Doormats and feminists

One of the requirements for my undergraduate degree was a course in literary theory. It was upper division, but still a survey course in which we read and discussed a variety of theories ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics to Derrida’s deconstruction and the post-structuralists. Somewhere in the middle we touched upon feminist literary theory, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

The day the professor introduced the lesson to us, many of the other students in the class (all women) scoffed. How was this relevant, they wanted to know. Feminism is about trying to get votes and better pay. Didn’t we get those things? Aren’t feminists just whiners? What does this have to do with literature? Isn’t feminism dead?

Paul, our professor, responded by telling us that every person in that room was a feminist.

I smiled because I knew he meant to include himself. And I thought that was fabulous. The woman sitting beside me – a buttoned to the throat, evangelical, suburban mother of five – objected. She was most certainly not a feminist and how could he stand up there and say that she was. He didn’t know anything about her outside of the classroom and how could he accuse her of such a thing.

Paul spoke slowly as he responded, “You are in this classroom, on a college campus, getting an education, and learning about something other than domestic arts. You are wearing blue jeans and not a skirt. You are making eye contact with me, a man, and not looking at the ground when you speak to me. You are not at home, with a child at your breast, checking on the roast in the oven and making sure your husband has clean shirts for tomorrow. That,” he said, “makes you a feminist.”

She wasn’t convinced. Even after we read Woolf and Rich and Gilbert and Gubar. The fact that they were able to write anything at all proves that feminism is an outdated notion, she argued. Even after we discussed the canon and how it was almost entirely made up of works authored by men. That's because women didn't write until recently, she argued (missing the entire point made by Woolf and everyone else we read). For every discussion, she was the counterpoint to the feminist view. And she believed feminism to be useless, even harmful.

I’m sure to this day she probably would protest. I imagine her at dinner parties, her arms folded in front of her as she absent-mindedly caresses her string of pearls with one hand and tells the other soccer-moms and wives of her husband’s business associates about that crazy radical professor who accused her of being one of those filthy man-haters.

And it pisses me off.

Big time.

Because she is part of the problem.