Unknown Speaker 00:21 Morning Good Morning are allowed to get started to have enough time into 10 Good morning, welcome to the fifth now annual scholar and feminist conference. To open the conference, I'm very proud indeed to introduce the President of Barnard College, Jacqueline Anderson met the Unknown Speaker 01:59 last thing that anybody needs this morning is to hear from college presidents. The occasion of our getting together this year is to celebrate the creativity of women and the use of their minds. That seems a very small, and yet an absolutely eternal and overwhelming reality. And it is appalling, but after so many centuries, it should require a special conference, to draw attention to it, and to enhance our appreciation of one another's work and of ourselves. Nevertheless, that is indeed where we are. One thinks back to the Middle Ages, and remembers the difficulties of our early women scholars Sistina, Pisa, and others like her who are unnamed. And recognize that for women, it isn't only the court and the content, providing an environment where they could use their gifts, whether smalls or extraordinary. We recognize without human attitudes in human nature has not changed. We do indeed have a larger canvas on which paint. We believe that we're very lucky at Barnard College, and having a tradition in which women may function fully as scholars aren't artists, teachers, critics. And we know too, that that only begins the list of ways in which people can be creative. They, we hope that you will enjoy all of the aspect of creativity which are exploring in these discussions, which will go away enriched, unsure of your rights, and the privilege of being a creative individual. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 04:16 I'd like to just for a moment, mentioned that the planning committee for the conference and Jane Gould and Ellen McManus of the Women's Center are responsible for having these conferences happen and keep happening and shouldn't be really here with us. I'm Elizabeth minich, Academic Coordinator of this year's conference. Can you hear me? Is that better? Okay. I have two tasks before we get to this morning's panel. The first one is on behalf of the planning committee, although they can speak for themselves. So this is really just my summary of how we got to the topic for this year's conference. We did it in our usual, rather informal and basically collective way, thinking back over the task for conferences, thinking about our own work. And then if other feminist scholars and asking ourselves what it would be helpful now to think together about. We agreed that we continue to need to find lost women, that we need to continue revealing bias wherever we find it. And that critical analysis on the deepest level is necessary. Because there is a skew in our very mode of perceiving the world. A skew that excludes distorts and oppresses women. But while we agreed that this crucial restoration and critical work must proceed, we also found that we have another goal. And it seems to be time to, to deal with it together. We want to do our own work, to create as well as to criticize, and just how we are to create when we are increasingly aware that our intellectual tools and supports and rewards and even our largely unconscious images of the creative person, are the products of a culture that has exploited and devalued us, is the question we found before us. How can we create communist works? We asked ourselves a lot of questions as we explored this topic. How do we start? How can and should we work? What should we work on? Who do we work with? And who do we work for? How do we survive while we work? No experts on these topics suggested themselves, we're all experts in agonizing over them. And no one speaks for us all. It began to be clear that it was time to open up the topic, and to do so without the delusion that there was any one person or any group of people who were experts. So we decided to set up the conference to offer you and ourselves the chance to talk with feminists who are artists and activists, as well as scholars. Because on this level, before this problem, we all stand before the same blank page and empty canvas to steal honors title. Our differences as well as our similarities might we've got help to demystify the creative process for feminists, we have no pretensions of solving the problem, just making it a little less private, a little less isolating and frightening. We hope to create a feminist work we suspect is to call on resources excluding from the professional technical tools and discourse that constitutes specific academic disciplines. To reach back into our own experience, we discover sources of understanding and creativity, that all too often we've had to turn off with a great expenditure of energy in order to become proper, credentialed scholars, professionals. So we decided to open the conference with a panel rather than with formal papers and with panelists who are artists, as well as scholars. We want to be explorative and have a personal collective conversation. We don't want to just express conclusions. Everyone here, could and should participate in such an exploration. But since we can all talk at once, the members of the panel agreed to help us talk together later, by giving us something in common, what they will share with us. It's our hope than to raise questions to explore what is personal professional, shared public, private, personal as well as political dimensions of creative, creative feminist works. To turn it into something less mysterious. We're open to all of us. I will turn to the panel shortly. But I have one other task. Unknown Speaker 09:18 After the panel had gathered one evening, to prepare for the conversation that will be continued. Today I find myself with an assignment. Since it's a scary one. I've taken it on with both trepidation and some excitement. Please don't be misled by the fact that I have paper in front of me. That's a mark of fear. Or that I will sometimes sound as if I'm making pronouncements. I really am not. What follow are reflections, not conclusions. It's not even quite an essay. It's more a series of suggestions. The one question that we found ourselves faced with that we didn't really quite want to answer was What is it feminist work? You see why this is a frightening topic. We've avoided defining such works, although we think we recognize them and sometimes find and lose friends on the basis of a shared or violated understanding. I find this to say the least an interesting situation. We won't define this thing we want to create and share not because we're lazy or cowardly, we're none of those. We have a real and I think, fully justified disinclination to limit the notion we have of what makes it work feminist. I think it's worth thinking about our disinclination and not just backing off from it. To define feminist works would not only create friction among us, not always a bad thing, but would indeed close off possibilities. After all, everything is what it is by not being something else. The negativity and exclusivity that are part of defining worry us, and I think rightly so, on one level, the dangerous in defining delimiting something, or basic problems and coming to know anything. The particular The thing is it is cannot even be spoken. The minute it is named, it's grouped with other things, and its uniqueness lesson. As Gertrude Stein once said, A rose is a rose is a rose. She wanted simply to point at the Rose and say, let it be there it is, it's not like something else have the courage to confront it for what it is. She felt as we do the limiting involved in defining something, fitting it into a framework, losing perhaps what's special and precious. It's a sign of the importance of feminist words to us that we hesitate to put a definition between ourselves and the works in their own terms. It also indicates that we believe the types the categories we presently have by which to define it may indeed violate it, or at least be inappropriate. I take that to be true. It indicates something about the categories we find ourselves with. Another fear we have is I think that something defined becomes a type threatens to become a standard to be judged or judged against. If we know this is a feminist work, it enters into some kind of competition with other feminists works. We tend not to want this to happen, and thereby again, in our reluctance reveal a positive position. We want to encourage, not discourage difference, to offer support to each other, not competition. Our hesitation to define feminist works then reveals that we don't want to close off our creativity but to increase it, that we don't trust our present categories of thought to be adequate to it, that we believe we need to confront feminist works as openly as possible, and that we want to work together Unknown Speaker 13:06 to turn to the positive side. What happens when we think about feminist works without rushing to define them. The fact of the matter is that we do recognize feminist works. And we do try to live up to some standard. We have however vaguely in mind, we recognize that we recognize and that word is something important. We find in feminist work, something familiar, something that names something for us that we knew, but did not know how to speak. I think that's the starting point. But it has to catch in it. It leaves open the possibility that any woman will recognize a feminist work. And our experience sadly, tells us that may not be so some people's perceptions of what is the feminist work understanding of feminist work seemed to be better than others. Some women, again, sadly, aren't feminist, does that then argue against the idea that feminist works speak to the unspoken dimension of women's experience? I think not. Just as we have to learn to see art, to hear music, to read poems, and can do so better or less well, we have to be willing and able to recognize feminist work. Engaging in a discussion about a feminist work with someone who has not thought about feminism is very much like looking at a painting with someone who's offended. Because an abstract tree doesn't look like a tree. The world in which we live not only doesn't prepare us to recognize the feminist work, it positively works against it. It punishes those who create them at the least by withholding acceptance. Precisely because the forms of our world are not those of a world where women are included and are equal. Such a world keeps us from being able to resound with a voice that speaks to us to truly do feminist works after all, have been labeled crazy for centuries. It's one of their distinguishing marks, distinguishing them from works including works by women whose thought or vision remained safely within the same everyday constructs of a sexist society. Yet if we will, we can recognize these works even if at first we can understand them because we haven't the concepts the language that would allow us to, instead we have to let loose be willing to feel, to feel what we have learned not to do in order to survive. So, I would suggest that the recognition called forth by feminists work is of something remembered by can play with words