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Highlights from this issue...
Welcome to my world...
Anthrax attacks, real and faked, fill the news headlines. Suddenly
"we" are told to fear mayhem, in the mail, in the sky or anywhere in
between. But women have been living with terror since long before September
11th and its aftermath--and the women and men who staff and use abortion
clinics have an especially close acquaintance with it. We invited Merle
Hoffman of Choices Women’s Medical Center in Queens, and journalists
Laura Flanders and Ruth Rosen, both regular contributors to the Women’s
Review, to add another dimension to today’s news.
Merle Hoffman is the founder and president of Choices Women's Medical
Center in Queens, New York. The clinic is licensed as an ambulatory
surgery center, a diagnostic and treatment center, and a mental health
center that specializes in rape, incest and domestic violence. The
Women's Review asked her to talk about her work, and to reflect on
the history of violence against abortion clinics and providers.
MH: I founded Choices in 1971, as an outpatient abortion center,
while I was a graduate student in social psychology. Abortion was legalized
in New York and five other states prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision
that legalized the right to an abortion nationally: New York repealed
its criminal abortion laws in 1970.
Slowly but surely, it became my life's work. From seeing perhaps three patients a week in a basement space, Choices became the largest single-site women's medical-feminist medical-center in the country. We see approximately 50,000 patients a year; about 15,000 are abortion patients and the rest come for gynecology, family planning, prenatal care, primary care and psychological services. We also do vasectomies.
WR: How many of those do you do?
Not enough! Women come in for sterilizations a lot more than men come in for vasectomies. But I'm working on it.
So abortion is just one of a range of services you provide.
Absolutely. I see abortion as an integral, primary part of women's health care.
How soon after you started the clinic did you start getting harassed?
When I started the clinic in '71, it was the golden age: suddenly abortion was legal! Before then it was a political, moral, psychological, theoretical, theological issue--and all of a sudden women were lining up around the block for abortion services. That was a radical, radical change, a major reversal of reality. I think what I fell in love with was that pioneering aspect: we had gone where no women had gone before. Feminists were working in abortion clinics; it was a very exciting, romantic thing to do, almost a sacred duty. Pro-choice consciousness and abortion as a service was still connected to feminism. Later there was a bifurcation of the political and service arms of the movement, but in the beginning that wasn't the case. The political activists, the theoreticians, the writers, the service providers were all working together.
It started to get different in 1976, when Henry Hyde cut off Medicaid funding for indigent women. Most of the patients that I saw at Choices were poor women, and a lot were on Medicaid. Henry Hyde actually said, "If we can't save all the children, we'll just save the children of the poor." But saving the children of the poor meant destroying the mothers of those children. That realization politicized me, and started me on a lifetime of activist work.
Around that same time or soon after, picketers started to show up in front of the clinics, and anti-choice activism started to increase generally. In the beginning the pro-choice people minimized it. That was a major error, strategically, of the movement as I've seen it. The opposition was laughed at, everyone said "Of course abortion will never be made illegal"--and then Bill Baird's center on Long Island was firebombed in 1979, and that's when things started to get hot. Then in 1981 the Hatch Amendment was introduced, to make the fetus a constitutional person at the moment of conception. There were all sorts of other creative legislative attempts to stop abortion.
What was it like to live through this escalation?
It was very different in the beginning, because the battle was fully joined by the pro-choice forces. I remember in 1985 leading rallies and marches, when people were very excited to get out there and face the opposition. There were pro-choice marches and rallies and the March for Women's Lives on Washington in 1989. That year I also organized the first pro-choice civil disobedience demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Those were heady political times. Pro-choice activists went to jail! That seemed like a watershed in the movement.
But after '89 it started to become more violent. The first murders were in '93, and it got worse from there. There were bombings--not only bomb threats--and butyric acid attacks on clinics. One physician was kidnapped. All kinds of horror, harassment and violence--the atmosphere became much more dangerous. Then came the invasion of the clinics by Operation Rescue.
Was your clinic invaded?
Mine was not invaded, because it's in Queens which, from the point of view of media coverage, is geographically undesirable. They picked places in Manhattan where the media would be more likely to show up. Not that I wasn't picketed, but massive invasion, no. I remember when the police sent buses down to Planned Parenthood to take the Operation Rescue people away and arrest them. OR actually had their kids there, six or seven years old, and they told them to go and lie down in front of the wheels of the buses, because they knew the buses wouldn't move. They chained themselves to the clinic doors; they even had two or three people chained around the neck with a kind of a concrete collar that it took the cops about six hours to break through. Or they would just sit in the waiting room and harass the patients. Those were very wild and tense, exciting, challenging times.
When the murders started, it changed. There were always those among us who felt that it could happen--I was one of them, but a lot of people thought something like that was impossible. I suppose it's easier to be in a state of denial. But they did it! Paul Hill did it. John Salvi did it. That totally changed the tenor.
How does all this affect your own life?
I think of myself as a warrior and at the same time a healer. I've lived in a parallel universe as long as I've been involved in this work. I've been living in what I call a state of existential dread for all this time, because there's nothing like the threat of an unexpected, violent death to focus your mind. Since the first murder, or even since the bombings in '77, that's always been possible. And I've known it's possible. When Salvi went into the Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, he shot two clinic workers, women who just happened to be there on that day, who just happened to be at the front desk. The fact that I am doing something, and that my staff is doing something, that could cost us our lives has been part of my life as long as I can remember.
