Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  More than ever, Susan is indebted to the editorial and connubial genius of Don Gray. She has also been buoyed by the wit of her stepdaughters and daughters, Julie Gray, Susannah Gray, Marah Gubar, and Simone Silverbush; the kindness of her sons-in-law, John Lyons, Kieran Setiya, and Jeff Silverbush; and the hilarity and insights of her grandchildren, Jack, Eli, Samuel, Jonah, and Gabriel. Her extended family overseas—Bernard and Colin David as well as her honorary son-in-law Suneil Setiya—could not have been more supportive.

  Our sage agent, Ellen Levine, emboldened us to take on this project and inspired us to stay on track. An astute intervention by our savvy editor, Jill Bialosky, and her perceptive assistant, Drew Elizabeth Weitman, helped us transform a ponderous draft into the readable book we hope it has become. And we give thanks for the meticulous brilliance of our copyeditor, Alice Falk, and the enthusiasm of our publicist, Erin Sinesky Lovett. As we got this book ready for production, we were especially grateful for the generosity of Erica Jong and Robin Morgan, who kindly waived permission fees for their verse. In addition, we thank the administrators of Indiana University for helping us with research costs along the way.

  All of our benefactors support the networks upon which feminists depend, but we remember moments that seem like yesterday when each of us knew what it meant to inhabit pre-feminist environments. Toward the end of her doctoral training at Columbia University, Sandra was counseled to forgo a job search since, one professor informed her, she would have to follow in the footsteps of her husband, who was also an academic. Upon Susan’s arrival at the English department in Indiana University, she was handed a syllabus to type by a senior colleague who assumed she was a secretary. Such events, which now seem faintly comical, were not long ago and far away. They were quite common everywhere and all the time before the remarkable transformations wrought by the feminist imagination.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE

  1 Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (William Morrow, 1990), p. 248.

  2 Sojourner Truth, “Keeping the Thing Going While Things Are Stirring,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (W. W. Norton, 2007), 1:512–13.

  3 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University Press, 1979), p. 3.

  4 After Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic primaries, Jimmy Kimmel said, “In spite of her experience, her track record and her skills in the debates, American voters ultimately decided she just didn’t have what they were looking for in a president, which is a penis”: quoted in “Best of Late Night: Late Night Says Elizabeth Warren ‘Realized She Was Overqualified,’ ” New York Times, 6 Mar. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/television/late-night-elizabeth-warren.html.

  5 Jay Inslee, quoted in Joseph O’Sullivan, “Inslee Rebukes the President, as Trump Encourages Rebellion to States’ Coronavirus Stay-Home Orders,” Seattle Times, 17 Apr. 2020, www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/inslee-rebukes-the-president-as-trump-encourages-rebellion-to-states-coronavirus-stay-home-orders/; @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 17 Apr. 2020, 11:21 a.m., twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1251168994066944003; 11:22 a.m., twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1251169217531056130; 11:25 a.m., twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1251169987110330372.

  6 @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 29 Nov. 2020, 10:05 p.m., twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1333245684011642881; @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 1 Dec. 2020, 8:59 a.m., twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1333772740483026944; Nicholas Fandos and Maggie Haberman, “Impeachment Case Argues Trump Was ‘Singularly Responsible’ for Capitol Riot,” New York Times, 2 Feb. 2021; Peter Baker, “The Last Act of the Trump Drama: Rage, Denial and Retribution,” New York Times, 6 Dec. 2020.

  7 Hillary Rodham Clinton, interview, 60 Minutes, aired 26 Jan. 1992, on CBS; Clinton, “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” United Nations Fourth World Conference, 5 Sept. 1995, Beijing.

  8 See Elaine Showalter, “Pilloried Clinton,” Times Literary Supplement, 26 Oct. 2016, www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hillary-clinton-vs-misogyny/.

  9 James Robenalt, January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam and the Month That Changed America Forever (Chicago Review Press, 2015).

  10 E-mail correspondence between Ruth Rosen and Sandra M. Gilbert, 4 May 2020.

  11 For more about women’s utopian efforts to seek the presidency, see Ellen Fitzpatrick, The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016).

  12 See Gail Collins, “The Senate Bathroom Angle,” New York Times, 22 Dec. 2016; Judith Plaskow, “Embodiment, Elimination, and the Role of Toilets in Struggles for Social Justice,” Cross Currents 58, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 51–64, at 52–53.

  13 Consider such feminist publications as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies, Chrysalis, Frontiers, and Aphra, as well as the Feminist Press.

  14 See two striking exceptions to this rule: Jeannette Howard Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey (Vantage Press, 1956), and Gwen Needham, Pamela’s Daughters (Russell and Russell, 1972).

  15 W. B. Yeats, “Easter, 1916,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Scribner, 1996), pp. 180–81, at 180.

  16 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; repr., Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.

  17 Gilbert and Gubar, Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 2:618.

  18 Gloria Steinem, “In Defense of the ‘Chick-Flick,’ ” Alternet, 6 July 2007, www.alternet.org/2007/07/gloria_steinem_in_defense_of_the_chick_flick/.

