So when a delegation of Brooklyn College’s women’s studies faculty came to meet me, their new dean of undergraduate studies, and asked if I would like to speak on my scholarship at a Women’s Studies brown-bag lunch, I was spurred to write an essay that arose from “The Heroine’s Progress,” the course I had developed as an English and Women’s Studies offering at Barnard a few years earlier.
That course had traveled with me in my recent career moves. After leaving Barnard in 1983, I had taught it at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where I’d spent two years as dean of the college, and now, in the fall of 1985, a newcomer to Brooklyn College, I was planning to introduce it there as well.
My talk drew together George Gissing’s minor 1891 classic, The Odd Women, and E. M. Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910. I had been struck by the books’ similar endings, noteworthy in the way men have more or less been sidelined, and women, left to raise a child whose father is absent (The Odd Women) or dead (Howards End), take charge of the future. I titled the talk “Sisters and Progeny” because in both novels the women caring for the baby are sisters and also because “sisterhood” was the rallying call of the 1970s and ’80s feminism that was engaging my contemporaries and me, as we joined together to oppose patriarchy and claim equal opportunity for our gender. It was exhilarating to see women escaping the denigrations of Betty Crocker ads, claiming sexual freedoms, enlarging professional vistas, maybe going to medical or law school and not just graduate school in English, or at least having choice, at least not having to stay stuck in bad or avowedly limiting situations. To speak about my work at the brown-bag lunch was a way of presenting myself as a sister feminist to my new community.
But if my theme was the solidarity of women, it was also the enervation of men. I know I was trying to work something out of intense concern to me personally—not just the power and potential of women but also a question about men. Who might they be in the lives of women emancipated from their dominance? In a sense my world was catching up with my own understanding because I had always known women to be powerful. Not just my mother but also the many successful working women of our acquaintance in Hollywood—costume designers, actresses, singers, and writers—gave me models of female efficacy. But what role did men play in such women’s lives? I remember “Pops,” the husband of couture lingerie designer Juel Park, who often invited us to her beach house. While Juel would gossip with my mother about the stars who frequented her elegant shop on Rodeo Drive, Pops went off to the bedroom to take his naps. That’s the image of him that lingers. “Men are children,” my mother instructed me. To her they always seemed pitiable, easily manipulated creatures, good for sex, to be sure, but in important matters not to be counted on. From her father who died in her infancy right through Trevor and Bow Wow, men had let her down badly, that was clear. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald, the one man she seemed to have admired as well as loved, had shown his unreliability by dying right in front of her—and doing it just before Christmas! Of course, my experience with men diverged from hers. But in it, too, despite my great longing for an alternate script, lay a fair share of doubts and disappointments. In the books I chose to discuss at the Brooklyn College Women’s Studies brown-bag lunch, men are weak or defective. It was not my own history I had in mind, but to have fixed on books in which women are energized and men unreliable cannot have been merely accidental.
My personal situation in the fall of 1985 was a complex one. In the public sphere I was a rising, forty-three-year-old professional, headed, I thought in all likelihood, for the presidency of a small liberal women’s college. The job at Hollins represented a step in this direction, and my husband, Donald, never overly invested in his own career, had quit his work as a union organizer in New York to go with the children and me to Virginia. Hollins gave us a big free house that my mother, when she visited, said reminded her of Tara in Gone with the Wind, complete with the services of a black maid named Buttercup. Donald was able to find a half-time position at the college assisting the director of adult education, who, it so happened, reported to me. But I lasted as the school’s chief academic officer only two years before calling upon my interview skills to help me get back to New York. Going to Brooklyn College constituted what is called a lateral move. The school was much larger and more vibrant than Hollins, but there was no free house, I was one of several deans, and the chain of command had me reporting to the provost, not the president. Still, my mother could retain her bragging rights about “my daughter, the dean.” And that person remained someone with a bright future.
Behind this façade of success, however, lay a more troubled story. Forster exhorts