No one, no one, can understand this unless they live it. It's interesting that since September 11 I feel less dissociated, less alienated, as if the whole collective reality and collective consciousness is my internal and political reality writ large. Now people understand what it is to be in a state of existential terror, people are talking about reality, meaning, purpose, politics as Realpolitik in a way that only the people in my immediate world seemed to talk about before. "Welcome to my world." I mean, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was teaching us how to open suspicious letters twelve years ago. It was just another day. When I go to my car I look underneath, to see if anybody's planted something. After they murdered Barnett Slepian in Buffalo in 1998, I stayed away from my windows for quite a while. That hypervigilance, the awareness that I could go at any moment, has been with me for a long time.
Now, I feel this sense of psychological freedom, I feel more myself than I have in many years, because the theatre of my life has expanded.
Do you think that now, as people are so conscious of what terrorists can do, they may become less tolerant of anti-abortion terrorism?
Hopefully, yes. This country notoriously has a very short attention span, but there can be a situational empathic response. There's a favorite line of mine from Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I love your enemies because they drive you into my arms for comfort." I feel as if the enemy has driven people into each other's arms in a sense, into their hearts, into their minds, so that people can connect to each other on a much more profound level than they've ever done before. I've had people who've known me for twenty years say "My God, you've lived with this, all this time." That's right.
Do I expect that to translate into more support on the pro-choice side? I hope that it will. Historically, there has been a disconnect between the theory and practice of feminism: at some point the pro-choice movement got split off from the feminist movement just as abortion services were split off from the institutional practice of medicine. I would like to see the academics, the journalists, the theoretical feminists come to Choices. I've always had an open invitation to them to come and spend time here, to see the reality that they're fighting for. As far as the anti-choice people are concerned--well, Andrea Peyser wrote a piece about me recently in the
New York Post, and she got letters from anti-abortion people saying
"How dare you compare anybody who provides abortions with victims of terror
on September 11th? You're comparing murderers with victims." The anti-abortionists
have a fundamental understanding of reality that will never be changed
by either reason, intelligence, or another reality. That's not going to
disappear.
Is that a parallel between the World Trade Center terrorists and anti-abortion terrorists, that intransigence?
Yes--and another is the justification that what they're doing is God's work and that they're killing the infidels. I think there has to be a realization on the pro-choice side, or the anti-terrorist side, that there are some people you cannot reason with. When I debated Nellie Gray, an anti-abortion leader who's the leader of the March for Life that takes place every year, I said "Why can't we talk about birth control? Why can't we come to some common ground in areas that don't have to do with abortion?"--"When you put the bloody knives down, then we'll talk," she said. I've debated every leader of the anti-choice movement, but after a while I stopped debating, because it's like being told "We'll have five minutes from an SS guard and then five minutes from a concentration camp victim." There's no parallel, there's no bridge. Those people believe that I am a Hitler, that abortion providers are creating a second Holocaust, and that therefore they have a right to override the law and kill us. That's what Mohammed Atta believed. We were infidels to them and we're infidels to the anti-choice movement.
So I don't have a very optimistic view. The lesson is that there are different
visions of reality and that reason, or thinking that you can change hearts and
minds, doesn't always work. That sometimes, unfortunately, you need stronger
violence to eliminate violence. That mankind, womankind, humankind is not ultimately
perfectible, and we have to live with the realities of our limitations.
Read the two associated articles by Laura Flanders and Ruth Rosen
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A legend and her legacy
Sarah Winnemucca by Sally Zanjani. Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 2001, 366 pp.. $29.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Siobhan Senier
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Sarah Winnemucca |
SARAH WINNEMUCCA was one of the most visible and complicated Native American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Educated among Euro-Americans as well as within her Paiute community in Nevada, Winnemucca played the stereotypical Indian princess to achieve political ends. She worked as an army scout and interpreter during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, alienating many Native Americans. At the same time, she incurred the wrath of powerful US government officials for her vocal and persistent attacks on the reservation system. By the 1880s, Winnemucca was lecturing on the east coast, spectacular in a fringed dress, leggings and tiara. In 1883, she published Life among the Piutes, often referred to as the first autobiography written by an American Indian woman. Before her death in 1891, she returned to Nevada to open an Indian school.
She is also one of the most written-about Indian personalities. In her own day, newspapers across the country covered Winnemucca relentlessly and often brutally. History has treated her more kindly, making her the fond subject of children's books, Nevada state promotional literature and ever more biographies. Gae Whitney Canfield's 1983 Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes remains the best, a scrupulously researched account that supplies much information Winnemucca chose to leave out of her own autobiography, such as the names and backgrounds of her husbands--at least three--and her youthful performances as Pocahontas with her family in Virginia City and San Francisco.
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Wearing a buckskin dress, red leggings and moccasins, Sarah electrified audiences at her lectures. From Sarah Winnemucca. |
Readers could use a reconstruction of Winnemucca's life that would attend to the previous competing versions--her own, her contemporary detractors' and later admirers'--as strategic representations. Sally Zanjani's Sarah Winnemucca partly fits the bill. Zanjani reevaluates Winnemucca not as an unwitting tool of Euro-American people and institutions but as someone invested in tribal culture and survival. As she astutely puts it, "Sarah has been called an assimilationist, and to the extent that she did not advocate resistance in the mountains until the last man fell, this was true. It does not, however, convey the nuances of her position.... [S]he meant only selective adoption of some of taibo's [white people's] innovations. Never did she favor the eradication of the Paiute culture she so profoundly valued."