  19 Hillary D. Rodham, “Hillary D. Rodham’s 1969 Student Commencement Speech,” Wellesley College, www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1969commencement/studentspeech. Edward Brooke, the first African American popularly elected to the Senate, was a liberal Republican in the Nelson Rockefeller mode. For his address, see “Progress in the Uptight Society: Real Problems and Wrong Procedures,” Wellesley College, www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1969commencement/commencementaddress.

  20 See Charles Bethea, “Race, Activism, and Hillary Clinton at Wellesley,” New Yorker, 11 June 2016, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/race-activism-and-hillary-clinton-at-wellesley.

  21 Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (Simon and Schuster, 2017), p. 117.

  22 “Hillary Rodham Clinton Interview, 1979,” YouTube, uploaded by AlphaX News, 13 May 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg_sEZg7-rk.

  23 Nancy Sinatra, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” on Boots (Reprise Records, 1966).

  24 Clinton, What Happened, p. 118.

  25 Ibid., pp. 113–14.

  26 Bethea, “Race, Activism, and Hillary Clinton at Wellesley.”

  27 Clinton, What Happened, p. 115. Misogynist attacks, which have been amply studied by scholars, included outré pictures of her as the snake-headed Medusa as well as images of her face imprinted on toilet paper, both of which can be found on the internet.

  28 Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013).

  29 Claire Cain Miller, “Sexes Differ on Persistence of Sexism,” New York Times, 19 Jan. 2017 (published online as “The Upshot: Republican Men Say It’s a Better Time to Be a Woman Than a Man,” 17 Jan. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/upshot/republican-men-say-its-a-better-time-to-be-a-woman-than-a-man.html).

  30 Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (Haymarket Books, 2017), p. 69. For Emma Watson and Miss Piggy, see Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (PublicAffairs, 2016), p. xii.

  31 Zeba Blay, “How Feminist TV Became the New Normal,” HuffPost, 18 June 2015, www.huffpost.com/entry/how-feminist-tv-became-the-new-normal_n_7567898.

  32 Kirsten Gillibrand, speech at Women’s March on Washington, 21 J
an. 2017, Washington, DC, www.c-span.org/video/?c4650727/user-clip-senator-gillibrand-speaks-womens-march-washington.

  33 Margaret Atwood, “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump,” New York Times Book Review, 19 Mar. 2017.

  34 The television adaptation deviates from the novel in casting black women as Handmaids.

  35 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; repr., Anchor, 1998), p. 45.

  36 Alison Bechdel, “The Rule,” in Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1986), p. 22.

  37 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929], annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar (Harcourt, 2005), p. 75.

  38 Ruth Rosen argues that Cold War panics led the United States to educate girls: The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (2000; repr., Penguin Books, 2006), p. 42.

  39 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, pp. 90, 186.

  CHAPTER 1: MIDCENTURY SEPARATE SPHERES

  1 For Robert Lowell’s characterization, see “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” in Selected Poems, expanded ed. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp. 129–30, at 129.

  2 Adrienne Rich, unpublished letters to Hayden Carruth, quoted in Michelle Dean, “Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Awakening,” New Republic, 4 Apr. 2016; she recalls her merciful discovery in Adrienne Rich, “The Distance between Language and Violence,” in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, expanded ed. (W. W. Norton, 2003), pp. 181–89, at 187.

  3 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Virago, 1991), p. 26.

  4 In a September 1952 interview for Pageant, Monroe said, “I’m personally opposed to a deep tan because I like to feel blond all over” (p. 125).

  5 The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes (Knopf, 1982), p. 319.

  6 Ibid., p. 212.

  7 See Ginia Bellafante’s “Suburban Rapture,” New York Times, 24 Dec. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Bellafante-t.html. For “blessed Rombauer,” see The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (Anchor, 2000), p. 249.

  8 The exhibition Paper Doll, curated by Anne Koval at Owens Art Gallery (2011) and Mendel Art Gallery (2012), displayed Plath’s dolls. See Koval’s catalog entry, “Paper Doll,” for a description of the “romantic titles” that Plath gave the doll’s outfits (Paper Doll [Owens Art Gallery/Mendel Art Gallery, 2011], p. 14). The dolls can also be seen in Plath’s archives at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. Darlene J. Sadlier describes and reprints some of them in The Lilly Library from A to Z (Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 39–40.

  9 Varsity, 26 May 1956.

  10 Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 236–37.

  11 The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 1, 1940–1956, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (Harper, 2017), pp. 1203, 1063.

  12 Plath, Unabridged Journals, p. 211.

  13 Letters of Sylvia Plath, 1:1247.

  14 Ibid., 1:1228.

  15 Ted Hughes, “You Hated Spain,” in Birthday Letters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 39–40, at 39.

  16 Plath, Unabridged Journals, pp. 22, 20, 160.

  17 Ibid., pp. 54, 77 (the final ellipsis is hers).

  18 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963; repr., Harper, 2013), p. 85.

