Vaughan: It’s now May 6 and I’m continuing my interview with Carolyn Rhodes. We’ve talked about a lot of things – your teaching, your research, your involvement with Women’s Studies, with the Women’s Caucus, with the Friends of Women’s Studies – and now we’re going to talk a little bit about your own ideas and feelings about certain things. In the 70s, you were quoted in the Mace and Crown as saying “I’m not a radical. All I want is equality.” Tell me now, looking back, just how radical were you?
Rhodes: Well, I mentioned when we were talking about my potential for acting in a caucus here that in the late 1960s and the early 70s, I did know firsthand about professional caucuses in the major Modern Language Association and in the regional group that I went to every year, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, SAMLA. Also I had many friends in Psychology, and the American Psychological Association had an excellent caucus. They gave some amusing names to their officers the protester-in-chief was called “The Harrier.” Then, I subscribed to Ms. Magazine from the start which was 1972, and reading all their features, you know, alerted me to what activist women's groups were doing as caucuses or other kinds of, as I said once before, rabble rousers.
The goals of most activists I really found very reasonable. I even liked some that were said to be going too far – traditionalists would say “that’s going too far.” It was a catch phrase, always used by those who didn’t like what feminists were working for. Robin Morgan later picked up the phrase, and with great pride, called her autobiography “Going Too Far.”
Some of the “stirrers up,” some of the people who were totally anti-men and things like that made me gasp. But, I recognized that whenever there were outraged protesters shocking people, it eased the pressure on the kind of groups I joined. By comparison we were just modest and reasonable.
All the changes that our ODU women's caucus sought have been justified. None of our “Movers and Shakers” were radical; in their activities here at any rate. We all wanted fairness, equal opportunities, equity. After the authorities, the men in power, began to respond to our calls for change, we urged them to pay a lot of attention, to make differences about other problems, say sexual harassment particularly towards students but not totally, and campus safety. Those aren’t radical requests. Some opponents argued that the caucus wanted too much--that we were going too far when we became concerned about, say child care facilities or granting leave to women at the late stages of pregnancy, as if families didn’t matter, even if men didn’t get pregnant.
Would those be unfair privileges? Are those advantages to women only? We certainly thought they were not! Personally, I confess that I have radical fantasies. I would really like to see sweeping social change of many kinds. In part, those notions linger from my early acquaintance with a world at my high school that was really liberal and then I began to develop utopian hopes and did my dissertation in that realm. In every utopia, well most utopias, every person is well- fed, well-housed, well-schooled. Everyone lives in peace, and everyone has time to enjoy books and music and art, sports, games. Some of those utopias even function without money. They find other ways to offer rewards and benefits: travel, time off, getting to do more pleasant jobs than you know sewage or something. When I taught utopian fiction, my classes debated about whether they would want to move to any of those designed worlds that we were reading about, assigned reading. I made my own choice at that time which was Marge Piercy. She envisioned the utopia I'd like to go live in. That happens in her novel, Woman on the Edge of Time. She re-imagines basic patterns in society, new structures for parenting and teaching and sharing political decisions. But her good society is small and rural, and it’s in a wider world where it's being attacked by vicious, realistic, dominating power structures – a society of war and greed and waste, where the violent had the power and the powerless are in poverty.
I used to wish for some cause I could join to really move us toward utopia, but I haven't found one. Feminist activism has been a way to gain certain winnings while working with people who inspire me. At least in my mother’s Methodist flag-waving, we can brighten the corner where we are, and we can try to encourage the next generation to solve the problems, illuminate wider worlds. Some feminists have written about the better worlds they would like to see and get to. For instance, Marilyn French has a set of books about what’s been wrong and what could be better. The one that I reviewed and put on my reading lists was called Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. It came out in 1985, and it’s a big book – what 98% of it, no, all but one final chapter is a review of world history, showing women subjected to centuries after centuries of various kinds of patriarchal power. But then, she has a closing chapter. There, she is prescribing, I think, ways to create a feminist future, certainly a full description of what a feminist future would be like and improve the lives of women and men and children. We’d all thrive.
