In her own words
I've been going through the contents of a folder I found while cleaning out my mom's apartment, discovered after the "nostalgia box" had been hauled to my storage unit in Virginia and therefore jammed unexamined into my suitcase so I could stay focused on the tasks at hand. (So many tasks.) Among the photos and miscellaneous bits of writing, was this gem that seems to me to capture so much about her: How she thought. How she questioned. How she struggled.
I thought you might appreciate it, too.
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March 16, 1977
Something happened to me today in the seminar when students began to discuss the readings on problems and methods of women's history. All the pleasure I had taken in reading Sherry Ortner's piece on male and female, culture and nature, in Natalie Davis' piece on European women's history and its potential directions, in Mill's "Subjection of Women" was somehow attacked, questioned, and finally revisited by the students. They wanted to know "why this?" — and they meant "why women?" Why not educational reform, or industrialization, or something else, anything else? I felt the resistance, the immediate stiffening of backs and hardening of glances, and I realized that it was me they were resisting — me as a woman at last willing to look at my own history, at my anxieties, my fears, my stereotypes, my biases, willing to see them as historically produced.
Today I went to war with culture, and I thought I was only going to teach my class. All the enemies I have internalized over 35 years were suddenly before me, wearing the faces of the students I thought I knew, and was known by. There was the smiling and uncomprehending good little girl who always does the reading but never ventures a word, the quick frightened girl who will consider the problem if you can call it "just like the problem in art history of...," the budding radical who will legitimize the question by calling it Marxist, the lovely frightened student who is terrified by the prospect of explicating such a text. And there were the boys: one sardonic, contemptuous in words of more than three syllables, and unwilling to commit himself but perfectly willing to commit intellectual and spiritual atrocities of hubris and half-knowledge, the California kid torn between doing one's own thing and looking at both side of every question, the first-year grad student feeling ever so slightly superior to everything, including his own limitations. (Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, n'est-ce pas?)
In the silences, the stiffened backs, the hardening or evasive eyes, were all my past selves, out of which I have so painfully wrested my present self, reminding me rather ominously how elusive freedom is, how hollow are words like modernizationand liberation. I have not yet come into that moment when I can see my past trailing behind me like the wake of a ship; it is still a reef, a sand flat, if no longer an anchor; I am not free of it. And as I told them that my desire was to illuminate the whole past of which they are a product, to give them a fuller relationship to the things that make them what they are so that they may then transcend them, I realized that I would not be merely the conductor of that tour, but at the same time the monument, the guide, and the perceiving eye. It's a messy business.
How to be both subject and object? How to be engagée and empirical? Perhaps the real question for me is this: how to be worthy and unworthy at the same time? Woman is both. Women are both. I am both.
