Writing in the Real World

When Hillary Clinton encountered a heckler's sign, "Iron My Shirt," at a January 2008 campaign rally, she could easily have responded with Anne Bradstreet's complaint from 350 years ago: "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits" (25-26). Substitute "iron" for "needle" and the observation remains essentially unchanged. The question of women's appropriate "domestication," far from being settled, still provokes anxiety, anger, and arguments. Women's place--in the home, in American society, in the world--figures explicitly or implicitly in many important contemporary conversations; for example, whether one supported Hillary Clinton or another candidate, the recent presidential campaign exposed the powerful vestiges of separate spheres ideology. How could a woman, who should have her hand on the toaster, touch the button that could end the world? (1) As we approach the fourth conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, our last meeting seems a world away. In 2006, nearly 450 participants, from almost every state and from several international locations, discussed a wide range of topics. The essays collected in this special issue of Legacy address a number of recurrent concerns among the approximately 350 author- or theme-based presentations: performance, identity, genre, the meaning of home, issues of mentoring, and the concept of "legacies"--the relationship between generations of women writers. (2) Most broadly, however, in one way or another all of the essays here tackle the inevitable imbrication of public and private domains. (3) The remarks that follow invert the conventional structuring of introductory essays. First, I will trace some of the continuities among the contributions here represented. I will then widen the circle to meditate on a specific and putatively nonliterary genre, obituary, that occupies a conceptual space between public and private, and, in the case of Susan Gilbert Dickinson's obituary for Emily Dickinson, between prose and poetry. In the final section, I will speak briefly of personal loss, then return to the essays here, pondering how some of the concepts they advance are embodied publicly in the twenty-first century. In the process, I attempt to reflect, more associatively than analytically, on Tanya Ann Kennedy's observation that "there may be problems with feminists arguing that they are done with a dominant ideology, such as the public/private binary, when it is not done with women" (2), and her reminder of American women's historical intervention into debates about "civilization [and] citizenship" (8). What place does our work--which includes both the texts that we study and those that we write--have in the world? ENVISIONING CITIZENS, AT HOME AND ABROAD In the 2008 presidential campaign primaries, candidates were scrutinized for both their "presidential" ("public") and their "human" ("private") qualities. Hillary Clinton appeared close to tears in response to a New Hampshire voter's question about her (public) private life: "How ... did you get out the door every day? I mean, as a woman, I know how hard it is to get out of the house and get ready" (Breslau). Immediately, newspapers and blogs across the world, as well as voters in their living rooms, asked, Did Hillary cry on purpose? (4) American women appearing in public roles have often elicited a cloud of problematic questions about authenticity and selfhood as well as respectability. (5) Native American women such as Zitkala-Sa have offered particularly provocative challenges to gendered and racialized norms. Zitkala-Sa's life-writing and her complex construction of identity--especially via her variegated rhetorical strategies--continue to attract commentary. (6) Of special interest to many scholars of Native American women's writing have been performances of "Indian-ness." Both on stage and in staged photographs, Sarah Winnemucca was adept at re-presenting herself to white audiences as the "Indian Princess"; in her performances, Pauline Johnson appeared first in "buckskin" and then in European evening wear; in the West, Ora Eddleman Reed offered "Types of Indian Girls" to readers of Twin Territories, a magazine published in Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century, repudiating stereotypes of Cherokees as savage but also "playing Indian" herself. …