An Atlas of a Difficult World System: a Marxist Feminist Reading of Adrienne Rich’S

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An Atlas of a Difficult World System: A Marxist Feminist Reading of Adrienne Rich’s

Poetry and Prose

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial

fulfilment of the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Allison Marie Brooks

May 2020

Dissertation written by Allison Marie Brooks B.A., Allegheny College, 2007 M.F.A., University of Michigan, 2010 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2020

Approved by ______, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Dr. Tammy Clewell ______, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Dr. Christopher Roman ______Dr. David Lucas ______Dr. Molly Merryman ______Dr. Kenneth Bindas Accepted by ______, Chair, Department of English Dr. Robert Trogdon ______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Dr. James Blank

TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………………………………...iii

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………………iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………v

CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION……………………………...………………………………………….pg. 1-11

CHAPTER ONE Second-Wave Feminism: Women, the Reproduction of Labor, and Surplus Value……..pg. 12-39

CHAPTER TWO Gender Stereotypes, Democracy, and American Poetics…………..…………………….pg. 40-75

CHAPTER THREE “The New Feminism,” Sex Class, and Rich’s Submersion into Radical Feminism………………………………………………………………………………..pg. 76-115

CHAPTER FOUR Global “Feminization” of Labor and the “death” of Poetry Debate………………… pg. 116-148

CHAPTER FIVE Rethinking “Difficult” Poetry: “An Atlas of a Difficult World” as a Framework for Adapting Feminist Ideology and Aesthetics……………………………………………………...pg. 149-200

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………...pg.201-207

ADDENDUM A………………………………………………………………………pg. 208- 213

Figure One……………………………………………………………………………pg. 214

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………pg. 215- 219

iii

List of Figures and Tables

Figure One: Academic Labor Force Trends 1975-2015…………………………………pg. 129 Table One and Two………………………………………………………………………pg. 212

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Tammy Clewell for serving as my director and enabling the writing and revising of this project to be a labor of love.

For my grandfather, who first taught me the art of structural demolition.

For Kevin. Always.

Introduction My dissertation is a Marxist feminist rereading of Adrienne Rich’s work set against the

“feminization of labor” trend described by contemporary Marxist theory. In executing close readings of Rich’s poetry and prose in this context, I seek to bring in to conversation two critical academic debates: the aforementioned “feminization of labor” trend as described in the work of

Guy Standing, and the “death” of poetry debate as it relates to a perceived “crisis” in the readership, publication, and teaching of American poetry since the 1960s. The feminization of labor can be understood as an evolution in labor relations, emerging since the 1960s, that describes how jobs are made less secure and paid less either because women are now employed in large numbers in that industry or else because of the traditional affiliation those jobs have with women. The “death” of poetry debate describes a decrease in readership and several other vague issues of “importance” and “quality,” which are said to represent a deterioration of American poetry produced since the 1960s. Both of these discussions have been gaining scholarly momentum in recent decades yet to the best of my knowledge no effort has been made to consider the manner in which these trends coincide and how they might inform each other. In other words, I suggest that the “crisis” of poetry discussed by American writers, educators, and publishers might be better understood or at least further illuminated by considering that the business of being a poet in America has become “feminized.”

Entering this discussion from a Marxist feminist theoretical stance, I argue that rather than the flamboyant concept of poetry “dying” we are presently witnessing the feminization of jobs facilitated by the increasingly cemented relationship of published poet and college instructor following the MFA boom of the post-war years. To make this argument, I propose a chronological reading of three major poems written by Adrienne Rich—"Snapshots of a

Daughter-in-Law,” “Diving into the Wreck,” and “ An Atlas of a Difficult World”—interspersed

1 with speeches and craft essays composed by Rich in corresponding time frames. I argue that

Rich, perhaps influenced by her increasing engagement with Marxism, shifts the project of her poems and their relationship to show her readers how “feminism” can no longer be framed as solely a “woman’s issue.” Rich uses “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” as a feminist manifesto of sorts, articulating the oppression and isolation women’s liberation looked to challenge.

However, I will demonstrate how both “Diving into the Wreck” and “An Atlas of a Difficult

World” problematize Rich’s poems’ engagement with feminism, moving away from merely articulating some essential and natural experience of what it is to be “woman” and offering an alternate site for collective action that would include both sexes. Just as Rich’s work has been seminal in the study of women’s literature, I seek to demonstrate how her writing calls us to reconsider our assumptions about the natural supposition that sex is the sole rallying-point for feminism, and in so doing offers guidance in imagining the future of feminist politics and polemics.

