12 Ibid., pp. 237, 243.
13 When collected in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, the essay appeared as “Looking for Zora,” pp. 93–116 (quotation at 102).
14 Ibid., pp. 107, 110.
15 White, Alice Walker, pp. 258, 259. Sara Blackburn wrote the review of Sula; New York Times Book Review, 30 Dec. 1973.
16 White, Alice Walker, p. 272. Walker’s biographer, Evelyn C. White, suggests that envy was the motive for the estrangement: “Rukeyser had never imagined that her own literary light might be outshone by the impoverished black woman from Georgia whom she had taken ‘under her wing’ ” (p. 271).
17 Alice Walker to Muriel Rukeyser, letter quoted in ibid., p. 273.
18 Rukeyser never mailed the letter she composed in response, where she mentions the money she gave Walker at a difficult period in her life (ibid., pp. 125–26, 275).
19 Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (Dial Press, 1999), p. 234.
20 Statement quoted in ibid., p. 235.
21 Ibid., p. 238; Ellen Willis is quoted on p. 236.
22 Gloria Steinem, quote in Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, pp. 290, 291.
23 The story of the demise of the Sagaris Collective, whose members could not decide whether to accept funding from Ms., is told by both Heilbrun (The Education of a Woman, pp. 297–99) and Brownmiller (In Our Time, pp. 239–42).
24 Jo Freeman, “Trashing,” Ms., Apr. 1976, pp. 49–51, 92–98, at 49.
25 Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 373, 382.
26 Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, pp. 280–81. See Ruth Rosen’s chapter on the FBI, “The Politics of Paranoia,” in The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 227–60.
27 Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Have You Ever Supported Equal Pay, Child Care, or Women’s Groups? The FBI Was Watching You,” Ms., June 1977, pp. 37–44, at 37, 44.
28 Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, p. 309. In the same year as the radical feminists’ allegation against Steinem, Elizabeth Forsling Harris—the first publisher of Ms., who left after the first issue—sued Steinem, alleging stock fraud.
29 Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 286, 290.
30 Phyllis Chesler, Letters to a Young Feminist (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997), pp. 56, 59.
31 Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 660.
32 Winifred Breines, The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 152.
33 Sheila Tobias, Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement (Westview Press, 1997), pp. 155, 156.
34 Lepore, These Truths, p. 662.
35 One cynical view of Schlafly’s successful “pro-family” and anti-ERA campaign is offered by Sheila Tobias: it provided “a vehicle for a politically ambitious woman. Unable to ‘make it’ in other arenas and having a tremendous drive to wield power and hold office, Schlafly was clever enough to realize that of the range of issues available to a conservative in 1972, the ERA could be her own” (Faces of Feminism, p. 140). See the Hulu television series Mrs. America for a dramatization of Schlafly’s rise to power.
36 Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 91.
37 Lillian Faderman, “Enter, Anita,” chap. 18 of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon and Schuster, 2015), pp. 321–35, at 332.
38 “Feminine Fulfillment,” season 5, episode 19, of Maude (originally aired 28 Feb. 1977 on CBS). The episode “Trouble in Chapter 17” of The Rockford Files (season 4, episode 2; originally aired 23 Sept. 1977 on NBC) depicts a character named Anne Louise Clement (Claudette Nevins), who is closely based on Marabel Morgan.
39 Audre Lorde, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 81–109, at 90, 92.
40 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 110–13, at 112.
41 Audre Lorde, “Love Poem,” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 127.
42 De Veaux, Warrior Poet, pp. 130–31.
43 Lorde, “An Interview,” p. 98. To Adrienne Rich, who recalled hearing Lorde read the poem at a coffeehouse the year before—“It was incredible. Like defiance. It was glorious” (quoted in ibid.)—Lorde explained, “Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder” (p. 99).
44 The quoted phrase is from Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 45–52, at 49. Possibly she was also trying to protect her comrade in the emerging Combahee River Collective, Barbara Smith, when she said, “The Black lesbian has come under increasing attack from both Black men and heterosexual Black women” (ibid.). On the evolution and significance of the Combahee River Collective, see Winifred Breines, “Alone: Black Socialist Feminism and the Combahee River Collective,” chap. 4 of The Trouble between Us, pp. 117–49.
45 Audre Lorde, “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 60–65, at 64. See, for example, Lorde’s discussion of the murder of the young actress Patricia Cowan in the poem “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices” (Collected Poems, p. 353) and in this essay.
46 Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 66–71, at 66, 67.
47 De Veaux, Warrior Poet, pp. 151–52.
48 Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” pp. 67, 68.
49 Ibid., p. 71.
50 De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 252–53, 252.
51 Lorde, “An Interview,” p. 103.
52 Lorde, “Power,” in Collected Poems, pp. 251–16, at 215. She later explained what she meant: “if we are really ready to put ourselves behind what we believe, then we can bring about change. Other than that, it is only empty rhetoric, and it is our children who will have to live out our destinies.” Interview with Marion Kraft in 1986 in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (University of Mississippi Press, 2004), pp. 146–53, at 148.