This latest biography appears in the University of Nebraska Press' prestigious "American Indian Lives" series, which has broken new ground by promoting both some of the best Native-authored autobiographies and the most sophisticated scholarship on the genre. Yet unlike other books in the series, this one doesn't significantly extend Indian nationalist models for thinking about historical figures like Sarah Winnemucca. Nor does it offer a cross-cultural feminist take; consider, for example, the unexplained decision to refer to its subject as "Sarah." Zanjani adheres closely to the structure of Winnemucca's own Life Among the Piutes, the document she cites most.
There is new information here. An experienced Nevada historian, Zanjani uses her formidable familiarity with nineteenth-century state newspapers to fill in the local context for her remarkable subject's actions. For instance, she finds fascinating--and troubling--accounts of conflicts between Chinese immigrans and Paiutes over liquor sales by the former group to the latter. But this new information is mainly subordinated to the task of re-telling Winnemucca's life story.
WINNEMUCCA’S GRANDFATHER and father were known as "chiefs," even though, Zanjani notes, the Paiutes, like a number of other indigenous peoples, didn't traditionally organize themselves under hierarchical and centralized models of leadership. The title of chief partly came from colonial practice, in which white officials sought a single person with whom to negotiate; partly, perhaps, from the men themselves and their communities (though to this day some Paiutes dispute the Winnemuccas' claim to the position); and partly from Sarah Winnemucca's own calculated portrayal of herself as "the chieftain's weary daughter."
Her father, known as Old Winnemucca, spent much of his life resisting white encroachment, fleeing reservations into the mountains where he and other Paiutes could continue practicing traditional ways. Her grandfather, on the other hand, won fame as an Indian who welcomed white settlers. Called Captain Truckee, he fought, in a painful irony, with General Fremont in the war to seize Mexico. Winnemucca's mother and other Paiute women continually challenged Truckee's decision to move their families to live and work among whites, where their daughters were under constant threat of sexual assault.
Winnemucca fended off rape herself with a knife; rode on horseback against time to stop hostilities between whites and Indians; sneaked into an enemy camp to rescue her family; traveled to Washington to speak with President Hayes and his Secretary of the Interior about the forced removal of her people to the Yakama reservation, 350 miles north of their traditional homelands. As Zanjani aptly describes it, the Winnemuccas tried everything--visits to powerful officials, legal action, diplomatic maneuvering, theatrical performance, threat of violence and media spin. "It is difficult to conceive," she concludes, "what methods the Winnemuccas might have used to more effectively influence events."
Sarah Winnemucca is as fast-paced as the life it describes. The problem with simply retelling this story is that it's not easy to do. Winnemucca's autobiography was solicited by white women reformers in Boston. How heavily it was edited is not actually known, although most scholars (including Zanjani) take editor Mary Mann at her word when she says her corrections were modest. But Life Among the Piutes reveals a constant tension between non-Native readers' expectations and Paiute values. Winnemucca writes, for instance, that "If women could go into your Congress I think justice would soon be done to the Indians," closely echoing the words of Mann's sister Elizabeth Peabody: "Woman's wit is needed in administration."
As Zanjani correctly observes, such moments show Winnemucca was wise to her Boston readers' brand of feminism. But it is not fair to say those moments may have been "fanciful," nor that marrying an Indian, as Winnemucca appears to have done only once, "would have meant reversion to the role of a traditional Indian wife primarily occupied with gathering food for her family instead of pursuing the path of her own strong ambition." Quite the contrary: Winnemucca's life story makes a powerful case for the claim that traditional Paiute culture gave women positions of respect; it was contact with a violent frontier patriarchy that altered those positions, and her public speaking and advocacy could have been a means for continuing traditional female forms of power.
Such analysis is somewhat buried in Zanjani's descriptions of what she unfortunately calls Winnemucca's "unfortunate weaknesses"--drinking, gambling, multiple marriages and affairs with Indian and non-Indian men, and bar fights. True or not, these stories were constructed by people like one of the reservation agents Winnemucca criticized, who, "had grown obsessive on the subject of Indian sexuality and saw licentiousness wherever he looked." But in Zanjani's mission to retell the whole story, she misses some valuable opportunities to address the pervasive and prolonged sexist misrepresentations of Winnemucca.
WINNEMUCCA’S REPRESENTATIONS of Paiute culture are so multilayered that any retelling requires much more critical depth. Zanjani laconically quotes Truckee stroking a gun and saying "goodee gun, heap shoot," making him look childlike and primitive. In truth, the image may have had the same effect in Winnemucca's autobiography, where the quote first appears. But Truckee's behavior must have been driven by Paiute value systems and practices. Zanjani does find that regional newspapers promoted Paiute people as industrious employees and suggests Truckee may have been self-consciously exploiting such portrayals. Yet historians still need to explore how other Paiute beliefs--cosmologies emphasizing human mutuality, for example--affected Truckee's and other Paiutes' behavior.
The most original parts of Sarah Winnemucca are its final chapters, in which Zanjani emphasizes how Winnemucca's actions were geared toward Paiute self-determination. She rightly points out that Winnemucca raised questions about the 1887 Dawes Act, a devastating piece of legislation that divided communally held Indian lands into 160-acre parcels with the express intent of abridging Native sovereignty. In a letter to Senator Dawes, Winnemucca proposed that Indian leaders, not white officials, be allowed to choose the land. Most importantly, in her Paiute school, Winnemucca conducted classes bilingually and, Zanjani writes, made "no effort to separate the children from their families and erase their identity as Indians."
