Professor Karen Klein received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe college and her ma and PhD from Columbia University. Currently. She teaches at Brandeis University in 1971, Doctor. Klein compiled a syllabus for the national women's committee entitled autobiography the person between myth and history Nationwide. The syllabus has proved to be most popular a new syllabus called feminism and the family in literature the result of dr. Klein's teaching and lecturing about women's literature has recently been completed. This was the subject of dr. Klein's talked at the fall meeting of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul chapter of the Brandeis University women's group students reading with them and for them,I found that some of the things that I was learning from women writers were things that I could talk about to the various Brandeis women's groups to whom I speak and also to other woman's book review group's so on with whom I have been working. I found that the groups of more mature older women enjoy these writings and found the missing African as did the student out of this kind of lecturing and teaching came from the women's committee national office a request to do a syllabus on feminism and the family which is the title that's been given to you today. Now, what I want to do this afternoon is to talk to you a little bit about the syllabus and to read to you some things from the introduction, which I have written for the syllabus. There is a problem in doing a syllabus such as this that and is why women writers all together. Is there such a thing.As women's literature and it was with that problem that I began to struggle and think as I started the introduction to a syllabus which deals with the writings of various women authors. The poet Mario rupees are asked what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life and answered the world would split open. Well, the world has split open. If not, the actual world the publishing world and the world of mass readership as women and increasingly large numbers have poured forth in poems in books theirselves their stories our stories and have shaken our awareness of what it means to be womanly to be female to live and experience and speak of that experience from inside a female body. Now that we have an abundance of women writers and a cultural climate which is easier for their works and sympathetic to their work. There is a special problem of definition and classification is all writing by women a special category of literature. We how can we find a commonality among women writers after all we don't give courses in male writers at Brandeis. Can you imagine anything more in Congress and lumping together a writer like Henry James in a writer like Philip Roth and simply give me a call or send mail right is it would be ludicrous and no respectable literature teacher would do such a thing and here I was trying to do that make it respectable and I wondered is there a genre that we can call women's literature? Now it used to be thought that there was in the 19th century and the term women's literature was pejorative writing by women was thought sentimental trivial romantic and intended for a predominantly female audience if the author were praised at all, it was for being a keen Observer of the social scene such praise while acknowledging a talent of sorts formally limited the scope of the author's perceptions and the importance of the subject matter about which she could claim to have something to say perhaps for these reasons and to get themselves published both Charlotte Bronte and Mary Ann Evans initially published under male names and Evans Road as George Eliot all her life. Now much sentimental trivial and romantic fiction has been and continues to be written and to the tune of very successful sales, but it is written by both men and women and the mass readership that such trash enjoys indicates. It is read by both men and women even if it could be proved that the readers of such novels were predominantly women that does not prove that the talent for writing them is limited to females and the latter point is what is it issue here. If we turn to style we find this way of approaching writing is no more able to provide a definitive classification of women's writing then the 19th century Notions of sentimentality and limited scope were now imagine this kind of experiment that you can do bearing in mind that what you're trying to do is find some way of a finding a definable similarity in the writings of women take a number of passages from both men and women authors. Choose them randomly present these passages anonymously to a group of readers. Ask the readers on reading the passages to tell which passages are written by men and which are written by women and to give the criteria for their judgments bringing all the criteria together. You could then make a list of what characterizes women's riding what characterizes meant we could identify female. And male stylistic qualities and then say she writes like a man. She writes like a woman like a man doing the experiment is of course possible, but not profitable the results are useless and Ludacris. There is no set of General criteria by which we can assign with accuracy female authorship or male author ship to any piece of writing that is given to us anonymously to say she writes like a man is no compliment to a woman nor to a man either because it doesn't mean anything style knows no sex. Another way of trying to find a common denominator for