As both a student of Marx and perhaps the most notable American feminist poet Rich was a leading figure in the push to allow women’s poetry the same access to publication, critical reception, and curricular representation as American male poets. Indeed, her book Of Woman

Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, originally published in 1976, sought to make a case for a different yet equally worthy form of poetic labor that could be categorized as

“women’s writing.” In a similar fashion, in the same decade, Marxist feminists Marge Benston,

Selma James and Mariarose Dallacosta were making a case for women to enter the labor market, escaping the socially determined role of housewife and mother that was the predestined fate of generations of women prior. I will demonstrate that Rich’s usage of tropes, genre conventions, and the “poetic I” in the early stage of her career—as is apparent in “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-

Law”—mirrored both the ideology and efforts of the labor-based goals of these Marxist feminists. However, as the decades progressed and the passage of time allowed for a retrospective consideration of the efforts of second-wave feminism, Rich’s poems evidence her effort to employ the aforementioned writing techniques, but with an increasingly skeptical attitude toward identity politics and “women’s” collectives.

Toward the end of her life and career Rich re-anthologized several of her essays relating to the craft of writing women’s poetry, the critical reception of women’s poetry, and the separate- but-equal curricular integration of women’s poetry in American colleges and MFA programs.

Reflecting on her role in second-wave feminism, she expressed concern about arguments for women’s poetry or women forming political coalitions organized around sex as a marker for membership. In the foreword to Arts of the Possible Rich writes:

For some readers, the first four essays in this volume may seem to belong to a bygone

era. I include them her as background, indicating certain directions in my thinking both

about poetry and about the society in which I was writing twenty to thirty years ago. A

burgeoning women’s movement in the 1970s and early 1980s incited and provided the

occasions for them, created their ecology. But, as I suggested in “Notes toward a Politics

of Location,” my thinking was unable to fulfill itself within feminism alone. (1)

She goes on to articulate further:

In selecting some essays from my earlier work for this collection, I sometimes had a

rueful sense of how one period’s necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of a

later time. The accurate feminist perceptions that women’s lives, historically or

individually, were mostly unrecorded and that the personal is political are cases in point.

(2)

Thus, in my reading of Rich’s three poems alongside Marxist feminist theory relating to women’s labor participation, I will illustrate how Rich deliberately reconsiders and moves away from previous attempts to write about and argue for the creation and categorization of a distinct

“women’s poetry.”

While “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” was undoubtedly a sort of feminist manifesto that sought to articulate the oppression of women in relation to their gender roles, “Diving in to the Wreck” and prose essays written during the late 1970s and early 1980s demonstrate Rich’s growing uneasiness with second-wave feminism’s goal of overthrowing patriarchal oppression by pushing for women to gain “equality” in terms of the existing status quo. Through close readings of the aforementioned poem, as well as consideration of essays from Blood, Bread ,and

Poetry: Selected Prose, I will provide linguistic evidence of Rich beginning to trouble the argument for women to be received as “equal but different” in both literature and the workforce, marking a shift in her writing toward challenging social relations on a broader level beyond

“women’s issues.” It is my suggestion that during this era Rich shifts from not just radical feminism but to a stance we can now recognize as Marxist feminist. I will do so by demonstrating that her prose, reading material, and poetics turn increasingly toward scrutinizing and exposing the relationship between capital and systemic oppression of particular groups of people, who are devalued and debased in a way historically associated with women.

Ultimately, Rich’s shift away from writing that originates from a position of giving voice to woman-as-poet becomes fully apparent in “An Atlas of a Difficult World” and her essay collection, Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society. In both works Rich engages deliberately with

Marxist theory and implies that she has adjusted her poetic gaze, specifically in response to the increasing exploitation of labor under capital. Of this era, Rich asserts, “I felt the shortcomings

4 of my own language pitted against a lethargic liberalism . . . ” (6). At this time Rich began reading Muriel Rukeyser and Raya Dunavskaya as well as Marx himself. Dunavskaya’s perspective on Marx had a significant effect on Rich’s own writing, as she describes how,

“[Dunavskaya’s] fusion of Marx’s humanism with contemporary feminisms expanded my sense of the possibilities of both. I was also undertaking a kind of research into poetics, both as writing and as reading” (7). And in a parenthetical aside of what this new poetic and theoretical perspective required from her ontologically, Rich notes: “(I have had to reckon in and out of gender to do my work)” (7).

