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

WOMEN UNDER SIEGE 29at commencement but on Class Day, "a separate, more lightheartedevent." 28 )Wolf herself was showing the Scripps graduating class how she survives,but though her methods were different, her general approach wasold-fashioned indeed. Earlier in this century, many households still hadsmelling salts on hand in the event that "delicate" women reacted todisplays of male vulgarity by fainting. Today, women of delicacy have anew way to demonstrate their exquisitely fragile sensibilities: by explainingto anyone who will listen how they have been blighted and violatedby some male's offensive coarseness. If nothing of a telling nature hasrecently happened to us, we can tell about how we felt on hearing whathappened to others. We faint, "discursively" and publicly, at our humiliationsat the hands of men.The Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas, is a pleasant hotel, but not all ofthe five hundred participants of the 1992 National Women's StudiesAssociation Conference were happy with it. One woman, a professor ofwomen's studies from a well-known southern college, complained to meabout the weddings being held there throughout the weekend. "Why havethey put us in a setting where that sort of thing is going on?"The conference participants represented a cross section of the NewFeminist leadership in all areas of the women's movement. Some headurban women's centers. Others work in the offices of important politicians.Many of the women who attended the conference are in the academyin one capacity or another, either as teachers or as administrators.Being aggrieved was a conference motif. The keynote speaker, AnnetteKolodny, a feminist literary scholar and former dean of the humanitiesfaculty at the University of Arizona, opened the proceedings with a briefhistory of the "narratives of pain" within the NWSA. She reported thatten years ago, the organization "almost came apart over outcries by ourlesbian sisters that we had failed adequately to listen to their manyvoices." Five years ago, sisters in the Jewish caucus had wept at their own"sense of invisibility." Three years later the Disability caucus threatenedto quit, and the following year the women of color walked out. A perniciousbigotry, Kolodny confessed, persisted in the NWSA. "Our litaniesof outrage . . . overcame our fragile consensus of shared commitment andthe center would no longer hold." 29At past conferences, oppressed women had accused other women ofoppressing them. Participants met in groups defined by their grievancesand healing needs: Jewish women, Jewish lesbians, Asian-American