Here some of Zanjani's most fascinating and original research comes into play: she has interviewed Paiute elders, including one who remembers her family's experiences at the Lovelock school. Paraphrasing this woman's speech, Zanjani reports that Winnemucca "taught [her students] English, naming each thing in Paiute and English. When she said 'up,' the boys jumped up gleefully to show they understood by lifting the roof of the brush shelter, and Sarah laughed as merrily as they did. At the word 'down,' they flattened themselves on the ground."
Zanjani also spoke with Alexandra Voorhees, a Paiute woman who now performs as Winnemucca at chatauquas and in other venues. Voorhees calls modern Paiutes "divided in their devotions" toward Winnemucca. Reporting her conversations, Zanjani wries that "At least one man has publicly charged [Winnemucca] with prostitution (not, says Voorhees, 'a Paiute argument')." In beginning to conduct this kind of oral history, she paves the way for a new interpretation of Sarah Winnemucca--one informed by the ways she is understood by Paiute people themselves.
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Arnold Genthe's famous photograph taken in |
Reviewed by Nancy Gray
THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY I remember feeling I couldn't put down was Nancy Milford's Zelda. The first poems I remember being bowled over by were Edna St. Vincent Millay's. What a treat then, I thought, to have in my hands a new biography of Millay by Milford. It had been a long time since I'd read either writer, but having once done so I still trusted both women. Each had left me with a sense that I had learned something about living that I might just need to know. So it was in happy anticipation of renewing my acquaintance with them that I picked up Savage Beauty and began to read.
I was hooked from the first paragraph of the Prologue. Milford's own fascination with her subject, what she calls the biographer's tendency "to be charmed, beguiled even, by the past," comes through almost palpably onto the page. It may be Millay herself who does most of the beguiling, but it is Milford who charms her back into life, and us into giving ourselves over to the reading of that life. For it is not just Milford's considerable talents as a researcher that make this biography so good, but her ability to inhabit the text as storyteller that turns it into something fascinating. She is helped in this endeavor by the presence of a remarkable third party, Millay's younger sister Norma. Milford knew that Norma was both the key and the principal obstacle to "any serious work" about Millay; but by the end of their first meeting she also knew that an alliance, however uneasy, had been formed between them.
Norma was Edna's only heir, she controlled her estate, and she thought she might write what she called The Biography. But as we sat there eating and drinking and talking, it became more and more clear to me that I was going to write the biography of Edna Millay, that I would write it with her sister's help and permission, and that I would resist her influence as best I could. (p. xi)
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Eugen and Edna in Maine. |
A hunch drove Milford to Edna's, now Norma's, New York farm Steepletop in 1972. There she had hoped to find the papers, photos, letters and notebooks she suspected Norma had kept since Millay's death in 1950. And there she found them--"thousands of pieces of paper"--along
with a slyly generous custodian who "intended to read each piece of paper before I did and to hand it to me. In order, she said, to tell me what it meant. Or might mean."
It is the relationship between biographer and custodian, almost as much as the life of the poet, that gives the story its shape. Images such as the one Milford offers of herself and Norma "crouched over a letter" call up a picture of two women in collaboration, as if conjuring a third. Milford keeps Norma in the loop by periodically pausing as if for an aside, always at a moment in the relating of events that she intuits mean more than the evidence, or Norma, may at first suggest. In studying a scrap of Cora Buzzell Millay's memoir, for instance, in which she encourages her daughter Edna to submit the poem "Renascence" to a magazine contest, Milford notes that Cora neglects to mention that she herself had submitted poems to the same contest. That's all she says about it, at least directly. Following a break on the page a bit of present-day dialogue appears, unannounced, and suddenly we are privy to nuances of relationship far more complex than mere biographical reflection could provide:
"If I'd thought that would occur to you, I wouldn't have told you!...."
"You didn't tell me," I said carefully.
"Of course they were not competitors. Mother would never have competed against Vincent. She was competing. As Vincent was." Norma paused, her head bent down, and then, softly, watching me closely through her filmy glasses, "She was competing with Vincent. Was she not?" (p. 63)
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Edna after her wedding to |
I began to look forward to Norma's comments. Milford uses them skillfully to draw one into the intangible, speculative aspects that make a life so much more than the sum of its parts. In the process she gives her own permission to Norma to keep a hand in the writing of "The Biography," while inviting the reader to work with them both in deciding what the pieces of evidence mean, "or might mean."
BUT SAVAGE BEAUTY is not Norma's story, or Milford's--it is Vincent's. By all accounts one of Millay's most striking features was her voice ("a deep contralto voice, you know"). Nearly everyone who met or heard her commented on it. Milford cleverly chooses to let Millay speak for herself as often as possible. "I can always hold them when I speak, I find," Millay once said, With the help of those thousands of pieces of paper Milford found at Steepletop she lets us "hear" Millay in all her moods and throughout her life as recorded in letters, diaries, notebooks and of course the poems. Undoubtedly the combination of Millay's deep, seductive, adult voice and a physical appearance that regularly evoked the image of a fragile "elf-child," got people's attention. But it was a personality variously praised and condemned as "bewitching," kinetic, daring and determined that caught and held them. As Milford interweaves her own words with those of Millay and her friends, family, publishers and smitten devotees, what emerges is a vivid sense of Millay's talent, charisma and commitment to living her life only and completely as she saw fit.
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Eugen and Edna rent a tiny house at 75-1/2 |
By the time Millay was fourteen she was winning prizes for her submissions to the children's magazine St. Nicholas. By 1908, when she was sixteen, she had collected 61 poems into a copybook she called Poetical Works. Milford notes that in this collection she was, on her own, "serving her apprenticeship."