again, re member, put together again, for us from the depths of our own unnamed on thought about repressed experience as women, such colleagues to us make the world shake the whole world, even if we don't at first understand just how far they reach. Feminist works do not speak to or for a subculture or just add a different point of view to those with which we are familiar. Women have always been here, every society every race every class, Rembrandt may have shaken the bourgeois world when you painted beggars as Pope's, but a feminist painter can check the bourgeois world, the beggars world and Rembrandt's world. A feminist work is not more particular than other experimental, innovative works. It is more universal. That's one of its marks. So a feminist work is familiar in a way that goes below and overreaches the conventional the stereotype, moving us to a level that is recognizable, though we didn't know we knew it. And it is a universal impact. One small insight from a feminist work sends ripples through health, instructional, conceptual and emotional structures, opening fissures for feelings as well as thoughts we may not know how to deal with. It can make us mad as well as frightened. That is, if we haven't already become hooked on the exhilaration of finding thoughts and feelings free. That it angers are exhilarates us is another distinguishing mark. The struggle of feminist artists, scholars workers of all sorts is then if I met all right, to see think and feel not in some mysterious new ways, but unfamiliar but unvoiced unshown ways ways that those who have at least begun questioning convention stereotypes etiologies, produced by and supporting a sexist world will recognize and take up Unknown Speaker 17:37 as Simone de Beauvoir put it, real passion asserts the subjectivity of its involvement, a subjectivity that is not private, although it is someone persons, but it's a disclosure of being no a disclosure, not a creation. I emphasize this idea of disclosure rather than creation and recognition rather than definition, because I think they help break through the mystified notion of the creator, the artist, we often have the Creator some kind of demigod engaged in something that excludes the rest of us before whom we must bow. That kind of relationship is not what we seek to have with feminists works. Devo hearts point is that works at issue from passion as feminist works do reveal an individual and unique subject subjectivity in a shared world. They bridge the public and the private with the movement of passionate thought. In doing so they invite us to join in to believe that we too, can create these that are some touchstones by which we recognize not divine feminist works. They are dangerous to accepted sexist stereotypes and ideologies in a very inclusive and basic way. They reveal the creator in a way that includes and inspires us, rather than calling on us to submit and admire. They move where feelings and thought lead even if in so doing that first appear odd. The issue from someone who's speaking for herself, herself speaks to and for us all, if we're both willing and able to listen. Obviously, then a feminist work is not just about women, or by a woman or appealing to all women, or the advocate of a particular point of view. It could be all of these things. And if it had not broken through conventions and stereotypes and theories, and a way that made us as audience think and feel freely and for ourselves, it would not, I think, be feminist. I began trying to think through what makes something feminist one evening after I'd spent hours listening to some people I had thought were intelligent, interesting people discuss women's lives what they said was obvious super Visual and completely uninteresting. I'd heard it all before on television, read it in magazines and loved it. I was very upset by this experience. And I realized that I was upset not because of the content of what they said, Lord knows, we've all heard that before, but by the quality of thinking that they were revealing, and I realized that one of the things feminist works have in common, however different they are in content form, and message is a quality of intelligence. I believe this is so because they are the product of minds and spirits that have gone through the conventions that are questioned and felt more freely than the society in which we live, day by day normally allows their works that whatever else they do call on us individually and collectively, to think and feel more freely and more fully than before. Because in breaking conventions, they somehow begin to reinstate to give back to us to remember some part of our experience that has been left out in a world that thinks human and man are synonymous. They give a glimpse of a human intelligence, a whole intelligence not or anyhow a little less limited to the half categories, half of you that presently hold sway, claiming to be the whole view and so doing they simply are more intelligent. And who can define say beforehand, what such Fuller and freer intelligences may create? To do so would be to hamper them. Let me finish by saying again that although we cannot define feminist works, cannot know them, categorize them before we meet them, we can recognize them, when we do encounter them. As we recognize, although we could not have defined beforehand, friends, and people we have just met people who approach us freely, fully as equals, expecting that we will respond in kind. As Hannah aren't wrote, friendship is not intimately personal, but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world. Feminist works, I believe, are the works of such friendship, and call on us to continue to be able to recognize them when we're fortunate enough to encounter them. With that, I will stop and introduce our friends on the panel. Unknown Speaker 22:52 Introduce them in the order in which they all they will speak. They will each speak for 15 minutes, and then to each other. And then we will open up the microphone. So if you have questions or comments, please do keep track. We would like to hear from you, too. We'll start with Eve Marian poet and playwright. And then Nancy Miller Mellon fellow in the humanities at Columbia University, and harmony Hammond, artist and member of the heresies collective. Unknown Speaker 23:29 I would just like to Unknown Speaker 23:30 say a couple of preliminary remarks when we were having the planning committee meeting, Unknown Speaker 23:36 which was the most pleasant meeting I've ever had. Is that better? Unknown Speaker 23:48 Can you hear now? Okay. I said I just wanted to make a few brief preliminary remarks when we were having a planning meeting, which was the best planning meeting I have ever been to because I felt such a sense of camaraderie with everyone present there and continue to one of the things we talked about was space and we are very upset. By this space by this gymnasium, we hope that the air will circulate but the main thing about it is that we are sitting here and you are sitting there which we did not want of course, what we wanted was for some wonderful feminist artists to design us an ever widening and ever encompassing circle. That would not cost any money. That's a future assignment. But I I just want to let you know about that. The other thing that I want to tell you is that I am absolutely terrified. It is difficult for me to be in academia. I always feel as though I'm some kind of imposter and I And I have taught very little I taught some writing courses in the late 60s at City College. And because I am naturally a poet and feel a little uncomfortable in the habitat as the prose world. In order to help myself, what I'm going to do is present my remarks in the form of a parenthesis. I'm going to give you a little poem at the beginning and a little poem at the end. So you'll know when I finished. And it's the first day that I taught at City College. This was in the late 60s. And after 10 minutes, I realized that I was totally drained. I was like one of those eight timers where the Sun runs down and all of the white and red corpuscles had gone completely out of my body. I had taught them the accumulated wisdom of all of my years, and I still had 50 minutes to go. So I wrote this for myself, and it's called the first day of class City College. I sit down and crimp lead pulling my skirt below my knees. Don't let them think I'm trying to keep up with various smiling and my voice too loud. I say correct me if I mispronounce your name, and mine's the same as the dictionary although I answer to Miriam Marian Merriman au and smiling louder. No, I'm not a professor. No. Nor doctor. I'm afraid I'm just a patient. Better call me plain old Mrs. scanning the room for sweet reproof at my ever passing for playing. No takers. Thomas mod once said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The smile is staining my armpits. On the floor, I do my utmost to frown I say. Short Story technique has one thing in common with all other forms of writing it cannot be taught. But as long as we're here together let's try to learn from each other showing the smile blobs up again. I can't hold it down. No wonder they hate me already. I hate myself but not as much as I hate them. To my right, a student with motorcycle streaming hair and a large button on his lapel that spells John Luke go dark. I can't stop smiling. It's a disease as I tell him. masculine feminine and weekend are two of my favorite films. The student grumps he hasn't the same disease. Another button displays invest in Vietnam send your son's not dogs. I smile ironically, to show my sympathy. There must be some pills I can take maybe tape up my mouse at night. The next button helps me though. Dracula sucks socks Unknown Speaker 28:06 I address myself to the dark green window blinds. I only animated audience flapping against the wall. I say. As Gorky observed, the cook doesn't have to sit in a pot in order to make a good soup. Still, all I would add it's usually better to write about what you know. And stare at the monster button. A few Snickers for my reward. Glory, glory, the red eyed girl walks out allergy, allergies, pregnancy, boredom. I swooned back in my chair, vanity unto death till she returns a case of simple kidneys. darling girl could wish you for my daughter. I read them Isaac Babel. They listen, life is good. Unknown Speaker 29:09 And Elizabeth alluded to the fact that there we were sitting with a cat on the table and for a while trying not to talk about the cat of what is a feminist work. So I feel I must take it up to a degree. And I think it is simpler to try to figure out what is non feminist work. She tried to shake the space. So these are some notes that I made. I think overall, non feminist work, adheres to patriarchy fully determined values. The shorthand for patriotically determined is PD and it is a little sign that I have made for myself that I keep over my desk and I try to keep everywhere I go because I think We really must be aware of it at all time and it's something that we tend to lose sight of it's like smog or like vodka tasteless and smell us, but it is around us. And I think that we should always know that we are