In February 2005, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWAG) at Columbia University organized a one-day symposium, “Writing a Feminist’s Life: Academics and their Memoirs.”1 The event was dedicated to the memory of Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, who taught at Columbia in the English Department for more than three decades. A group of prominent feminist scholars and critics gathered in Philosophy Hall, home of the English Department, to read from their memoirs and speak about the project of writing feminist lives. Participants addressed a packed hall and shared memories of Heilbrun’s years at Columbia as well as the impact of her work on their own writing.
Heilbrun believed that it was crucial for women writers to tell the stories of their lives. In her many books, including Reinventing Womanhood, The Last Gift of Time, and most famously, Writing a Woman’s Life, Heilbrun called for women to take the risk of telling stories that went beyond the conventional boundaries of feminine experience. She encouraged younger scholars to be bold, to think outside the inherited models of marriage and motherhood, to prefer quest to romance, and to make public women’s private desires and dreams. She wrote the stories of unusual and accomplished women like Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, May Sarton and Gloria Steinem, women who committed themselves to intellectual and social autonomy and saw themselves as crafting independent destinies. She also told the story of her own struggle to invent herself as a woman scholar and critic in When Men Were the Only Models We Had. Heilbrun’s ideas won her widespread acclaim in the academy and beyond its doors. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Modern Language Association, Heilbrun was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees. She was equally celebrated under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. Under that name, Heilbrun was the author of a series of detective novels whose heroine, Kate Fansler, was much admired nationally and internationally for her wit and literary repartee. Unusually for a professor, her books were read and celebrated by academics and lay readers alike. Heilbrun’s work addressed themes of women’s ambition, friendship, intellect, and, in the last years of her life, the meaning of aging in American culture. Heilbrun was dedicated to the principle that women should author and control their own destinies, a belief that extended to her commitment to rational suicide as a legitimate means to end life.
Though Heilbrun’s message to women has now achieved widespread acceptance, in her time she was a controversial figure in the conservative halls of Columbia and did not always feel herself to be welcome there. It seemed both fitting and ironic for this event to be held in Philosophy Hall, but the conference showed that Heilbrun’s legacy and influence continue beyond her death in 2003. This issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online brings together the papers presented at the symposium, excerpts from the discussion period, and a series of personal essays by colleagues and friends of Heilbrun that reflect on her life, the themes her work addressed, and her impact on their own careers as writers, scholars, and teachers.
We, the editors of this special issue, also knew Carolyn Heilbrun as a teacher, a scholar, a collaborator and a friend. Carolyn and Nancy taught graduate seminars together at Columbia in the late 1970s and early 1980s about heroines and their destinies. Over their long friendship, they wrote with, about, and to each other, sharing ideas over many a dinner on New York’s Upper West Side. Victoria wrote her Master’s Essay under Carolyn’s supervision in Carolyn’s final year at Columbia. In the friendship that developed, they shared passions for many things, including Bloomsbury, feminism, and dogs. Carolyn and Nancy started the influential book series, “Gender and Culture” at Columbia University Press in 1983. For the past 20 years, the series has published some of the most important works on feminism in the humanities. After Carolyn’s death, Nancy invited Victoria to become the new co-editor of the series, continuing the model Carolyn established for feminist collaborations between writers and friends across the generations.
- In addition to IRWAG, the event was co-sponsored by the following organizations at Columbia: the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Institute for Research in African American Studies, the Middle East Institute, the Center for Comparative Literature & Society, the Office of the Vice President of Arts and Sciences and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. [↩]
