A fact of life

...696: Commonweal...

...When I sat down recently to prepare a lecture on women as writers in the twentieth century, it seemed to me that there had been a veritable explosion of women writers of significance and literary importance...

...At bottom, we can surmise, that change really began when the new constituency became necessary to those universities...

...Some women have made it to the level of middle management in business — and are stuck there for the foreseeable future...

...Only men were major...

...Yet in male institutions they have been almost invisible...

...If there is one field, for example, in which women have been conceded a kind of equality in the last few centuries, it is that of literature...

...In the course of the synod, however, the bishops' minds were changed...

...The certifiers of literary excellence refused to acknowledge them...

...Archbishop May, speaking for the American bishops, said that the whole world had to be considered...

...OF SEVERAL HINDS Abigail McCarthy DON'T CALL US, WE'LL CALL YOU WHAT THE SYNOD SAID TO WOMEN H aving lived long and seen much, I am not surprised that the month-long synod on laity ended leaving the laity just where we were when it began — in the pews...

...Archbishop Weakland, in a personal intervention, had asked that women be allowed to serve fully in all non-ordained ministries...

...The final proposition of the synod reads in part, ' 'The synod gratefully acknowledges the work of women in fostering vocations in the priesthood and the religious life" — a work largely of the past, of another era...

...Women in the church whose hopes were raised by the many early interven4 December 1987: 695 tions asking for greater roles for women saw those hopes dashed in a few short weeks...

...The American bishops had asked in the interventions that women be allowed to serve at the altar and as lectors at Mass...

...Many of the burgeoning class of church professionals who staff the ecclesiastical, charitable, and educational institutions of the church, who literally keep them alive in this time of declining vocations, have a right to feel keenly disappointed...

...The names swarmed into my mind...

...So the requests that women might serve at the altar and as lectors were deleted...

...If this inability to see even the greatest women writers as equal obtains in the non-threatening world of literature, what can we expect of the power centers...

...I am not surprised at that either, but—oh, my brothers — it is really too much to expect me and other women to accept this on the grounds of "specificity" or "non-specificity" as the case may be...

...A combination of acclaim in the media, feminist political pressure, and the change in constituency, as women joined the student bodies and faculties of the Ivy League, all played a part...

...Let us not talk of specificity...

...Literary historian and biographer Phyllis Rose tells us (Writing of Women, Wesleyan, 1983) that when she graduated from Harvard in 1964 as an English major, she had encountered "only two women on the reading lists of all the courses I took: Jane Austen and George Eliot...

...But, in general, the instructors could only see women as minor writers...

...In the English-speaking and European world, women emerged as writers in the eighteenth century and many became celebrated authors in the nineteenth century...

...And may a historian-1 know not be right when she explains why the crowds during the papal visit fell far short of predictions in New Orleans, San Antonio, even Detroit: "It was Mama who got the family scrubbed and out to church events — and she's not doing that any more...

...It was more than three decades later when, after much argument, a woman, one woman, Edith Wharton, was elected to the Academy, the upper house of the Institute...

...The first American woman was elected to Congress in 1916...

...Can obduracy be softened and the ability to see sharpened only by self-interest and the need for an institution to survive in the form in which we have known it...

...They experienced "the impact of differing cultures and conditions in shaping the appropriate pastoral response...

...If we have lately shared responsibility in matters of ministry, policy, and practice, we are reminded that we have done so strictly by sufferance on the part of the clergy...

...This obduracy is not necessarily related to the universal problem of how those who hold power can ever be persuaded to share it, let alone yield it...

...Specific implications," they said, "must be worked out in the specific situation...

...There is no measure of how its attrition affected the great falling off in vocations, but it is worth thinking about...

...let us talk of the tenacious obduracy to change in male-dominated, institutions...

...Never mind that it is pretty hard to think of a late-twentiethcentury culture (outside of the ayatollah's) where representatives of the majority of the baptized serving in the sanctuary or pulpit would be too unsettling...

...In the first half of the century alone you had such great names as Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf, Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlof, Ellen Glasgow, Flannery O'Connor — any one of them the equal of their male contemporaries, several of them, like Virginia Woolf, unique influences on the other writers of their generation...

...Now, almost three-quarters of a century later, only a tiny fraction of the members of Congress are women — and there may be fewer after the next election...

...It has as much to do with the ability to see and to comprehend what one sees...

...Yet Rose's account of how change occurred in academia is suggestive...

...Change will occur, perhaps, as the constituency changes...

...If it were not for media interest and feminist pressure, the role of women would not have been mentioned at the synod at all...

...Perhaps there are parallels...

...She traces the "canon formation" which transformed Virginia Woolf from a woman writer to one of the "genderless greats...

...They conformed, she thought, to the male idea of what a writer should be...

...Absolutely astonishing, however, was the failure to recognize these women in the supposedly detached and scholarly world of the universities, especially in the halls of ivy...

...When the National Institute of Arts and Letters held its first election in 1904, only one woman was elected — Julia Ward Howe, who, said Malcolm Cowley, was more of an institution than a woman...

...Not awfully bold at the end of the twentieth century, but heartening...

...Nineteenth-century authors...

...Take politics...