male-defined interests of the state, produces and perpetuates reactionary politics—a slow and subtle form of sororicide.
There is no one to save us from that—no one except ourselves. So in the debris of what once looked like a vital liberation movement, one searches for signs of life. Three beacons wink in the wasteland. The dogged and often thankless work being done by fewer and fewer feminists to change oppressive laws; the starving self-help centers and mutual-aid networks; and, healthiest of all, the dazzling accomplishment of women’s art and scholarship. Nothing, it seems to me, is more exhilarating, and more dramatically to the point, than what is happening among the artists and scholars. The pejorative, limiting intention of the labels is still around (women playwrights, women photographers, etc., are obligatory annual roundups in various media) but not for long. It may be the first hint of a possible victory in being viewed and respected as human beings without being male-like or male dominated. Where self-sabotage is harder to maintain; where the worship of masculinity as a concept dies; where intelligent compassion for women unlike ourselves can surface; where racism and class inequity do not help the vision or the research; where, in fact, the work itself, the very process of doing it, makes sororicide as well as fratricide repulsive.
Thirty years after Miss Harriet Tubman—black, female, mother, daughter, nurse, cook, wife, and “commander of several men”—asked a roomful of sexist, bigoted, class-conscious white men for her back pay they granted it. I have not chosen to begin and end this piece with her plea because it makes a poignant anecdote, but because the key to feminine oppression is most clearly seen in the response to her stand—a response that gathered together the full force of the special brand of American racism and sexism.
And don’t think she didn’t know it. They gave her twenty dollars a month for life. She was seventy-five years old then, and they probably did not expect the pension to have to last very long. Stubborn as a woman, she lived thirteen more years.
Literature and Public Life
TO RETURN to the site of one’s graduate school life, one is always in danger of repeating one’s original status in the place where inquiry occurs, problems surface, and help is needed to sort out all the difficulties so a clear and persuasive argument can be advanced. I feel like that now, lo, these many years later: perhaps a committee is sitting somewhere ready to interrogate me following their listening to this paper. It is a useful bit of recollection because I want to use this occasion and this provocative site to examine (or float) a few thoughts I have had no chance to articulate, except in my fiction. And to identify how those thoughts are made manifest in my work.
The problem I want to address this evening is, as I see it, the loss of public life, which is exacerbated by the degradation of private life. And I am proposing literature as an amelioration to this crisis in ways even literature could not have imagined.
During the eighties and nineties, technology and the regime of the electronically visual world have altered perception of the public and our experience of one another. (The current Age of the Spectacle promised intimacy and universalization in a global village setting. But it has delivered frightful confusion about private and public existence.) Following the demise of the much maligned sixties and seventies, during which there was an actual, contested, fought over, fought for, and fought against public (and publicly expressed) life, it seems unlikely that there will ever be a decade like that: where issues of conscience, morality, law, and ethics were liberationist rather than oppressive. And it is interesting to note that it is a decade that, unlike any previous one, is embarrassed by itself. That kind of public life (the Civil Rights movement, etc.) is not experienced as media phenomena made possible by “the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy [which suppresses] the realities of division and exploitation; [disguises] the disconnexion of private and public existence.” The consequence may be apathy, disgust, resignation, or a kind of inner vacuum (numbness), “a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience,” where, as F. Jameson observed, “never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.” That was 1971 when those comments were made and they are inapplicable to some degree