The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

The appropriate feminist response to The Feminist Promise is to send truckloads of gratitude to Christine Stansell, professor of history at the University of Chicago, who collected and digested a vast array of material, much of it ephemeral, and put it in a history book. Some of us hang on to the materials of history—like Laura Murra and my late friend Arlene Meyers, who preserved so much of the material base of second wave feminism as it was happening. Others, like Alice Echols, tracked down those of us who lived the history and captured these accounts lost in mainstream versions. The Feminist Promise takes a wider view of this idea, starting with the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and ending with the problematic high profile attained by global feminism in foreign policy.

Neither from the “great woman school” nor the annales philosophy, The Feminist Promise is a narrative history of feminists in both their public and personal lives, and the great opportunities, victories, and defeats of a social movement. Stansell profiles the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Hillary Clinton, Mavis Leno, and other major figures; includes (and misses) some less well-known feminists in this “herstory”; and airs some dirty linen. The material masterfully presented makes The Feminist Promise worthwhile. It’s a long, scholarly, but remarkably rollicking read. My criticisms lie in the tone, the Freudian shaping, and the “promise” of feminism she posits.

A couple of decades makes a huge difference in the tone of even a friendly, and openly participating scholar. There’s a distance not just from lived experience but from living, wild, raw, social movement feminism and the introduction to the shorter anthology focused on sexual politics that Stansell helped edit, Powers of Desire. The Feminist Promise takes a necessarily more comprehensive view. Its changed tone may well result from the trough between feminist waves, the ascendancy of theory over the practice of a lived movement, and historicity itself. She takes note of the periods of lassitude that interrupt the movement forward, while ending on a note of problematic triumphalism with feminism as geopolitics.

Stansell’s organizing trope is the familiar one of mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters, which distorts the complexity of feminism by jamming it into a family drama. (To be fair, she acknowledges in her conclusion that feminism has now moved beyond the family romance.) Feminism’s almost bipolar, cyclic nature, and the back-and-forth between those confronting and those pragmatically working within the system, are two alternative explanatory devices that come to mind. Still, she who collects the records plays the tune. In trying to arrange a marriage between feminism and democracy, the promise of the title, she doesn’t really ask “whose democracy?” though she differentiates between feminisms.

Speaking of lived history, I have long misremembered this quote as from Susan B. Anthony: "Our history has been stolen from us. Our heroes died in childbirth, From peritonitis, Of overwork, Of oppression, Of bottled-up anger. Our geniuses were never taught to read and write, We must invent a past adequate to our ambitions. We must create a future adequate to our needs."

Because I first saw this quote on a poster illustrated with a woodcut of Anthony that hung in the women’s liberation office on Mintwood Place in the District of Columbia, my mind leapt to the conclusion this anonymous quote was Anthony’s, and stuck there. I stand corrected. More important, thanks Professor Stansell for clawing some history back.

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 14th 2010

The Southern Woman

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Spencer

Modern Library

I grew up in the so-called New South, where there are sweet tea and skyscrapers, Gone with the Wind screenings in posh movie theaters, and Faulkner reading groups, but no stereotypical southern drawl and no cornbread. In an age where regional identity yields to interstates and chain hotels, can I still call myself a southern woman? After reading Elizabeth Spencer’s collection of short stories, I think I can.

Spencer’s South is not just a location; it is a kind of voice, a way of thinking and of speaking. “She was one of the old school of Southern lady talkers,” Spencer writes of one of her characters. “She tried to protect you from even a moment of silence.” So goes the conversation of Mrs. Harvey in “First Dark,” a story about a well-to-do Mississippi socialite struggling to come to terms with her daughter’s undistinguished suitor. In a volume that shifts from the bayous of Biloxi to the piazzas of Florence, voice, as much as setting, becomes the guiding force of Spencer’s fiction. Nearly all of her protagonists are women, and their voices—funny, shocking, anguished, and strange—propel the reader through story after story.

The Southern Woman is split into four sections: “The South”; “Italy”; “Up North”; and “New Stories.” Many of the stories in “The South” deal with rural landscapes, religious orthodoxy, and the legacy of slavery. In “Sharon,” a young girl first learns of the relationship between her White uncle and his Black housekeeper. Sexual awakening is the theme of the sultry “Ship Island,” about a girl from a poor family coming of age among Marine Club boys, eccentric millionaires, and a raucous adult Bible class. Spencer’s heroines are never dull; they break horses and chase ghosts through small towns and back roads.

The narrators in The Southern Woman often wrestle with family conflicts, and stories across all of Spencer’s geographies feature runaway relatives, errant husbands, and anxious parents. One of the most touching pieces in the collection, the novella “The Light in the Piazza,” tells the story of an American woman, Margaret Johnson, who brings her daughter Clara to Florence. Clara is permanently brain damaged from a childhood accident, and when she falls in love with a young Italian man, her mother learns to see her daughter as an adult for the first time: “a warm, classical dignity had come to this girl,” her mother realizes, “and no matter whether she could do long division or not, she was a woman.”

Spencer is not afraid to take risks in her writing, with mostly superb results. In some of the stories, particularly “The Business Venture” and “The Cousins,” the narrator’s voice is so intimate it becomes almost cloying. Spencer’s quirky characters are fascinating when they waver between the real and the fantastic. “The Finder” tells the tale of a man with a supernatural ability to find all lost things everywhere, and “I, Maureen” tells the story of a woman whose life changes after she experiences a vision in a flying piece of glass. Both of these stories exemplify Spencer’s dreamlike sense of comedy—a humor that both laughs and thinks.

Whether strolling through Southern farmlands or European squares, Spencer’s characters are fresh, funny, thoughtful, and, above all, honest. You’ll find someone to like in The Southern Woman, no matter how regional—or region-less—you are.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, December 4th 2009