"True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School"

Those who know me, and/or have read this blog at all regularly, know that I am a feminist from way back, and that feminism, women's lives, and women's issues are all extremely important to me. I am also an academic. So a book titled "True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School" (W.W. Norton, 2011) was bound to catch my eye and intrigue me. The fact that the book is edited by a leading feminist literary scholar, Susan Gubar (coauthor of "The Madwoman in the Attic" and coeditor of "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women"), whose work I have admired (and in the case of the Norton Anthology, taught) for years, was another incentive to read the book. And the fact that it is dedicated to the memory of the late scholar and author Carolyn Heilbrun, whose work I have so greatly esteemed and enjoyed so much (and wrote about here on 7/14/10), was yet another incentive. This book is a collection of essays by leading and pioneering feminist academics in various fields such as literature, history, and education. The essays are divided into two sections; one focuses on "Personal Views" and the other on "Professional Vistas." Of course the two areas -- personal and professional -- often overlap. Because these women were pioneers, they have seen the sweep of changes that have occurred over the years in women's studies and in society. They have both suffered for being pioneers and experienced the excitement of being part of the changes in scholarship and women's lives over the past 40-plus years. Most of the writers are quite candid, even when vividly recalling very painful and even humiliating experiences of being belittled and ignored in academe and elsewhere; remember that many academics (mostly males) for most of history did not see the point of studying women's lives, women's literature, women's history, or women's issues. But these strong women academics persevered. In the course of their stories, we learn not only about feminism in the academy, but also about how it intersects with race, class, religion and other identities. Following the old feminist saying that "The personal is political," we see how these scholars' experiences with their families, their colleagues, and their institutions are all formative and influential. The essays are compelling and mostly very well written. I couldn't get enough of them, and wished the book had been longer. The authors include Nancy K. Miller, Jane Marcus, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Jane Tompkins, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Martha Nussbaum, Lillian Faderman, Hazel Carby, Annette Kolodny, and Nancy Chodorow, and more, all giants in academe and in the fight for equality. I admire them so much, and can't thank them enough for their courage, leadership, scholarship, advocacy, and example.