living in that PDE world. So I think non feminist work, first of all adheres to those patriarchal Lee determined values, we needn't go into a long description of what those are for a group like this, simply that we know the male is a superior being with a natural right to rule the male as the active principle male is metal etc, etc, etc, as the king and not I sit. In the non feminist work world with patriarchal Lee determined values there are it is the world of three P's I will not say the other key. But any organic males can figure out what that is. The three are the patriarchal Lee determined rules of paid, published and praised by the male establishment. I think that a non feminist work, in order to be taken seriously by that world, must be paid for in their coin of the realm, which means that you must go by the economic standards of the white male establishment. And all of us whatever work we have done, if it has not been paid, in their coin of the realm are not taken seriously. One of the great traumas of my life was when I had my first poem published in a magazine and I was so high I had invented the airplane, I had invented any drug before it was needed. And my mother, with whom I had a great deal of rapport as well as conflict said to me, how much did you get paid for it, and I was terribly wounded because, of course, I had been paid no money. And I felt as though she had slapped me in the face. So we must be paid for in the coin of their realm, if we are going to live in the world of non-feminists works, second published, one must be published by a respectable that means male run, press, male run gallery, male conducted orchestra, male, rented space, male conducted University, whatever it is, that is what published in means in the patriarchy determined world. And the third is to be praised by the male established critics. Now, in that world, one can perhaps be queen for a day, or become the darling of the day. There are those who are taking some time as exceptions, we can all name them from time to time, there is a woman who has taken off, and we are told, Well, how can you object to this review of what you consider a feminist book, after all, it was given to a woman to review. And certainly, if a woman is going to pan another woman's book, there must be something wrong with it, we, as the male establishment are absolved of responsibility. So there are feminist impersonators. These Queens for a day are taken off as the exception to the rule that women can't be funny, that women can't be politically astute, etc. And etc. Well, just to give you a notion of non feminist work now, what I think in a positive way, feminist work can be and this is extremely sketchy. It's presumptuous of me to tell you it's sketchy, because you'll see feminist work differs from merely work by women artists. I think Unknown Speaker 34:21 sometimes when I lecture to school systems on trying to do away with sexist material in the curriculum, and I talk about feminine behavior versus masculine behavior, and I say, and I do believe totally that feminine behavior is anything which is done by somebody who has female sex chromosomes, so it doesn't matter what it is. But I do think that feminist work is not merely worked by women artists. I consider and I'm in trouble with a panel and I'm in trouble with you. But I must say that I have this crude belief In the feminist work is political advocacy. Whether it is overt or covert, is covering for covert anyway. You know what I mean? It is propagandistic. Perhaps sometimes on a less conscious level than some obviously propaganda stick works. But there is in it an awareness of the patriarchy and patriarchy determined values. And I believe that there is a discontent with those values, it is more than an awareness of it, it is more than just putting the tree in the painting. To go back to Elizabeth's reference, I think one must see certain things about that tree. Either one must see that it is the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, which was given to us by Patriarch really determined writers. Or we see that there is some fruit on the tree, which perhaps is not making sense to us, and that will poison us if we take it. So feminist work, doesn't need necessarily to seek to topple the system. But it has to some way reveal its inner springs or inner workings. A gothic romance is not a feminist work, even though it can show women as passive and men as pillars of the establishment. So to a degree, one could make a case for the fact that the plot in a gothic novel, and the characters in it are showing you exactly what life is like under the patriarchy. But it is not a feminist work. The other point that I want to make about feminist work is that it doesn't exclude men. Some feminist work may exclude men, but it need not. But it does not reinforce the power of men in a patriarchal Lee determined society. So therefore, the roles in some way, have shifted. Well, I just want to leave those for whatever rumination we can do. And I thought that I would just like to give you a slight inside view of the sources for what I think are my own feminist work. And I think it is hard for me to separate out work that I consider overtly feminist from cover, like, I think probably most of my work is feminist, although I found one book, and I went through it. And I thought, I really do believe that if anybody read that, without my name on the cover, they would not know that it was by a woman. And that is the Nixon poems. And I think it's interesting in a way that it should be that book, I felt that I could not survive. And I mean, that truly that I could not survive as a physical being with just being president. And so I use the magic of poems to try to get through that period as one uses the magic of poetry all the time to get through pain or pleasure. But I felt that I had really transcend transcended or subsumed whatever it was my own sex in that that the politics have absolutely become foremost. I think that the sources for my own feminist work, by and large, are two persons to whom I owe so much that I never can express at all. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the many lives that she led in her overcoming her bourgeois background, in daring to do what I think is your mark of seriousness as a, an artist, daring to slip on a banana peel and make a goddamn fool of yourself. Unknown Speaker 39:08 Charlotte Perkins Gilman for being so acutely aware of economics in our lives of the role of money, and our individual households where women are always going around in addition to whatever they do, doing the housework and the shift work and everything else. So they are the deep sources of my feminist work as I consider that poets like Breck pray there and Aden are probably ancestors for me and other aspects. In my feminist work, I feel that what I am looking for, first of all, that I'm seeking roots for myself and for my sex. And I think probably in my own work, I find that the deepest in a book like Growing Up Female in America, I was So, this may when I was growing up that all of the biographies that I had look to for role models seem to consist of Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale. Unknown Speaker 40:11 So I had to Unknown Speaker 40:13 seek out roots for myself. The second point is an attempt to create role models, where I have deliberately written books for children like mommy's work girls and boys, boys and girls. Third, I have attempted to bridge the sexual gap because I feel that it is very difficult for us to bridge that gap of understanding in works like the double dead and a husband's notes about her and the club. I think that new forms of art by women can become feminist art. I think we can see this in ways that we might not think of really as artworks. And the first way that I think of it is taking dimensions of our lives and changing them so that I think as women carve time out of their lives, that this is a work of art, to find ways in their lives, as they are mothers as they are homemakers as they are still, we are still subservient in that PD world, so that it feeds to ingenious ways of using materials and space as well as time. Secondly, the new form of art by women that can become feminist art, I think, the cooperative forms that we have evolved out of consciousness raising, so that we have sharing and new communes, of whether they are art comings or literary groupings, or exchanging experiences of a rape experience that happened to me and to you, or a feeling of insects that we had or feelings of menses and menopause, whatever it is that group that we are able to give to one another because in some ways, we have not been as frozen and locked out of our sensibilities as men. Third, I think elevating into art, the daily artworks and artifacts of women's lives. So that now sewing, decorating, nesting, and the giving and flowing of affection. I think that this is one area that we must consider can somehow enrich our lives and come into the world of art. And the first point I think, is the celebration and knowledge of women's bodies in new erotic art. That is non violent will not have time for the enclosing poem. Thank you very much. Unknown Speaker 42:53 Okay, oh, I'm sorry, I'm a foster this is a failure reliever. And it is what I think of as not restoring women to the place but trying to think of women in new ways of failure reliever. As I went under, my whole life flashed before me and I saw I had always been going down. I had always volunteered to be under sinking to my knees naive green girl, pining for love and the lack of Hamlet never knew me. Not ever. Even with our bodies draped around each other. He could scarcely place who I was. He looked right through me. fondling my tits, keeping the hard writing going. The hard writing fuck that was never for me but for ambition revenge hole for his father's death, the thrill of the kill the way of a man whose climax will come only with other men. He would barely notice that I was gone. I was drowning myself, for nothing. In rage against my waist itself. I burst from the core of bio green darkness ripped off the wet drapery dragging me down the sentimental garland of flowers a noose from which I shook my hair loose, and like the first creature emerging from the sea on the first morning of the world, I gasped upon the shore, began to grow, stood upright and walked naked, solitary, free Unknown Speaker 45:00 It feels uncomfortable in academia, I feel uncomfortable. Well are you about my discomfort if I Unknown Speaker 45:27 try again. Unknown Speaker 45:31 What I was saying was that if he feels uncomfortable in academia, I feel uncomfortable being the academic flanked by two artists. And I'm not at all sure that what I have to say is not permeated with p d values. I'd like to begin with a few. I'm sitting on top. I'd like to begin with a few lines from an essay on women's writing by a Sikh suit that was published in Science Fiction speak now, can you hear this, listen to a woman speaker. Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering. If she hasn't painfully lost her when she doesn't speak. She throws her trembling body forward. She lets Velop herself. All of her passes into her voice. And it's with her body that she vitally supports the logic of her speech. She lays herself there. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking. She signifies it with her body. In a certain way, she describes what she's saying. Because she doesn't deny her drives the passion part they have in speaking her speech, even when theoretical or political is never simple, or linear or Objectify. Generalized, she draws her story into history. We have been asked to speak personally today, personally, but not idiopathic Li. We have been asked if I may rephrase the request to inscribe that rhetorical figure. women writers are said to manipulate so inadequately selectively making a part stand for the whole, a first handicap. Academics Moreover, have the reputation of being poor personal speakers. They confuse the account of a working life with a curriculum Vita. I will try to overcome that second handicap by saying something at least for starters, about the grid through which I perceived my work, and the metaphors of the working process the work in progress. After that, I will feel free to return to the protective categories of the academic paradigm. It is the fashion and French literary circles by which I am vicariously contaminated, to inquire of a speaker or alternatively, if one is the speaker, to identify the locus of one's discourse, to name the place out of which one speaks, or as they are set to say in California to say where one is coming from. It is no less common in feminist circles, at least since Virginia Woolf to transcode the metaphor and to speak of one space and that is where I shall begin. I live in a one bedroom apartment gets better Unknown Speaker 49:09 or worse. Unknown Speaker 49:11 The one bedroom in question has been separated into two equal areas by a room divider of standing bookcases. On one side of the divide is my bed and my TV, on the other my desk, more bookcases and a reading chair. A telephone negotiates that awkward politician as does my body. I devised this obstacle course so that I would not have to look at my books when I went to sleep and woke up and the obvious corollary but I would not be able to see my bed from my desk. What bearing does this have upon creating feminist works? I don't know exactly. In fact, I would be hard pressed Determine whether I'm speaking as a feminist, a woman, an academic, a writer, or your garden variety erotic. Nevertheless, that typography has everything to do with my experience of what I do, which is a battle to establish a balance of power between the two major poles of my life, my bed and my desk. I have, I have a room of my own then, that room is inhabited by two weary antagonists, vertical Professor Miller, and writes productively. I'm horizontal Nancy, who watches television from her bed, and main lines into the telephone. On a good day, the pair does not seem incompatible. The bed is occupied for legitimate eight hours, the desk were virtuous five, and all is right both in the room and with the world. On bad days, however, that ratio is skewed resolutely in favor of the big the typewriter is routed by TV programs to appalling Canadian public. And Professor Miller, that recent and fragile construct becomes a fainting guilty memory, vanquished by an archaic and hence more powerful adversary. I will return in closing to my room and to my roar. back for a moment, I would like to talk about what I do when I'm vertical. When, when Elizabeth minich asked me to participate in this panel, I was in the process of teaching my first overtly feminist course, and writing my first overtly feminist criticism. What that means in terms of attention is that after several years of trying as discreetly as possible to subvert the unconscious assumptions of undergraduate men and required courses at Columbia College, a most onboarding task, I can assure you, I was teaching graduate and undergraduate women in a post devoted to French women writers. At the same time, I was finishing an essay on French women autobiographers, I will clarify what I mean by feminist criticism in a moment. I mentioned these curricular items, both to situate myself for you in time, and to explain to you and to myself, what led me to take the mildly anxiety producing step of speaking here today about my activities as a feminist critic, anxiety producing not so much, because I have never spoken in public. But because I have been to the conferences that preceded this one, I even ran one. And I know from that experience that someone always says nothing new. We've heard that before my paranoia, the most prevalent form of psychopathology at Columbia. Is such it's such that I have already anticipated that someone will say that today, it's now already said, let me say them from the outset that I am prepared to assume my belated Miss anxiety producing too because I have extremely mixed feelings about what it may or may not need to be a feminist critic. So why did I accept? I could cite my megalomania, where my masochism. But I think in the final analysis, I accepted for men and mimic reasons to float another figure, I accepted on the assumption that I was probably very much like other feminist critics, and why shouldn't die, as well as another say how I perceive that struggle since struggle? It is an afternoon workshop at last year's conference, a distinction was made between feminist critique and feminist criticism that I would like to take up briefly again today, roughly speaking under the rubric of feminist critique, combos that is of literature that focus on the texts of male authors, but better to uncover and demystify the workings of what in France is now called Phallocentric discourse. Unknown Speaker 54:09 My own published work comes under that heading as opposed to a feminist critique. Feminist criticism takes as its object writing by women, its project is both archaeological and reevaluating, the better to reclaim and you read the specifically female inscriptions of culture. I've tried in my recent work, both in the classroom and at the typewriter, to say something about the specificity of women's writing. And I would like to say that the experience has given me pause. On the one hand, it is very exciting to abandon male for female on the other, it is fairly terrifying to edge one's way toward the precipice of theory. By theory, in this instance, I mean a coherency series of statements capable of accounting for the production of women Is writing and of describing the writing itself. But why you might ask, does reading women's writing immediately translate itself into a compulsion to make theory? Well, if a person whose function in this world is not to be a literary critic, besides to read a woman writer, that person has only to decide after the fact whether she or he likes the work in question. If, however, the reader not having Virginia Woolf recommended income of 500 pounds a year, earns her living by writing and talking about texts in an institution of higher learning. That reader has a rather more arduous task to perform that reader, as she inscribed the critical act within the academy must not only justify the choice of the work in the first place, because most women's writing has no obvious that is canonical claim to consideration. She must also for political and intellectual reasons, at least I think she must have she has to survive. Be prepared to say something about the writing, while women's writing and this is the stumbling block, and a particularly awkward one to bypass. One begins with the assumption that women's lives are different from men's in some irreducible way, a bottom line assumption as far as I'm concerned, and that difference and that that difference would have to affect imaginative structures in some material, hence, decipherable way. One then begins to look for difference. I was impacted inscription of difference. I was engaged upon that quest with my students last fall. One as I said earlier, Elizabeth minich, asked me to speak and thought mid term in a moment of hubris and extraordinary naivety, that when the semester was over, and answer, if not, the answer, would be insight. It was not. At best I can say that we had a close encounter of the third time. We all felt that something was out there, it was flashing at us, even if we could not present empirical evidence, which would attest to the existence of another world, another experience, and most important, another modality of language. What we did not arrive at was any consensus as to the nature of the encounter, nor what might govern the imaginative and linguistic processes of the inhabitants of that world. And that twin failure was exceedingly disheartening for how will we to produce a theory, when we could very articulate what it was that we had experienced, like me backtrack a moment to the critique, criticism, opposition. When in the performance of critique, I work on many effects, I proceed, as though are confronted with an artichoke. I slowly and systematically remove the leaves cut away the privilege of until I arrive at the heart. This patient removal of layers is rewarded by the overdetermined discovery of the core. And what could be more gratifying. Once the artichoke is dismantled. You can see what you have. And you can describe it, textual politics. When I work on women's texts, I begin as though I were dealing with an artichoke. But I must confess that by the time I finished, I generally feel that my artichoke has turned into an onion. The layers are indeed there. But what is at the center. Unknown Speaker 58:40 desire in me to theorize is not unlike the impulse to artichoke, if I may, coin verb and to be interrogated. The notion of stripping away layers is after all associated in our culture with a male erotic strip to the final layer, veil or piece to fall away is the cache sex the secular fig leaf. Therefore, to go with the artichoke metaphor, which I really inflicted upon myself, is to embrace a masculine is analysis. To the extent that different texts call for different modalities of reading, it is not surprising that the fallow go centric text, you miss it a practice that both reveals and reduces. Therefore, it is perfectly inevitable that given my training, I should get off on the artichoke and it's hard to feel at ease with the onion to enjoy its onion this would mean accepting a radical decentering and reorganization of pleasure, finding pleasure not in the revelation of a center, but in the process itself of peeling away of layers. But anyone who has ever dealt with an onion in what my parents like to call the real world has already perceived To the inherent flaw in my opposition, while an onion is indeed constituted by layers, beyond removing the brittle out outer skin, one does not peel onions. To perceive that an onion has layers, one has to cut into it, slice, chop or dice. And for those incisions as we will no one pays the price of tears. What I am trying to bring out here, in view of a conclusion is quite simple. And it is this, that the articulation of difference cannot be taken undertaken with old metaphors and familiar recipes, but that for the time being, I have found no new ones that work to my