To fully unpack the applications of Rich’s interest with fusing “Marx’s humanism with contemporary feminisms,” my dissertation will investigate Rich’s writing during the latter decades of her career—“An Atlas of a Difficult World” era—specifically examining her poetry and prose’s engagement with Marxism. Beyond that, I look to further unpack the evocative comment that one of the greatest American feminist poets felt it necessary to “reckon in and out of [her] gender” in order to do the “work” of writing poetry. I argue that because of her deliberate engagement with the theory of Marxism and an expressed desire to fuse it with feminism, Rich’s writing of this era suggests a consideration of the potentially negative consequences of a women’s movement that still insists their exploitation and political interests are distinctly divergent from oppressed laborers structurally posited as women were only decades prior.

My dissertation will demonstrate how Rich, by the 1990s, fully shifted her poetics and polemic from emphasizing woman-as-poet to articulating the oppression and difficulties that poet-as-laborer signaled. I will also explicate that this does not make her work any less

“feminist,” but is perhaps the reframing of feminism the movement needs. Rich makes this shift

5 especially clear in the titular essay from Arts of the Possible, though it is also evidenced by other essays in the collection. In a parallel fashion, as I demonstrate how Rich’s prose and poetry speak of the increasing exploitation of the entire labor market and an unease with labor- movements that are portrayed solely as “women’s issues,” I will also discuss how Marxist feminist theory from the late 1990s to the present gives us a way of understanding how overall labor-exploitation relates to the historical oppression of women, their entrance into the labor market in mass numbers after the 1950s, and the feminization of labor across all sectors of industry. Though Rich never engaged directly with the theory of “feminized labor,” beginning in

1971—the year she wrote “Diving into the Wreck”—her work demonstrates a distinct and increasing unease with the way women’s writing and women’s movements reproduced rather than alleviated the systems of oppression in American society. I suggest that Rich sensed how attempts to write and make a case for women’s poetry—at a certain point— began to simply reproduce and reinscribe negative stereotypes relating to women and femininity. Building on

Judith Butler’s account of the way the feminist subject is constituted by the culture and power- systems it petitions to grant emancipation, I will reread Rich’s poems with a sensitivity toward finding textual evidence of the manner in which women are portrayed as oppressed because of their sex, while showing how “woman” is continually used as a reason for oppression. In Gender

Trouble, Butler accounts for this process using the theory of Monique Wittig:

A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of

oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor; the “myth of woman,” plus

its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of

women. Thus, this mark does not preexist oppression. . . . Sex is taken as an “immediate

given,” a “sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what we

believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic

construction, an “imaginary formation.”(qtd. in Butler 35)

This assertion is useful to my proposed reading in two ways. First, it allows that feminism must question our sensuous experience of any aspect of life with the supposition that such experience is influenced by society. In this case, Butler invokes Wittig to underscore the fact that even the galvanizing identity of “woman” must be interrogated if we are not to simply recreate old patterns of oppression. Secondly, the idea of an oppressor imposing the “mark” of womanhood or femininity—as a means of devaluing an individual—strengthens the need to consider the future of feminism in conjunction with the Marxist feminist discussion of how and why labor becomes “feminized.” Therefore, my close reading of Rich’s work will be guided by Butler’s challenge to expose our assumptions of aspects of life that we believe to be natural, concrete, or irrefutably confirmed by our sensory experience of them. I will be drawing on aspects of Butler’s theoretical critique of sex and gender pertaining to Marxist feminist theory, providing a framework to engage with capital’s need for both sex-assigned labor roles and gender stereotypes.

