Celebrating Blanche Wiesen Cook

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel honoring Blanche Cook at the American Historical Association meeting in San Diego this past weekend (January 7-10, 2010).  The other panelists were Lawrence Wittner, SUNY-Albany on BWC's peace history research and activism; Marcia Gallo, University of Nevada-Las Vegas on BWC's groundbreaking contributions to LGBT history; and Paula Giddings, Smith College, on BWC as Eleanor Roosevelt's biographer.  My talk is below.  The four talks complemented each other and I think Blanche was really happy.  It was nice to be a part of this and I even got to sit in the sun for a half hour poolside!

Supporting Radical Women: Blanche Wiesen Cook & Feminist Biography

Debra L. Schultz, Ph.D.

Fellow, The Writer’s Institute, City University of New York Graduate Center

2010 AHA Annual Meeting, Special Session Honoring Blanche Wiesen Cook

 

In a 1999 review of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume Two, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd referred to Blanche Wiesen Cook as Eleanor Roosevelt’s “ferociously feminist biographer.”  It’s reasonably certain that Blanche would embrace this.  As a lyrical writer, she would love the alliteration—ferociously feminist—and as a chivalrous historian of radical women, she doesn’t mind being a bit ferocious when critiquing misogynist biographers.

In her November 2008 essay in the new journal The Sixties, Blanche describes herself as an activist, journalist, and historian—in that order.  As long as I have known her, she has fully and proudly inhabited those three identities. 

My talk is called, “Supporting Radical Women” because that is exactly what Blanche Wiesen Cook has done for decades—especially when it was not an easy or popular task.  What kinds of support has Blanche’s work provided to radical women?   Visibility. Permission. Encouragement.  Role Models.  Recognition of the Need for Support Networks.  Recognition That Women Can Have Diverse Political Opinions and Not Kill Each Other.  Legacies of Change.  Transformation of Scholarship to Recognize Women’s Leadership.  Intellectual support for social movements.  Political support for academic movements (at CUNY and her freedom of information work as AHA Vice President for Research).  Understanding of the Interrelationship of Struggles.  Infusion of Global Consciousness into Scholarship and Activism.  Just to name a few.

Blanche’s body of work asserts that uncovering, documenting, interpreting, and widely disseminating the details of political women’s lives is in itself a revolutionary act.  It certainly seemed that way to a young, impressionable mind when Blanche Wiesen Cook spoke rousingly on campus during my freshman year of college.

I can practically still feel the light-bulb going off in my head when I first read Blanche’s ground-breaking essay, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism:  Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, & Emma Goldman.”  First published in 1977 in the feminist journal Chrysalis, I encountered it in Cott & Pleck’s 1979 anthology A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women—itself now a historical document.  Here is how Blanche introduced her thesis:  “In the past, historians tended to ignore the crucial role played by the networks of love and support that have been the very sources of strength that enabled political women to function.” 

It was a revelatory moment.  The message I received was that even radical, heroic, fearless, revolutionary women not only needed the support of other women to fulfill their social change agendas, but that these relationships could be life-sustaining.  Women did not have to do it alone and we did not have to follow a traditional model of achievement or relationship.

It was also important to note the distinctions Blanche made among the different political positions, feminist analyses, and class consciousness of early 20^th century women reformers.   Female support networks do not always operate on consensus--and diversity among women is to be embraced, not suppressed.  The latter point about difference would be seared into my consciousness by one of Blanche’s dearest friends, whom I had the privilege of hearing on campus that same year: Audre Lorde.

Determined to get out into the real world, I signed up in my second semester for an internship at Val-Kill, which was not yet open to the public.  I was in heaven:  conducting research at the FDR library, reading and touching Eleanor and Franklin’s letters to each other.  It was thrilling to trod the same footpaths as ER and her unusually close friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, the next duo to influence Eleanor after her other unusually good friends, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. 

I was working in the FDR Library when the Lorena Hickok brouhaha first hit.  I overhead two librarians dismiss Lorena Hickok, but gossip gleefully about Earl Miller.  Distressed by their homophobia, that may have prompted me to write the youthfully indignant letter Blanche still has in her files. 

            Later, I came to appreciate and learn from the nuanced ways Blanche wrote about all of ER’s intimate relationships.  Her scholarship helped legitimate feminist biography and changed historiography forever by demonstrating the centrality and inter-relationship of the public and the private in the lives of major historical figures.

My next revelatory moment came when I read Blanche’s pivotal 1979 SIGNS essay, “Women Alone Stir My Imagination:  Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition.”  In it, she quotes the pivotal insight from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.  Blanche asserted:  “Virginia Woolf’s entire life is reflected in her work, and demonstrates Woolf’s conviction that ‘The public and private worlds are inseparably connected; and the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.’”  I was too young to have participated in consciousness raising groups, but thanks to Blanche, Virginia Woolf, and Sara Evans, I had full comprehension from age 18 onward that the PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL. 

From reading Blanche’s two early essays, I also internalized the idea that women’s knowledge, relationships, and accomplishments represented a cultural tradition, MY cultural tradition, which if not tended to and fiercely protected (there is that word FIERCE again) would be lost in an endless cycle of forgetting.  “History tends to bury what it seeks to reject,” Blanche asserted in “Women Alone” and she has rescued many visionary women from historical oblivion. 