53 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” pp. 110–11, 112, 113.
54 Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 40–44, at 41, 42, 44.
55 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 36–39, at 37, 38; “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in ibid., 53–59, at 55.
56 Blanche Cook, quoted in De Veaux, Warrior Poet, p. 257.
57 Jonathan Rollins, quoted in ibid., p. 225.
58 Audre Lorde, “Breast Cancer: A Black Lesbian Feminist Experience,” Sinister Wisdom, no. 10 (Summer 1979): 44–61, at 60, 61
59 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 124–33, 127; this essay was given as a keynote at the National Women’s Studies Association Convention in 1981.
60 Casey Cep, “Fighting Mad: Reconsidering the Political Power of Women’s Anger,” New Yorker, 15 Oct. 2018, pp. 83–86, at 84; the essay is a review of Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.
61 Alice Walker, quoted in “Dorothy Bryant,” in Feminist Writers, ed. Pamela Kester-Shelton (St. James Press, 1996), p. 77.
62 Though the work was controversial in the Chinese American community, with some of Kingston’s male contemporaries claiming that its author hadn’t represented the “real” China, by the nineties The Woman Warrior and its companion volume, China Men, were “the most frequently taught texts on college campuses by any living American writer” (Amy Ling, “Maxine Hong Kingston,” in Contempora
ry Authors [Gale Research, 1991]). In the view of the prominent Chinese American playwright Frank Chin, for instance, The Woman Warrior represents a “fake” China described in a pseudo-Christian autobiographical mode. See Chin, “Come All Ye Asian-American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. (Meridian, 1991), pp. 1–92, at 8.
63 See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1989): 139–67.
64 The “American” children, all born in the States, are compared to two older children who died in China: the “Chinese” children. But of course all the American children grapple with the ghosts of China.
65 Alex Zwerdling, “Imagining the Facts in Kingston’s Memoirs,” chap. 7 of The Rise of the Memoir (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 185–218.
66 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976; repr., Vintage, 1989), pp. 96–97.
67 Ibid., pp. 3, 16.
68 Ibid., pp. 6, 7.
69 Ibid., p. 9.
70 Ibid., p. 22.
71 Ibid., pp. 47, 52, 53. There was of course a Disney movie titled Mulan that appeared in 1998, but accounts of its production suggest that the creative team hadn’t read The Woman Warrior.
72 Ibid., pp. 90–92.
73 Ibid., p. 152.
74 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929], annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar (Harcourt, 2005), p. 66 (on Austen); Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë, letter of 12 Mar. 1837, and Brontë to Southey, letter of 16 Mar. 1837, in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, vol. 1, 1829–1847, ed. Margaret Smith (Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 166–67, at 166–67, and pp. 168–69, at 169. On the Dickinson anecdote, see Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” (1976), in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 99–121, at 99.
75 “The Dinner Party: Entry Banners,” Brooklyn Museum, www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/entry_banners.
76 Judy Chicago, quoted in Nadja Sayej, “Judy Chicago: ‘In the 1960s, I Was the Only Visible Woman Artist,’ ” The Guardian, 20 Oct. 2017, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/20/judy-chicago-the-dinner-party-history-in-the-making; Hilton Kramer, “Art: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ Comes to Brooklyn Museum,” New York Times, 17 Oct. 1980.
77 Alice Walker, “One Child of One’s Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s),” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, pp. 361–83, at 373. See also Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” chap. 6 of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 152–75, at 156–57.
78 Shulamith Firestone, “On American Feminism,” in Woman in Sexist Society, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (Basic Books, 1971), pp. 485–501, at 495.
CHAPTER 8: IDENTITY POLITICS
1 Betty Friedan, “Feminism’s Next Step,” New York Times Magazine, 5 July 1981.
2 Susan Bolotin, “Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation,” New York Times Magazine, 17 Oct. 1982.
3 Walker received the prize in 1983 for The Color Purple and Morrison in 1988 for Beloved. The Newsweek poll came out in 1986; see Eloise Salholz, “Feminism’s Identity Crisis,” Newsweek, 31 Mar. 1986, pp. 58–59, at 58.
4 Marilyn Power, “Falling through the ‘Safety Net’: Women, Economics Crisis, and Reaganomics,” Feminist Studies 10, no. 1 (Sept. 1984): 31–58. Tax cuts for the rich were matched by cuts in “funding for education, public housing, and most other social welfare programs,” according to Corey Dolgon; see Dolgon, Kill It to Save It: An Autopsy of Capitalism’s Triumph over Democracy (Policy Press, 2017), p. 182.
