Ann Snitow gave the following talk on the occasion of her retirement from The New School on April 9, 2019. In their introduction, the two current directors of Gender Studies, Margot Bouman and Lisa Rubin, pointed out that Snitow, now emeritus, had the distinction of having founded the Gender Studies program at the University twice.

The Dyer’s Hand

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand And

almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand

Shakespeare, Sonnet 111

I ask myself: What has dyed my hand? A passion for feminism.

Inevitably, such passion distorts. Inevitably, there’s both strength and limitation in such a love.

What is feminism after all? What are its proper alliances? What have been its worst moments of stupidity?

The feminism I love and that has sustained a lifetime of engagement is the feminism of uncertainty. Feminism keeps changing—and should.

Uncertainty: What an odd banner to fly under—but there it is. I am never satisfied, and since I constantly complain about feminism, I certainly landed in the right place—The New School, where we are famous for critique.

Founding Gender Studies here—twice—has been uphill because of this very skepticism among my colleagues and sometimes even inside myself, and, of

course, sometimes because of a less justifiable resistance, an inertia that is a liberal form of sexism.

During these same years I have taught in The New School’s summer school in Poland, “Democracy and Diversity,” directed by our heroically persistent Elzbieta Matynia, and have worked as a feminist activist across most of East Central Europe.

There, resistance to feminism has a different history:

At first plenty of indifference to what was seen as an inadequate, old Stalinist project, female emancipation. Then an invidious taboo against a return to communism. These were the first motors of critique in East Central Europe when I started. In 1992, when Irena Grudzinksa Gross introduced me to Adam Michnik as a feminist activist, this famous Polish dissident laughed. So ridiculous and unimportant was feminism. That was then.

But, as I’m sure you all know, resistance to feminism in the region has changed.

Forget uncertainty, satire, teasing humiliation. Now feminism is evil, the death of everything dear, enemy of the good. A deadly certainty has rolled in.

Governments have taken draconian action against evil feminism: Gender is no longer a legitimate subject of inquiry at school in Hungary. Since the patriarchal order of things is natural, it is not to be studied—or questioned. In Poland, motherhood is lavishly funded and battered women’s shelters are closed. The Law and Justice Party has just announced its hope that Poland will soon become “a region free from LGBT.”

So, feminism is dangerous. Well, I’ve always thought so.

Feminism seeks to imagine different possible futures and new freedoms feel dangerous.

What are feminism’s sins? What lurking harm lies in feminism? Feminists are internationalists—working across borders—disloyal.

Feminists are a force against xenophobia and Othering in general; we work with refugees, against racism, supporting the dispossessed. We are what Adrienne Rich called “disloyal to civilization.” Dangerous, dangerous.

Feminists defend the bodies and the free will of women and queer people, undermining patriarchal authority in the family and the church. Unruly, disloyal, disobedient.

With my dyer’s hand, my passion for feminism, I’ve always hoped feminist desire might fuel resistance and be dangerous, a real disruption.

I don’t demand that my students have a passion for feminism, that they share my dyer’s hand. What they will be passionate about is their own business and, humbly, I don’t know what it will be.

I do teach them critique. The need to define and refine the tasks of feminism is ongoing.

But to this teaching of critique I choose to add something else—something that often gets displaced. Feminism, allied with many other liberation movements, has the potential to be dangerous. I want to let my students know how powerful feminist struggle can be.

The feminism I care for marks us as in resistance to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary and to the Law and Justice Party in Poland and to our current government right here. Potentially, we are a key part of the great pushback. Don’t let anyone dismiss us as only a matter of individualistic culture, a misleading sideline disparaged as “mere identity politics.”

Dear friends and colleagues, thank you for your superb company in this undertaking: To help our students know how dangerous they can be. We are marked by our feminism, our resistance. What could be better? Avanti.

Mine will always be writing that puts lack, point of view, limitation – in other words my own speaking voice – in the foreground.

– Ann Snitow

Ann Snitow has been a treasured colleague of mine for over twenty-five years, and her warmth and integrity have seen me through many tumultuous moments at Lang College.  But I’d like to speak here of the effect her work has had on my teaching and, by extension, my students in Literary Studies.

For many years, I began my Introduction to Nonfiction class with two writers – Joan Didion and George Orwell – who had each famously grappled with the difficulties of the written word.  I wanted students to understand how slippery language can be, how ‘truth’ in nonfiction is contested, the writer always an unreliable narrator.  They were used to thinking about fiction in this way, but nonfiction was assumed to be authoritative, a kind of sermon from the mount, meant to be (almost) the last word on any given subject.  I wanted my students to question those inherited convictions.

