Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Introduction

FEMINIST: (adj.) embracing the assumption that women have the same human capacities as men

ENGAGEMENT: (n.) a piece of business requiring attention; agreement to be in a specific place at a specific time for a specified purpose; a job or period of employment especially as a performer; emotional involvement; a tie of duty or gratitude; commitment; betrothal; the action of crossing swords; a battle, conflict, or encounter between hostile forces; the stage in labor/​delivery in which a baby’s head begins to descend

I. Feminist Engagements

I’m saddened when a student prefaces a comment with, “I’m not a feminist but...” I’m dismayed when it becomes clear that for her, “feminist” is the “F-word”—a term to be shunned, despite the fact that she may hold attitudes that feminists have advocated for over a century. For me, the word brings to mind feats of daring self-respect and acts of courage, endurance and imagination; it conjures up a cast of remarkable extraordinary and ordinary women and men, bravely patient and bravely impatient; it suggests an abiding sense of social justice and passion for changing the world.

As Estelle Freedman observes in The Essential Feminist Reader, the word “feminism” was not used until the late nineteenth century, but the ideas it embodies have provoked debate for over half a millennium. Her clear and simple definition of the term—“the belief that women have the same human capacities as men”—makes it sound so unobjectionable that it is hard to imagine why the word has been so provocative, vilified, and fraught for much of its history. As it turns out, the term is far from unobjectionable due to the pervasiveness of a constellation of attitudes—sometimes referred to as androcentrism or patriarchy or misogyny or male chauvinism—that have (a) denied that women have the same human capacities as men, (b) questioned whether they deserve the same social, political, and economic rights that men enjoy, and (c) ignored or erased women’s experiences, voices, and contributions to society and the arts from mainstream narratives of human history and creative achievements. As British writer Rebecca West said in 1913, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

The perspectives inherent in what Charlotte Perkins Gilman referred to as “our androcentric world” were, for much of world history, as ubiquitous (and therefore viewed as unworthy of comment) as air. How do we learn to see air?

How do we come to understand that the conditions we face as individuals may be intimately linked to larger patterns in place for thousands of years, patterns so familiar and common as to seem unworthy of notice? How can we understand the world in which our mothers and grandmothers moved as vastly different from our own, yet umbilically linked to our own? Why should we try? Exploring these issues can give us a deeper understanding of our past and can help us craft a more socially just future.

This book is not an effort to define what feminism is and is not. Rather, it is a deeply personal book with humbler aspirations: it is the record of one American literary scholar’s feminist engagements during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first.

The most common meaning of “engagement” involves an agreement to marry. But an “engagement” is also an agreement to show up at a time or place for a particular purpose. It is a promise implying an obligation of action, a gig for a performer, an emotional commitment, a conflict involving armed camps. It is also a part of the process by which a woman gives birth to new life.

The feminist engagements in this book embrace all of these meanings. A promise to marry? Well, not exactly—but from the late 1980s, as my awareness of feminism deepened, I vowed to stick with the challenges it posed for the rest of my life. That commitment required me to “show up”—in person or in print, on various occasions, with a particular purpose in mind. Sometimes it obligated me to act. Sometimes it required me to perform. Sometimes it pitted me against hostile forces. What those engagements always did, unfailingly, however, was activate and energize my work as a scholar.

The essays in this volume are informed by a capacious interpretation of feminism. At its most rudimentary level, feminism is an affirmative answer to the question posed in the title of a little book of suffrage rhymes that Alice Duer Miller published in 1915, Are Women People?. At its core, feminism involves taking women seriously. Taking women seriously requires listening to their voices and refusing to let them be shouted down, redlined from the cultural conversation, or denied respect as authors and artists or as active thinking and feeling subjects. It requires recognizing and dismantling structures of gender-based discrimination and oppression and challenging the assumptions invoked to justify them. It requires making visible the largely invisible mental maps that constrict the canvases on which women—and men—can paint their lives.

II. Latecomer

I was fairly late coming to feminism as a subject of intellectual inquiry because, as my friend the late Lillian Robinson put it, I’d had all the disadvantages of a first-rate Yale education. I was a member of the first class of women to graduate from Yale College—the class of 1971—an experience that I discuss in the essay titled “Changing the Story” in this volume. Being in the first group of women in an institution that had barred us for the first 268 years of its existence was an education in itself. But while we may have been living our feminism, we were not studying it; few women made it onto our syllabi, and even fewer made it onto the faculty. It would take a while for the feminist issues that were percolating furiously at places like San Diego State and Cornell (where the first women’s studies programs were created) to have a visible impact at Yale.

The women’s liberation movement, as feminism came to be known at the time, appealed to me greatly, but although I’d read about the existence of women’s groups of various sorts around the country, I didn’t know of any on my campus. At Yale virtually any extracurricular activity earned you a spot in the record books for having integrated a previously all-male enterprise. When I saw a poster advertising tryouts for a Slavic Women’s Chorus, inexplicably I showed up, auditioned, and joined. Only years later did I figure out why: to be in a room full of women at Yale in 1969, I had to learn to sing in Bulgarian!

No wonder I found it thrilling to march down Fifth Avenue with ten thousand other women the summer after my junior year, in August 1970, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage. But the battles our feminist foremothers had fought seemed fixed in the distant past, as one by one I broke down barriers and took jobs that had previously been held only by men and as I watched women politicians, athletes, and authors chalk up a steady string of “firsts.”

My dissertation and my first book, which grew out of it—a study of writers who moved from journalism to fiction—was about men. I was breaking disciplinary boundaries, melding journalism history and literary history, and challenging prevailing paradigms of both fields in the process. Where are the women? demanded an acquaintance—who would become an early pioneer in women’s studies—when she met me socially as I was in the middle of my dissertation. Her question irritated me. It would be years before I uncovered the work of women who might have fit perfectly into that study. (Once I found them, they would be on my syllabi from that point on. But it took a while. Only later — much later — would I realize why they’d been so hard to find.)