Vaughan: You’ve talked a couple times about your experience at Hunter College High School and the teachers being liberal. And, so what impact do you think that liberal thinking had on you. Would you say this was when you discovered your own feminist leanings?
Rhodes: Well I certainly discovered interests in social change with enthusiasm. That foreshadows both utopia and feminism. I was a teenager at Hunter College High School in New York, and I began surely under others’ influence, although you know my parents cared but they didn’t take any active role – you know, they were humane. But, at Hunter, I began to care about people who were unfairly disadvantaged, kept from opportunities in a clear way, in recognition of the structures that were keeping them dispossessed. The mistreatment of Negroes, as we were saying in the 1940's, certainly kept them from having chances that were available to a great many Americans in general and that those who had them took for granted. Probably the injustice I learned most about was one that riveted my Biology teacher, upset her and she let us know we ought to change. She had us examine how poor people in the United States couldn't get proper medical treatment, sometimes couldn’t get any. She sent me to the first Broadway play I ever attended. It was polemical, called Medicine Show, and dramatized the need for what in those terms were called “socialized medicine,” not very different from what we now mean when we say “universal health care.”
Probably the Hunter ambience of feeling free to try for any career was a pre-feminist kind of trait. I had two adults in my life whom I cared most about – my mother and that teacher of mine at Hunter, Mrs. Ruth Lilienthal. They were both feisty women, assertive, quick to resist anything they objected to. And, they never doubted that women who tried could be winners. But as far as I know they had no interest in analyzing the patriarchy at all, or lingering on oppressions that they could perfectly well see but that wasn’t their interest. I'm pretty sure my mother never heard of patriarchal oppression, or patriarchy. At Hunter, my schoolmates were all ambitious, and our teachers spurred us on. We were intended to succeed and we thought we could. As they now say, “Irrational Exuberance.” We were Hunter girls, but we were not girlish in any sense of being coy or fluttery. It’s more like the girls who can tell each other "You go, girl!"
By the time I was a sophomore at Hunter, 15 years old, I wanted to become a psychiatrist. When my friends pooled their money to buy me a gift for my 16th birthday, they chose a book -- they decided on quite a whopper – big Modern Library, heavy book. It was Brill's translation of selections from The Works of Sigmund Freud, Modern Library. I didn’t read it all, but I read some of it. And I kept it, for a long while. In my first year at college, I acted in school plays. One of them was a comedy, and was called Groceries and Notions and I played what was called in the play and listed in the chart: “Suffragette.” I got to where the costume she was wearing, sort of like the ones you see in the 1848 displays, really pre-World War I costumes, about 1910. Decades later, I found out that the term “suffragette” really was a put-down. The women who wanted votes for women called themselves “suffragists.” It’s a little different to want suffrage as an –ette or an –ist. But the practice I had, or the alertness that I might have had acting in that role really didn’t teach me anything about struggles for women's suffrage. I just played a comic part with a fun, silky costume and an umbrella -- a figure of fun.
In 1947, I married and moved to Kentucky. There, I met with Lexington's members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But whatever we did there-- move there in ’48, yes. Meeting with that group, a main process we went through was having our own discussions and people bringing in data of situations where blacks were not treated equally. And so we documented these complaints, and we took them to city officials, and we had big meetings around tables – them on one side and us on the other, city officials. They were polite; they put us off. We were polite, and we were totally ineffective. A little later I was able to join a really activist group, the American Civil Liberties Union. With them I learned more about injustices, and I also took part in some protests of the ‘60s, maybe the late ‘50s. An integrated group of us gathered for a sit-in at the lunch counter of the local ten cent store, Woolworth’s. It had never served Blacks there, and it didn't serve us. The police came soon and sort of escorted us out. There was a more tense confrontation when our group went over to Winchester, a town ten-fifteen miles away and tried to integrate the public park just by going in as a mixed-race group when the park had been always reserved for whites only. There was a crowd of local people – luckily they stayed across the street – but they milled around and jeered and threatened us. It was scary. Again, the police came and shooed us all away. Nothing too much came of that.