satisfaction. I have found no new metaphors that is metaphors I can announce in public. Mainly I think because I am booked as honor more has diagnosed it so accurately in the polemic number one on the male approval desire filter, abbreviated ma D, which I do PD, which as she puts it in scrubs by quiet magic women to sing proper client tunes, or father lover Piper, who says he has the secret. I've had to mutilate the line for my argument but my apologies. It is the same MACD that led me to split my room in half. And D valorize. The bedside. Ma D again, that makes me feel skeptical about onions anxious about theorizing and nostalgia for my artichoke days. I would like to respond to honors poll for poems women. And to take down my room divider, my photo sanitaire, I would like to, but am I ready for details? First, can Unknown Speaker 1:02:07 you tell me, can you hear me when I speak? At 34 it sometimes seems amazing to me that I'm still making art. I always feel that I'm not working at all. But when I sort of turn around and catch myself by surprise, I see all this work I've done. Like many women, I always think I'm never doing enough for a woman to make art and patriarchal culture is no easy matter. It is not only considered an active act, but an aggressive one, a refusal to participate in male ritual. Those women who take the work seriously, are punished by isolation and separation from other women to focus on their work, to even continue making it women have often had to remove themselves from the world of women. Between us and Georgia, and Agnes and the weeds is a silence as wide as the desert, an absence of touching. This is a choice I grew up with but did not want to choose. And my story is not unique and it's a story of many women. Feminism has broken the silence has given me the intellectual and creative support which has not only allowed me to keep working, but helped me to develop work which comes from my experiences as a woman in society. But let me backtrack a bit too. As a lower middle class teenager, I went to college in Haider, Illinois because that's where I got a scholarship at 19 I got married through seven years of marriage, while I worked full time as a waitress and office clerk and artists and a gallery director and one choice choice jar accounting toilet paper for Army survival kits. I painted I painted large pregnant women Nast mothers and daughters, and later androgynous figures and hermaphrodites. I moved from traditional glazes and scumbling earth tones of ochre and umber to the garish and McCobb a visual Our Lady of the flowers mother and daughter on Carnival day, lover and I only the canvas head but one person. I could not paint male figures. My husband and artists stop painting. unsupported by the male dominated academic and art world and embarrassed by the emotional outpouring in my work. I removed myself from the painting and began to do proper Hardhead shaped canvases like a good artist in the 60s should little by little, I was beginning to realize that the art world wasn't an alternative to the middle class society in hometown, Illinois where I grew up. But that went in. And I was to learn later, especially mothers and lesbians are equally oppressed in the world of culture. I knew that if I wanted to be taken seriously, as an artist, I had to paint what the boys painted. And I had to do it bigger and better. And I proceeded to do just that. Slowly, but consciously, I painted myself out of my work. Although I could not articulate it, there was some level one was, I knew that the working was necessary to mine survival, that the pain literally held me together. A strong relationship was formed between me and my work, then, not in reaction to the bad circumstances of my life. Rather, the work was a focus, the place where I confronted myself I learned about myself, the work got me through those circumstances, working felt good. And I learned that it was like dreaming or exercise, I learned that my work, like the lovers would not go away, and to trust the process of going into the unknown, getting scared, and coming out on the other side. My work, like my body would not take me someplace, I could not handle Unknown Speaker 1:06:27 the work of many women, my age was personal. But we learned to hide this aspect for fear that the work would be ignored or ridiculed. Underneath were internal feelings of not having the right to work in the first place, and the fear that our work would be taken away from us. So we hit our sources and disguise the meaning of our imagery, informal concerns. When I moved to New York in 69, I went through big changes in my life and work, I was pregnant and divorced. In addition to living in a new city, I knew that I would always be making art of one sort or another, and that I wanted it to have something to do with me. Now if this was true, true, it's going to have to change but I didn't know what form the work would take. It wasn't until 71 When I began to meet with a group of women interested in exploring the relationship of feminism art work, that my sources and processes were uncovered and validated. Never before had I talked about how my work function for me, the work was a center. And when we talked about other things in the group, that was always in terms of how they affected the work or our ability to work. Using consciousness raising techniques, we started with our personal associations or the way a piece made us feel, and then how these associations were implemented through visual means. The right to make work was assumed as was the choice of content. So the work was critically dealt with on its own terms. criticism was aimed at helping each of us make the best possible work to achieve and honesty and clarity. We talked about many things work problems, our headaches, the need for naps, and we're working, getting to a place in the work where you think you have to stop power, competition, anger, failure, and success. We talked about why we couldn't work both the natural and unnatural silences that Tillie Olsen speaks of in her article Why writers don't write. We gave ourselves permission to not always know what we're doing and to do many different kinds of things. In the art world, one is never supposed to admit being influenced by another artist. As though there were too few ideas to go around professional competitiveness, pretense creation is equal to the Immaculate Conception. We found that context the way we influenced each other as well as the larger feminist movement affected our work, and it became very important to acknowledge this fact. And once doing so, it became part of the meaning of the work and the work cease to be so isolating. Feminists are symbolizes the confronting and gaining control of one's own life, as opposed to control over the lives of others, a theme brilliantly discussed by Carol Duncan and several articles now the aesthetics of power modern erotic art, another article male domination and virility and 20th century art. The feminist work process is not linked to not separate from the meaning of the word. Connecting was the function and meaning of women's traditional arts and is consciously a function of feminist art today, but we must be aware of merely taking women's art from the past and recreating it out of context. Making art simply is not that easy. We can draw on a woman's artistic tradition, but we must be able to move out from life eyes we should not limit ourselves to narrow preconceived definitions of feminist imagery. The history of the patriarchal art world has been the history of definitions and boundaries, the artist is special and in his own unique space, as the audience or as a certain kind of artist, you are on the outside. And those who have not been into making white western male art have been on the outside, women are on the outside. However many of us are questioning if we even want in getting crafts into fine art museums is not the answer. When critics talk of feminist art as the avant garde of the modernist tradition, they miss the point. Feminist Art is outside of something other than the modernist tradition of art. We are exploring not one but many areas of feminist art making, and it is not a linear process. There is not one central theory of feminist art, and I don't know of any feminist who wants one. Unknown Speaker 1:11:02 Our definitions of feminist art must include process change and growth. Labels are a limitation only if you make them so. The beauty of the unlimited mind or whatever it is, Martin calls the untroubled mind is a vital precondition of discovery and creativity. labels in themselves are separate from the word sources for matriarchal history, women's traditional arts crafts, techniques and materials, primitivism, decoration, central imagery, redefining one's body and relationship to nature, women's sexual imagery, journalistic marketing, these are just some of the things that appear over and over in our work. Now it can be argued that men to work with these concerns or that it was feminism that made it acceptable to work in these areas, which is what I think is true. However, the real point is that these ideas do reoccur over and over in feminist visual art and because of that they are of interest to us. We should not make assumptions about who makes art, who sees it and what its function is to be but remove aesthetic hierarchies, and allow the different experiences of women to be accessible. This will happen by demystifying and de privatizing the creative process, when making art as well as owning art ceases to be a privilege. And the art making process itself is available to different to win and have different classes, races and geographic bathrooms, we will begin to see the political potential of creative expression. The realities of how much artists made the choices of materials and techniques used is something so basic and revealing that it is often mystified rather than talked about. Feminism has provided community. But art is affected by several other overlapping conditions necessary for work, money for materials, workspace and time for work. To meet these conditions, it is necessary to validate your own situation and needs and not get caught thinking that you should be working in a certain manner, or that you need a certain kind of space or time. Part of the reason I use rags in my work is that they're free and they're not precious, and they're not easily damaged. I used to get them from winning friends when they cleaned out their closets. But now I get them from the street. In fact, my daughter and I go red picking together. We are both shopping bag artists. I like to live and work in the same space. This integrates my art with all the other things I do in my life. Also, I need to spend time with my work. Know it well before letting others see it. Sometimes the work has such a power, I feel it might do something on its own, so I like to keep an eye on it. Unknown Speaker 1:13:54 Right now I sleep on top of my painting. Art is a surplus commodity in this society, and is not shared or used by the majority of people. Artists are not part of the paid workforce. Like most artists, I cannot support myself directly off of my work. So I try to