women's literature other than the obvious fact that the works are written by women would simply be to read a great many women poets and writers such an Enterprise May yield any number of things pleasure Amusement boredom Enlightenment or an increase in wisdom, but it won't produce any common denominator which links all these works together and makes them Define ably female the poems and Maxine kumin volume up country. For example have more in common with the observations of the natural world and the spare tights and tactical lines of poets like a r Ammons is a man and Robert Frost then they do for example with the confessional electric Dynamics. Sometimes hysterical poetic outpourings that characterize Diane wakoski poems. Any attempt to find an underlying and characteristic likeness in women's ridings is doomed because the assumption is false. What is true is that since the twenties more women are riding and more women are being published and the subject matter. They write about has become both more diverse and more personal. The reason for this as Virginia Woolf showed in A Room of One's Own has nothing to do with Biology and everything to do with cultural and social patterns when the expectation of women's achievements were limited by social attitudes and the restrictions on their life pattern set by cultural forms few women wrote or painted or made music or entered male-dominated Arenas of business or politics or the professions. Of course, there were exceptions made more all the more exceptional because there were so few. Changing cultural Pat and the availability and social sanction of contraception have open the world to women and change the Notions of what women can do and that includes what women can right about now the poet Adria and Rich and may I say whenever I refer to a woman writer a woman poet that's a recommendation to read these are really good people and I'm talking about and their works are first right address and Rich Wright's from Deep outrage about war and the destructive inhumane technocratic brutality which Des poils all of us Denise levertov rights of blacks and protest and social justice Margaret Atwood forces her heroin into a confrontation with the Canadian wilderness in order to find and make peace with the archetype of ghosts of her past. Doris Lessing and Grace Paley right of women on their own who must make a living for themselves and their children or deal with the pitiless constraints of poverty and the welfare system Erica young Marge Piercy and many others right of the beauty and pain of intense sexuality. The choice of subject matter in itself is not remarkable, but women writing about the subject it is for war the Working World outside the home the Wilderness and sex have been masculine terrain unexplored by women writers. I worried about writing about sexuality male writers suffered public consta Chi castigation and flat legalistic censorship when they wrote explicitly about sex and treated sexuality as an appropriate subject for serious literature. However, cynically and Vino a sex has been and increasingly is exploited by pulp writers and Publishers the first serious writers Joyce Lawrence and The Poets who made sex literally respectable gained an artistic freedom from which later writers both male and female have benefited women are free to write openly now of their own sexuality and in fact some consider it a political and affirmative act to do. So, ironically the abundance of sex in contemporary literature has helped women by focusing attention on them for sex is one area. Where in women Have an equal importance and an equal share with man unlike war or Heroic Adventures traditionally and presently arenas for exclusively male exploit. Justice now women are exploring in their writings areas, which traditionally have not been subject for women novelists and Poets. So two women now our writing more personally about their own lives and experiences the autobiographical impulse which is such a prominent part of contemporary writing has found extensive expression in works by women autobiography at autobiographical fiction are inappropriate mode for a group whose stories have often been imaginatively told by men, but who now have found their own individual voices and are telling it from the inside from women of such diverse backgrounds and life experiences as black artist Maya Angelou black poet Nikki Giovanni how to tell Lexie wife of the famous Theologian Paul tillich Sylvia Ashton Warner and new New Zealand school teacher. Simone de Beauvoir the French intellectual can books telling us of what it was like to grow up as a girl and live as a woman in writing these women are bearing witness and telling a story that has not been told in history. And because it has not been told there is some urgency in the telling of it now as more and more women turn to their own lives to make the substance of a book and add their voices to the testimony. How some women are going about the business and telling their own stories autobiographically others are looking unsentimental e and unromantically at the lives of women and creating a literature which speaks directly to the experience of woman from a woman's point of view. And this is where I find a commonality in certain women writers not all women right from this point of view. I call this point of view feminism. I know that the term has political connotations that is not how I'm using it feminism politically is of course the women's movement for suffrage initially in the 19th century for political