In 1985, eight months pregnant with my daughter, I attended a champagne toast with my friend Anne in honor of Toni Morrison, who had the previous year accepted the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities chair at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA). Before Toni’s speech, when everyone but me was drinking champagne and milling about, I spotted one of my former English professors who had also been my academic advisor and greeted her clumsily, hands framing my large belly and saying something like, “You can see what I’ve been doing.” I knew she would be disappointed. She looked at me, said “I see,” and moved on to talk to another professor. It was humiliating.
This is what I had come to expect from most of my women professors at SUNYA. There were a couple of wonderful exceptions, but most of my female professors were radical lesbian feminists who did not look kindly on women who married men and had children. In their classes, feminism was the point, period. If you wrote a paper, you needed to work in a feminist angle to get an A. It was that blatant. This didn’t seem unreasonable in a Women’s Studies course (of which I took several), but in a course on the American Novel? Why were we reading Sarah Orne Jewett but not reading Henry James?
It was difficult even in the Women’s Studies classes to express a different point of view. In one course on Women and Health (in the fall of 1981) a few brave young men showed up, only to be booed by their female classmates when they spoke. In that same class I got to know a woman who proudly described herself as a radical lesbian feminist and actively recruited other women to become lesbians, too. The idea was that lesbians make better feminists because they don’t cavort with the enemy. She said, “I’m ready to send all males to moon or some other planet and live only with women, procreating by parthenogenesis.” I replied, “I would have a problem with that because I have a two and a half year-old little boy.” She said, “Well, I hate to tell you this but he’s going to grow up to be a man.” As if that’s all that needed to be said about a two and a half year-old little boy.
Come to think of it, that class was super weird. The instructor, a woman with a PhD in Health, gave us a live demonstration of inserting a speculum in her vagina. I guess this was to help us become more familiar with the cervix, but the whole thing seemed really inappropriate. Like the real purpose was to intimidate males so they wouldn’t sign up for the class or would immediately drop it after reading the syllabus. What could possibly be the reasoning behind manipulating course content to intimidate males? Is it bad for men to learn about women’s health?
I have never experienced women being as hateful to other women as in my time as a student at SUNYA; this includes the female professors and classmates in my Women’s Studies classes, and the women in the consciousness raising group I belonged to for awhile. The consciousness raising group was particularly interesting. My girlfriend Judy, a young woman with an infant, and I were the only non-lesbian members, and though in theory we were supposed to identify and discuss systematic forms of oppression, we ended up talking a lot about lesbianism being the pathway to true feminism. The young woman with the infant was living with a sweet hippie-like guy who was a self-professed feminist and was generously sharing parenting, housework and expenses with her. She told us these things and he sounded like a saint to me. But she was not grateful or happy for her domestic bliss. Instead she was whining about him still being a male, and thinking she really should become a lesbian to become a more perfect feminist. The lesbians in the consciousness raising group encouraged her to come out.
It was offensive, though at the time I admired these strong women, liked being around them and listening to their point of view even though I was sometimes thinking these people are so full of shit.
Look. If you’re a lesbian, come out. But don’t tell me you’re becoming a lesbian to become a more perfect feminist, and that I should, too. It is backward to exclude the very women you need in your camp.
I have no idea what it’s like for young women on college and university campuses these days, but hopefully this kind of hate rhetoric is long gone.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Very Interesting. This is a very p.c. topic most would not want to go near. I like it and fully agree, however, I believe the younger (gay and women) generations do not have the same upward battle with equal rights therefore do not harbor as much misplaced anger.
Corey, that it is good to hear, though my daughter, 25, tells me she had a couple professors with a similar bias. My friend Anne, the same Anne referred to in this post, commented on facebook that she googled and found that one of my old professors is still teaching and that student ratings are publicly available. Anne says that “As recently as 2008, they are reporting that she’s a heterophobe and creates a dictator-like atmosphere in her classes.” So I guess it still goes on.
Thank you for your comment!
Susan–thank you for bringing this early post to my attention. It reminded me of a large lecture class I took at the U. of Montana in which we were discussing the politics of reproduction. I spoke up one day to share my take–that both males and females knew what caused babies and that we therefore SHARED responsibility. The entire class laughed at me and I still didn’t get it.
As I shared in my story recently, I paid a high price for the expectation that my partners would enter in to sexual sharing with the same degree of seriousness my body was obliged to.
It is absolutely a shared responsibility, as you say, but I know that not all men see it that way. I am sorry the men in your life didn’t. That is, until your wonderful DH!