I argue that Rich’s shift from writing from the position of woman-as-poet to poet-as- laborer marked an attempt to challenge not just pervasive gender stereotypes—as was the case with “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law”—but the way in which the perception of women as

“equal but different” because of sex might be linked to the increasing oppression of all people. In other words, second-wave feminism’s attempt to enter the labor force under the banner of

“different but equal” workers—instead of eradicating the oppression of women—provided capital with an opportunity to not only pay women less in perpetuity but to also devalue and destabilize labor more universally. Theory demonstrates that this trend impacted all jobs, and I

7 will underscore the trends impact on “the job” of the poet. Marx tells us that capital is continually struggling to reproduce the exploitive conditions of labor and will seize on any shift in laboring dynamics as a potential site to do so. Thus, after the mass entrance of women-as- laborers into the work force, capitalistic society drew on sex and gender stereotypes to justify paying women less and also to “feminize” formerly stable and family-supporting jobs, in the manner described as the “feminization” of labor. With this dynamic in mind, I will demonstrate how Rich’s writing questions the way in which feminism and language itself are related to the deteriorating labor conditions she witnessed in her lifetime. I argue that the only way to fully appreciate this evolution in labor relations, and its effect on all aspects of society, is to employ

Marxist feminist theory in approaches to a variety of academic debates. My dissertation will demonstrate the effectiveness of a Marxist feminist theoretical approach in reading canonical

American poetry, offering a fresh perspective on the relationship between eras of American feminism and Rich’s career, discussing how the Women’s Movement is responsible for the creation of categories we identify as “women’s writing” as well as the creation of Women’s

Studies courses. Just as Rich was a potent voice in the argument for a place for women’s poetry and Women’s Studies in academia, she is still a guiding voice. I argue that Rich’s later works facilitate discourse that assists in determining the future of the goals and strategies of the women’s movement, the place of women’s writing in academic curriculum, and poetics in

America. Though she is no longer writing or teaching, her words have feminist polemic potency still—both in our present historical moment and in the inevitable years of struggle yet to come.

Prior to her death, Rich can be read as calling for poetry and feminism to trouble the usages of sex and identity politics to articulate “women” as a subject for feminism in both aesthetics and political action. Her earlier poems and writing fought simply for women to have a

8 poetic voice, rather than serving as either trope or muse for the masculine gaze. However, once this linguistic empowerment was achieved Rich seems to challenge the effectiveness of

“woman” as a natural and essentialized identity, contemplating whether or not this sort of

“identity politics” was an effective tool for challenging the status quo or was more complicated than she had supposed in her early years of feminism and writing. Moreover, in the last decade of her career Rich calls for an application of Marxist theory in approaching both the craft elements of poetry and forming political coalitions. In reconciling feminism with Marxism, Rich envisions a theoretical stance capable of offering a more complete social critique than feminism alone: “I’m not sure I could have read Marx with so much patience and appetite had I not participated in the inevitable shortcomings of the feminist movement in the United States” (AOP

5). She based this dissatisfaction primarily in her sense that, “[Women’s ] movement was becoming parochialized into ‘women’s culture.’ Meanwhile, the expansion of capitalism’s force field, the impoverishment of women within it, and the steep concentration of wealth were all brutally accelerating” (5). However, at the end of this passage Rich reflects, “I still believe what

I wrote in 1971: A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution”(6). Here, Rich urges us to think about all aspects of society and challenge how we perceive our relationship to the elaborate web of oppression and exploitation and how to challenge the assumptions that inform the tactics of previous modes of revolution.

By the beginning of the 2000s, both Rich and Marxist feminism urged readers to reconsider the interaction between society and capital— even something we consider to be as natural or outside society controls as sex as a marker of difference between laborers. In this way,

Rich’s later poetry questions the effectiveness of tactics meant to challenge the status quo, as she

9 seeks to achieve greater equality among all people. Ultimately, this dissertation will participate in a discussion that challenges academia to rethink the way Women’s Literature and Women’s

Studies are categorized and taught.

Rereading the work of Rich, who not only composed, but taught, and argued for a place for women’s poetry in the American literary cannon demonstrates the problematic interplay of sexual bias, gender stereotypes, and social structures that enable capitalism. I suggest that we are currently in a moment of crisis relating to feminism: by some accounts we live in an age where the movement is obsolete—after all we nearly elected a female president. There is a general sense that the movement needs guidance and a rearticulating of its goals and strategies in moving forward. For instance, in the summer of 2018, Kent State University’s own Women Studies program offered a course dedicated to facilitating a dialogue about “what’s next?” for the women’s movement. And while we owe a great debt to the pioneers, scholars and writers who have brought us this far, we must be rigorous in interrogating our strategies and theories and the assumptions that may impede feminism’s ability to fully rupture systemic oppression. From a labor market perspective, the persistence of the wage gaps gives a concrete indicator—and theoretical starting point—that “women” as a collective continue to be devalued and oppressed. I will fully discuss the rationale laid out in the essay “The Logic of Gender,” written by the