Milford allows the reader first-hand access to Millay's talent and development by including a great many poems, in both finished form and draft. It's one of the real pleasures of this book. Coming upon "Renascence" at the end of the first chapter, I was reminded of how it had once made so much seem possible--that someone so young could write about life and death as if she knew them well, and especially that that someone could be a girl. Of course I was only the latest in a long line of readers who wanted something new to believe about the possibilities and talents of women. By the time Millay published those famous quatrains that seemed weightless and yet somehow heavy with knowledge (candles burning at both ends and such), she had given New Women of the Jazz Age what Milford calls "their rallying cry"--"in these... verses there were no repentant women." Louis Untermeyer referred to the poet's voice as "the sound of the ax on fresh wood." Millay herself commented in an early letter that "I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I see."
WHO KNEW SUCH A VOICE would emerge from poverty and isolation in rural Maine? Vincent, for one; her mother Cora for another; and of course Norma. (Even the youngest, Kathleen, admitted it, though her sister's celebrity would never cease to rankle.) Among the constant anxieties about money in the letters that flew back and forth among the Millay women were admonitions to write, to publish, to let no one stand in the way. Vincent was considered the family genius, the one whose potential was most likely to be realized. Despite the demands of her caretaking duties as the eldest child of a single mother who had to work away from home for long periods of time, the budding "girl poet" took her potential seriously. Along the way she also learned to use others' interest in her to ensure that she had what she needed to succeed. Through Norma's job as a waitress in a Camden summer resort, Vincent gained one of her first champions outside the family. Caroline Dow, after hearing Vincent sing and read her poetry at a hotel party, made it her business to get her into Vassar. Connections made at Vassar (volatile thought the relation between student and school was) gave her access to the manners and homes of the rich and, more importantly, to New York City.
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Edna on the stoop at Steepletop, |
There, in the twentieth century's first decade, Millay found a sense of kinship with the writers, artists and activists of bohemian Greenwich Village. She wrote and performed her own plays with the Provincetown Players. She met Max Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell and others connected with the radical magazine The Masses. She took the first of her male lovers--Dell, a devout aficionado of Freud, who told her, "You pretend that you have had many love affairs--but the truth, my dear, is that you are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls at college." There, too, she and Norma "sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity" until they could use this new "freedom of language" without shocking themselves.
It was also in New York that Millay honed her skill as a poet-performer. By the time she was touring the country as the first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, she routinely held audiences spellbound, whether on the radio ("the very sound of your voice transforms our country living room into a place of magic"), or in person ("She said every poem she'd chosen... & then the house came down. Cheers. People stood up. Some cried"). Eventually she found that her reputation preceded her and threatened to eclipse her work: "I hope I shall never write a poem again that more than five people will like," she wrote to her husband Eugen during a 1924 reading tour.
But from start to finish it was poetry that commanded her greatest loyalty and passion. She composed whole poems in her head wherever she was and whatever she was doing. Edmund Wilson, who never quite recovered from loving her, came to believe that aside from her mother and sisters, people mattered to Millay primarily as subjects for her poems. The poems do at times seem to support his view: "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! / Faithless am I save to love's self alone. / Were you not lovely I would leave you now: / After the feet of beauty fly my own." But then, what writer of notoriety has not been read for autobiographical clues?
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Edna and Eugen at their bar by the pool at |
Millay was not as indifferent as some would have it, however. A remarkable number of former lovers remained in her life long after initial disappointments. She and her husband Eugen Boissevain were together 26 years. And there was George Dillon, a fellow poet whose long presence in their lives Eugen accommodated not only because he believed in open marriage, but also because he knew it was the best way to keep Vincent. By all accounts, Eugen was a remarkable man. He was devoted to Millay (though Milford also suggests he was controlling enough to make access to her difficult), taking care of her during illnesses and addictions, providing a seemingly endless vitality she sometimes could not manage for herself.
One of the most disturbing bits of information Milford provides about this relationship is that when Millay had become addicted to morphine after an automobile accident, Eugen also took the drug to the point of addiction, "so that he would know what it was like for her... so that he would know what she went through trying to stop it." Millay missed Eugen intensely after he died of lung cancer in 1949, but she seems to have been planning a future for herself as a poet right up to her own death a year later, at 58, after a fall down the stairs at Steepletop.
Milford is a biographer who prefers to ask questions of the evidence rather than to draw too many of her own conclusions from it. It's a technique that's satisfying in its invitation to the reader to stay involved. Yet it can create odd contextual gaps. We learn little, for instance, about the effects of World War One except that Millay supported the editors of The Masses during their 1918 trial for "treasonous" publishing. We learn more about her protests against the Sacco and Vanzetti trial; but the Great Depression is notable primarily because her books sold so well in such lean times. And there is a curious silence about Pearl Harbor, though Milford says a good deal about Millay's vociferous anti-isolationist stance in regard to US participation in World War Two.
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Edna ("Vincent") and Normas. |
Milford's scrupulous attention to Millay's own interests as nearly her only source (there was, after all, an abundance of personal papers from which to draw) means that any social and political history or literary criticism that might come into play is tied very closely indeed to the biographical record. And in the end what we get is a richly complex picture of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a sense of coming to know her almost from the inside out. It's an absorbing tale, told with a researcher's attention to detail and a storyteller's sensibility--a rare enough combination to make Savage Beauty a very good read. And who knows? Maybe Norma will be next. ("People used to say that I did what Vincent Millay wrote about.... How are you going to handle that?")
