younger generation of women who became politicallyactive through the civil rights, the New Left, and eventually the women’s

I was told that because I was in the lowest echelon of the teachingestablishment, I shouldn’t have free speech. It is reserved for ladder-rank faculty or professors whoreceive tenure

een attacked by our peers, particularly Black males

“what parents can do for themselves and each other,” declaring that theone essential skill for parenting is “the ability to ask others for help.

douse themselves in the milk

The small, vengeful Godwith the huge God voic

Rather, when faced with the loneliness and isolation thatcame with farm labor, migrants worked to replicate the family structure familiar tothem—patriarchal, heterosexual, and sanctified by the Catholic Church—even whenit took on a new meaning and operated imperfectly in the borderlands

Mexican man, he needed (or was expected) to settle downwith a wife and family and fulfill his patriarchal duties of supporting a household.

But I was struggling to bring my life into focus. I had neveireally given up on poetry, nor on gaming some control over myexistence.

mitive reaction of protectiveness, the beastdefending het cub, when anyone attacks or criticizes him—Andyet no one more hard on him than Í

fill me with despair at my ownfailures, despair too at my fate,

PoliticalFilmSe

one full Black lily    luminescent    in a homemade field

We do run through theexam. We pass a speculum around, wepass a pap stick around, etc.

We are supported by studentr~gistration fees and so our o

providing advice onpreventative sex practices may be viewedas condoning the lifestyles (of gays).

accine may come toolate to prevent a substantial number ofheterosexuals from being affected

Those who have plenty of food such as white people use still make the acornmush occasionally. When a little salt is added it is quite agreeable to a whiteman’s taste.”

cuUeda new excuse

he aim should be to assist rather than to let her flounderhelplessly in a sea of despair

claiming female brains could not sustain theexertion of academic pursuit without serious damage to their health.

is no longer a little girl, but byno means yet a young woman . . . but a something quite unique and apart

that women choose this method much more often than men.

suicide intent” as a feminine pathology: the product of a biological fragility hyper-bolized by social precariousness, industrial alienation, and the hormonal maelstrom

To once again become secondary to a lifedeemed more important than yours. To host a kind of parasite.

Madame Diaphragm,were pressed into service: shallow rubber cupanointed with cold-as-a-Slurpee spermicid

that did not apply to white women: “A wife must do her very best to help herhusband make a living. She can earn as much money sometimes as he can,and she can save money.”5

Widows and single womenwith children were those most often burdened, whereas single men were stillable to find work as day laborers on farms and plantations

They leanedmore heavily, in theory, toward protecting women, especially against physicalabuse, but in practice, draconian and arbitrary punishments often resulted aserrant behav iors were disciplined in ways that benefited employers of blacklabor

The correction wasto establish marriage as a permanent, monogamous, exclusive relationshipwith husbands assuming power and authority for the care of their wives andchildren.

mea11i11gmacrilincal, mea11i11gforever.So,chis is remembering.

f an older history came throughmy mouth

he grandmothers were my tribal gods.They were therewhen I was born.

In 1972, when, with the help of a Rockefeller Foun-dation grant, I launched the M.A. program in Women’s History at SarahLawrence College, ours was the first graduate program of its kind in theUnited States and, to my knowledge, in the world (

Whatever we found out, we immediately shared with everyone. Weorganized graduate student workshops, issued survival manuals, organizedand proposed our own panels and fought to get them accepted by programcommittees.

We supported all effortsto make the hiring process open, equitable and accessible to all, and withsome support from government affirmative action rules, we succeeded.We also lobbied for the appointment of women to the advisory boards ofthe AHA and OAH journals and as members of program committees.

When a job opened, a professor from thatdepartment would call his friends and contacts in other schools and elicitthe names of their favorite and preferred students.

The group was overwhelmingly male;there were so few women and so very few female graduate students thatone noticed each woman in the room

and I knew in my bones that womenbuild communities. But as I entered academic life as a student, I encoun-tered a world of “significant knowledge” in which women seemed not toexist.