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.