equality and now for a kind of Social and cultural equality, but it's all use the term feminism. I qualify it as literary feminism and apply it to those women writers who speak of the lives of women focus in there. Books and their poetry on the experiences of being a woman as a girl as an adolescent as an adult as an older woman these women these literary feminist stay very close to their own female biology including that in a lot of their writings and they write extensively about experiences that pertain only to women such as the experience of being a daughter in a family and the experience of being a mother I would like to digress from the introduction to the syllabus from which I've been reading for a moment and talk to you a little bit about some of the things that I found out about mothering in the course of teaching women students the group that had asked me to give them a course in contemporary women writers. As a course went on I found that not only were they somewhat hostile to mothers in literature, but someone has to their own mothers, which I suppose is typical of late adolescent but that they were hostile to the idea of motherhood itself and I felt very disturbed by this because I am very much a feminist and so would these women but I'm also a mother so I felt that I ought to somehow redress the the balance and so when each of the girls in the chorus prepared a paper to be delivered to the rest of of us in the course, I decided that I would also prepare a paper on mothering and I would examine the text we tread very carefully and closely to find out what these women writers had to say about mothering from inside the experience of being a mother. Now this is very different from when somebody like DH Lawrence and Sons and lovers which is the flying book writes about the experience of being a mother because he rides from the Suns point of view. He is writing about his mother but I wanted a woman who was a mother writing about being a mother. Okay. I thought then initially I would find that perhaps the women resented being mother's because they wish to be mad. I found it that was an erroneous assumption. None of the women writers events the slightest desire not to be women and yet all of the ones that I was studying with the point of view of mothering in mind indicated that mothering itself was productive of intense and it seemed to me unresolvable conflict The Works that I dealt with the most were Virginia Woolf to the lighthouse her portrait of mrs. Ramsay, who is In fact, Virginia Woolf portrait of her own mother Julia Stephen Tilley Olsen's marvelous marvelous short story tell me a riddle. And if you haven't read this, I encourage you to all run out and buy this it's in paperback inexpensive paperback and is one of the most remarkable stories ever written by anybody male or female Christina Steve's remarkable book The Man Who Loved children written in the early forties overshadowed by the exigencies of the world war here went out of print was resurrected in the late 50s by Randall Jarrell the poet who wrote A Fine introduction to it is now been republished. It is in hardcover think it may be by now in paperback and Doris lessing's book The Summer before the dark, which I see has just come out in paperback and Sylvia Ashton Warner Auto buy Graphical work called myself another one I could mention if it's the same kind of conflict runs through is a book by Kate Chopin call The Awakening written at the turn of the century a book which so horrified the reading populace that it was even written by a woman that misses Chopin herself a widow and the mother of six children whom she raised after husband's untimely death was barred from the writers Club in St. Louis where she had gone to live after her husband's death. The one of the reviews of one of the most liberal magazines of the time. I absolutely castigated. Mrs. Chopin for even writing it all of these Works show. In their portrait of a mother, but at the very heart of mothering lies the conflict between the desire for children the love for them and the desire to have them and raise them and the desire on the part of every or that part of every female who is not a mother that part of every mother which is not a mother for an individual self for a life of the self and that both conflicts both sides of this conflict were extremely intense. This is expressed. For example in the portrait of mrs. Ramsay by the fact that on one page she is saying she always wanted to have a baby in her arms. Why did the children have to grow up? She didn't want them ever to grow up and two pages later. She is thinking to herself. It's night and the children of all gone to bed. What a relief now I can just sit down and be my son. By myself, all of these women right of the tremendous tearing exhausting draining process of mothering and yet the conflict is extraordinaire like complex and not at all simple because none of these writers would choose not to have the children or their mother the mothers that they depict would not have chosen that they not have the children. So it seemed to me that what was being shown by these artists these women writers was that this kind of a conflict is one that is in unresolvable inside of women and it may be the female variant of a very old philosophic and social conflict that has run through cultures, perhaps since the invention of cultures and that is the conflict between the South and the society the conflict between the individual as an i To let unit and the individual as he or she relates to groups this