Endnotes collective, which describes how dearly the market still needs a society where sex and gender stereotypes persist. It is sufficient to note here that through perpetuating the belief that a woman’s “real” job is still executing or organizing tasks of the 1950’s housewife, capital is able to justify paying women less as well as increasingly exploiting more workers via decreased wages and destabilized forms of employment that become “feminized.” By remembering that the labor organized around poetry in academia is governed by market-relations, just like any other

10 form of production, I hope to expose the assumptions that have allowed us to perceive sex as partially a social construct that we reinscribe, as it is an established tool for capital’s exploitation of labor. I argue that rereading the aforementioned texts can illustrate that Adrienne Rich realized how a feminism unwilling to challenge our assumptions about the subject for feminism, a feminism that does not critique our empowerment-tactics and ideology, will result in increasing oppression and exploitation of all laborers including laborers who teach many of the academic courses that feminism made possible.

Chapter One: Second-wave Feminism: Women, the Reproduction of Labor, and Surplus Value

“To work and suffer is to be at home”- Adrienne Rich

Marxist feminists including Margaret Benston, Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and their contemporaries synthesized a critique of patriarchal oppression with a critical analysis of this oppression’s relationship to capital. However, despite their attempt to offer feminism a fuller critique of society under capital, the act of applying Marxist theory to feminist discourse is often greeted as a curiosity, rather than a vital step in articulating the social arrangements that traditionally posit women as the lesser sex. Take, for example the introduction to Women’s

Studies textbook Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions wherein editors Susan Shaw and Janet Lee describe Marxist feminism as “a perspective that uses economic explanations from traditional

Marxist theory to understand women’s oppression. For Marxist feminists, the socioeconomic inequities of the class system are the major issues” (11). One might infer from this short description that Marxist feminism places class struggle above the larger goal of equality for women. Yet this curtailed analysis misses Marxist feminism’s singular ability to account for the

“bigger picture” of late-stage capitalist society, which sought to create theory in service of a feminist collective capable of articulating the oppression experienced by women.

As a rereading of second-wave Marxist feminist theory will demonstrate, these works dared to suggest that perhaps the reason why “women’s issues” and “labor issues” were considered distinctly separate problems was because capitalist society somehow benefited from promoting that distinction. Beyond merely finding ways to apply Marxist theory to sex-related issues, as the previous quote describes, Marxist feminism during the second-wave era articulated a dialectic approach which allows for a critique of social relations and systemic totality. This

Marxist feminist theory not only sought to identify a contact point of the “patriarchal” oppression other feminists focused on, but also considered male privilege and female oppression in the context of the less apparent but just as insidious arrangement of labor relations under capitalism, thus allowing a more effusive critique of societal arrangements as a whole.

In what follows I revisit at length two seminal essays of Marxist feminism of the second- wave era: Margaret Benston’s “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation: Women as

Housewives” and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ “The Power of Women and the

Subversion of Community.” I do so in order to borrow—and to further elaborate on—the framework they provide for analyzing the relationship women’s oppression bears to capital. This theory serves as a starting point for my reading of Rich’s poems, as it informs second-wave feminism’s goals of facilitating women’s escape from the confines of the “home.” The prime takeaway from these texts is twofold: first, they articulate capital’s need for unwaged laborers— that is, women working in the home, whose unpaid activities are essential to the reproduction of labor of their husbands—and secondly, the elaborate social relations that conspire in producing the belief that a woman’s natural duty is to perform these unwaged labors.

Prior to the publication of “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law,” which is understood as

Rich’s “feminist awakening,” Rich describes the negative impact that unpaid types of labor which Marxist feminism calls “women’s work” had on her ability to write poetry:

I was writing very little, partly from fatigue, that female fatigue of suppressed anger and

loss of contact with my own being; partly of the discontinuity of female life with its

attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children’s

constant need. (AOP 20)

She elaborates on this further:

In the late fifties I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself

as a woman. The poem [“Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law”] was jotted in fragments

during children’s naps, brief hours in a library, or at 3:00 am after rising with a wakeful

child. (23)

Rich describes a condition common to most American women prior to second-wave feminism in which the prime usage of their days was to be devoted to household tasks and childcare. Indeed, the need to find times when children were sleeping to write implies a guilt that the work of creating poetry ought not to infringe on time designated for the “natural” job of motherhood.

