Fictional Feminism

How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality

Kim A. Loudermilk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135884390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of "fictional feminism" that recuperates feminism's radical potential, thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.

Chapter One

Out of the ’70s: Feminist Politics and Popular Fiction

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Women’s Liberation as a leaderless amalgam of dispersed groups and practices was held together not by organisation, but by an infrastructure of magazines, touring speakers, broadsheets, films and exhibitions and—last but not least—creative writing.¹

Many scholars claim that second-wave feminism has been a literary movement from the outset.² They often mark the beginning of the movement with the publication of a book—Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). As further evidence, scholars point to the large number of feminist novels published in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and the proliferation of feminist presses during the same period. Most of all, however, feminist scholars rely on their own experiences and memories to illustrate the importance of literature to feminism. For example, Cora Kaplan writes, “it seemed to me that in the 1970s those of us engaged in the feminist critical project…all read poetry and novels as they came out…. We read them because those texts were part of the on-going debate of the social movement of which we were part.”³ And Bonnie Zimmerman states, “No body of literature will ever have as strong an impact on my ideas as that produced in the first few years (roughly 1968 through 1972) of the women’s movement.”⁴ Gayle Greene takes a very personal view of feminist fiction:

What I love about contemporary women’s fiction is the way it can empower women, the way it empowered me. I came to feminism through reading and teaching feminist fiction and theory; it was this that showed me connections between my life and the world, connections that were a lifeline because they made me less isolated and meant that change was possible: my confusions weren’t a personal affliction, a private calamity, but were ‘shared, unnecessary, and political.’⁵

I, too, remember coming to feminism through reading fiction. In the early 1980s, I took a college class on writing by women which introduced me to writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Zora Neale Hurston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Tillie Olsen, Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker. Despite the fact that the women’s movement had been active for more than a decade and women’s studies was an established program at many universities, it was still this class that opened my eyes to women’s oppression and our place in Western culture. It also helped me to decide to make women’s writing and feminist theory the focus of my academic career.

Women less identified with academic culture trace their feminist beginnings to literature, too. Journalist Susan Bolotin says, “I came to feminism the way so many others did in the 1960s—through books. I discovered Virginia Woolf and rediscovered Jane Austen. I cried over Sylvia Plath…. And I made the decision to learn to take women as seriously as I had always taken men.”⁶ suan Faludi discusses the first time her mother read and responded to a feminist novel, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room:

I well recall returning home from college my freshman year to the flushed and fuming presence of my mother, who had just finished The Women’s Room. She felt, she said at the time, as if French had taken up residence in our living room and transcribed every detail into a novel. Then she realized that the similarities were no coincidence, because what had happened to her had happened to the wife across the street and the one next door to her. They had all been had, or let themselves be had, and she was filled with the sort of anger that is peculiarly bracing, the kind of fury that fuels small and big changes.⁷

To use the terminology of the women’s movement, The Women’s Room “raised the consciousness” of Faludi’s mother. Reading fiction could indeed substitute for the women’s movement’s most powerful tool—the consciousness-raising group, according to Lisa Maria Hogeland. In consciousness-raising groups, women shared their personal stories in order to understand that the problems they had felt were only personal were in fact political. Hogeland claims that realist feminist fiction provides similar narratives and allows for similar realizations.⁸ In fact, some feminist presses published novels expressly for this purpose. For example, June Arnold, co-founder of Daughters, Inc., states: “We specialized in novels partly…because we believed in the novel as a woman’s art form—that it could be an extension of and intensification of consciousness-raising, a place where reader and author could communicate on an intimate personal level, where the reader could see her own or her sister’s experience portrayed….”⁹ I would suggest that fiction is a poor substitute for the consciousness-raising group, however. When the individual act of reading fiction is substituted for the group sharing of real-life stories, some of the major goals of consciousness-raising—community building, organizing, political action—are neglected.¹⁰

