Silences (38 page)

Background

Linked with the old, resurrected classics on women, this movement in three years has accumulated a vast new mass of testimony, of new comprehensions, as to what it is to be female. Inequities, restrictions, penalties, denials, leechings, have been painstakingly and painfully documented; damaging differences in circumstances and treatment
from that of males attested to; and limitations, harms, a sense of wrong voiced.

The three years had also shaped a swelling indictment of literature, in its beginning around Images of Women in Literature. Virginia Woolf had once called it “Women in Fiction—and in Fact.”
Sexual Politics
is how Kate Millett defined the difference in 1969. Tentatively phrased, exploratory questions in the beginning:

                  
Is women’s character in fiction a function of cultural values? of male subjectivity? and not an accurate portrayal of woman’s real situation and reactions?

                  
Are women portrayed only in terms of relationships to men; men in a variety of situations?

became arraignment:

                  
There is a wide discrepancy in American culture between the life of women
as conceived by men and the life of women as lived by women.
^*

               
Literature has unwittingly aided the conspiracy of silence, neglect, as to the nature of women’s lives and services.

                  
Throughout much of our literature, fanciful constructs of the female, her character and psychology, have obscured the limitations suffered by actual women. Worse, they have encouraged
expectations and behavior that only strengthen the real oppression.
^*

A search began for different (truer) Images of Women in Literature.
^**
Women writers, previously scarcely included in the literary curriculum, began to be hungrily read and studied in increasing number; “Women in Literature” classes, teaching now mostly writing by women, proliferated,
^†
became (often interdisciplinary) Women’s
Studies courses. They had to be argued and fought for.

            
There are practical and intellectual reasons for establishing some separate courses dealing with women writers. We cannot change literary history or reinterpret a tradition overnight. We cannot create women writers where they do not exist, and few existed before the Nineteenth Century. . . . Women writers should not be studied
as a distinct group on the assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic resemblances distinctively feminine. But women do have a special literary history, susceptible to analysis, which includes such complex considerations as the effects of social and political changes in women’s status upon individuals, and the implications of stereotypes on the woman writer and restrictions on her
artistic autonomy.
^‡

            
The contribution of women writers has been ignored too long—the addition of a few women to reading lists is not sufficient. An entire course makes more sense, because when studied in succession, their writing and experience reveal patterns which are almost impossible to perceive if they are studied only in relation to male writers.
^§

“By what standards should literature
(itself) be judged?” came into question. “Should viciousness or falseness of portrayal affect the evaluation of literature?” asked one course description. An older touchstone for literature—truth—re-entered the classroom to reside along with critical analysis. Classes themselves became profound experiences, charged with intellectual-emotional discovery. (“For a tear is an intellectual thing.”
^*
)

Feminist literary criticism came into practice.

The woman writer herself became a special field of exploration (one to which an increasing number of women writers contributed, some in fictional form).

Realization of the “staggering exclusions from the male-stream of literature,”
^**
roused and emboldened diverse expression: poetry, fiction, biography, personal accounts, criticism, anthologies.

Five years later (1976), it is unmistakable that out of the sense of wrong has come substantial yields for literature: its enlargement and vivification through reclamation of obscured writers and intensified rereading of classic ones; new insights and perspectives; an enhancement and deepening of literary scholarship, criticism, theory; an opening up and freeing for already existing writers; the
coming into being and encouragement of new ones;—and an outpouring of writing in every field and form of literature.

All while “still in the egg life, chafing the shell.”

Women in Fiction and in Fact: 1815–1975

1815: Jane Austen: “I will not allow books to prove anything”

            
“Yes, we certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is perhaps our fate rather than our merit.
We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always business of some sort or other to take you back to the world
immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. . . .”

                  
“But let me observe that all histories are against you—all stories, prose and verse.”

            
      
“Please, if you please, no reference to books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

—The exchange between Anne and Captain Harville in Jane Austen’s,
Persuasion

1871: Walt Whitman early on noted the discrepancy between “Women in Fiction—and
in Fact.” In
Democratic Vistas
(“Literature has never recognized the common people”) he counterposes against

            
the stock feminine characters of the current novelists (Ophelias, Enids, princesses, ladies of one kind or another) [presented] as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought after

four “typical” American women:

            
A young American woman, one of a large family
of daughters, who, some years since, migrated from her meagre country home to one of the northern cities to gain her own support . . . an expert seamstress . . . cook . . . her presence itself healthy and bracing . . . preserves her independence. . . .

                  
. . . another woman who, from taste and necessity conjoin’d, has gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business,
partly works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life, is not abash’d by the coarseness of contact, knows how to be firm and silent at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness and decorum, and will compare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers. . . .

                  
The wife of a mechanic, mother of two children, a woman of
merely passable English education, but of fine wit. . . . Never abnegating her own proper independence, but always genially preserving it, and what belongs to it. . . .

                  
. . . a resplendent person, . . . known by the name of the Peacemaker . . . well toward eighty years old, had always lived on a farm . . . an invariable and welcom’d favorite, especially with young married women
. . . numerous children and grandchildren . . .
uneducated, but possess’d of a native dignity. She had come to be a tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of difficulties, shepherdess, and reconciler in the land.

“The foregoing portraits,” adds Whitman, “are frightfully out of line from [the] imported models of womanly personality.”

1975

            
Shortly after the publication
of Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint,
Charlotte [Baum] attended a meeting of a Jewish women’s “reading club” to participate in a discussion of the book. Although Charlotte’s experience in no way paralleled Alexander Portnoy’s, she intended to defend Roth’s point of view, and to support his right to demythicize the legendary Jewish family.

                  
Most of the women in the group were
in their sixties. They were the daughters of Eastern European Jews, either born here, or having immigrated as children. They were now upper-middle class women whose husbands, none of whom had attended college, were manufacturers or owners of medium-sized businesses. Their sons were university-educated professionals, or associated with the family businesses. Their daughters were themselves all active
in Jewish philanthropic organizations like Hadassah, ORT, B’nai B’rith, and synagogue sisterhoods.

                  
The women began to defend themselves against Roth’s highly critical view of Jewish women, as embodied in his character Sophie Portnoy. They described their sacrifices, struggles, and hardships, and Charlotte knew she was hearing the truth. She remembered stories from her own past,
about her aunts’ involvement in the labor movement, her mother’s friends who had taken in boarders to supplement the family’s income and her own mother who worked in the grocery store eighteen hours a day. She found herself agreeing with these Jewish women that if anyone had complaints to make, it was they! . . .

                  
Why were there no Jewish women novelists recording their experiences
and hers? Had the daughters of these women been so psychologically damaged that they were incapable of generating a voice of their own?

—from the preface to
The Jewish Woman in America,
Michel, Hyman, Baum-Sheedy, 1975

*
Lilian Schissel.

▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P
. 23

*
Lillian Robinson.

**
Title of a pioneering anthology textbook; Mary Ann Ferguson, editor.

†
Some 110 in
1970–71. (By 1973 there were 600 courses in literature alone.)

‡
Elaine Showalter.

§
I cannot identify the author of this quotation or all previous quotations, but they were copied (in 1971) out of course descriptions or
Female Studies
(K.N.O.W. and Feminist Press).

*
William Blake.

**
Adrienne Rich in her preface to Susan Griffin’s
Voices,
1976.

LITERACY
^▴