LETTER TO THE EDITORS

Spring 1999
Volume 25, Number 3

Sitting on the sidelines of academia, worried about feminism but relieved to be out of earshot of the cannons, I find myself, in my fictional persona, quoted by Robyn Wiegman in connection with--and, I fear, against--my friend Susan Gubar's article "What Ails Feminist Criticism?". Thus, I insert myself--the oldest living female English professor, however emerita--into this sad exchange. I have a certain amount to say but shall not repeat Professor Gubar's arguments, essential as they are. My points are but addenda to or variations upon hers.

The exchange is sad because Professor Wiegman's answer to Professor Gubar is another battle in the war of generations that along with so much else in our culture, is injuring feminism itself, while adding to the unfortunate spin put on feminism by the media and in academia.

My initial astonishment at finding my story quoted in Critical Inquiry soon dwindled to dismay as I understood that the rudeness offered to my character, Beatrice Sterling, was not far from the tone Professor Wiegman chose as appropriate for addressing Professor Gubar, who had fought early feminist academic battles when Professor Wiegman was at her mother's knee. As Elaine Showalter, quoted in Professor Gubar's response, has remarked, there is little point in writing as a feminist any more, since one grows weary of hostile reactions produced by people who then turn around to ask for a letter of recommendation.

Nor have I mentioned Professor Wiegman's mother lightly, since I wish to speak of mothers, both those remaining from the daughter's infant years and those "mothers" who taught and labored on behalf of feminism in English departments and now garner the inevitable anger daughters reserve for their female parent. It is no accident, as any feminist literary scholar can testify, that through the centuries the female protagonists of women's novels have no mothers, or (rarely) mothers inadequate to their roles.

No woman academic over fifty, at least in English departments, has avoided the struggle of being perceived, despite all efforts to avoid this unhappy fate, as a surrogate for the mother. And what woman loves her mother, provided she has survived beyond her daughter's puberty? (Of course, if she dies when the daughter is young, books will testify to her irremediable loss, to the tragedy she has inflicted on her abandoned child. Let her live, however, and. . . .) But here is Marianne Hirsch, describing a group of fellows at the Bunting Institute who were youngish mothers, meeting to discuss their experiences of the maternal.

A painful set of divisions . . . emerged between the discourse of mothers and that of daughters, opposing voices we each in various ways contained and could not combine. We found . . . that when we spoke as mothers, the group's members were respectful, awed, helpful in the difficulties of formulating maternal experiences. When we spoke as daughters about our own mothers, however, the tone and affect changed and we all giggled knowingly, reverting back to old stereotyped patterns of discussing a shared problem--our "impossible mothers." The sympathy we could muster for ourselves and each other as mothers, we could not quite transfer to our own mothers. Although as mothers we were eager to tell our stories, as daughters we could not fully listen to our mothers' stories. This inability, this tragic asymmetry between our own two voices, was so pervasive as to be extremely difficult to discuss. It revealed the depth and the extent of the "matrophobia" that exists not only in the culture at large, but also within feminism. . . . For me this was the most poignant discovery of the group, and increased my own determination to concentrate . . . on the perspectives of mothers and on the difficulties feminists have in sympathizing with those perspectives.1

In my experience, hardly wide but eclectic, only the Italian feminists have avoided this generational assault, which in the U.S. becomes an attack upon the admittedly white, middle-class, often Jewish women who first breached the male academic hierarchy. The reasons for such admirable Italian restraint are not far to seek. In Italy, feminism is not an academic undertaking. Although there are a few women faculty in Italian universities, the influential feminist movement in Italy has had its being almost entirely outside of the academic sphere. Thus, free from the additional tensions of professional hierarchy, Italian feminists find themselves able to confront within feminism the problem of mothers and to urge that the struggle between generations be faced and diminished.

