Catharine R. Stimpson (Working It Out 71-76) was raised to work, not to be supported as we were a generation later – “after the war,” as it was said.Her picture of herself as as a worker “was that of an angel: wings and body of fire; shooting toward heaven, at once desperate and choreographed; longing to leave the hereness of the base world behind and go into orbit in welcoming space.” (71-72)
She decided not to marry because “the sanctity of domestic love could never sufficiently compensate for the rigors of domestic service.” (73)
She went through a “lost period” where she was “empty of both animating purpose and a job that might execute and symbolize it” (74); she forgot her name was “Catharine” and believed she had been rebaptized as “girl.” This period was necessary in its way, as it provided “some exploration of possibilities of not being ‘good’.” (75)
She considers herself to work in memory of her blood family, but also for her political relatives; she is at the same time uneasy about her membership, through success at work, in an elite — “what [her] politics have ultimately taught [her] to suspect.” (76)
*
Born in 1924, May Stevens (103-116) is one of the older of the contributors to this 1977 volume; like many of them, she is still working. I am quite taken with her painting, which I did not know. Like Stimpson, she was raised to work; unlike her, she was not expected to become a professional. She decided she would always paint and always make her own living, but she did not connect these two things at the beginning.
Stevens resisted going to a “regular college” for fear she would end up as a teacher, which meant being an old maid. “Art school would save me, subsituting bohemianism for the prim academic life. I chose to … make my life riskier, more open.” (105)
Now I see: it is the primness which disturbs me about the academic life, not its corporate nature which appears to be what disturbs so many other faculty. And my parents, of Stevens’ age, dreamed of art school for us, perhaps for this reason.
Stevens’ parents were lower middle class. They gave her a great deal of moral support but she was very different from them. Her father was a white, working class conservative (see her poem for him on 116) and her mother
…did not sew, did not cook well, and did not keep a beautiful house. She had been forced to leave elementary school when her father died. She had no social graces and no talents. She only loved me and my brother without question. When my brother died at sixteen and I left home, the long disorientation consumed her and she was committed to a state mental hospital. (112)
Stevens’ comments on this situation (112-113, and 115) are extremely insightful in terms of political analysis and I will not summarize them here, because I want you to buy the book; there is a great deal in this essay in particular on gender and politics and work and love and artistic creation that people deserve to read directly. I will quote one paragraph in full:
Work for me has meant establishing my identity and my freedom in the face of pressures of many kinds. The roles of wife and mother and working woman (teacher) have eaten away at my energy and courage. I have had to fight to get my work seen and understood. The comparison with my painter-husband and his work, and the competition that inevitably exists even in the most loving relationship have chipped at my strength. The art-world necessities of modishness and historical determinism in style, as well as the sexism of art history and art criticism have had to be analyzed and combatted. Every one of these issues distracts and takes time from the real battle–that painful, private battle in which each artist works out her/his way to the most honest and authentic statement. I see a real similarity between that struggle and the way a woman (and any other oppressed person) creates herself through trusting her own needs and desires and working to achieve them. I have not had a psychological difficulty getting down to work, but rather the problem of finding my true work within my chosen field, of finding the task that only I could do–which is the artist’s task. (15; emphasis added)
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“The comparison with my painter-husband and his work, and the competition that inevitably exists even in the most loving relationship have chipped at my strength. The art-world necessities of modishness and historical determinism in style, as well as the sexism of art history and art criticism have had to be analyzed and combated.”
This reminds me a bit of Sylvia Plath and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. In her poem, “Daddy”, she refers to her father as a Nazi and her husband as a vampire – “Every women loves a Fascist.” Ted Hughes had her poetry book, “Ariel”, published and divided her oeuvre into two sections, her poetry before she met him (not so good) and after their connection (better). Pretty arrogant for a serial adulterer who considered himself the arbiter of her talent as well as a bad father whose son committed suicide two years ago.
He wrote a poem after he was told that she had committed suicide in 1963 called “Last letter.” You can read it at: http://lovingsylvia.tumblr.com/post/1263482483/last-letter-by-ted-hughes.
What an amazing jerk, that Ted Hughes (the poem is pretty bad, too). I did not know about the son’s suicide. I just read an article on it in the London Times and it is interesting how they make Hughes the victim of all of this (the mistress he left Plath for killed herself too).
I don’t get the impression from Stevens’ piece that her husband was outrageous like this — although who knows. And there are lots of artist and writer couples where the woman gets the short shrift career wise and in other ways — Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Elena Poniatowska and Octavio Paz, etc.