I am becoming myself again at long last; I can feel my life flowing back to me. On the radio they are discussing managing your (musical) career “as though it were a work of art itself” and I like the concept.
*
I am still reading Working It Out which is a really epoch making book, in my view. I wish an expert like Historiann or Clio Bluestocking would review and contextualize it as a historian would. I could of course do research on the reception and impact of this book, but that might constitute procrastination.
Meanwhile, here are some incomplete notes on Adrienne Rich’s foreword to the volume (xiii-xxiv). This foreword is in some ways the most dated piece in the book, but it makes several key points which I, for one, never absorbed fully and which do not go stale. Fragments:
– the damage that can be done to creative energy by the lack of a sense of continuity, historical validation, community … support of friends … may make survival possible; but it is not enough (xiv-xv)
– women who go through undergraduate and graduate school suffer an intellectual coercion of which they are not even consciously aware … where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence (xv)
– Simone Weil: the commonplace, and false assertion that spiritual values cannot be destroyed by force is cruel to the past, for they can be and have been on numerous occasions (consider, once again, what book burning did to Nahuas and Mayans like me). For spiritual values and a creative tradition to continue unbroken we need … a dialogue with those who came before us.
-women in patriarchy, however, have been withheld from building a “common world” (Arendt) in this way (xv)
-women not described as “working” when we create the essential conditions for the work of men (or for our own) (xvi)
– the fear that if we do not enter the common world of men as some form of honorary man, we will be sucked back into the realm of servitude; this temptation and fear “compromise our powers, divert our energies, form a potent source of ‘blocks’ and acute anxiety about work” (xvii)
– if, in trying to join the common world of men, we split ourselves off from the common life of women and deny our female heritage and identity in our work, we lose touch with our real powers and with the essential condition for all fully realized work: community (xvii)
– feminism means assuming self consciousness as woman – renouncing obedience to the fathers – recognizing that the world they have described is not the whole world; masculine ideologies are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclusively “human;” we must think and act out of that recognition (xvii)
– especially insidious is the sabotage which appears as paternal encouragement, approal granted for internalizing a masculine subjectivity; women working in he common world of men are denied that integrity of work and life which can only be found in … connectedness with ourselves and other women (xviii … and interwoven through to the end)
– shedding the encumbrance of someone else’s baggage, ceasing to translate (xviii)
– Hannah Arendt’s masculine/masculinist descent (xxi-xxii)
– the importance of not just rising above all of this, being one of the few who rise (xxiii-xxiv)
Then there is the introduction by Ruddick and Daniels (xxv-xxxii). Apparently Freud said the healthy person should be able to love and work well; Erik Erikson said intimacy and generativity were “the two central developmental tasks of adulthood.” (xxv)
The condition of women typically interdicts these tasks, as it interdicts the aspiration toward autonomous creative work and also our ability to see ourselves as purposive workers. (xxvi) I remember hearing: “it is unsettling about you, that you are a woman with a purpose; it is not right.”
In this volume they are addressing our “volatile relationship to our work as well as our sense of its developmental importance” (xxvi) and also the right to exercise power in one’s work (xxxi). Like Rich’s foreword, this introduction seems more dated than do any of the narratives that comprise the book. Yet it makes points which many still recognize but darkly, if at all.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“-women not described as “working” when we create the essential conditions for the work of men”
-Let’s not confuse “working” with “serving.”
” especially insidious is the sabotage which appears as paternal encouragement, approal granted for internalizing a masculine subjectivity; ”
-I don’t get this at all. My father always supported and encouraged my intellectual goals while my mother persecuted and ridiculed me for reading. Her idea was that I needed to learn to cook and knit to find a rich husband.
Also, subjectivities don’t have genitals. Hence, they can’t be masculine or feminine. The idea of a “female brain” is deeply patriarchal.
“the fear that if we do not enter the common world of men as some form of honorary man”
-This is just as confusing. Is the suggestion that some women actually grow penises in the workplace? I have no idea how one can be any form of man without a penis. Or some form of woman without a vagina.
This book came out while I was in college. At that time it was difficult to get a book by a woman onto a syllabus or a graduate reading list, and hard to get a dissertation topic like yours approved. People older than me, people Rich’s age, were struggling to make that change and that was a lot of work.
The idea of the “female brain” as it appeared in so-called cultural feminism (Gilligan et al) came later and is not a concept this collection uses. The version of it that appears in b.s. “fields” like evolutionary biology (or in the 19th century and earlier) is something these writers oppose. Rich is talking about women’s history and experiences, and also women’s knowledge.
A lot of the writers in this collection talk about having had periods of feeling alienated from their work and realizing that it had to do with having been trained to divorce themselves from it: for instance, to be interested in literature but expected to work only on male authors, and not to allow into your work any perceptions about the texts that might come to you based on your life experiences as a woman. To read sexist authors and not see them as such. To write without considering the experiences and perceptions of women, including your own. To do this was to be “professional.”
In other words, to be “professional” was to see the world from the perspective of a white man of the privileged classes, and to discount insights which might come from other points of view. That creates alienation from work. An analogy could be learning to read HEART OF DARKNESS and to see it, as many critics did for a long time, as a novel about “evil” in the abstract and not about colonialism.
I have the same relationship to parents re work as you do. There’s a lot to say about how that works and what it does. My father would most likely have voted against allowing the dissertation you wrote to be written, while at the same time praising and prizing you as a student. This is of course better than being told not to study at all, but it is not unproblematic.
Work vs. service, I think you vastly underestimate the kind of skill and expertise that goes into domestic and other supporting kinds of labor. That goes for work by non elite men, as well. But this book is about having a “work of one’s own” – not just work. Cf the Stevens piece, one of those I like best, on the obstacles set up to “finding the task that only I could do–which is the artist’s task.” (15)
…The other thing in this book is, all the authors, although raised to work (unlike my generation, which came later) were, nonetheless not raised to put their work first. To have a vocation was good, but to put it first and/or be original or challenging in it was something they had trained not to develop from early on. They talk a lot about what they went through to train themselves out of that. And as we know, just stopping doing something is much easier than being able to perceive and identify what has been with one so long that it seems almost instinctive.
I did not read this book when it was new. Had I done, I would have said, oh, but I have heard of these ideas, we have absorbed them already, and the bad old days are on their way out anyway. That would have been a thin reading on my part.
… ah, and I meant to say in the post itself – I bolded the comment on the value of community because it’s therapeutic for me. For years I thought that my difficulty working without community was a sign of weakness or lack of seriousness. That was a misconception I had picked up in graduate school and as an assistant, from the “motivational” or perhaps more accurately, the *disciplinary* folklore I absorbed via the oral tradition.
That, I see from Rich’s essay, is one of the [sexist / generally oppressive] ideas I did not recognize as such (as in the book of Exodus, where Pharaoh says they must make bricks without straw). I did not allow myself to think of community as a necessity, but thought rather that my need for it was a flaw in me.