As a graduate student there in Kentucky, University of Kentucky, after my husband had died, I took a course in Victorian Literature that required me to read parts of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. I admired the essay, and I especially admired Mill's insistence that the woman he loved had shared in writing it – Harriet Taylor, I think her name was, but she was his wife. Yet my respect for Mill's arguments and his wife’s didn't lead me to think a bit further about feminist issues. Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique came out in 1963, but I never heard of it until later. I was then taking my last graduate classes toward my PhD and had started my research, finding books that I could treat in my dissertation – utopias and dystopias as well. When I managed time to read novels for pleasure, they certainly didn’t raise my consciousness. Those novels of the ‘50s and ‘60s – I think I mentioned this before -- featured women as victims, even if the novelists were feminist, [or] were female, not feminist. They showed stories of life where readers could see pitiful, trapped lives, but nothing in the novel would make you wonder or try to figure out what to do about that kind of vulnerability, even oppression, trappedness. I've already told about some barriers that I met myself, like the nepotism rule. Only later did I realize that it typically, usually hampered women, very rarely men. So I don't recall any meaningful consciousness-raising until I came to Old Dominion College in 1965.
In my first few years here, there were all the challenges of getting started and the pleasures of liking the new world. My teenagers then missed their friends in Kentucky, really quite dramatically. I was subject to stage fright, having never taught full time before, never had any upper division courses. The tenure process loomed. But, as I said, when we started our interviewing, the people and the pace of the campus and Norfolk suited me very well. Then I began gradually to develop a feminist consciousness. It wasn’t like a conversion it was just little recognitions, one after each other. For instance, when I joined the SAMLA Women’s Caucus, I was excited to meet activist women there… activists for feminism. Their views were new to me and very convincing. And they were sure that they could change the attitudes and eventually the policies of men in power back home on their campuses. Probably I read the articles in Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful quite soon after the book came out in 1970. I might have heard about it from SAMLA activists or from younger colleagues at ODU. Then too I admired Gloria Steinem's journalism – you know she got famous for the expose of [Playboy] the bunnies and all that -- and I subscribed to Ms from its very first publication in 1972. In each issue I always looked for the book reviews first and made lists for my summer reading, but I read soonest any books or articles that friends would recommend.
So, obviously I had become rather fervent as a feminist by the time we were milling around to start the caucus here at ODU, which was really maybe as early as ‘69 and certainly well before ’73 when we put out the questionnaire and ’74 when we organized officially. A few years later that group and some others were proposing courses for women's studies, and I learned much more about feminist research and feminist theory. Those were deeper and more intricate studies than we had ever needed for politicking early in the 1970's.
Vaughan: O.K., well this might be a daunting task for you, but I’d like to know if you have a definition of feminism, or several maybe? Can you define it?
Rhodes: Well, you’re so right, several is what it’s going to amount to. I still stand by of course the very simplest definition, wanting equality for women. Dictionaries all say that as a definition with added modifiers -- wanting social equality, political equality, economic, and other kinds. Beyond believing that women are deserving of opportunities just like any human being and believing that women have potential just as great as men’s, or just as little. I like to stress the “ism” aspect of feminism. That is, I want to go beyond equity and opportunities to affirm that women's potential to organize and improve their own status is an important part of feminism and without it; they are not enabled to fulfill whatever potential they have.
In my classes I sometimes began by asking students what would happen if everyone took women seriously. We ourselves have to be serious. Every woman needs to believe that she's capable of autonomy -- that means making decisions on her own. She needs to have confidence in her strength and clarity further to carry out those decisions.
Feminism is about options. That's a simple, useful concept. Sometimes we want to question choices, we feminists want to question choices made by some other feminists. But we mustn't criticize too quickly. She had options, and she took one that you wouldn't. It's ok to explain why you see it differently.
