Azalea Bushes

Excerpt from Virginia Woolf Panel (possibly at Mount Holyoke College), 1981

PAMELLA FARLEY: (Virginia Woolf 1981 Side 2 on Digital; Virginia Woolf Berks 1981 Side 1 on original tape) …come after ours… and in particular, speaking for myself, I want to thank those people – those women – who have supported me, and in name of the others, those who have supported them: the sisters, the lovers, the Doloreses of the world who have made it possible for us to be here and tell the truth and survive.

This is a panel on Virginia Woolf and her world, and we will be moving back-and-forth between specifics and generalizations about the period. Virginia Woolf wrote about her mother:

I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. This influence, by which I mean the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves – public opinion, what other people say and think, all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that – has never been analyzed in any of those lives which I so much enjoy reading or at least very superficially. Yet it is by such invisible presences that the subject of this memoir is tugged this way and that every day of his life. It is they that keep him in position. Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us. How that society changes from decade to decade, and also from class to class. Well, if we cannot analyze those invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir, and again how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in the stream deflected, held in place, but cannot describe the stream.

We will be working to describe both the fish and the stream. My name is Pamella Farley, I teach at Brooklyn College and at Barnard College, and I will be working to describe the realities of race, class and sex as they intersect as material forces in the life of Virginia Woolf, with a particular focus on the operation of the medical model as a sanction in her life, and calling for revision of the view of madness that is applied to her.

This is Julie Abraham, who is a student at Columbia University; she has been working on Virginia Woolf for several years and has read the Woolf and Vita Sackville-West papers both in the New York Berg Collection and in Sussex. She will be talking about the coincidence of lesbian and feminism… feminist writing… in… as a background and in relation to the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf as lesbian lovers, and talk about the exchanges freeing Sackville-West from a dualistic self concept based upon a sense that sexuality is masculine.

This is Lillian Faderman, whose work you are familiar with; she is a co-editor of Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century-Germany, which was published by Naiad Press in 1980, several articles, and the book Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. She is working on another book on the trial of women in Scotland, which was the background for (Lillian Faderman: Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour.) Lillian Hellman’s – yes – to tell the true story, which Lillian Hellman was not able to do. She will be talking about the forces… the historic forces that came into play, particularly focusing around the year 1928 when several lesbian images came into the culture in an unprecedented way, and examine the relationship of those forces to the work of lesbians… also to the image of sexuality that was present at that time.

The other woman who is listed in the program, from England, Annabel Faraday, is unable to be with us. And, so, the fourth participant in this session is you. (Audience chuckles.) And we will attempt to leave an hour’s discussion time so all of us can have a chance to share in the dialogue.

JULIE ABRAHAM:

The title of my paper is My Darling (GAP IN TAPE) Past Decade: Falling In Love With Women, A Possibility Denied.

 JULIE ABRAHAM TALKS UNTIL END OF VIRGINIA WOOLF 1981 SIDE 2 TRACK.

(Virginia Woolf 1981 Side 1 on digital; Virginia Woolf Berks 1981 Side 2 on original tape)

Crowd talking, Tucker tries to move folks so more people can get in and fit into the room space. This goes until around 1:10 at which point Lillian Faderman gives the title of her paper, Love Between Women in 1928: Why Progress is not Always Progress. Her talk runs until the end of the track.

(Virginia Woolf 1981 Part 2 Side 1 on Digital; Virginia Woolf June 81 Pt 2 on original tape)

Lillian Faderman’s talk continued until around 3:24.

3:30  Question/Answer. Sounds like Tucker is the first person to respond to a question.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPANT: Could you say a little bit more about that? A little bit more about the race… apparently not aware of…?

TUCKER(?): Um…

AUDIENCE PARTICIPANT: Could you repeat the question?

TUCKER: The question was to say more about the eugenics theorists. The eugenics theorists at that time were attempting to determine blood characteristics as characteristics inherent in bodily types, social characteristics which we might now recognize as being composed of more political and social and economic factors. But, that that time, there was a great emphasis… and previously, and in the 19th century also, and not only studying body types which included people making studies of heads, feet, etcetera, used to differentiate between “superior” types and “inferior” types which was clearly a racist technique that was continued in the 20th century with explorations of different types of women so that some effort was made to distinguish between those “deviant” types and those “normal” types. There were different kinds of characteristics that were looked at

(Virginia Woolf 1981 Part 2 Side 2 on Digital; other side of Virginia Woolf June 81 Pt 2 on original tape)

LIZ WESTON: …History Channel, and I’m Liz Weston. I will be moderating to the extent of introducing all speakers, but the comment will come from you, the audience. For the presentation there is one change, which is that Madeline Wegs who is first on your program will be going last. Other than that, the order will remain the same. One brief introductive comment, which comes out of something that was…

Let me just briefly introduce each one before her presentation. Our first speaker is Jo Blatti, who is a research associate with the New York Council on the Humanities. She has a Masters degree from SUNY-Buffalo, and has designed and produced two social history series for public radio.

 Around 2:23 the track cuts out, and sounds like it switches to something entirely new. New voice: “We found it. I didn’t hear some of your question because I was looking for it, but it was….” The conversation is about masculine presentations… the person asking the question sounds like Tucker. Conversation about “street dykes.” New speaker jumps in and starts to qualify “born from the freedoms of the 40s.” Yes… Tucker sounds like she’s asking a deep question about “street dykes” as defined by the presenters, and how their definition takes into account both class stratification and folks living in-and-out of public institutions. The speaker laughs saying that this is the piece that Pamella always focuses on. Speaker defines “street dyke” as “someone who is in the bars seven days a week, people who dress as ‘bull daggers’ or whatever all the time, except some of them hold down jobs. In the Buffalo community, all the street dykes are not people who are living off the street. A good portion of them work full-time jobs….” To me it seems speaker doesn’t answer question, and mostly acknowledges that Tucker has a point about how rough street dyke life is. New question from new speaker about butch-femme parallel to male-female relationships. New question about S/M existing in ‘50s, speaker says “Sure,” audience erupts into laughter. Conversation goes on with pretty intense questions (e.g. domestic violence and rape in butch-femme relationships). This panel/talk/presentation runs until the end of the track.