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The imperial stronghold of Trifels, |
Unsentimental journey
Travels with a Medieval Queen by Mary Taylor Simeti. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, 306 pp., $25.00 hardcover.
Reviewed by Madonna Hettinger
PART HISTORY, PART TRAVELOGUE, Mary Taylor Simeti's book retraces the journey of a twelfth-century queen from her husband's center of power in Germany to her own birthplace and much-disputed royal inheritance in Sicily. Constance of Hauteville, empress of the Holy Roman Empire by virtue of her marriage to Henry VI of the Hohenstaufen line, traveled from the fortress of Trifels in the Black Forest to her childhood home of Palermo over a matter of about twelve months in 1194, her journey slowed by the discovery en route that she was pregnant (after nearly ten years of a barren marriage) with the heir to her husband's imperial throne and her father's Sicilian kingdom.
Equipped with guidebooks, some solid historical background, a good friend and an eager imagination, Simeti made the same trip by car in a matter of weeks, her journey too often rushed by the mundane concerns of modern-day travel. For Simeti, an American who has lived in Sicily for nearly forty years, both journeys represent an occasion to contemplate what it is to live in two cultures. For the reader, both journeys also raise familiar questions about gendered expectations and the assumptions we project onto women in history.
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The noblemen of Salerno and their wives |
Simeti has taken on an admirable challenge. It is never easy to reconstruct the lives, concerns and ambitions of medieval people. For medieval women, even those of royal rank, it is especially hard. For Constance, the historical sources are elusive, veiled and almost all written from the perspective of a medieval court chronicler. She most often appears in the written and pictorial sources as a shadow in the background or as an emblem of imperial or dynastic ambition and accomplishment.
Daughter of Roger II, one of the Norman kings of Sicily, half-sister of William I of Sicily, beloved aunt of his son William II, cousin of a usurper named Tancredi, daughter-in-law of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, wife of Henry VI of Germany and mother of the brilliant but strange Frederick II, Constance, like most medieval women, is usually defined in terms of her relationships with men. To some extent Simeti turns the tables and tries instead to emphasize the queen's relationships with women, some famous, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Johanna, and some fictional. These relationships are even more absent from the historical record, but they are ripe for creative speculation.
Simeti puts Constance at the center of this story of kings and kingdoms, letting imagination take over when the sources are silent. Rather than using the traditional devices of historical fiction, she cleverly interweaves the documented history with her own observations on the visible remnants of the landscape Constance saw on her twelfth-century journey and with imaginative musings on the queen's state of mind. At points in the story, Simeti invents characters to comfort and advise her "lonely" Constance: an Arab handmaid from the cosmopolitan Palermo of her youth and a learned midwife from the rich medical community of Salerno. This approach is creative and full of promise. It offers greater license than more traditional modes of historical fiction and gives the reader a closer feel for the physical world through which medieval characters moved. In some respects Simeti fulfills that potential: in others, she seems to shy away from its fruition.
READERS INTERESTED IN THE BASIC chronology of the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire's designs on Italy should have no quarrel with Simeti's technique or her research. Although Simeti confesses that she is an amateur historian, she does a credible job of constructing the complicated web of marriages, wars and palace plots that sent Constance off as the bride of an emperor-to-be and brought her home again as the mother of another emperor-to-be. She creates a rich background for a story that, because of the lack of written sources, will always be sketchy. At times she goes further than this basic reconstruction of facts and attempts to summarize, without fully engaging, the historical debate on such questions as the influence of queen consorts on their royal husbands and the emotional attachment between medieval parents and their children. Such complex issues are not easily summarized even by professional historians, and here Simeti might have consulted more sources. Still, the reader can benefit from the questions she raises.
Those reading either for deeper historical "truths" or for a good story will appreciate Simeti's desire to fill the documentary void with imagined scenes. In fact, a number of professional historians have begun to allow themselves--always with clear warnings to the reader--to insert creative vignettes in their works. At their best, these imagined interludes can raise questions, challenge our assumptions and make vivid the social and material circumstances of historical actors. Simeti's imagined scenes featuring Constance with her handmaid and midwife do not err by straying too far from historical fact, but they do sometimes seem a bit too tentative. Just as the reader is ready to see the invented characters more fully developed and listen in on an instructive dialogue between the queen and her servants, Simeti retreats, hinting at where her imagination might take her rather than actually following it. Similarly, rather than challenging assumptions about medieval women's concerns, limitations and powers to take command of their own lives, Simeti too easily equates Constance's options and sensibilities with her own.
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It was most probably here, in San Nicola, that
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Simeti clearly feels a kinship with her subject. Like Constance, she left her native land, language and culture when she married. She interprets Constance's life through lenses that reflect on her own experience. The first is the lens of cultural difference. Here Simeti's rich descriptive prose serves her purpose very well. She is adept at bringing the color and texture of Constance's two worlds to life: the fabrics of royal costume, tents and baby clothes seem almost touchable. This facility for description is also beautifully employed when Simeti slows her own journey long enough to paint a verbal portrait of the twelfth-century churches, walled towns and lush orchards along the route she shares with Constance. The inanimate takes on life when she describes a "double row of delicate marble columns whose pale gray stone is veined with pink, as if the bricks had bled their color in the rain."
