Questions

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I came to BC in 1978 and retired in June 2011, though I will still teach an occasional course here (one on the Novels of Dickens in fall 2011 for instance).  I was already very interested in feminism in the 1970’s; one of the first courses I taught here was called “Literature in a Man’s World.”  I discovered BC’s unique Introduction to Feminisms course, which was then meeting in the Women’s Resource Center, and helped to stabilize that long-lasting course.  I was part of a group that founded the Women’s Studies Program in the ‘80’s and served two terms in the ‘90’s as the first female chair of the English Department.

2. What are you most passionate about?

Well, off the top of my head I’d say -- literature itself, and more deeply, the pleasures and values of the reading-experience, the way reading stimulates and integrates curiosity, delight, learning, and self-scrutiny, and stimulates those contradictory/complementary desires both to be alone in a writer’s imagined world and to talk to other people about that world.  Eventually “literature” came to include books, plays, film, TV, and all the more contemporary visually intense forms of storytelling and world building in video games and other media.   I have a passion for traveling as well, and for Renaissance music and early rock, for medieval and nineteenth century painting, and for art deco jewelry.

3. How do you define “feminism”?

I guess I define it in several ways.  Historically feminism is an attitude that begins with the notion that BOTH women and men are endowed with qualities – intelligence, creativity, compassion and endurance, ambition and sexual desire – which are sometimes stereotypically assumed to be stronger in one gender than the other, and that cultural factors are probably more responsible than biological factors for the persistence of such stereotypes.  Academically, feminism is always interested in recovering from history examples of women (and men) whose intelligence or creativity or endurance or compassion has differed from the stereotype, or whose general “humanist” attitude has had a “feminist” aspect to it. And “theoretical” feminism is still engaged in interesting meditations on the linked – but not identical—concepts of “sexuality” and “gender.” The history of feminism during my lifetime has included efforts to better understand how all these factors might take somewhat different shapes in different national or racial cultures, efforts to better enable women (and men) to understand their own genuine individual talents and desires and to make choices of work and family life based more on this and less on culturally ascribed “roles,” and efforts to understand the long history of same-sex relationships whether viewed psychologically, sociologically, or as sexuality.

4. Why do you identify yourself as a feminist?

Because It is one of the key movements of my time, to which I’ve contributed and from which I’ve benefited, and because the arguments within feminism as well as those around or against feminism continue to provoke fruitful reflections on my life inside myself and with other people and with the world itself.

5. Who or what inspires you?

Like question 2, a pretty amorphous question.  I’m inspired by the example of other specific people, living and no-longer living, by precious examples of joyous creativity and difficult thinking and heroic action (I include under ‘action’ such things as Virginia Woolf’s long battle to understand life and create fiction, right up to the moment of her suicide), and by the belief, traceable probably to my early delight in the theological writing of Teilhard de Chardin, that I in my way and all of us in our time are part of a human effort that has a spiritual and divine aspect, to which it is good to “witness.”

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