It was only when I added a third writer to the sequence that the lesson really kicked in.  Ann Snitow’s essay “Life Sentence:  My Uncertainty Principle” is a beautiful piece of writing about writing, at once reflective and, for my students, revelatory.  Here was a self-professed essayist, writing analytically about social change, who was at the same time “hopelessly skeptical about most claims of cause and effect, suspicious of artful structuring devices, leery of confident summations.”  Here was a writer who struggled with sentences while writing beautifully crafted prose.  Above all, here was a writer who consciously resisted the allure of authority itself: “if I doubted, then I would have to develop confidence in that doubt.”  She was essentially modeling a way in which a smart, thoughtful, self-aware person might write, making uncertainty a more interesting condition than the more common kinds of pronouncements that suddenly seemed artificial or even, I daresay, patriarchal.

I also valued the piece because it contains a perception that reminds us just how personal even the most seemingly analytical essay really is: “The shape of the sentence, and of the essay as a whole, is a complete confession.”  The idea of confession is usually associated with explicitly personal writing, but Snitow shows us that sentences and narrative structures themselves reveal the writer’s mind at work, an intimate (and inescapable) kind of disclosure that Didion herself would acknowledge.  My students had never thought of their own analytical writing in that way, and new perspectives opened up.

By reading a writer like Ann Snitow our students are encouraged to explore their own uncertainties, which is arguably the most lasting element of a real education.

Powers of Desire came into print at the exact right time for me – I had just gone back to college after having flunked out, and I lived between worlds and ways of thinking: my studies in culture, my political activism, and my late nights in the local dyke bar. In addition to helping me think about each of these worlds and ways in relation to the others, Powers of Desire seemed to provide a model for synthesizing them into a meaningful adult life. Some books are beacons – Ann Snitow’s book was that for me, and for a raft of my friends and fellow travelers. And admixed in the person, as well as the work, the great subtlety of her intellect with the unsubtlety of passion, persuasion with charm, clarity with creativity –  powerful combinations. Imagine my delight and honor, my veritable fangirlism, to call myself her colleague when I got to The New School.

What is fierceness? We are often asked to imagine fierceness as aggressiveness, attacking, the one who takes up space. But I want to think about Ann, who is absolutely fierce. Who advised me at faculty meetings to “just drop your one marble–” your one idea, when you’re ready, when necessary. Ann who first came over to me in Wollman Hall in 2007 and firmly stuck her hand out and introduced herself. Yes, we should know each other. How could this renowned feminist, unflinching in her politics and ethics, with a razor-mind that is also hugely capacious, funny, scintillating and visionary, be so modest, so present?  Where was her ego, her airs?  Ann has taught me generosity as a modality, as a politic. She has shown me that to care is fierce, that to listen well and understand sides, frames, perspectives, and differences is fierce, that engagement, emotionality and fun is part of scholarship and ambition. At my 40^th she arrived at my Brooklyn apartment. There I was pregnant and surprised to see her, in the evening light, undeniably present and ready to enjoy, celebrate.  Ann the feminist strategist, clear-eyed, understanding what’s at stake, what’s possible. But also, Ann is not discomfited by uncertainty, wavering, ambiguity, nuance, the waters deepen not shallow, think of Keat’s “negative capability” or just read Ann’s latest book, The Feminism of Uncertainty. Ann has done so much for feminism, so much for me personally. My class, Feminist Avant-garde Poetics, is built from her tutelage, her pedagogy and immersive way of being.

Gender Studies was revived at The New School in 2009 because of Ann Snitow’s Herculean efforts.  As a tribute to Ann, I would like to convey the impact the program has had and continues to have.  By the end of my term as director in 2016, we had a course booklet with about 75 courses from across the university and over 50 Gender Studies minors.  A spring 2015 program assessment gave us a sense of just how transformational the program was to our students.  For a number of students, the program changed their lives and worldviews.  Gender Studies courses taught them to think critically and intersectionally and to challenge norms and conventions.  As they exited the university, they set out to change the world, to become pioneers in the areas of social justice and human rights.  The program has not only impacted students, but also faculty.  It has brought together scholars, artists and activists from across the university, and it has provided us with a forum not only for the exchange of ideas, but also, in this bleak political moment, for commiseration, strength and hope.