find a job for 20 hours a week. And that way I can still have time for working. I'd rather earn less money and have more time to put into my work. I've noticed that being a mother affects the way I use time that I use it differently than other women friends who do not have children. I use every little scrap of it. continuous time is a privilege for me. But it's important. I feel best if I can work a little every day. Otherwise I lose my train of thought. There's an image in Tai Chi each one of pulling silk from a cocoon. You must pull it evenly and consistently without stopping or jerking or the thread will break and you must start over. People have different work habits Instead of doing a series of small sketches, and then one or two major works, I sort of plod along slowly doing many pieces and several kinds of work simultaneously. For me, the doing is as important as the final object, for it is imaging that my mind flows that I find out about myself. The work is where the fragments come together. taking yourself seriously means making a commitment to your work, even when it gets rough and scary, or you feel depressed. There's a point in the creative process that's hard to talk about. It's the point of transformation and means giving up control and self. And therefore being in control and finding self. That is simultaneously feeling very powerful, and feeling the power of something much larger. It is important to stay with your work, then let it take over for a little while. This point of creativity is the shamans edge, the point where the form becomes real. I say point because you can't stay there very long through a few pieces maybe for once an idea gets developed, you must be willing to leave it safety change with it or move on. Survival does not merely mean money, but psychologically surviving as an artist, survival is continuing to work. I am very good at undermining myself. So I must be suspicious of my own reasons for not working things that I could come up with like it's too personal, it's been done before looks too much like somebody else's work. It doesn't fit in with my oeuvre, all these things that come up with, which are really defenses, which just keep me from working, there's nothing productive about them. So I say learn what's helpful to you and what isn't what affects you negatively and keeps you from working. This might take the form of professional approval, showing or deadlines, other activities or relationships. Be selective. Your studio is an important place, and it's a privilege for anyone to come into it. Be clear what you want from those who show your work to that they have a negative effect on you and keep you from working for two weeks, then they aren't worth having in your studio at all. As Louise Fishman advises in her article how I do it. In the third issue of heresy. She says, keep the creeps out of your head and out of the studio. Disability, the very word makes many of us nervous. By disability I mean sharing your work making it public saying it's important enough that somebody should look at it. Visibility takes different forms through exhibitions, magazines and panels such as this, or just through showing your work to friends, critics, dealers, and so forth. Learn when and where to be visible. Exhibiting makes you feel very vulnerable. So only exhibit when you feel strong and good about your work. I can show unresolved or unfinished pieces to some women friends because I trust them. But I do not show this kind of work to dealers or critics for that would be doing a number on myself. The system has embedded them with so much power that I have to separate them and their responses from my work. This is hard to do if I'm depressed or feeling exceptionally vulnerable. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned with how others relate to your work. Certainly feminist art evolves communication. But remember that people whether they're naive or sophisticated, bring many different things to a work of art. Some never really opened their eyes at all. And others bring interpretations that enrich in our own understanding of the piece. Unknown Speaker 1:18:41 I have been rejected in some of the most unpleasant ways often reminiscent of a witch hunt, from galleries and teaching jobs because I am a lesbian, or because I am too political, whatever that means. It's painful as this is, I try not to let it or my anger get confused with my work, art rural power, career critical responses are all separate from the work and sorting them out is necessary to continue working. I've been talking today about two different aspects of creating feminist work, on the one hand the function of making art for the individual and the work process itself. And on the other hand, the collective function of art, the sense of connection and communication, where personal confrontation exists as a visual metaphor for others to relate to the role of the individual, in this case the artists but in other cases the leader and the collective is an issue which has not been dealt with adequately in the feminist movement. We acknowledge community as a support context for individuals making art. But in our desire to dissolve hierarchies, we have been too quick to develop the unspoken belief that collective means better In this process, we have not validated individual creative expression. Sometimes in fact, we have killed it. Obviously collectives like individuals can be oppressive or exclusive, and we need to take a closer look at both processes. As may Stevens who is leading a workshop this afternoon on the subject suggests individualism and collectivity are a false dichotomy. They are not necessarily in opposition to each other, but can coexist and be mutually supportive. What is the difference between working individually working collectively or collaborating? Do they produce different kinds of work? How do we examine the goals and statements of each process? collective process comes in many forms, conceiving and directing a theater piece with input from the actors. A community mural designed and painted by the people in the neighborhood, or an individual artists collaging materials used by women and their grandmothers are different forms of collective work. collectivity doesn't mean that everyone does everything all the time. And one per thing I'd sort of like to suggest is to think about is that as feminism sort of changes, or redefines what it means to be an artist or to be a leader, that perhaps those two will become something very close and very similar, or that they could look to each other. As models in someone. The development of individual artists parallels the development of feminist art and vice versa. Just as there are times an artist needs to go inside for protection and or connection with herself. So we as a group of women have had to do this. But we cannot stay there inside the personal is a beginning and not an end. And feminist art needs a larger context, we need to take art based on the personal out of the private and into the public sphere. That is by making feminist art available to as many women as possible by doing apologizing the art making process. And by contributing to what Judy ground and Andrew enrich have called the common world of winning, that feminist art will continue to grow. There was a time when we needed to, to support any work done by a woman, but that time has long past it is not enough. We deserve better, we owe it to each other to help each other make the best possible work. Anything is not okay in the name of feminism. Feminist criticism is sort of what I'm talking about here. And it's my belief that it will evolve as the work itself evolves in a context where we do not have to spend energy defending it's very competent. Unknown Speaker 1:23:19 You I had said before that the people on the panel would talk to each other briefly at the end of the presentation. But at this point, they would rather open the microphone to people from the floor wherever the microphone Unknown Speaker 1:23:39 is. Sorry, the technological world does this to us. The microphone we had on the floor isn't working if you'll ask a question or make your statement. I will try and repeat it for you. Or if you'd like you can come here and I'll Angeles this not entirely adequate one whichever you prefer. So what do you think makes a great call. Unknown Speaker 1:24:53 Nancy, I know you're very elegant about artichokes, onions, but I I really want to know what you mean, when you I really, I guess the metaphor doesn't do I need you to push it further to say, what is why is there no core and famous works? Or? Or why is it? Just? You know, I don't I don't want to Unknown Speaker 1:25:21 I think it's probably not wise to believe that metaphor, but I didn't say that feminist works didn't have a center. I what I said was that when I work on women's writing, in an effort to understand if there is a specificity to that writing, in my experience, I have not found something like the core of an artichoke that I could describe. In other words, I can say, women's writing is and then say XYZ and then give a series of reasons why it's why it is that way. And what I and the reason and I it seems to me that perhaps the reason I don't find a center or perhaps that there are two things one is perhaps one doesn't need to find the center and two perhaps there has to be another modality of reading that I have not yet come to see that was an answer Unknown Speaker 1:26:40 that question a deal with an insurance claim provider a women's Unknown Speaker 1:26:54 consciousness as Unknown Speaker 1:26:56 one is based on the assumption that we still have meaning that women are really a subgroup away I feel like the majority of humanity is not sensitive to that condition of consciousness or culture or are all that enormous variety of expression is stretching. So, I think that maybe some of you and that many of us have had various especially those of us claiming that with any discipline which might factors in brainwashing and so, we have a much harder time staying with adults to deal with was I was very strong in fact, I was very good at the point that is not the end of the whole process. The process is the core part of this one seems to be about all of Augustine mediation together is a split and find a way to have meaningful processes and an intellectually connected Unknown Speaker 1:29:44 it looks as if people will have to come use the microphone. If they will do their projects magnificently. And if somebody didn't hear her, then probably the rest of us need a microphone. Yes. Unknown Speaker 1:29:59 Yes. said that you've been treated terribly by the male artworld. And then you said that you tried not to let that your anger that interfere with your work, it seems that you'd be able to use it in your work, since that's part of woman's experience. And I just wondered, if any, if you or the other two women have feelings about using anger in feminist work, or parliament, there was a, there was Unknown Speaker 1:30:29 a point in time where that was very important where, where it was like, initially sort of contacting the anger. I mean, I think, you know, most of us when we originally are in