coldhearted scientist وداد

I am not sure what else Anne Lasoff wrote.  She felt guilty about writing and “beat down guilt as one would beat down an igniting spark.” (209) She felt (guiltily) “that writing and school were not an avocation but a private vice.” (210) As she began writing her life was no longer pinpointed on her oldest daughter’s, who was “released from the oppressive  knowledge that [Lasoff] was affected by everything she did.” (211)

Born in 1922, Lasoff is the oldest of the contributors to this volume (most were born in the thirties; the youngest, Alice Walker, in 1944). She is one of the more working class of these writers, and one of those (if not the one) who had the least access to higher education early on.

*

“A Work of One’s Own,” by the recently deceased Sara Ruddick who edited this volume, has some elements in common with the Virginia Valian piece I have already discussed at some length. Both of these writers, who went on to become very successful academics, suffered from dissertation paralysis and were coached out of it, or prodded out of it in part at least, by their husbands.

Ruddick suffered complete paralysis for several months, during which she could not read or talk about anything relating to her thesis, and certainly not write. For many years afterward she suffered from “serious inhibition, halfheartedness, and vacillation in [her] work–the legacy, in a milder form, of paralysis.” (129)

Note that I am going to argue that this was not procrastination. It may have had to do with not knowing how to work — Valian’s problem — but there has to be more to this. Or, if it is only a question of knowing how to work, then knowing how to work is more than having a methodology.

I will read this essay now, and comment upon it later.

*

It sounds unfair but I am tempted to say there is something easier about these women’s lives than about the lives of those of us who came later — separated by too many decades from the early twentieth century feminists, raised during the backlash of the fifties and sixties, not old enough to participate fully in the revival of the later sixties and early seventies, old enough to receive the backlash from that, not young enough to receive its benefits.

Of my close women friends in school, honor students, all became housewives except me. The divorcées finished college late and became high school teachers. Those who finished college before marrying, married better and are still housewives. They used their college educations as I was expected to use mine.

Of my women associates from those days one has the kind of interesting career I would have liked. Indeed, it resembles the one I had planned rather closely, even down to the topics of her books; it is quite amazing. But my point is that only one of us did it; my theory is that she did it by refusing to listen to our non feminist elders.

Axé.