Teaching in the '70s Background

Brief History: Teaching in the ‘70s Background

One day in the mid 60s at PSU my lover Emily inexplicably called to ask if I would take her class to teach Stein’s Melanctha, so I taught, to both her students and my own – her refusal and silence giving me newly opened eyes – that elliptical and highly coded text – a narrative about lesbian love, told as though about black people torn between exemplary decency and passionate taboo. It was based, as I subsequently concluded after research, on an all-female relationship triangle in her own life during her early years on the east coast before moving to Europe.

Just as Stein’s eyes were opened to the non-anomalous existence of same-sex relations by reading Dante’s Inferno on an Italian hillside, thus illuminating love in her own and her two companions’ lives, I too had had my life explained to me after being accused of being, in my own relationship triangle, a frustrated lesbian, a term I had perhaps merited without ever having heard; my Inferno was a sexologist’s text introducing me to the term homosexuality, like the Inferno simultaneously providing both taboo and avenue.

When I began teaching in New York, the required literary canon included only one woman, Jane Austen, and one gay man, Whitman (not acknowledged as such). When I taught his poetry as sexual students anonymously sprayed the classroom desk on which I sat with some sort of oily disinfectant. Teaching Melville’s Moby Dick without ignoring Ishmael’s marriage to the harpooner Queequeg and their delight in orgies of sperm was a betrayal of official blindness to what was not to be mentioned about canonical text, just as Shakespeare’s love sonnets to a young man were described as to a dark lady by respectable editors and critics alike. I had to fight to get Emily Dickinson and Chinua Achebe into the list of required masterpieces of world literature. In the early ‘70s the editor of the best anthology of American literature explained that Dickinson (whose botched biography undoubtedly all of you know) had “confused her pronouns” in some of her poems. In fact she wrote most of her poems, including love poems, to Sue Gilbert, enclosing them in notes to Sue, and never publishing them. “Wild Night! Wild nights!/ Were I with thee/Wild nights would be/Our luxury.” It was difficult to get colleagues even to acknowledge the context of her poetry and to consider its implications in interpreting her work.

At a centennial Dickinson conference held at Brooklyn College, I put together a panel of poets that included Eve Merriam, Joan Larkin, Alicia Ostriker, June Jordan. (Adrienne refused, keeping to her earlier resolve to respect the poet’s choice to put her poems in a drawer during her lifetime). I read and spoke about the Dickinson letters and poems when I introduced the session, the only part of the conference which ended up as blank on the conference videotapes made by the Humanities Institute.

I chose to teach Dickinson as my parting seminar in the English Department at the university; some students took incompletes and finished their papers with the sympathetic cooperation of others in the department after I retired. Dickinson is still barely contested; Achebe thankfully is a literary staple.

Some of the most exciting intellectual work we did in those early years was to unearth “lost” text and discredited writers, and re-evaluate their worth, the standards used to disparage them, the theory used to discount them, the periodization used to disappear them, and to bring forth new interpretations. But even in that process feminists themselves might participate in eliding the lesbian while celebrating the woman/feminist. Perhaps one of the reasons so little has been written about this period of lesbian history is the pain as well as the exhilaration of the period.

Given the suicide rate of women writers, and the standard narrative plot (marriage or death) for independent women in literature, given the virtual disappearance of lesbian writers (except Stein who perhaps unsurprisingly thanked god she was not born a woman) and the suppression of lesbianism among writers before and after their death, it appeared a matter of life and death to do research as a lesbian and to make and share lesbian interpretations of texts.

[a matter of life and death: In my own life a conversation with a lover, Adrienne Lockhart, before she died at the age of 33, made me take note of a complex of ideas that became fruitful over subsequent years in researching dis/ease. Ady who was dying of breast cancer asked me to come take care of her in her last months, and I did, paying for my own substitute at the college, and quietly going to live at her place in Bryn Mawr for the last months of her life. I found the notions I had grown up absorbing about order and meaning to be challenged to the core; she on the other hand found order and meaning. She spoke with others who knew they were dying, and she came to think that there was a reason, at least a contributing factor. Her father was a doctor in Australia. When we were graduate students, during the period of sexual freedom, smash monogamy, and emerging lesbian identity in the ‘60s, without divorcing her husband who went to Canada, she became a lesbian (in fact we had a triangle lesbian relationship). She thought about what function illness played in people’s lives; others told her how their disease functioned in their lives. This approach made sense to her. She told me that with the breast cancer she had gotten beyond her father’s control; he couldn’t save her; the doctor was powerless in the face of her disease. This conversation left death and being a lesbian resonating subconsciously in my mind. Perhaps also in that of Emily, the other woman in the triangle, who became obsessed with the theme of the suiciding heroine in literature. I encouraged her to write about it. I was writing about Virginia Woolf, to whom E.M. Forster, another (gay) Bloomsburian, had said that women should not be independent of me. As I saw it, Leonard’s control over Virginia which she resented, and railed about when “mad,” was not entirely healthy for her; when Dr. Octavia Wilberforce told her she could stay out of a rest cure only if she convinced Leonard, who had previously committed her, that she took stones and put them in her pocket and walked into the River Souse.

