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Nancy K. Miller, "The Age Difference"
(page 4 of 6)
Moving through the mirror to contemplate the limits more than the
marks of time, I feel another kind of urgency: this is my life, and so
much of it is already in the past tense. Now what?
("The Marks of Time," 108)
When I was about to hand in the manuscript of But Enough, I
gave it to Carolyn to read. She said it was fine except for the fact
that she didn't appear in "Decades"; I had not included her in the
Columbia part of the story. I wrote a parenthesis that after some back
and forth finally satisfied her:
(At the end of the decade [of the 1970s], through one of the rare
institutional arrangements at Columbia that - inadvertently - worked on
behalf of women, I met Carolyn Heilbrun, then a senior member of the
English department, who performed several small miracles that saved both
my writing and my career. We twice taught a seminar together called "The
Heroine's Text," in which we read French and English, male- and
female-authored novels and tried to figure out - only occasionally
agreeing - whether the limited arrangements of female plot turned out
differently either in national tradition or according to authorial
gender.)
("Decades," 39)
Looking at that passage today, it strikes me that I had failed to
mention Carolyn's quite important role in the history of my
institutional narrative because I had continued to think of my life
solely in terms of male power arrangements. That was not an entirely
erroneous view of the world at Columbia, but it did leave out of account
what other kinds of interventions women, and notably Carolyn, were
sometimes able to make on behalf of other women.
In the Afterword she wrote to Changing Subjects, Carolyn sets
herself apart from the authors included in the book:
To me, roughly a decade and a half older than these women, the
stories are both strange and achingly familiar . . .. [B]y the 1950s . . . I was
already married, having children . . . and organizing my life around
them . . .. Those years are largely a blur, but I remember when I was teaching
full-time at Brooklyn College, a man asked me what I did with my
children while teaching: I told him I locked them in a closet. Or
perhaps I only wanted to tell him that. Anger seethed, and went
on seething until the '70s and early '80s.
("Afterword," 268)
In the '70s and '80s, Heilbrun writes, her life and
the lives of the women writing in this collection coincided. Older
than they, I was, I suspect, happier, if only by contrast. Suddenly the
world, and above all the place of women in that world, righted itself
and began to sing. When I published Toward a Recognition of
Androgyny in 1973, it was greeted by men as though I had been
advocating S&M. But that was the year of Roe v. Wade, and Billie Jean
King beating Bobby Riggs: anything seemed possible.
("Afterword," 269)
Carolyn goes on to lambaste Columbia for not understanding that the
world was changing and locates the time of writing this piece at a
dramatic moment: when the English department "threatens to turn down for
tenure a brilliant feminist woman" (270). This was, most of us will
remember, the catalytic event that brought Carolyn to the decision to
retire early. That turning point here, however, is necessarily, and
silently, proleptic (if I can put it in a way Carolyn would hate).
Writing before the departmental decision not to tenure Susan
Winnett, Carolyn reviews her life as a feminist in somewhat disturbing
terms:
Columbia has stopped hurting me, but like someone who has escaped a
battering marriage - and the analogy is, in many ways, not a far-fetched
one for feminist women faculty - I cannot wipe out the terrible years. I
cannot change the isolation of all my time at Columbia. But the
friendships I have found among women, and what is still referred to as
my private life, have made that isolation, if not welcome then benign:
it's not cancerous, but it doesn't do anyone any good.
("Afterword," 270).
A few months after writing this, Carolyn left Columbia in a very
public fashion.
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