On a personal level, Ann has been and continues to be an inspiration to me.  Her courage, her warmth, her spirit, and her intellectual honesty embody for me the qualities of humanity and feminist leadership that we need in the world today.  I am grateful to Ann for enabling this community of like-minded scholars and activists at The New School and for bringing me into it.

I first met Ann millions of years ago, in the early ‘80s, when I joined the NY Institute for the Humanities Center seminar, “Sex, Gender and the Consumer Society.”  I was a dance historian, not so familiar with the words “gender” or “the consumer society,” and certainly not linked together.  And what a mind had invented that seminar! 

One learned a new vocabulary in it, along with a perspective that seemed new for a minute, then urgently retroactive – as if you’d gotten the glasses you didn’t know you needed.  Ann, with her ebullience, her enormous warmth that seemed directed at everybody but at the same time intentionally at you, presided.  One felt welcome.  One always feels welcome in the presence of Ann – a welcome that is immensely precious because it lifts everything, such as one’s spirits that needed lifting, even if one was not aware of this need. 

When I joined the Lang College faculty about thirteen years ago, I was included even more often in that beam of welcome – in the halls, at faculty meetings.  Being so included was a gift.  I remember early in my Lang time, in one of my first faculty meetings, when then dean Jonathon Veitch recognized a question from Ann, adding that she all but invented Lang College.  Of course, I realized with a start – she embodies the best we can be.

I associate Ann with a very strong sensory impression of yellow light – a yellow lens of hope and tolerance and Socratic expectation, turned on anything or anyone that falls within her gaze. 

Holding History

We’ve been working on the history of this marvelous and maddening school for close to a decade, and Ann’s been one of our most important muses. We’ve met with her over many years, talking informally and formally. She is this history – she came to Lang in its very early days; she critiques this history – she has been instrumental in telling the comings and goings of Gender Studies; and she keeps this history alive – she has saved documents, flyers, and tales. Ann has helped us appreciate that The New School has always been a site for struggle and has modeled for us – as activist, scholar, colleague – how one might continue to love this imperfect institution. She holds us and our history in a warm, though mindful, embrace.

One of Ann’s projects that has served as a guide for us is the Feminist Memoir Project, a project undertaken with Rachel Blau DuPlessis in response to the discovery – disturbing but perhaps not surprising – that the women’s movement hardly appeared in emerging histories of the Sixties. It’s a wonderful volume, taking you deep into many moments of the women’s movement, its vantages and questions as varied and compelling as the women featured. Now these women’s voices were there for all to hear! But, ten years later, the pattern had barely changed.

What especially inspires us is what Ann did next. She wrote an essay admitting that Feminist Memoir Project hadn’t changed the prevailing narrative, and owning the anger and disappointment this realization provoked. Then she sought a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and arrived at a way to continue the struggle.

Ann’s deeper understanding took the form of acknowledging that women’s histories – at least the histories of the women’s movement – are structurally hard to remember. She utilizes Bill Hirst’s work on what kinds of memories are “sticky” and establishes that the women’s histories in question simply aren’t. They don’t tell a clear story, with a clear end, a unified voice, a charismatic spokesperson. Charismatic speakers were many, but none wanted to be a spokesperson. And the movement’s messages were many – as many as you would need for a movement whose goal was not some definable end state but the blossoming of as many kinds of lives as empowered liberated women might seek to live. Sticky political movements walk in lockstep, but not movements of liberation.

What to do about this? Ann names the temptation to learn to throw like a boy, and resists it. Something more than superficial would be lost if a movement like the women’s movement disciplined itself into sticky behaviors. The cacophony of voices of the women’s movement doesn’t represent a loss of focus. It’s not just a phase. It’s what liberation looks like. How can this abundance be held for future generations to discover?

This leads to a chastened sense of what historians can do. Many of the stories they want to tell aren’t sticky, and will likely be overlooked, simplified, bowdlerized. The struggle goes on. Our work on New School history tries to capture and convey a kindred cacophony, knowing we’ll always be out-shouted by tall men with catchy slogans. And in our documentary work we seek to produce an archive for those who come new to the struggle, to show them what liberated lives, lives owning the challenges and ambiguities – the uncertainties – look like.

Our approach to New School histories – polyvocal, collaborative, open-ended, and staving off pressure to “write the book” – is nurtured by these ideas and by Ann’s splendid example.