consciousness, raising something, that's one of the things you get in touch with. And that's what I got in touch with in that group was anger, trying to be a woman and an artist and two things that were supposedly mutually exclusive. And the work was very much about that, sort of claiming it and putting it out there. Now it's there or not there, I'm just not focused on it in the same way. It's like it doesn't I feel that from doing that is how I've learned or to know that it's important to try to separate it out. And obviously, like I said, there are times when that system or those in power it gets in, affects me. But it doesn't take me too long to just sort of push it aside and get back to what it is I'm doing. It's a waste of my creative energy, unless it is used, but I'm finding that now. I'm just not the work isn't about that in a way that it used to be. Maybe. Unknown Speaker 1:31:42 Well as Dorothy Wordsworth perhaps said, poetry is anger recollected in tranquility. I think that, Unknown Speaker 1:31:50 of course, Unknown Speaker 1:31:52 one is fueled by anger, it's adrenaline. It is an initial stage. I think, also, it is a later stage, I think that we are sometimes in danger of being a mutual admiration society, because there really is so much to admire about all of the people here. Unknown Speaker 1:32:21 I think that we Unknown Speaker 1:32:23 must, that's why I stressed that, Ed, I think we have to go back and be aware all the time. And anger is a useful tool. The only times that it is not useful is when it gets in the way of the work. So that one says that the the anger is more important than the artistic expression. That's the danger of anger, that it's such a sudden thing that you are going to produce the book then and you say, well, the hell with it. That's it. That's exactly the way I feel. And I am not going to go over the work. But it's certainly anger is a constant Unknown Speaker 1:32:56 talk. I'm not angry all the time. I mean, you know, I think that most of us have many different feelings in the world, maybe about the anger, but it's about other things to. What this is, okay. Unknown Speaker 1:33:23 I'd like to ask harmony or anybody else, who's the mother on the panel? How was creating or establishing your own creative workspace? In relation to the needs of your daughter? Did you find a concept and how did you overcome it, Unknown Speaker 1:33:39 and I can tell you what I did. I used to have a very small loft that I lived in work, like I said, in the same place, it was basically one large room. And at that time, she was very tiny, and she slept a lot. And I just did all my work. And I thought this is terrific. I don't know what this problem is being an artist, my mother, and everything I could do, then she didn't sleep so much anymore. And then she started crawling around and pulling my paper out. And I just realized that that was a point, sorting things out where, you know, I was really I was angry at her then because she was getting into my stuff. On the other hand, of course she was it was there. She could see it. She was curious, like any child. So what I did when we moved is I've just always had a separate studio space. We've had a shared living space and she has her own good sized room. And she respects my studio spaces my workplace. She always had for a while she had a swing in there. She had her own little like easel or something. She couldn't bring her things in there. She couldn't leave toys all over, but she could do certain things. And what I found is that I could do certain kinds of work certain parts of my painting, say, while she was there interrupting me and making comments and so on and so forth. And then there's another level where I really need that kind of quiet, that kind of focus and conscience concentration. And I just simply don't try to do that when she's around because it's insane for both of us. So I do that at night when she's asleep. But it's funny because my painting wall used to be on the opposite the other side with her bedroom. And when she would be in bed at night, she would say, like, you know, harmony and want to drink or whatever. And I'd always say what Be quiet, I'm working right. And so she now talks about her painting and drawing as her work. Unknown Speaker 1:35:33 So she, she, she respects it, because she's Unknown Speaker 1:35:36 grown up with it, and I respect your space to have to say, Unknown Speaker 1:35:47 I'm a little bit afraid to ask this question, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I think Elizabeth, you said that feminist works, show a quality of intelligence and essentially that they break through conventions and use reinstate and remember, and as a literature teacher, I really appreciate much of what you've said, I'm a French literature teacher, and I'm now in my Introduction to Literature, French literature course, they both laughed. And for me, he fits, he fits much of what you've said, perhaps with a small f for feminist or big F for feminist. And I would just like to ask you to react to I guess, to defining a male artist is different, or from my impression from what you said that, that both layers work. And I know about the good woman and the bad woman, and I'm just talking about a poem like Congress called Dance, which for me, breaks through many things. And I'd like to just hear some, some response Unknown Speaker 1:36:59 we probably have a couple of responses, Nancy would know, both less work better than I do. Unknown Speaker 1:37:05 I'd rather pass since I Unknown Speaker 1:37:07 wasn't about to offer a definition of I think it's your definition that question now. I have a couple Unknown Speaker 1:37:15 of responses one, which goes back to you and I'll get to the other which was just that I don't agree with was that at all because I think that there's a lot of feminists work that's not intelligent. I wish it were all intelligent. You know, I mean, that's what I'm talking about. I was talking about before. I would like if that were true, and I think that we owe it to each other to push each other so that maybe is true, but it's not there's a lot of bad work around. It to the other question is I don't I think that you know, men can write work or paint or whatever that breaks through that but to me that isn't feminist because I based to be a feminist means to be is to see you know, and experience being a woman in in in a patriarchal society and there's no way a man can have that experience. It's that simple. He made your work at sensitive, that breaks through that seems not male or female or androgynous or whatever, you know, terms you want to put it in, but it's not feminist, because that implies being a woman. Unknown Speaker 1:38:20 That's just me what there's, I think there's a distinction between works by feminists where the works cannot be the sort of good we'd like and feminist works. That's maybe Unknown Speaker 1:38:37 good. Could I just say a word on that? Because I I hope we're not going to stay on this point all the time, because I think it becomes very ticklish as to what is a feminist work? And what are paradigms of work that can be used perhaps in feminist horses. For instance, I think the greatest short story of all time, about the condition of a woman's life is checkoff story, the Darling it is not a feminist story. And yet, in presenting a woman who is always taking on the aspects of whatever is the male in her life down to her very young son, it is exquisite in portraying certainly balls X letters of to married women, the letters that they wrote back and forth to each other, your ganja breaking mother. There's so many examples of one view of nevermind Shakespeare and Chaucer. But I think we are so I think we have to go along with what harmony said. We're talking about work by women in those in the feminist work context, and I just have a terrible feeling that we're gonna get hung for the rest of our time on that borderline of whether a man can or a man cat and I want to caution it because it was like those early consciousness raising times on When a male was tested as to whether he did the dishes or not, if your lover husband did the dishes, he was okay. If he didn't, he was not okay. And that really is not the major test. Question Unknown Speaker 1:40:23 I think it's really a false crowd because it seems in a way that it's what's going on here is a false problem. And it's something that that you've, all of us have offered up the answer for already either Harmony's talking about the point in the work where you transcend yourself and the worth takes over. And what something that Elizabeth had mentioned also, Portland has a cycle of three poems, which are called the lesbian poems, which are very little known. And in which he transcends his own point of view in an amazingly convincing way, and taps through into that larger reality, which is there, okay. In which, you know, he was being spoken through and why it's, it's might just be a false problem that we've already got all the answers to he'll do anything? Definitely, Unknown Speaker 1:41:45 I just want to respond in a sense to something that I keep hearing about the quality of intelligence or intelligent, feminist work. And to me, I guess, by my definition of feminist work, I wanted to completely smashed that and get that back out of a definition, because, to me, that's what you just said about quality. And wanting more and more intelligent work really undercuts working towards, to me female imagery, and process kinds of things, using them. More say dream states or other ways of arriving at your artwork, and not necessarily intelligent, rational, linear process to get your art, I suppose being art, it's very head oriented. And to me drastically different than my definition of feminist art, which is one to work from your feelings, and your imagery places, and not necessarily that we have to ever create an intelligent art doesn't have to be intelligent to be quality art. I think that brings me to the next question Unknown Speaker 1:42:50 that I was going to ask is, how how do you evaluate what criteria of success do you use apart from the PD world? Because this has been a problem? Come on to me, as a woman, I've been very suggestible to criticism in what I do, and I have yet to evolve a good self critical evaluation for my own work. And if any of you have a clue, I would appreciate it. Unknown Speaker 1:43:18 I don't understand. The question is, what are the criteria for evaluating feminist work? one's own work. Unknown Speaker 1:43:29 You know, the thing, the thing that I look for most is just is just a clarity, honesty, that kind of thing. And I think that that sounds very ambiguous, perhaps. But that still leaves room for individual each individual's work. And that is related to quality for me. In other words, whatever it is, you're trying to say, in your work. Are you able to do that? Well, I mean, it gets down to that. It's not just what you're saying, but are you saying it clearly? You know, it's the writing. Does the writing articulate those feelings? Does it come across in terms of the formal aspects of the painting or whatever? How do I feel what am I feeling what you want to say? Unknown Speaker 1:44:18 