We need not rely only on anecdotal evidence to prove that the women’s movement valued literature. The many feminist newspapers, newsletters, and journals that arose out of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and 1970s also illustrate the close relationship between literature and feminist activism. Beginning in about 1968, feminist newspapers and journals began to spring up in cities all around the country.¹¹ Some of these publications folded after only two or three issues; others continued well into the 1980s (although often with a succession of different editors or editorial collectives); a few remain in print today.¹² In 1977, when preparing A Guide to Women’s Publishing, Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman discovered over 150 feminist periodicals in the United States and Canada.¹³

For the most part, these early publications considered themselves political journals—they contained articles on electoral politics and grassroots campaigns for change, news about women in the world, information about speeches and rallies, essays of political thought, manifestos and editorials. Yet most of them also featured some kind of literary work as well—poetry, fiction, and/or book reviews. For example, off our backs included poetry by its second issue (February 1970) and began featuring fiction by 1971 and book reviews by 1973. The Feminist Voice, a newspaper out of Chicago, included short stories and book reviews from its first issue (August 1971), and in October 1972, it produced a special literary issue filled with poetry, short fiction, and lists of recommended reading. Even organizational newsletters, such as the Nashville NOW Newsletter, contained book reviews and asked members to submit “news items, poems, contributions of any sort.”¹⁴ These three are not the only examples; almost all of the major feminist journals and newspapers paid some attention to literature, primarily in the form of poetry or book reviews (fiction presumably was too long to easily fit in the newspaper or newsletter format).¹⁵ And certain writers—Marge Piercy, Robin Morgan, and Judy Grahn, for example—show up in publication after publication, becoming literary spokeswomen for the movement.

This attention to literature in primarily political publications was not simply coincidental or necessary to fill pages. Rather, it was a considered, theorized and fully stated political choice. In an early editorial for The Feminist Voice, for example, Valerie Walker replied to readers who complained that the newspaper was “too literary, not literary enough, too political, too apolitical, too Marxist, too anti-Marxist.” She stated, “This paper…is an open forum for the expression of ideas. And these ideas may come in the form of factual reportage, opinion, fiction, poetry or graphics.”¹⁶ HERA, a Philadelphia newspaper, agreed: “We feel a responsibility to help inform women about on-going efforts to end capitalism and male domination as well as the creation and development of economic/cultural forms which are pro-woman. HERA welcomes articles, poetry, graphics, photos, reviews, etc.”¹⁷ Some journals, such as Black Maria, specifically sought to “reconcile the so-called contradiction between individualism and collectivity, politics and art, philosophy and action.”¹⁸ And in its opening statement, Chrysalis, a very professional-looking Los Angeles journal, spelled out its commitment to combining art and politics:

Chrysalis … takes its form and content from the women’s movement itself…. Women building practical alternatives to patriarchal institutions, women developing new theories and feminist perspectives on events and ideas, women expressing their visions in verbal or visual art forms—women’s culture includes all of this, and Chrysalis exists to give expression to the spectrum of opinion and creativity that originates in this diversity.¹⁹

While the goal of some of these journals was to put art “at the center of social change,”²⁰ others hoped to redress the lack of women’s voices and visions in the mainstream media. Aphra, in its inaugural issue, claimed that the mass media are incredibly biased, presenting only male fantasies and recreating male power structures, and forcing women to create their own media outlets. Other journals also wanted literary and art works to fill their pages and asked their readers to submit them for publication.

Throughout the history of these feminist publications, writers theorized the relationship between feminist politics and feminist literature. Many feminist activists felt that authors had an obligation to help promote the objectives of women’s liberation. Karen Brodine, for example, asserted, “If women writers assume they represent many women, if they are nourished by a movement that many women built, then they are answerable to that movement. They must support it as they have been supported, acting critically to change it where it fails.”²¹ Certainly some women writers agreed, at least to some extent. The women who organized the first National Women’s Poetry Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts consciously chose poets who believed “that art can be a tool for political change…. Art can make people aware of their oppression; give them a sense of collective power through its unifying force; and move them to action.”²²