5 This Bridge Called My Back was edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; All the Women Were White, All the Men Were Black, But Some of Us Were Brave was edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith.
6 Needless to say, the two of us came in for our share of invective. One of Susan’s former graduate students informed us (much later) that she failed to get tenure because feminist members of her department believed that her scholarship was based on our “problematic” work, which had been “disproven.” See Kathleen Davies, Sacred Groves: Or, How a Cemetery Saved My Soul (Bedazzled Ink Publishing, 2019), pp. 86, 119.
7 Dworkin was called “the angriest woman” by Ariel Levy, quoted in Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon and Schuster, 2018), p. 154; “not the fun kind” describes a fictional character who is clearly a surrogate of Dworkin in Andrea Dworkin, Ice and Fire (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1987), p. 110.
8 Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (Dial Press, 1999), p. 302.
9 Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (Basic Books, 2002), pp. 4, 77, 139.
10 Ibid., pp. 142, 149, 180.
11 Ellen Willis, “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography” (1979), in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Anne Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review, 1983), pp. 460–67, at 464; Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (Random House, 1977), p. 169.
12 Gloria Steinem, quoted in Traister, Good and Mad, p. 155, Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 302.
13 Michelle Goldberg, “Not the Fun Kind of Feminist,” op-ed, New York Times, 22 Feb. 2019.
14 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (Free Press, 1987), p. 137.
15 John Gray’s book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (HarperCollins) did not appear until 1992.
16 Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangement and Human Malaise (Harper and Row, 1976).
17 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (University of California Press, 1978). Carol Gilligan argued that girls are not inferior to boys in moral reasoning, as Gilligan’s mentor Lawrence Kohlberg had asserted; instead, they commit themselves to an ethic of care, whereas boys tend to espouse more abstract notions of justice. See Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, 1982).
18 Carole Vance associated “the positive possibilities of sexuality” with “exploration of the body, curiosity, intimacy, sensuality, adventure, excitement, human connection, basking in the infantile and non-rational—are not only worthwhile but provide sustaining energy.” Carole S. Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Vance (Routledge and Kegan, 1984), pp. 1–27, at 1.
19 Carole S. Vance, epilogue to ibid., pp. 431–39, at 433.
20 Gayle Rubin, “Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on ‘Thinking Sex,’ ” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 1 (2011): 15–48, at 16. In “Thinking Sex,” her contribution to Pleasure and Danger, Rubin objected to both right-wing and anti-porn efforts to regulate sexuality through the state and called for a new “sexuality studies” that heralded the emergence of queer studies. See Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Vance, Pleasure and Danger, pp. 267–319.
21 Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 316.
22 Catharine A. McKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 217–18.
23 Actually, in Indianapolis a city councilwoman who fought against the ERA enlisted the help of MacKinnon but not Dworkin, “whose passionate radical feminist rhetoric and unruly appearance would not have been well received.” Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 325.
24 Dworkin, Heartbreak, p. 170.
In Minneapolis, the ordinance was vetoed as a violation of the First Amendment. In Indianapolis, it gained the endorsement of Phyllis Schlafly and Christian conservatives and was signed into law in 1984—the year that Mississippi ratified the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote!—but its constitutionality was soon under attack in federal court (Bronstein, Battling Pornography, 328). The Supreme Court found the Indianapolis anti-pornography ordinance unconstitutional in 1986.
25 Schlafly was a woman whom Betty Friedan wanted “to burn at the stake” for stalling the progress of the ERA. See Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 12.
26 Bronstein, Battling Pornography, p. 329.
27 According to Sarah Schulman, “the ‘sex radicals’ won control of the lesbian community.” Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (Routledge, 1994), p. 8. Traister declares: “The prosex feminists won, conclusively” (Good and Mad, 154).
28 Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation” (1987), in For Adult Users: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, ed. Gubar and Joan Hoff (Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 47–67.
29 Traister, Good and Mad, p. 189.
30 Johanna Fateman, “The Power of Andrea Dworkin’s Rage,” New York Review of Books, 15 Feb. 2019, www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/15/the-power-of-andrea-dworkins-rage/.
31 Gloria Anzaldúa, interview with Karin Ikas, in Borderlands/La Frontera, by Anzaldúa, 2nd ed. (Aunt Lute Books, 1999), pp. 227–46, at 238, 229.
32 Ibid., pp. 230–31.
33 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, pp. 33, 34, 35, 25.
34 Ibid., pp. 38, 59, 43, 41, 40, 44–45.
35 This is the translation in Sonia Saldivar-Hull’s introduction (in ibid., p. 4) of a passage that appears on p. 37, where it is written in Spanish.
36 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, pp. 78, 81, 95.
37 Ibid., p. 49.
38 Ibid., p. 52.
39 Ibid., pp. 102–3.
40 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938], annotated and with an introduction by Jane Marcus (Harcourt, 2006), p. 129.
Still Mad Page 38
