Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

20 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?Though she had long held a prestigious chair in Columbia's Englishdepartment, Heilbrun made it clear that she felt beleaguered there. Butshe had survived. "In life, as in fiction," she told the New York Times,"women who speak out usually end up punished or dead. I'm lucky toescape with my pension and a year of leave." 3Thirty-two years ago, therewere no tenured female professors in Columbia's English department.Now eight of its thirty-two tenured professors are women, and a majorityof its junior professors are women. According to the Times, such facts donot impress Heilbrun. "Female doesn't mean feminist," she snapped. 4As if to underscore that Columbia was intent on slighting her, ProfessorHeilbrun accused the male and female members of the Columbia Englishdepartment of deliberately scheduling their own feminist conference onthe same day as the conference honoring her. The Chronicle of HigherEducation later reported that Ms. Heilbrun was mistaken: the rival conference,"Women at the Turn of the Century: 1890-1910," had beenplanned many months before this one. 5Heilbrun's theme of "siege" set the tone for the rest of the conference.As the Chronicle put it, "If someone as prominent as Ms. Heilbrun couldfeel so 'isolated and powerless'. . . where did that leave other feminists?" 6One admirer of Ms. Heilbrun, Professor Pauline Bart of the University ofIllinois, spoke of Heilbrun and herself as victims of mass persecution:"Carolyn [Heilbrun] and people like us will survive, from the outside ifneed be. One of my male students, a Chilean refugee, and his wife justhad a baby. They named him Paolo, after me, because his father foughtback and was tortured under Pinochet, and he sees me carrying on inthat tradition." 7Throughout the day, speakers recited tales of outrage and warned ofimpending male backlash. Sarah Ruddick, a New School for Social Researchfeminist known for "valorizing" women as the gentle nurturers ofour species, paid tribute to Heilbrun's "politicized anger": "Our anger, asCarolyn puts it so well, arouses the patriarchy to disgust." The historianBlanche Wiesen Cook (who had just released a book in which she claimedthat Eleanor Roosevelt was really a lesbian) spoke of the vital stake womenhad in the impending 1992 presidential election: "It is a cross-road thatwill lead to a Fourth Reich or a real opportunity."Jane Marcus, of the City University of New York, called the afternoon"Anger Session" to order, introducing herself as "an expert on anger" andthanking Heilbrun for teaching her "to use my rage in my writing." Sheintroduced the other panelists as angry in one way or another: AliceJardine of Harvard University's French department was "angry and strug-