingston, Nancy K. Miller, Alexandra Morphet, Jean Robinson, Rebekah Sheldon, Jan Sorby, and Alberto Varon. The knowledge and intelligence of Jonathan Elmer informed Susan’s approach to this project from start to finish.

  Our collaborative process was of course also facilitated by our families. As always, Sandra is grateful for intellectual and emotional support from her son, Roger Gilbert; his wife, Gina Campbell; and her oldest grandson, Val Gilbert, along with his partner, Noreen Giga. Her daughter Kathy Gilbert-O’Neill and daughter-in-law Robin Gilbert-O’Neill, together with their two lively sons, Aaron and Stefan, grounded her life with feasts, fun, and technical help. Her daughter Susanna Gilbert was always available for analytic discussions as well as much personal aid, while her granddaughter Sophia Gilbert continually lightened and brightened her days. But her deepest debt for sustenance while she was working on this book is to her partner, Dick Frieden, who—as she coped with a hard year—kept her going while things were stirring, reading chapter drafts, cooking meals, and traveling everywhere with her, both mentally and physically.