kind of complexity. I had never gotten from male writers who wrote about mothers and it's this sort of understanding that I continue to look for in books written by women these kind of women who my term literary feminist. Now these writers examine the stresses and problems inherent in the traditional women's roles and they the literary feminists do not find the lives of ordinary women trivial amount of dishes and diapers may not be Mount Everest but what it represents yields its own heroism and despair. There's a marvelous Story by Grace Paley, which I would like to tell you a little bit about in this story a young woman. She's 26 years old named Virginia who has for small. Cauldron is abandoned by her husband left with no money and a cold water flat and forced to go on to welfare. She struggles to keep the children fed and to keep some semblance of unity in the house and her life goes from one to spare to the next finally to get some money. She decides that she will become a contestant on the television program that gives money to victims of disasters. And so she compiled a list of all of her miseries I saying that this list to describes this way and says, it could have brought tears to the eye of God if he had a minute. She's all ready to go in a male friend of hers comes over to visit and she shows him the list tells him of her plans to go on at to get onto this program and he looks at the list and he didn't hear you can't get on to that program. He says why those people that they take on that program, they really suffer and he looks at her list and he said this and he dismisses it with a sweep of his hand. He says these are the little disturbances of man. Now women who read this story do not dismiss the disturbances. They respond with a wry awareness both humorous and bitter and a visceral understanding of the suffering. This is not to say that men do not understand that emphasized they do. But in a different way and from a different point of view and it is point of view, which is crucial here the Sharon awareness Between Women readers and women who ride from within female experience indicates to me the presence of a subculture that is of a female subculture and it is this subculture I believe which is with its humor and pleasures and insistence on telling it like it is which is being heard from now in contemporary literature and which constitutes a literary phenomena again, I have to emphasize not all women writers write out of this particular point of view. They are not at all what I called literary feminist, but women who are and right from this point of you see part of the problems of women's lives as stemming from being female in a male-dominated male-oriented culture. I believe this is true, but it's not the whole story. Women's problems are more complex, even though they may constitute a subculture women as humans participate in the wider culture and Michelle with man the problems of War race economics technology and violence which beset both and many women writers are cognizant of and responsive to these wider concerns about his women. They have a different biology and a different biological and social role from men and must find to some degree a separate identity digress again for a moment. I think now the idiot logical wave is very much against what I have just said the finding of a separate identity. There is a strong desire on the part of both men and women alike to find similar identities to sort of unisex or as you wish androgynous, which is the combination of the Greek words. Gross and gynuss male-female to find a kind of androgynous identity for people. I'm very skeptical of that. It's an Enterprise. I think that people humans each individual is what he or she is and part of that depends upon what kind of body you have not only the gender of the Bonnie but whether you are tall or short large or small the way you experience yourself in relation to the world is part of what constitutes your identity and much of that experience depends upon the experiencing apparatus you have and that experiencing apparatus is your body and your mind together in a Unity. Not just a body not just a mind. It is no accident that is women are finding their personal voice has more writing deals with subject matter pertinent only two female biology in a proper marriage Doris Lessing describes the early married life pregnancy childbirth and motherhood of her heroin Martha and Englishmen who review the book when it came out objected to the large amount of gynecological detail. The book was published over a decade ago and his Viewpoint has not prevailed women readers did not find such details objectionable women are not just now creatures of their biology, they seek achievement and adventure and that means moving into the wider World which is defined by male standards and male role models. The interaction with this male world is problematic for women in it are both separate and yet the same the relationships of a woman to her female self to the female subculture and to the male World in which she lives and in which she has a share are complex and ambiguous but complexity and ambiguity and human relations is of course what literature is all about and our best women Riders by thoughtfully and courageously examining these problematic areas are helping all of us as we grow up through a time of unsettling cultural transition. And their roles and in their writings women are struggling with the meaning of their lives, which comes down finally to a question of identity should women try to