Some great definitions or some noteworthy definitions that I admire have been made by leading feminist figures. Alice Walker, for instance, created the term "womanism" when she noticed how white feminists often wanted to get white men's privileges – money, status -- without attention to other women having chances to better their lives. Walker defines feminism as quote “wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one, interested in grown-up doings, acting grown up, being grown up, responsible, in charge, serious.” So, in more academic terms, Walker is calling for autonomy, agency; maturity. Only if you have those can you think what else ought to happen, toward utopia.
Another definition I admire is Alison Jagger's: “Feminism is a political commitment to ending the subordination of women. Feminist academics are the intellectual arm of the Women's Movement. If we are not, we've betrayed our trust.” She’s just saying that those of us who teach feminism must also take action for feminist goals. [Click here for list of definitions.]
I should give a little credit to the dictionary that there is usually a second thing, aspect to wanting equality and that’s making efforts for it. Feminist teaching has become much more complex across the years when I’ve been aware of feminist thinking . . . they’ve seen more and more intricately how society is organized. Most students nowadays, for instance, grasp principles like androgyny, what Nancy worked on so early, or the social construction of gender. That is, they learn really easily that sex is physiological but gender is cultural. A society's expectations determine what is seen as male behavior or female behavior. Consciousness really has been rising since the 1970's. At least I think that some recognition that were then startling, I hope, are now out of date. For example, then, let’s see, it must have been by the mid ‘70s at least, I made a handout that I was still able to use constructively in China in the late ‘80s. I called it "Schooled for Submission," and I have a list of fields of study that can sometimes present false views of women.
[Click here for Handout .]
When those fields or departments present fixed traditional notions, then the teachers are setting needless limits on female potential. So I made a little chart about the mistaken ideas vs. the valid concepts that are sometimes taught in Biology, Sociology and so forth. Here’s what I said about psychology classes, pointing out assumptions that if they were taught, and they sometimes were, would wrongly polarize men and women: “Women are often defined as instinctive, emotional, intuitive, and even chaotic. In this view, we differ ‘innately’ from logical, orderly men. We just feel, while they think. We are weak, passive, dependent.” Notions like that are certainly still around, but not in academia, I hope, and certainly not in psychology departments. They never were in Women's Studies.
Our critics like to talk about us feminists as if we were all alike, but we can differ about what would be best for women and men and families and certainly society. Considering this range of goals and theories, currently people often speak of feminisms, using the plural. When I was teaching in the field, I tried to lead students to analyze contrasting schools of thought. Now that I’m retired, I can just enjoy my easy option of admiring many approaches. Watching young women in the current generation, I can cheer for each one who has made up her mind what's worth striving for and is doing something about it.
Vaughan: A few years ago, I recall someone chiding you for not doing your own e-mail. You apparently had Ernie writing your emails and taking care of that. Her comment was: "and you call yourself a feminist!" What was she referring to, and how have your technical skills advanced over the years?
Rhodes: Well that was Farideh Goldin, a good friend who was distressed when she stumbled on the fact that Ernest processed all of my e-mail correspondence, as it came in and as it went out. She found it shocking that a feminist would let her husband manage these personal matters. I ought to be independent. I ought to care about privacy. I had to explain that Ernest had been adept with computers since the mid ‘80s. He had retired, and he honestly liked to help me with paperwork. During our year in China he typed, cheerfully, and printed my syllabi and my handouts, quizzes. When he could speed through that kind of task, we both gained free time for relaxing and often time for exotic sightseeing. Managing my e-mail just followed naturally. He could do it, I couldn’t.
But Farideh wasn't the first to insist I really should do better. Babette and Richard were -- my children – were more adept than Ernest at things digital. Babette can do, what are those financial things, something sheets. [Laughter. Vaughan: spread sheets?] And Richard has his own Web site and does all kinds of computer things. They pestered me: “Get with it.” I heard an awful lot of: “Mom, you'll love it.” And they also said that Googling would be my preoccupation, compulsion.