The second lens focuses on the transformative experience of motherhood. Constance was considerably older than her rather cold husband, Henry VI, when they married in 1185. When the marriage had produced no children by 1194, Constance was believed to be sterile. After she conceived, at the age of forty, she carried a special burden of proving to the world that her child, destined to wear both the imperial crown of his father and the Sicilian crown of her father, was indeed flesh of her flesh. To prove it, she gave birth in public. Simeti sees in this long-awaited pregnancy and motherhood an avenue for Constance to step out of the shadows and assert herself as protectress of the child who would restore her family's Sicilian kingdom. Simeti reflects on her own experience with motherhood, which she considers a career, and sees the birth of her own first-born as a turning point that opened doors to confidence and self-discovery for her.
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At the journey's end, Constance, "in |
Simeti grew up in the 1950s and is quite frank about the mixture of expectations and limitations that was transmitted to her generation. Readers of later generations may find it curious that she talks about belonging to a cohort of women who still find it uncomfortable to dine at a restaurant in the evening without male company. Such revelations are instructive, however, because they give us a chance to reflect on our own assumptions. Gender is experienced in a historical context and does not always translate easily from one decade to another, much less from one century to another. Readers who find Simeti's Constance too retiring in the company of all those royal men might consider why their own perspective leads them to prefer imagining a more assertive queen in the royal court.
Travels with a Medieval Queen is most engaging when Simeti gives free rein to her descriptive powers, whether she is carefully articulating the complexities of court intrigue, the abundance of the countryside or the intricate decoration of a medieval baptistry. It is when she passes by the opportunity for such rich description, citing instead a need to "hurry on" that she never fully explains to the reader, that our own imaginations are left to wonder what cobblestone streets, ecclesiastical treasures and royal secrets we may have missed. Too often, Simeti presses on with her journey just when the reader is ready for her exploration. Still, she succeeds in making vivid and complex the life of a medieval queen too often left in the shadows of her male relatives. And she finds in Constance a very good companion for her own journey.
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Who stole feminism?
Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement
by Ann Russo. New York: Routledge, 2001, 226 pp., $19.95 paper.
Reviewed by Louise Armstrong
IT WILL NOT SUPRISE YOU: context matters. The tsunami of recent events is bound to affect the way any reviewer responds to a book that promises "a call to action for the feminist movement"--when, in fact, what is meant here is the US feminist movement. And (context again) with so much urgent work to be done within international feminism--on supporting groups like RAWA and other Afghan women's organization; on working with feminists worldwide to end trafficking of women and children for prostitution; on cyber-pornography--an exclusive focus on the US as an isolate of feminism suddenly seems more self-limiting than it might have in recent time past.
I say this to warn that I come to this book somewhat tainted by the times. And tainted, perhaps, by the fact that I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual, radical feminist writer; a long-time activist on the front of violence against women and children and of child sexual abuse. Which is to say I have long shared, even contributed to, the gender-based analysis of feminism that Ann Russo challenges in the essays that make up this book. These break down into four categories: Transforming Feminist Theorizing; Producing and Consuming Sexualized Inequality; Bringing Theories Into Practice; and Transforming Feminist Resistance Through Storytelling. Throughout the essays, however, runs an argument against the primacy of gender-based analysis. Gender-based analysis places the central focus on patriarchy, patriarchal privilege, as the fundamental historical license for male oppression of women via violence, social controls, rape, child sexual abuse. In this book, Russo tells us, "I seek to reflect, challenge, and expand some of the current perspectives on violence against women, particularly those that rely on gender-exclusive frameworks for their analysis and political strategy."
That I take issue with many of Russo's points does not suggest the book calls for dismissal; rather the opposite. There is little enough dialogue these days about the conceptualization of feminism. Any work that provokes thought, as this one does, is worthy of serious attention.
In place of gender-based analysis, what Russo urges is an analysis based on "interlocking oppressions." She tells us: "Violence against women has multiple interconnected sources, and is not tied exclusively to an isolated system of misogyny and male dominance. Histories of conquest, immigration, and slavery account for women's differential targeting and experience of rape, torture, and murder. Misogyny, racism, classism, heterosexism, and antisemitism, among others, construct the differential contexts of women's lives." Without doubt, this is true. Those radical feminists I know who work on issues of violence against women have long noted these oppressions, and fought on those fronts. Still, this does not seem to me to preclude an analysis that is primarily gendered. The radical feminist activists in the shelter movement are amply exposed, daily, to the class, race and other biases that affect women fleeing intimate violence. But what these women are all fleeing is a potentially lethal assailant.
Russo, however, appears not to be talking about radical feminists. Rather, she says, "The essays in this book reflect the ways I have tried to address the exclusionary, limited, and sometimes dangerous politics of the mainstream feminist movement in the United States." She complains that many of the original radical feminist collectives "became hierarchical organizations with paid staff whose credentials were increasingly dependent upon professional degrees, and decreasingly related to first-hand knowledge of violence and grassroots activism in the community... Many of these nonprofit organizations are not that different from mainstream social service agencies and increasingly they have become tied to state and national government policies and institutions." True, true, true. And a point well worth making. But this has little to do with feminism, even mainstream feminism. It conflates feminist activism with the hijacking of feminist activism, the adoption by government and social agencies of the issues raised by feminism in order to effect problem management rather than social change.
Cooptation may be a cliché, but it is real. For instance, "Zero Tolerance" was a phrase originally used by the anti-violence against women campaign in the UK. It has since been "borrowed" by agencies and governments fighting all sorts of things--drugs, creative income tax accounting--and has itself become a cliché (while the violence against women remains real). It is irksome, but feminism is not to blame.
WITHOUT A DISTINCTION between what radical (or even mainstream) feminist analysis intends and what cooptation by the Higher Powers and by the media produces, Russo's argument that a gender-based analysis is misguided begins to lose its legs. And her passion for "interlocking oppressions" leads her down some strange paths.