There was a current in the air.

Olga Broumas published “Cinderella” in Beginning with O, writing about the experience of being at Yale, the loneliness and the cost of being the privileged one at Yale, the men’s castle in which she felt trapped; she dedicated the poem to the women writers who did not survive, the Anne Sextons, the Sylvia Plaths, the Virginia Woolfs, and revealed the fragility of her own hold on life if she did not have sisters with whom to leave the castle, and share a hut.

If women could only tell the truth for 100 years, Woolf said, then a woman of genius could walk among us, and survive. So my intellectual work on Woolf was informed by the passionate desire to tell a truth that could be lifesaving.

Today, we have 19 years to go.]

I worked for years on Virginia Woolf, and after giving an interdisciplinary presentation – the first lesbian theory session at the Berks – “Beyond Marx and Freud: Power, Oppression and the Politics of Culture,” the only copy of which was lost by Feminist Studies and which drowned in the gay-straight splits most painful for me among socialist feminists, I concentrated on working closely with the feminist canonical Woolf. Because of the fierce resistance to lesbian criticism especially of Virginia Woolf, I decided I had to change the intellectual, emotional and political listening space in the academy. If I couldn’t get much lesbian work on Virginia Woolf published back then I could at least work on clearing the air, and over time as the listening space shifted, more would be possible. It was a sort of intellectual political work necessitated where no tradition of lesbian struggled existed.

[Listening space is a term acknowledging that the public discourses that condition people’s reception and understanding are constituted historically and can shift. Over the years I gave dozens of talks on Virginia Woolf; in the academy I was hushed and reviled; at the Virginia Woolf Centennial conference I was told my work was “gutter scholarship” (no one colleague refuted or commented on this denunciation, so strong was the will to keep Woolf the feminist heroine for straight feminism or to maintain a precarious closet even in 1981); in the community women flocked to courses I gave in the public domain; in bookstores I suggested readings and gave lecture-discussions; I gave the first lesbian/gay lecture at Harvard thanks to the Cambridge Gay History Project; I spoke, lectured, talked and taught at colleges where colleagues were closeted so there was “no one” to teach lesbian courses or advise student groups; at a major conference session on Virginia Woolf criticism where the designated speaker on lesbian criticism was straight, I spoke from the floor only to be told quite angrily that I didn’t know what I was talking about (though the lesbian criticism they were talking about was informed by my submissions to the journals, talks at conferences, reviews); I was told I should submit something on returning women; I was told if I wanted to write on Virginia Woolf I had to write on Leonard Woolf at the same time; I was invited to edit an anthology of Virginia Woolf criticism and write commentary on all the other pieces in the book, then barred from being in the volume at all when I asked if I couldn’t simply have my work stand next to others as part of the collection; most painfully, my own beloved sister/friends took aspects of my work without attribution, credit or thanks; women took the courses I had fought for and lived in infamy for having proposed, designed and won (yet rarely was allowed to teach myself, assigned instead to lower level courses while others modified the courses, wrote books, went on to the graduate center). Wasn’t this collectivity what I had been advocating, the spread of ideas like wildfire? Still, I felt burned. ]

I had been hired in 1970 as full-time faculty on a tenure track but not given an office, told to find a desk as graduate students did in a storage space on the top floor of the library, and was put on the list of Faculty Wives Club; after receiving my invitation in the mail I advertised for a wife to the 150 or so colleagues with mailboxes in the department office. I thought it was a humorous way to make a point about sexism in the academy. Still I surprised even years later to find my mail scrawled with “dyke,” “lezzie,” and swastikas. A female student in the night school brought her boyfriend to the office for her appointment, and he tried to beat me up; as I pushed my way out of my office in the women’s studies program and walked down the hall he shouted after me, “Bastard,” “Son of a Bitch.” “The best thing you can do,” the department chairman advised me, “is go home and forget about it.”

In the early ‘70s at Brooklyn College there evolved a division of labor among feminists. Lilia Melani sponsored the CUNY Women’s Coalition (CWC) sex discrimination suit against CUNY joined by Renate Bridenthal, who also was in the campus women’s organization that was fighting for childcare. I did women’s studies, teaching and organizing locally, regionally and on the east coast, getting the first interdisciplinary degree-granting program in NY, putting on a conference Strategies for Survival which organized planning tracks for regional and national professional associations and started the East Coast Regional Women’s Studies Association, forerunner to the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) which we formed 3 years later, and its 12 regional Women’s Studies Associations; I founded a campus women’s center and got a Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant to run Project Second Start for Brooklyn community women to return to school.