I don't know. You know, there Unknown Speaker 1:44:19 are those undefined things, I think, this feminist who maybe will participate in sort of evolving feminist criteria of some sort, but that's a little different than what you brought up. Why don't Unknown Speaker 1:44:46 She's asking you about success criteria if you don't accept the PDC success criteria. Well, I Unknown Speaker 1:44:54 I thought I tried to indicate some of that in what I said in our As the sources for my own work, it is a gratification to me. Sometimes I do partially successful sometimes not at all successful. I don't think one is ever completely satisfied with a work of art, I have a very simple standard that I go by, which is not only for works of art, but it's how I tried to conduct my life and I fight city hall as long as I can, when my head is being terribly bloodied, I walk away. There is always in an additional word that one can put in or an additional curve to a piece of sculpture or another step and a dance, whatever. But at a certain point, you have to think about your gains and your losses, you're not going to spend the rest of your life on one poem or one piece unless you are truly obsessed. So I think it's a matter of the kind of gratification that you get out of it. And that perhaps some audience, whether it is an audience of one, or a one and a half or larger, in for me, seeking up roots of trying to relate myself to the past so that I don't exist as an isolated individual. And I've trying to create some kind of role model, either for myself or for those outside. But principally, I think in any kind of art one seeks to satisfy what has not been satisfied in any other work of art. If you could find it and other people's work, you wouldn't do it because we're all basically lazy, and we don't want to work. And we all want to be horizontal Nancy, I think. And the the the judgments for criticism, we cannot answer here, no one has answered it satisfactory for themselves in the PD world. And eventually, what does it come down to work that persists over a period of time? I just don't think that one can give an answer. To that question, the question always exists. I don't pretend Unknown Speaker 1:47:20 to have the answer. And I'm speaking at this moment. But what has been somewhat troubling here is that if we are talking about feminism as being political, if we're talking about political art, and we're not at all talking about the society, the new society in which this art is going to be found, I think we're certainly not going to get it the answer. And I think that this has got to be integrated somehow in our trying to understand what we mean about honesty in our, what we mean about well, honesty in in the news in the so called New Society, because it's not enough to be a woman we have all I think, agreed to be doing so called feminist story. It's not enough to be perhaps a new woman in American society. If we're not talking about really radically changing the society. It's not enough to be a woman banker, for instance, in my mind, to be liberated. Unknown Speaker 1:48:23 Think I follow a little bit what was just said. Before I make my statement question, I just like to say that I thought all three, four talks were very powerful. And I think it's interesting that when we start talking about our own creativity, we become very powerful and are not sort of that six su image of me being nervous and totally terrified. I think there's a strange split here. That came out in Eid Merriman's point about looking over her work, and realizing if I understood correctly, that there was one work you felt. If your name wasn't on the cover, no one would know that it was written by a woman that were the Nixon poems. And you said, at that point, the politics overcame my feminist on my feminist creativity, and I think that's a very important point. And perhaps we have to work more on understanding what those politics that overcome us being women, and perhaps it's not a split, but we have to understand as women just said, that there is unless we understand the greater politics, if you want to call it that way. We will never function as feminists and never have any kind of changes in the society. I don't know if you have anything to say to that. Unknown Speaker 1:49:49 I think what I have Unknown Speaker 1:49:49 to say to it is that I want to retract what I said before because I thought about a couple of times that in a way that poems are just verses. Lennox, in verse form and in the Nixon bones. And I think they really do come, they are a woman centered. I think I am in everything I do. And I think probably their pages I could point two there, there's a sequence of dream poems about him and in which I am a woman in the poems and he is, whoever he is. But that, but the point that is raised about the the general kind of politics above and beyond feminist politics is a huge question. I mean, they're just enormous questions here. I don't know what we can do with them. I think that that statement before was of profound interest for us. And we need a whole conference for that, because of course, what we all have been dealing with here is the world as it is, we have been talking about the PDE world and of course, to create works in the future and to talk about a women's society. I have been hoping for a long time that there would be a conference on utopias and women's. Unknown Speaker 1:51:16 Even the planning meeting that we had, you talked a little bit about conscious feminism and unconscious feminism, coming out in the works. And I wonder if you'd like to say a little more on that? Unknown Speaker 1:51:28 Well, I think perhaps what I just said, when I went back over the Nixon poems, I think there is an unconscious feminism, I think. I think it's the difference between setting out to say I am going to make a point, or just having it come through, let me illustrate it from my own work, which is much easier when I wrote the club. That was a conscious work in the material that I was seeking for where I was doing a role reversal, which is a useful teaching device that I have used many times that is totally unoriginal, many, many people have used, it's a good way for opening one's head, simply to do away with sex stereotypes. So you reverse the sexes. I once taught a course for fourth graders in trying to give them some notion of women in history. And I had them take fairy tales and nursery rhymes and just change them around. So one little boy did send her fella and one did sleeping, handsome and that kind of thing. And it's just useful. So because I use women in personating men and the material that I saw, I was consciously seeking male chauvinist material. When I went back to look up songs at the turn of the century, I discarded the race things which were mammoth, staggering, the anti black material, the anti Italian material, anti Jewish, everything, but I focused on what I considered female stereotypes. And I was very biased, I sought that out. That was a conscious work. When I wrote the inner city, Mother Goose, that is not a conscious work in that I was trying to deal with my own feelings of the city deteriorating and living in the inner city. Yet when it came time to transform it, and to put it on Broadway, I think my unconscious feelings of feminism came in, in, I wrote something about the condition of the hooker, who is always picked up and the John is not picked up. I think that my bias was there. I wrote a long, somewhat erotic piece about a woman remembering a man in her life. And one of the reasons she loved him is that he made love to her during her period. And I think that that was a kind of unconscious feminism. Unknown Speaker 1:53:55 One more I'm about to run out of time, may or maybe two, if somebody's feeling very powerful, but All right, we'll have to one. And then this one makes use of Unknown Speaker 1:54:08 mine isn't a question. It's just sort of an announcement that the era is in a really bad state and the organization now has decided to work to for the amendment that will extend the time period to that era for seven years. And if you could all write one or two letters to your local congressman, and just let them know that you're in favor of it and that you're a constituent and that you really think it's important because we've gone so far in 10 years, and many people especially I think, people in college, I don't even think about all the struggles, because it's so I've accepted that I'm a woman and I can do what I want. And I haven't. I just don't want to have it all goes backwards. So if I'll just pass sheets of paper, and if you'd write, and then leave them at the table that had all the literature on it, because we want to collect it and send it sorry, in one big mess to Washington. Unknown Speaker 1:55:26 So my question is mainly directed to eat. But I'd be very interested in responses from all of you. It came up when you were talking about how anything a female does is feminine. And I've had a lot of trouble with that definition, in trying to do some work of my own. And I kind of come to define feminine as not necessarily directly hooked into the gender category of being female. And so I want to ask you, if, as far as you're concerned, men can manifest feminine qualities or whatever, you know, or if you could, in any way respond to that idea that that feminine is not necessarily female. Unknown Speaker 1:56:20 Well, that's Unknown Speaker 1:56:21 my feeling is that feminine is female, and that a man cannot exhibit feminine qualities? Because I think, and I have felt this for a long time. And I have been in that trap, I think in dealing with sexual stereotypes. And I think the whole question of androgyny becomes a ticklish one where we have talked about feminine attitudes and masculine attitudes and putting them together. So for me, it has been freeing simply to declare by theory that anything any female born of woman does is feminine. And anything any male born does is masculine. I'm talking about behavior. I'm not talking about workspace. Unknown Speaker 1:57:10 One more thing, or more, Unknown Speaker 1:57:13 I just like to back up what was just said about the Equal Rights Amendment. And this extension, I wanted to give you the bill number, because I think a letter which you might take time to write, which contains that information is always more impressive. It's HR resolution 638, which would extend the time by another seven years. And you should write particularly to the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. These people are respectively Peter Rodino. And James Eastland. I don't know what I do. I'm not even American citizen doing telling you to, to do this. But I guess we're all in this business together. And if we can get equal rights amendment here, I think it will help other countries too. And certainly write your congress person. To Unknown Speaker 1:58:07 practical announcements, first off at lunch, there are no assigned tables. Don't let that be confusing. We intended to let people sit wherever they want to. And if you would take your coats with you. Unfortunately, the Jim is going to have to be in use. So we'd appreciate that. I'd like to thank the panel very much