It is certainly true that in our world, some people's lives are taken to have more value than others', and that the rape of black women by black men is largely ignored, as is the rape of prostitutes by anyone at all; but it makes little sense to use the O. J. Simpson case to build an argument about the media's sensationalizing of the rape of white women by black men. Russo writes:
In these cases, the media constructs interracial violence against white, especially middle-class, women as brutal atrocities. The violence is attributed to the racial and/or class backgrounds of the perpetrators, and the media calls for swift and urgent action. These responses are in sharp contrast to how the media constructs the violence perpetrated by white, middle-class men. The perpetrators here are constructed as individuals with individual histories and identities; their violence is often made "understandable" in media constructions. (p.33)
If this is what you saw happen in the O. J. Simpson case, it is not what I saw happen. For all the ranting about Johnnie Cochran's playing the "race card," I did not see O. J. vilified despite the pictures of the brutalized (white) Nicole Simpson introduced as evidence. Nor did I see him criminally convicted. Race did not play trump in the Simpson case. Nor did it play trump in the Clarence Thomas brouhaha.
Gender did--I think.
Russo's argument that feminism should not be based on gender, but rather on an understanding of interlocking oppressions, rests a great deal of its weight on the fact that women are violent, are batterers of other women. Yes, this is so--but it's both quantitatively and qualitatively different. If female-to-female violence were on a par with male violence against women--resulting in maiming, shootings, deaths--surely (given the recent climate of women-are-violent-too in the media) we would be reading about it as routinely as we read things like Man Shoots Wife Over Children's Report Card. But female violence against intimates has never been historically condoned by the social order, and while--as Russo points out--women may be violent toward their children, they face unequivocal censure for it. They also face unequivocal censure for "allowing" their children to be abused by their mates, or in the case of heterosexually battered women, for "engaging in" domestic violence.
None of which is meant to diminish the effects of the lesbian violence Russo discusses or to suggest some hierarchy of pain. None of which is meant to suggest that attention should not be paid, and services enhanced, for victims of same-sex violence. It is simply to express my sense that this does not undermine the validity of gender-based feminism. (What is feminism if it is not gender-based? Humanism?) Nor does the fact that there are larger social problems (racism, classism, all that) seem to me to dictate that we diminish the primacy of gender as a determinant. Truly, all women do not have the same experience, and truly women born white and middle-class have "unearned privilege." But there is a difference between acknowledging this, trying to ameliorate it, and simply tossing the whole movement in the bin.
Russo writes, "Within the arena of domestic violence, for instance, white feminist leaders continue to look to the criminal justice system to enforce the agenda against violence without addressing the ways this system has been used to harass and unfairly criminalize women and men of color." Instead, "[F]eminists must seriously address in policy and practice the racism and classism integral to the criminal justice system." Well, but they do and they have (haven't they?)--in applying pressure for uniform police response; in actively helping all women who need them get restraining orders. Somehow, Russo's comment seems to me to overlook the fact that feminists are not in control of either the policy or the practice of the criminal justice system (or any other system). What they can do (and have done) is try to campaign actively for change through coalitions, through trainings, through creative attempts to change and influence legislation. And if you aren't going to use the criminal justice system to intervene on behalf of the victim of a homicidal maniac, what's your alternative? (And why is it you wouldn't suggest seeking an alternative were the victim male?)
MUCH OF WHAT RUSSO SAYS is entirely correct. What murks her argument up is the lack of a distinction between what radical and even mainstream feminists attempt, and the unintended consequences of those attempts: the effects of professionalization that go with funding needs; the role of the media and its need for novelty and sensation, its veneration of "experts." Oh--and the dominance of our therapeutic culture.
Russo writes, "In much of the feminist analysis of intimate interpersonal violence, the identity of survivors that is constructed in the narratives is often one who is powerless, devastated, hurt, and often destroyed. After reading so much of this literature, I found myself constructing stories about my own pathology and pain. Despite the recognition of survival, the emphasis has been on the violence and its effects. We called ourselves survivors, and yet this didn't ultimately feel transformative..." Invoking author Dorothy Allison, she adds, "Allison's words helped me to question the benefits of women defining themselves in terms of what others had done to us. If I define myself solely through the stories of my father's abuse and violence, or the neighbors', or the men from my young adulthood, then the perpetrators still control my identity and life, and in the process, I am further diminished."
Great. (I would say that; this is something I've been ranting about for decades.) But it is not feminists, it is professionals--therapists--who turned women's abuse into a primary definition of their identity. It was therapists who, for years, told me that abused women were too fragile to become activists.
And yet, some pages later, this development too becomes the fault of white, middle-class feminists. "White and middle-class feminists sometimes ignore or minimize social differences between women by focusing on what we perceive to be shared victimization among women. Many feminists, especially in the 1970s, believed that through sharing stories, women would recognize our common experiences of gender-based oppression and violence and from that shared experience join together in a unified feminist movement." And, Russo continues, "In retrospect, I realize that such a notion of sisterhood accomplished just the opposite because it reduced the complexities of many women's stories and it erased our historical, social, and cultural differences and divisions... In listening for commonality, we minimize women's different histories, cultures, contexts, experiences, and perspectives." The gist of her argument here is that we should be listening to women's stories "without appropriating them for an already existing agenda and framework...and this would become the groundwork for our theories and activism."
I could be wrong, but I think that's exactly what feminists did in the first place. And it was from that that the gender-based theory that we call feminism emerged
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