hold on to traditional concepts of female roles, or should they try to become like men does becoming an achiever or an adventurer me and giving up being a woman can a woman handle both the traditional female role and yet operate successfully in a male-dominated sphere. Does she want to I think that question is one of the real kickers. Are the new ways of looking at both women and men in society sociologist can point out the existence of these questions and if changing cultural norms, but women writers and Poets are telling us what it feels like to live through this time of fluctuating social patterns what it feels like to be caught inside of them and how complex and torturing the issues of identity our years ago Freud asked in despair or irritation. What does woman want now women are asking the same question of themselves and there are no easy answers. The issues are too complicated. We should all be suspicious there for of writing switch simplistically picture women as an oppressed minority and which reductively attribute all their problems to their victimization by males. Such writings may make good propaganda, but they make speeches sociology and they are not worth being considered as literature. To conclude I would do return to the question with which I began is all riding my women a special category of literature the answer cannot be a simple yes or no. No, I'll riding by women is not alike North are there any general categories are style or Theme by which we can characterize writings by women riding is right. It can be good or bad or mediocre, but it does not admit of gender classifications further in the final evaluation any Rider female or male must be judged on her or his ability as a writer not as a member of a gender. But yes, there is a point of view which I've called literary feminism which indicates the presence of a female subculture writing from the inside about the experience of being a woman living a woman's life which reaches a wide readership of women and perhaps it's simply States a very obvious and simple back and perhaps it should be stated because the obvious and simple facts are those which I never stated but assumed and then there's sometimes erroneously assumed and it is to the simple and obvious that we have to return to make ourselves clear. They obvious and simple fact that literary feminist. Tell us is that women are not men. That doesn't mean that they're Superior like Ashley montagu. Thanks, they are or inferior like the doctor Berman thinks they are but that they are different. I began with the poet Mario Rue Kaiser and I want to end by reading you. I hope home if her as it's written more like a prose paragraph than a poem. It's entitled Miss and it deals with the Oedipus story to refresh your minds about the Oedipus story. Since you have to remember it in order to understand the poem and it was didn't know his identity and he was wondering and he came upon the Sphinx and the swings told him that if he could solve her riddle, he would become King of Thieves. And what was her riddle her riddle was what walks on four legs in the morning 2 at noon and 3 in the evening and Oedipus thought for a while and he came up with the answer that the baby crawls on all four hands and feet early. It's nice that the adult in the prime. If life walks as a biped on two legs and that the elderly walk often with a cane 3 legs and so he answered man and that was the solution to the riddle. He did go and become King of Thieves, but on the way to becoming King of Thieves, he met a stranger at a Crossroads and there was some altercation and he accidentally killed the stranger the stranger turned out to be the present King and also Oedipus father on the Oedipus didn't know Having committed patricide unwittingly he went onto thieves where he did become king and he married the queen of Thieves Jocasta who was his mother, but he didn't know that either and he had some children by her this I do or of an unwitting doer of patricide and incest as a very successful reigning monarch is brought to confront his past by an old blind. Seer named tiresias who gives a tapestry makes Oedipus discover and understand finally what he has done and the crimes that he however innocent has nevertheless been guilty of Oedipus and an Agony and torment blinds himself inflicting upon himself this kind of punishment. The gods have inflicted upon him both the blessings and the curses, but he will take it into his own hands to punish himself in Play plays and of course, this is all done in the the message workout dramatically by Sophocles in the Oedipus Rex cycle and the light place. He becomes a kind of sainted and blessed figure. All right, this is the backdrop to Marie over Kaiser's poem. Long afterward Oedipus old and blinded walk the roads. He smelled a familiar smell it was the Sphinx Oedipus then I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother? You gave the wrong answer said the Sphinx, but that was what made everything possible said Oedipus know she said when I asked what walks on four legs in the morning two at noon and three in the evening. You answered man. You didn't say anything about woman when you say man said Oedipus you include women to everyone knows that she said that's what you think. You have been listening to Professor Karen Klein of Brandeis University her talk entitled feminism and the family and literature was given at the fall meeting of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul chapter of the Brandeis women's organization. I'm kind of Goldman.