  19 For a personal memoir of a Mademoiselle guest editorship and an extended reading of Plath in that context, see Sandra M. Gilbert, “ ‘A Fine, White Flying Myth’: The Life/Work of Sylvia Plath” [1978], in her Rereading Women: Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditions (W. W. Norton, 2011), pp. 114–33.

  20 See Cailey Rizzo, “A Sylvia Plath Retrospective Finally Puts Her Visual Art on Display,” Vice, 28 July 2017, www.vice.com/en/article/zmva5x/sylvia-plath-retrospective-visual-art-smithsonian. The collage is held in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College. See also Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, ed. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (Oxford University Press, 2007).

  21 The catchphrase “the man in the gray flannel suit” comes from the title of Sloan Wilson’s best-selling 1955 novel.

  22 Phyllis McGinley, “The 5:32,” New Yorker, 25 Oct. 1941, p. 19.

  23 For the comment of McGinley’s daughter, see Bellafante, “Suburban Rapture.”

  24 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books, 1999), p. 14.

  25 Ibid., p. 121.

  26 Sylvia Plath, “Barren Woman,” in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (1981; repr., HarperCollins, 2018), p. 157; “Munich Mannequins,” in ibid., pp. 262–63, at 262.

  27 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 224.

  28 More savagely, in “Inauguration Day: January 1953”—a prefiguring of Plath’s collage—Lowell added that “the Republic summons Ike, / the mausoleum in her heart” (Selected Poems, p. 57).

  29 W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton University Press, 2011).

  30 See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  31 See Shaun Usher, “Utopian Turtletop,” Lists of Note, 8 Feb. 2012, www.listsofnote.com/2012/02/utopian-turtletop.html. Was Moore serious, or was she slyly subverting that great American institution, the Ford Motor Company? Duplicitous or not, she dominated the New Yorker, along with the “housewife poet” Phyllis McGinley.

  32 Moore’s letter is quoted in Vivian R. Pollak, “Moore, Plath, Hughes, and ‘The Literary Life,’ ” American Literary History 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 95–117, at 103.

  33 Ibid., p. 107.

  34 Marianne Moore, letter of November 1961 to Henry Allen Moe, in ibid.

  35 Ibid., p. 108.

  36 The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2, 1956–1963, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (Harper, 2018), p. 110.

  37 Plath, Unabridged Journals, p. 354.

  38 David Holbrook, Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (1976; repr., Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 89.

  39 Posted in 2010 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOH-PyZecVM.

  40 Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 143. The quote appears in a chapter titled “The Feminist Complex.” Joanne Meyerwitz has cautioned that the book was considered extreme at the time and “did not represent the mainstream in the mass culture”: see “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Post-War Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (March 1993): 1455–82, at 1476.

  41 Lundberg and Farnham, Modern Woman, pp. 166, 265, 271.

  42 Ibid., pp. 266, 271, 270, 280, 304–5.

  43 Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920–1982 (Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 47.

  44 Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, 2 vols. (Grune and Stratton, 1944–45), 1:xiii.

  45 Ibid., 1:228, 229, 230.

  46 Ibid., 1:227, 228 (quoting Horney).

  47 Ibid., 2:79; 1:291, 292, 319.

  48 As a girl, Deutsch later admitted, she “hated” her mother, who beat her because she was not a son and who kept a “tyrannical vigil over [her daughter’s] chastity” because she valued only “status, conformity, and a good reputation.” Helene Deutsch, Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue (W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 62–63.

  49 Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (W. B. Saunders, 1953), p. 582.

  50 See, e.g., Karl E. Bauman, “Volunteer Bias in a Study of Sexual Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behavior,” Journal of Marriage and Family 35, no. 1 (Feb. 1973): 27–31.

  51 Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, pp. 574, 657.

  52 See James H. Jones, “To Deal Directly with the Rockefeller Foundation,” chap. 27 of Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 442–47.

&nb
sp; 53 Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things: A Biography (Pimlico Press, 1999), p. 439.

  54 Sharon R. Cohany and Emy Sok, “Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants,” Monthly Labor Review, Feb. 2007, pp. 9–16, at 10.

  55 On popular forms of contraception in the fifties, see Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Contraception: A Guide to Birth Control Methods (Prometheus Books, 1990); on unsafe abortion practices in the United States before Roe v. Wade in 1973, see David A. Grimes with Linda G. Brandon, Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation (Daymark, 2014).

  CHAPTER 2: RACE, REBELLION, AND REACTION

  1 Allan Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956), pp. 9–20, at 17, 18.

  2 Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Penguin, 2001), pp. 92, 93, 101.

  3 Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969; repr., Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1988), p. 131. The veracity of this book needs to be gauged against di Prima’s need to make money and her editor’s response to the manuscript: di Prima noted in her afterword that Maurice Girodias always wrote “MORE SEX” across the top of her pages (p. 137).

  4 Di Prima, Recollections, pp. 108, 107, 108.

  5 Ibid., p. 157.

  6 Ibid., p. 233.

  7 Ibid., p. 227.

  8 Ibid., p. 225.

  9 Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean-Eaters,” in Selected Poems (Harper and Row, 1963), p. 72.