Feminist periodicals were not the only vehicles for women’s movement literature. The movement also generated numerous feminist presses. Although many of the periodicals began publication in the late 1960s, most feminist presses did not begin operation until 1970 or later; by 1977, Joan and Chesman documented nearly fifiy presses in operation.²³ Presses existed in a variety of forms and with a variety of missions and materials. Many began as self-publishing labels that grew to include work by a number of women. Most of these remained small and published only a few books, primarily poetry, how-to manuals or political tracts.²⁴ Other, larger presses began with a clear vision of themselves as voices of the women’s movement. The most successful and well-known feminist presses of the late 1970s included Daughters, Inc., Diana Press, Inc., The Feminist Press, Naiad Press, Shameless Hussy Press, and the Women’s Press Collective.²⁵ According to Joan and Chesman, “these presses… share a commonality in longevity and number of books sold that institutionalizes them in women’s cultural herstory.”²⁶ Of these, only The Feminist Press remains in business today.

While a few feminist presses printed only nonfiction political work (Les Femmes Publishing, for example), most included poetry and fiction in their lists from the very beginning, and they did so for political reasons. For example, Daughters, Inc., co-founder June Arnold declared that “the novel…will lead to, or is revolution” and hoped that feminist presses would become “the thrust of the revolution.”²⁷ To that end, Daughters published primarily experimental novels. The Women’s Press, a British press that still publishes contemporary feminist novels, sees literature “as inseparable from politics.” Like Daughters, they published primarily experimental novels during the 1970s and 80s in order to “show how literary modes and the history of representation have constructed a false image of women.”²⁸ Literary form, then, becomes particularly important to these feminist presses; they see the disruption of conventional form as analogous to the disruption of patriarchal society. In this conviction, they agree with some feminist literary critics, such as Rosalind Coward, who distrust the politics of novels that employ conventional narrative form and suggest that “feminist writing may well be compromised by the uncritical use of the conventional forms of the novel.”²⁹ Kayann Short claims that experimentalism became associated with “feminist press-published books and realism with trade-published books.”³⁰ Not only were feminist presses more likely to publish experimental novels, according to Short, they were also more likely to publish novels that were “too radical” or “too lesbian” for mainstream presses to consider. Thus, they published “what trade presses still refuse to publish: books which challenge compulsory heterosexuality, epistemic violence against women, and the enforced sexual, legal, and economic exploitation of women.”³¹

While Daughters and presses like it were primarily concerned with consciousness-raising through contemporary feminist novels, other presses, such as The Feminist Press, saw their mission as educational. The Feminist Press reprinted novels by women that had gone out of print or were not available in the United States as well as new works by feminist writers. It hoped to “reach people with stories of women’s lives, to restore the heritage of women’s writing and to bring to the classroom a new literature with a broader vision of human potential.”³² What drew all of these presses together, whatever their specific mission, was the conviction that politics takes precedence over profit. As Gloria Greenfield of Persephone Press explained, “In accepting…books, it’s not a question of will this book sell? But will it be important, will it have an impact on our community? If it’s thought-provoking, if it’s non-oppressive, if it breaks through barriers, filling gaps that we have—that’s the kind of book that Persephone wants to publish.”³³ Like the feminist periodicals discussed above, then, these feminist presses saw a connection between feminist politics and literature and believed feminist publishing was “a political act as creative and diverse as the Women’s Movement itself.”³⁴

Clearly, then, the relationship between the women’s movement and literature was a close one. Not only did political activists look to women writers as spokespeople for the movement, but also many women writers themselves felt indebted to the movement for providing publishing opportunities, encouragement, and most vitally, an audience. As time passed and the movement grew, however, feminist writers began to publish their work in mainstream rather than feminist publications. In the pages that follow, I discuss the effect this move had on feminist publishing and on the relationship between the women’s movement and feminist writers. I then examine the ways that popular culture and mainstream publishing influenced the feminist politics presented in fictional works. As is still the case, the demands of mainstream publishing, especially in terms ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Out of the ’70s: Feminist Politics and Popular Fiction
• Chapter Two From The Women’s Room to the Bedroom: Marilyn French’s Feminist Fiction
• Chapter Three Sexual Suspects: Feminism According to Garp
• Chapter Four “Weak Sisters”: Feminism and The Witches of Eastwick
• Chapter Five “Consider the Alternatives”: Feminism and Ambivalence in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• Conclusion Into the ’90s: Fictional Feminism and Feminist Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index