Generally we do not admit of difference and disparity in our groups, in the name of an egalitarianism inherited from the youth movement. But this refusal is also and perhaps fundamentally a reaction to the obliteration of the mother in our society. The relationship between mother and daughter has no form in patriarchal society; it is therefore conflictual and mother and daughters are both the losers. We have come to understand that we can engage with disparities between women in our political practice and that this is precious.2

The price which every woman has to pay for her own freedom has to be paid not to society but to other women, first of all the mother. The price of female freedom is the 'payment of the symbolic debt' towards the mother: to put it another way, the recognition of the relationship between women.3 It is little wonder that in our country and in academia the one disparity never commented on is that between age and youth, between generations. After we "mothers" have all--and we all have, pace Professor Wiegman--recognized the existence and the needs of cultures, races, and classes different from our own, still we are found guilty of dreadful political sins. Can no one suggest that the differences between generations deserve consideration along with the differences between races, classes, national experience, and sexual orientation? Might not the complexities of the older generation's points of view be granted analysis?

Because the Italian feminists have not had to face women in authority in academia, have not had to mollify men (fathers?) in authority, they can recommend community between generations of women. They do not, furthermore, forget that they are fighting for a new place for women in a culture hitherto male-centered, and that that male culture, and some men, are what they must struggle against.

Here in academia, the younger female generations fight the pioneers of feminism, while the men in power (and in most universities, trust me, they are still in power) watch us destroy each other, saving themselves the unseemliness of that effort. Of course we feminists must argue with one another, must debate all issues, but is not deliberation possible as dialogue rather than disdain?

And so the young women denounce older women, following an unhappy pattern formed at the very beginning of this women's movement. Any woman who dared to speak out or to gain any attention from the public was attacked; no one could speak for the women's movement without being shouted down. Ti-Grace Atkinson was said to have declared: "Sisterhood is powerful; it kills sisters";4 today that "power" is used generationally. Trashing as a policy was eventually abandoned, but the poison remained. Today those who early on built academic feminism are accused of treachery by those for whom they built it.

Yes, Professor Wiegman and peers, we were limited in the beginning. We said "we" in the wrong way; but it was we who first admitted our mistake; in her original article Professor Gubar quotes Nancy K. Miller to this effect; Professor Gubar herself hardly deserves censure on the question of inclusiveness or outreach. Do none of us deserve recognition for our ability to change?

Am I manifesting deplorable self-pity? If so, it is not for myself but for all feminist women of my generation and the generations just after mine, and particularly for those gallant individuals who, at great personal and professional cost, undertook tenure fights to win places in academia for other feminists and for women who were not feminist. They are largely forgotten, their names erased like so much of women's history.

Perhaps the rewards were large for some of us early white women; perhaps we have accrued more attention than the younger generation finds bearable. But I doubt that the spectacle of the likes of Professor Gubar being blitzed in Critical Inquiry does anyone much good.

One other prissy point: Professor Gubar's title clearly indicates that she is writing about "feminist criticism," that is, literary criticism in English departments. She is not writing about women's studies, its scope or its current problems. But I'll stop. I'm beginning to sound like one of Marianne Hirsch's despised mothers, and who is listening?

Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Columbia University

Please submit your letters to <jww4@midway.uchicago.edu> or Critical Inquiry, 202 Wieboldt Hall, 1050 E. 59th St., University of Chicago, Chicago IL 60637. Space limitations may prevent us from publishing all contributions. Letters may be edited for length and style.

1. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), pp. 26-27.

2. Libreria delle Donne di Milano, "More Women than Men" (1983), trans. Rosalind Delmar, in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford, 1991), p. 121

3. Ida Dominijanni, "Radicality and Asceticism" (1987), trans. Sharon Wood, in Italian Feminist Thought, p. 137.

4 Quoted in Jo Freeman, "On the Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement from a Strictly Personal Perspective," in Live, from Feminism: Memoirs of Women's Liberation, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New York, 1998), p. 173.