We may be in danger of forgetting the historical moment in which these essays were born.  In “Female Support Networks,” Blanche wrote, “As I sit typing this paper—in June 1977—the radio announced that Dade County, Florida, by a vote of 2:1, has supported Anita Bryant’s hate campaign against homosexuals.”  We have come so far on LGBT rights, but at the same time, Anita Bryant’s spiritual comrades have been exporting homophobia globally, particularly in supporting the anti-Homosexuality bill just introduced into the Ugandan Parliament.  If this becomes law, not only would homosexual acts be punishable by life imprisonment, but anyone—a parent, a colleague, an HIV counselor--who “promotes homosexuality” or fails to report “homosexuality” would be subject to fines and up to 3 years imprisonment.  Fortunately, the LGBT movement has also become global and efforts to combat the bill have come from African civil society, European governments, our own government, and progressive religious leaders. 

Blanche understood and documented the historical significance of the moment in which she was embedded—the rise and romance of 1970s lesbian feminism.  I don’t want to forget that visionary moment before AIDs decimated a generation.  The question Blanche asked in her talk celebrating the 25^th anniversary of Stonewall is still relevant:  “If women controlled their own lives and lusts, what would happen to the dominant social order?” Blanche’s scholarship boldly claimed what Audre Lorde lyrically named--“The Uses of the Erotic; the Erotic As Power.”  The right to love in nonconforming ways and the liberating power of self-defined lives is still one of Blanche’s radical messages 30 years later.

            I think we can all agree that Blanche is one of our most relational historians.  In her essay in the now classic anthology, Between Women, she unabashedly and charmingly describes her “chemical, emotional, and profound connections” to her biographical subjects.  Woodrow Wilson, the subject of her dissertation, was boring and not the peacenik she had once thought.  While Jane Addams just did not stir Blanche’s imagination, Crystal Eastman and Lillian Wald were well worth flirting with.  Emma Goldman, on the other hand, though politically resonant, was a bit mean-spirited, so Blanche left her to Candace Falk, whose karma it is to preserve Goldman’s legacy.

            Blanche’s approach gave me permission to think broadly about what kind of historical research I wanted to pursue.  When I proposed an oral history-based master’s thesis on activist women historians, she said, “What’s the matter, don’t you like dead people?”  I do like certain dead people and I love archival research, but I also have an obsession with intergenerational feminist dialogue, so I pursued this topic, in the process interviewing both Blanche and Paula Giddings.  I remember how hard it was to find Black women historians to include in my thesis, completed in 1990.  It was therefore wonderful, at last year’s AHA, to celebrate the publication of Deborah Gray White’s collection, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower.

Blanche has always been an intersectional thinker, including race in her scholarship, activism and teaching.  Thus she understood immediately the research I wanted to do for my dissertation and then book, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement.  Born of my frustration that feminists were defensive and unable to break the impasse over white women’s racism, I knew I needed to talk to anti-racist white women, and the civil rights movement was the logical place to find them.  Blanche also understood my desire to uncover progressive Jewish women’s legacies and to explore whether the racial consciousness of a post-holocaust generation helped catalyze civil rights activism.   I’m grateful that Blanche supported my vision and wrote an inspiring foreward to my book.            

She also immediately understood my current research on the Roma rights movement in Europe.  Anti-Roma prejudice against “gypsies” is the one remaining respectable racism in Europe and far too few people understand its virulence and magnitude. 

In addition to being a consistently anti-racist scholar, Blanche has always been a global thinker, with a particular understanding of US foreign policy/imperialism and the dynamics of the Cold War.  In her 1985 essay, Feminism, Socialism, and Sexual Freedom: The Work and Legacy of Crystal Eastman and Alexandra Kollantai, Blanche described how Kollantai was marginalized first and foremost for prioritizing women’s sexual liberation in the soviet socialist agenda.  What post-soviet women refer to as women’s forced emancipation led not to liberation but to the classic double-burden:  a full workday and then full domestic responsibilities.  I am afraid we are a long way from the sexually liberated socialist feminist future Blanche invoked in her earlier essays but her quest for justice continues unabated.

Through my decade as one of the founders of the Soros Foundation’s first Women’s Program, I have observed have challenging it is for the international human rights movement to prioritize and integrate women’s human rights.  Despite the near-sacred status of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is shocking that Eleanor Roosevelt never won the Nobel Peace Prize and is rarely recognized today for her role in its creation.  There is still enormous resistance to integrating the more progressive economic, social and cultural rights into human rights agendas.  ER understood those were the rights that would materially benefit women, children, and the most disenfranchised people in the world.  We need Blanche’s documentation of the nuances of all the policy fights from the New Deal to the Universal Declaration to understand that progressive change must be fought for every step of the way. 

In preparing for this talk, I had my final revelatory moment related to Blanche Wiesen Cook when I realized that what I have actually done in my professional life is to build female support networks for political activism.  I spent six years at the National Council for Research on Women, a network of 100 research centers producing knowledge to improve the lives of women and girls, and then spent 10 years as Program Director of the Soros Foundation Women’s Program, linking women leaders in over 30 countries.  I spent some of those same years documenting Jewish women’s civil rights activism and Roma women’s anti-racist activism.  I have to conclude:  Blanche, you have been insidiously influential in my life.

            In addition to the influences I’ve discussed, I would like to thank Blanche for introducing what for me might be the most radical concept of all:  that one can do serious intellectual and political work, e.g. fulminating and fighting against fascism, and still have FUN.  Thank you for supporting me personally, politically, and professionally and for inspiring and challenging us to carry it on. 

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