I had been doing labor studies earlier, initiating in the ‘60s the women’s caucus of Workers Education Local 189 (a national local eliminated by Shanker in the mid ‘70s despite and because of our progressive struggles), and forming in 1970 the NY Women’s Labor Project to put together and teach a women’s studies course for working women that we taught through trade unions in the tri-state area and that was taken over by Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) as trade union women’s studies in the mid ‘70s. So when it seemed that despite widespread support among academic feminists and those in Modern Language Association (MLA) who knew my work that I might have a struggle on my hands, I decided to use the principles I had learned in the labor movement and fight for my job; years ago I had begun organizing in the academy precisely to protect as well as further feminist studies, it was here that I had begun teaching lesbian and gay works and lesbian courses both at Barnard and at Brooklyn, and if they could fire the coordinator of this early, degree-granting program, it would set the field back badly. On the other hand, a success might help. NYWSA formed a defense committee and held a public colloquium at Brooklyn: “Frontier or Backwater: Can Feminism Survive in the University?” in 1977.

I came up for tenure during the recession of the mid-‘70s when a Wall Street cartel took over NYC to prevent a bankruptcy that would have allowed them an insufficient return on their loans to the city (which had been paid off, with some interest, but not enough for them). Of course they slashed health, education and welfare, closing child care centers, hospitals, service programs, and schools: a good number of CUNY colleges were cut while I was making my case for retaining my job.

The English Department chairman held a secret hearing for the Personnel and Budget Committee, where two women colleagues charged that I wouldn’t teach texts dealing with marriage, that I gave all A’s; that I denied men entrance to my classes; that I wore leather pants and carried a lesbian around to light cigarettes for me – their false “testimony” resulted in a split vote. When I found out about the irregular proceedings and went to the Dean, my case was returned to the Department for another vote (the Chair retaliated against an older man who voted for me by canceling the summer session he had needed to help pay for his wife’s hospitalization). After breaking a half dozen appointments with me, a woman on the committee finally spoke to me after I wrote her a note that she didn’t have to approve of me as a lesbian, just vote on my record. A male colleague explained to me that the personnel committee was afraid that I would “make a Steinian gesture.” “What is that?” I asked. “Oh, you know, “ he replied. “No, what are they afraid I might do?” “You know. Put your feet up on the desk or something.” It was explained to me that, in any case, “We already have one.” (Joan Larkin identified as a lesbian and was a lecturer at the time.)

Not everyone on the university personnel committee charged with interviewing me and voting on my case came to the appointment; the first question I was asked was, “Professor Farley, how can you, as a lesbian, claim to do research?”

I had, idealistically, optimistically and foolishly turned down the lawyers on the CUNY sex discrimination suit. “Your case is perfect,” they said. “You are more qualified than full professors in your department; let us win a full professorship for you.” They had called me at 10:30 at night. They explained nothing about the suit or how I would fit into their work, told me nothing about what it would involve to go the legal route (which I already in my infantile leftist enthusiasm to make the revolution thought was bourgeois) or told me anything, in fact, at all. With absolutely no explanation of what was being asked of me, with no understanding or thought about what it would mean in the long run, with the memory in my head about a woman in my department who had sued before I got there and been totally isolated from effective political action, I said I would go the regular route. I even forgot about it, until recently, thinking about the ‘70s.

[Bourgeois meant to me the sort of energy-wasting work that took time well spent in struggles for social change to affect the perceptions and engage the actions of large numbers of people. As a responsible “politico” from the ‘60s who had had to spend time and energy to get our “hippie” allies out of jail; who had had to defend her right in court to speak out against the war on the first campus occupied by National Guard with live ammunition in their rifles; who had represented the activists in mediation conducted by Theodore Keel, labor mediator, negotiating with the university; who had taught Soul on Ice when it came out on the condition that students defend my job – I did, they did; who had opposed the Weatherpeople faction on the grounds that this was not a pre-revolutionary situation and opted for participatory actions.]

But while I was committed politically to institutional struggle, and thought even that if I did my work right I might, like so many of my colleagues on the left, be fired, what I meant by institutional struggle was not my career advancement. It meant opening up the resources of the university to the public in more equitable way.

I won my tenure; in an unheard of gesture, they did not even promote me to Assistant Professor at the time.

I felt I owed my job to the people who stood up, rather than pleasing the professoriate.

Out lesbians in the academy were rare birds. Flying back from the 1977 founding convention of the NWSA, where I had played and continued for some years to play a leading role, I picked up a flight magazine and found myself nearly in tears over an article on a species of bird nearing extinction. We had just formed a lesbian caucus and gone before the convention with a proposal for representation on the Coordinating Council. Susan Cayleff, then a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence, and I read our statement from the podium, including an explanation of why some, fearing for their jobs and professional reputations, were not out, and asked for support. “Will all who can, please rise?” A woman in the front row stood. As she turned around only to see that she was alone, another woman behind her stood. Then a third rose. Women began rising, slowly at first, and then in waves, to thunderous applause. [At the 10th anniversary conference of NWSA in 1987 lesbians had already been written out of the history, and so a few of us borrowed a bulky video camera and I interviewed some of early activist scholars who were lesbians; Sandra Pollack and I made a videotape, A Call to Rise! But there were only a handful of us visible publicly.

[A Call to Rise: whereabouts unknown, although I do have the interview tapes, which I showed at the Boston NWSA conference many years later to a nearly empty room (apparently lesbian history wasn’t operative or visible then).] <comments />