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Antiochian Online Special Feature
On Thinking about the Career of a Long-time Feminist Activist
and Scholar:
a tribute to Marianne Whelchel written and read to the faculty
by Jean
Gregorek, Assistant Professor of Literature
Since I came to Antioch College in 1994 Marianne
Whelchel, Emeritus Professor of Literature and Women's
Studies, has been my mentor, my closest colleague, and my
friend. I have grown to rely on her for everything that one
relies on close colleagues for: she lends me books and articles;
she gives me advice on my syllabi; she encourages me to present
my work at conferences; she edits my unwieldy drafts and always
offers impeccably correct and sensible guidance to me as a
writer. She also forces me to buy clothes-my limited wardrobe
repertoire would be even more limited if Marianne didn't take
me shopping and make me buy shirts that aren't black once
in awhile. She tells me when I need a haircut. She always
calls and checks up on me when I'm sick. She shuttles me back
and forth to the airport. She has fed me innumerable times.
I consider her to be one of the most completely honest people
I have ever met, and I know she will give me her unvarnished
opinion about any subject. She lacks ego almost to a fault,
and is incredibly kind, immeasurably generous, and supremely
modest about her own learning and accomplishments.
Since 1977 Marianne has been the backbone of the Literature
Department. She has inspired hundreds, perhaps thousands of
Antioch students over the years. Her knowledge of the subjects
she teaches-U.S. Literature, African-American Literature,
Women's Literature, Contemporary U.S. Poetry-is amazingly
wide-ranging. One of her strongest assets as a teacher is
her excitement for these subjects; her love for all forms
of poetry in particular has remained intense. She brings a
freshness and sense of discovery towards the texts she teaches
which is rare at any stage of a career. Open-minded, always
receptive to new ideas, she loves to look at literature in
new ways. And she is an incredibly supportive and caring professor
who really listens to, and goes out of her way for, her students.
Marianne's retirement has led me to think about the nature
of female friendships, especially friendships that evolve
from mutual work and mutual goals and commitments, or what
could be called "professional friendships." I became
interested in thinking about the uniqueness of these kinds
of relationships, the high degree of supportiveness and collaboration,
the slipperiness between the personal and the professional
which characterizes them (do male colleagues actively encourage
each other? shop together? rely on each other for advice on
fashion as much as for advice on where to send an article
for publication?).
Since the entrance of women into the professions is a very
recent historical phenomenon, only about 100 years old, we
should take a minute to reflect on how recent female professional
friendships are as well (this also applies to male-female
professional relations). Even here at Antioch College, an
institution which has long sought to pioneer gender equality,
it has only been in the past decade that a rough parity has
been reached in terms of number of female and male faculty;
that is only one benchmark, but it remains a useful one. The
academic discipline of literature reached a 50:50 ratio in
my generation of graduates students, but of course representation
of women in the sciences and in fields like math, economics
and political science lags far behind. But fortunately, the
once-shocking view that males and females can and should work
together harmoniously in professional settings is now for
the most part taken for granted, and collegial friendships
between women are expected rather than an occasion for surprise.
Probably the first writer to comment on the camaraderie
and esprit de corps (I use these words deliberately)
of female professional friendships was Virginia Woolf, who,
in a famous excerpt from A Room of
One's Own, recalls reading a novel by a young woman
writer who describes a couple of women named Chloe and Olivia
who work together in a laboratory and become friends. Woolf
comes across the phrase, "Chloe liked Olivia." Thinking
about the implications of this simple sentence gives Woolf
pause: "'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck
me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps
for the first time in literature..." Woolf goes on to
emphasize the fact that until the nineteenth century women
were almost entirely represented vis a vis their relations
to men; she points to the absence, in the tradition of European
letters, of female friendship and colleagueship: "All
these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling
the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple.
So much has been left out, unrecorded." She then calls
for the writers of the future to take up the multitude of
women's relations to each other, including the new (in the
20s when she is writing) arena of professional relations,
as well as other largely unexplored areas of female life experience:
"All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded."
Woolf's call, interpreted broadly, usefully sums up the agenda
of progressive literary critics and historians for the past
thirty years. This agenda encompasses both the lives of women
as a category and the lives of all those people who have historically
been perceived to exist on the fringes of Europe or seen as
marginal to European high culture. In literary studies this
has meant a shift from equating English as an academic discipline
with English as literature from Great Britain, to studying
Literature in English, with its accompanying commitment to
expanding the traditional canon of literary studies to include
works by writers from multiple traditions and from all over
the world.
Marianne has been at the forefront of this movement. She
has continually struggled to advance progressive agendas within
the discipline of literature, placing African American literary
traditions and the literature of Jews, Hispanics, Asians,
and South Asians front and center of the way American literature
is studied at Antioch. The Literature Department at Antioch
College defined itself as Literature in English, with an actively
multicultural mandate, years before most other literature
programs.
And the recording of previously overlooked lives and experiences
is of course one of the major motivating forces behind the
young interdiscipline of Women's Studies. We need to take
this opportunity to remind us of the many years of hard work
which went into the creation of academic spaces for the study
of women's texts and women's lives. I want to commemorate
the stubbornness, the doggedness, the pushiness, which were
unfortunately necessary to establish this new academic field;
the struggles which were necessary to establish Women's Studies
even at progressive institutions such as our own.
Marianne's career in both Women's Studies and Literature
has centered around the passing on of life stories which have
been left out of standard historical and literary-historical
accounts. Many of her classes take their inspiration from
the emerging field of women's literature. She has developed
innovative ways to teach non-traditional forms of literature
and history, including oral narratives and testimonial literature;
she has designed new kinds of courses around unofficial archival
documents such as letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and
oral testimonies. Marianne has organized and participated
in (and stimulated her students to participate in) numerous
women's history and memoir projects, projects which found
methods of listening to voices which would otherwise have
gone completely unrecorded. She has inspired generations of
students to think differently about what the relations of
men and women can be, and what the possibilities for women
can look like.
Marianne has made my life and career as a woman who studies
literature professionally not only possible but unremarkable,
something that can go without saying. She has kept the doors
open for female academics across the disciplines, for making
our presence less unusual, less remarkable. She has promoted
and sustained a vision of gender equality, which I believe
we are ever closer to attaining. And that is a real victory
for humanity.
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