Catharine Stimpson may well be my favorite feminist. Certainly she was my first. As a student in her freshman English seminar section in 1970 I was galvanized and dazzled by her extraordinary intelligence, her incisive worldview, and her analysis of the modern women’s movement, which had just begun to change our world. She became my adviser, later my friend. But I consider her above all my inspiration. For someone called upon to professionally parse the underpinnings of social and political policy, an early education with Professor Stimpson provided a complete set of tools: skepticism leavened with idealism, intellect paired with personal truth, the canonical and the counterintuitive both.
That last was much in evidence when Kate delivered the first Helen Pond McIntyre Lecture at Barnard. I would not have been surprised if she had once again used what she had learned from her position as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University to debunk the notion of political correctness on campus, a subject she has written about eloquently in the past. Nor would I have found it remarkable for her to talk incisively about the evolution of women’s studies in the academy or the women’s movement in the world.
But over the years I have learned that Catharine Stimpson is nothing if not brilliantly unpredictable. And so it was that she brought together cultural values, classical myth, and personal predilection to discuss how sports abet and undermine the position of women on the playing field and in the world, and how the ideals of feminism could improve and elevate organized athletics. “I am a feminist fan,” she noted.
I cannot say the same: for many years I was one of those feminists Stimpson describes in her remarks as long having a deep distrust of the macho ethic of professional sports. I am also the mother of a young woman with a fearsome right arm who blew out her knee at age 14 on a killer drive to the basket. Watching my daughter claim her body, her confidence, and her sense of cooperation and conflict through sports, that distrustful feminist gave way to one who began to see the possible synergy of athletic competition and female power. “I hope,” Professor Stimpson told an audience that included some of Barnard’s varsity athletes, “that the presence of women in sports will be a rebuke to corruption and a murderous desire to win; that it will provide a moral and psychological leavening; and that it will weaken gender as one of life’s organizing principles.” I may still have my doubts, but if anyone could convince me, it would be Catharine Stimpson. I remain her biggest fan.