So, after I retried, I really did try. Twice I started courses about using computers, but the lessons really overwhelmed me -- too much, too soon of technicalities. For me, the mouse just sort of skittered around. Push came to shove in 2005 when I began my sentimental project that would require online research. I had saved a lifetime of letters from my high school teacher, that one who had been my mentor in the ‘40s. After I had finished college and we became friends, we kept in touch, living in different places, writing letters. To discuss those 50 years of letters from Mrs. Lilienthal, I needed to search for data about topics she mentioned and to find whatever I could about her work and her life. Also, I wanted to reach other former students from Hunter who remembered her. She taught there for over 30 years. I asked for help from ODU’s Digital Services staff. They welcomed me to their workspace in Perry Library. Soon Steve Litherland became my mentor, really my tutor, and I at last began coping with basic computer skills. With his help, this third try was the charm. Steve convinced me that the keyboard wouldn’t explode, that the mice wouldn't nip me, and no glitch of mine could possibly shut down all of the university’s computers. In 2007, I set up a Web site – well, actually Ernie set up a Web site – for all I’ve done on that memoir of Ruth Lilienthal. [Click here for Web site chrhodes.com.] The contents have grown to more than 130 pages, including some vital references that I document from Web sources. My confidence grows as my skills expand. My children were certainly right to predict I'd be fascinated by search engines. Sometimes I roam around topics like book reviews and poetry and biographies and even history until I'm nearly in a hypnotic daze. And yes! I do my letter writing strictly on my own.
Vaughan: Good. Over the years you’ve received several awards and honors – for example, from the Women-In-Transition Program of the YWCA of South Hampton Roads; you’ve received two University Women’s Caucus awards; you were the first female full professor in the English Department and in the School of Arts and Letters; to name a few. Of which awards and honors are you most proud?
Rhodes: Oh, I’ve been thrilled. It is really thrilling, anytime, to be recognized with honors or awards. Now I can look back after decades and that’s very pleasant. One special time was when my friends and students and colleagues gave me a truly memorable retirement dinner, 1990.They spoke about projects we had shared, and they described me in glowing and funny ways. Afterwards they sent me copies of their remarks. So, if I have a sinking spell, I can read just read those again. Each year, I'm delighted to be present, to watch a women's studies student receive the scholarship that's named for me. Anita Fellman set that up, and she collected the initial funding. Now the Friends of Women's Studies, along with other donors, keep adding to the endowment. Honors like that of course happen, at least partly, because people are remembering earlier awards or honors, especially that pilot year in the National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and my share in getting it and carrying it through. It's rather ironic to realize how much my involvement in the trouble-making Women's Caucus taught me, and enabled me to be ready to administer the Women's Studies Program. That’s ironic, and it’s amusing. The hierarchy we questioned came round to sponsor our teaching about women's history and women's rights and strengths. They gave their support to at least the academic branch of feminism. And, I'm particularly proud that the caucus has given me honors. In 1983, just after I returned from my 1982-83 year in Romania, they had a surprise. They chose me as “the person making the greatest contribution to advancing the status of women at Old Dominion University during the first decade of the caucus, 1973-1983. Then in 1989, I received their yearly award honoring someone who has “helped to keep the campus community friendly for women.” In my case, the statement on the brass plaque praises my “continuing support for women and women's issues.” Beyond being very proud, I'm very greatful for the Fulbright awards that twice sent me overseas to teach. Fulbright appointments are funded by CIES the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars -- that’s our government at work! In much the same way, I was overjoyed to be selected to join other faculty for the seminars on East Asian Studies preparing us for our 1989 travels to Japan, to China first, and Japan. I described earlier the way we interacted with scholars in both countries, and the crises we happened to witness in the People’s Republic of China that May 1989.
As I said at first when I began to recall peak experiences like this, any award is a thrill. But others are listed on my resume, and I do appreciate them, but I think the ones I've just discussed feel especially significant. [Click here to link to resume.]
