Dear Sisters
Dear Erik,
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StumbleUponI just knew you'd love this book! I think you may be reading Dear Sisters as if it were a failed version of the book you'd like to read--a collection of personal essays or thoughtful explorations of gender difference. Dear Sisters is something else: It's a documentary account of the years (roughly l965 to 1967) in which the women's movement was a grass-roots, activist social movement involving thousands of women, most apparently "ordinary," most not writers, who were engaged in intense political and personal struggles that changed society swiftly, profoundly, and irrevocably. Baxandall and Gordon are both distinguished social historians (Baxandall won praise for last year's Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, co-authored with Elizabeth Ewen; Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction won the illustrious Bancroft Prize in American History), and their major concern, as they note in their introduction, is to remedy the paucity of published primary source material on the women's movement. They provide a running commentary on the historical material, which is mostly ephemera --position papers written up the night before the meeting, articles from underground newspapers, manifestoes put out by tiny collectives, polemics against people and groups now long forgotten, plus song parodies, cartoons, poems, posters, humor (yes, humor), and even stickers to paste on offensive advertisements ("Beauty is NOT in the eyes of the beholder!"). Much of this stuff was written quickly, often collectively, and was intended to serve immediate political purposes. Casey Hayden's and Mary King's Sex and Caste, the famous critique of sexism in the civil rights movement with which the book begins, is even subtitled A Kind of Memo. To me, that off-the-cuff, hand-made, provisional quality--even in the dreary ideological papers that irritated you--makes the collection touching. It's history on the fly. Reading it was like opening an old box full of miscellaneous stuff from college--leaflets, postcards, rough drafts, phone messages, notes from friends, drawings, to-do lists, outlines for long-lost or never written papers. You sift through it all and wonder: Who was that other, younger person? What happened to her? What of her is still in me?
Most feminist writing at present is produced by professional writers of one sort or another--journalists, academics, lawyers, staffers at one or another organization. Often they are speaking, or advocating, for someone else who does not speak. Oceans of ink were spilled on the issue of welfare reform, for example--but almost none of it was by women on welfare, like Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose "Welfare is a Women's Issue" is reprinted here and is still relevant. If you've ever been on a talk show or been cajoled into "media coaching" (what a nightmare!), you know we're living in a media and political world as processed and formatted as airline food. Dear Sisters comes from a more improvisational moment, when lots of things were up for grabs and people did wild things, some of which look pretty silly now. But without the wildness--what seems to me like a release of long pent-up energy and to you like hostility and hatred--little would have changed. I really liked the stories about women taking action--the Bread and Roses collective "invading" the Boston Globe in l970 to protest fluffy "women's pages" and sex-segregated employment ads, which the Globe was still running three years after the EEOC banned them as discriminatory. ("A simple courtesy to people who want to find jobs," one editor insisted--grrr!) And didn't you thrill just a little bit to "Hairy Legs Freak Fishy Liberal," in which a women's group confronts the peace-button-wearing proprietor of an aquarium store and embarrasses him into rehiring a saleswoman he'd fired for not shaving her legs? My absolute favorite grass-roots activist, though, was the high-school student in a l974 news story who confronted the mayor, who had come to a school assembly to urge female students to enter the Miss Pacifica beauty contest: "When the mayor started talking I said, 'Excuse me. Since the important thing about a woman is her measurements, as this gathering demonstrates, would you tell us the measurements of your penis before you speak, so we can tell if you're important enough to listen to?' " She was expelled for five days, but wouldn't you be proud to have a daughter like that?
Cheers,
Katha
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Try here for an interesting discussion of the format of the book, and here for "women get power through sex" (and follow the thread: "perhaps if men put less emphasis on sex...")]
If this feminist anthology is anything remotely like Tarloff says it is, it will conform completely to my impression of the most ardent feminists I have known since I was in high school a quarter-century ago--grim, dim, thoroughly intolerant, utterly predictable and generally unpleasant people with whom only the weather is a safe topic of conversation. Only with great difficulty can I remember more than one or two committed feminists whom I would not number among the dullest people I've ever met.
--Joseph Britt
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To Joseph Britt:
Not surprised here either. I haven't known very many in-the-trenches civil rights activists, or revolutionary Catholic priests or lobbyists for ending the cycle of welfare-and-foster-care who were blessed with a sense of humor, a gift for joy and an easygoing attitude towards the ups-and-downs of social change. I will say that the ones who do have these qualities can melt hearts and change minds far more effectively than anyone else, but they are rare characters.
Why should these feminists be any different?
--Amy Bloom
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[Note: Amy Bloom, a Slate contributor, is the author, most recently, of A Blind Man Can Tell How Much I Love You.]
One of the most frequent complaints about feminists is that we "don't have a sense of humor." I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder--but really, feminism and women's struggle not only for equal rights but for equal respect isn't really a light-hearted topic, is it? Why would you expect a description of our fight to be couched in terms of bonhomie and coquetry? When was the last time you read an article on slavery or civil rights that made you laugh aloud and slap your knee? Color me naive, but I don't hear anyone taking digs at Tolstoy because his writings were like reading a constant dirge. Some people call it art.
--Madelaine
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Tarloff is right that words & ideas are linked--which is why the fact that no one comments on women's presence in the workplace is not a victory for feminism. Almost immediately (in the grand scheme of things) after women started making up half the workforce, it stopped being acceptable to discuss that fact. So what happened to all the opinions about sex roles that were previously expressed? They've become more tacit than ever. On the one hand, women get paid less than men--systemic, covert discrimination. On the other hand, many men resent and fear women for intruding on their perceived territory. By discouraging open discussion of their issues (distasteful as they are) we're reinforcing an environment of hidden hostility and ego trips. It's words and actions that need to be linked. Only when we've gotten to the point where no action needs to be taken to remedy our gender issues, will it be legitimate to say nothing about them.
--Toth
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This book is yet another tedious example of White American social dialogue. Self-absorbed, moralizing, ignorant and oblivious to other cultures except in a missionary, disapproving kind of way. It is utterly useless to the large mass of humanity for whom women's issues are immediate practical and need to be solved within the framework of extremely slender economic resources, while preserving delicately wrought social structures and modes of dialogue built up carefully over centuries.
What a bunch of reckless, idiotic, self-centered, harm causing people these American feminists have been. American White Women have been liberated: sure--from being rich housewives. Now they are richer and lonelier worker drones-as are their white brothers. And who speaks to the rights of the children thus affected?
--A.S.Germain
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The opposition to the idea of wages for housework has to have more intellectual content than that such wages would attract women to an ultimately unfulfilling career--as opposed to what, working as a salesman at Sears? Working as an entrepreneurial housecleaner for somebody else? I hope y'all address the class issue and its evanescence in "third wave" feminism, which seems, in dropping issues like housework pay, universal child care, and all references to medical issues outside of abortion, to have oriented itself entirely to those issues which resonate with its upper class members.
--Roger
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