Much like other feminists of this era, Rich eventually “awakens” to challenge ideas of what is a

“normal” usage of a woman’s laboring hours and to question why the duties of housewife and mother are a woman’s “real” job more than any other pursuit. Describing feminism of this era,

Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman note, “radical feminists [a term they use in reference to Marxist feminism] agreed that their first task was to awaken women, helping them to explore their experiences and to discover how these experiences conformed to an assigned social role.

They called this process consciousness raising” (350). As a result, Rich—and other women of second-wave feminism— began to question why exactly society dictated that a woman’s lot in life is to toil endlessly in performing, as Rich noted above, “the work that others constantly undo.”

Beyond encouraging “consciousness raising” that simply allowed women to articulate the oppression and isolation of the housewife, Marxist feminism of this era offered theoretical explanations for why society needed to perpetuate the notion that a woman’s natural place is caring for her husband and children in the home. An integral step in that process was to

14 encounter the way in which societal norms create the impression that sex and gender stereotypes are “natural.” In the 1965 released American Women: the Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission, evidence of societal assumptions about women, housework, and childrearing permeate a document meant to hasten an historical process, described by Committee Chairman Eleanor Roosevelt, wherein America saw “the remaining outmoded barriers to women’s aspirations disappear”(25). The committee report observes:

The present homemaking style can be attained and maintained only when another

woman, or a man, replaces the homemaker who leaves her home to work. Wherever this

is impossible, everyone suffers: the husband’s job capacity is threatened; the children’s

health and psychological needs are less well met; and the woman working away from the

home is under the pressure of continual worry about what may be happening in the home

she left that morning. (187)

Even in this “progressive” report, which allows for women to work outside of the home, the assumption in the last line is that despite her form of employment a woman’s chief concern is for the care and keeping of her family. In challenging a history, culture, and concept of “nature” predicated on patriarchal culture, Marxist feminists focused on how capital benefited from women’s servitude in the home, using Marx’s theory to connect the seemingly separate sphere of the household to that of the market. To do so, they focused in on the crucial site of labor relations, and the properties of the unique commodity of labor power.

Much discussion and debate surround the question of whether or not capitalism created the need for patriarchal social arrangements or if patriarchal society eventually evolved into capitalism. This sort of theoretical approach tends to result in dismissing Marx’s theory as too

15 much a product of its moment to be useful. Yet for the purpose of my writing, I will not treat

Marxist theory as an historical artifact of the industrial age, but rather emphasize like-minded

Marxist feminists who seek to reclaim his work as a theoretical approach with limitless application to any epoch or age. Thus, while I acknowledge that there is a much wider swath of feminist theory, radical feminist theory, and even Marxist feminist theory of great merit and significance, I have chosen the aforementioned sources in that they examine women’s relationship to the value creation process, a theoretical effort vitally entwined with both second- wave feminism and Rich’s writing. Their focus on the value-creation process takes in to account patriarchal arrangements under capitalism, providing an account of why capitalist society needs sex and gender, and demonstrates how sex and gender are tied to women’s long history of laboring unpaid and unvalued in the home. In building from this understanding of the market’s need for gender stereotypes and the natural appearance of sex, we are able to grasp the full implications of the “feminization” trend across all sectors of industry, particularly the teaching and writing of poetry.

Fordism and the Separation of the Spheres

As I track the evolution of Rich’s poetic engagement with feminism, I will be simultaneously tracking the developments in Marxist feminism, arriving at “The Logic of

Gender,” which exposes the reification of sex and gender in our present age. The endnotes

Collective could not have arrived at these theoretical accomplishments were it not for the foundational understanding of “women’s work” generated by Benston, Dalla Costa, and James.

Benston et al. write in the early 1970s and reflect on an era of capitalist production understood in

Marxist theory as “Fordism.” The endnotes Collective offers a description of this stage in

16 capitalistic society necessary in order to understand women’s relationship to the reproduction of labor during the time of second-wave feminism:

In the second part of the 19th century, what some call the second industrial revolution,

there was a progressive move towards the nuclear family as we think of it today. First,

after decades of labour struggles, the state stepped in to limit the employment of women

and children, partly because it was faced with a crisis in the reproduction of the

workforce. (LOG 14)

Continuing to track these changes, they add:

This process culminated with Fordism, and its new standards of consumption and

reproduction. With the generalization of retirement benefits and retirement homes,

generations came to be separated from each other in individual houses. The allocation of

family responsibilities between husband and wife became strictly defined by the

separation of sphere. IMM activities that used to be carried out together with other

women (such as washing clothes) became the individual responsibility of one adult

woman per household. The married woman’s life often came to be entirely confined to

the IMM sphere. It became the fate of most women, and their entire lives were shaped by

this fate. (15)

While I will deal at length with the revised separation of spheres proposed in this essay in a later chapter, the “IMM Sphere” can be referred to synonymously with what Benston, Dalla Costa, and James identify as “the home.” Therefore, IMM activities can—for this chapter—reference synonymously what they call “housework” or “women’s work,” as it is assumed that during the

17 heyday of Fordism unpaid reproductive tasks were carried out within the confines of the family home.

“Escaping” the Home and “Exploding” the Role of the Housewife

During second-wave feminism activists and writers shifted their focus from the first- wave goal of gaining political empowerment in the form of voting rights and began to link the stigma against women to their perceived inability to earn a paycheck. It is during this era that the idea of wages for housework, and even pensions for housewives, was first suggested. These ideas were—and still are— often deemed laughably absurd. After all, how much should someone get paid for dusting or raising a child? And how in the world could employers be expected to pay for things that were done outside the office, in a place considered to be separate and private?

Society perpetuated the assumption that women were simply better suited to caring for the young and caring for the home and that anything taking place within the home had nothing to do with the world of wages. In The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in

Modern America Dorothy Sue Cobble reflects on women’s relationship to waged labor: “The answer to the perennial question ‘Should women work outside the home?’ has changed dramatically over time” observing “the debate was never fully resolved in the sense that, even today, in the minds of some, women’s claims to wage work is secondary to that of men’s” (69).

Cobble offers this commentary on the state of wage relations and sex not some decades past, but in 2004. This demonstrates that within the framework of societal norms and abstractions feminism is still confronted with gender stereotypes and sex-based disparities reflected in wage relations. We are still confounded by how and why the wage-gap persists, hindered by temporal constraints. And yet early Marxist feminists were able to deduce that capital required housework to be unpaid and that dismissing “women’s work” was necessary to maintaining the status quo

18 and to accumulation of surplus value—the motivation underpinning the need for women’s double exploitation.

Benston, Dalla Costa, James, and the majority of second-wave feminism participants reasoned that if women could escape the confines of the home and enter the work force in massive numbers then this would rupture the culture and market system. However, historians

Hymowitz and Weissman note, “The postwar consumer economy had come to rely on a workforce of women who did not think of themselves as workers and who were not taken seriously by their employers” (322). It stood to reason that challenging this perception of women and the workplace would cause the societal perception of women as the lesser sex to fall away with time. But beyond “escaping the home” second-wave feminism sought to “explode” the psychological effects of the figure of the housewife, since “before working women could affect any change, they would have to confront the double exploitation they faced as both workers and women”( 322). To that end, a simultaneous goal of second-wave feminism was to facilitate a dialogue between women in order to generate solidarity and shed light on the oppression and isolation resulting from being confined within the home.

“The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation”

I start with “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation: Women as Housewives” by

Margaret Benston for the simple reason that it was published prior to the work of Dalla Costa and James and is referenced in the latter’s essay, making it the first building block in progressing toward an understanding of women’s relationship to capital. In the introduction, Benston writes,

“in arguing that the roots of secondary status of women are in fact economic, it can be shown that women as a group do indeed have a definite relation to the means of production and that this is different from that of men” (1). From the start she moves to refute the idea that women exist

19 outside the wage-economy, in a realm separate from the male laborer. The phrase “means of production” is a term borrowed from Marx’s Capital and in the simplest sense refers to the material, machinery, and financial backing necessary to produce any sort of commodity. Marx uses “the means of production” as the single divisive distinction between capitalists and laborers: those who hold the means of production hire laborers, and those who do not possess them must sell their labor if they want to buy the commodities that make it possible to live. It is this arrangement that is the root of all capitalistic oppression of the worker. In stating that women have a “different” relationship to the “means of production” than men, Benston is making a critical suggestion about sex under capital. What she suggests is that while a male laborer is oppressed because of a market system that forces him to sell his labor in order to live, women are doubly exploited through this perceived erasure from the capitalist/laborer dynamic. While the laborer may be exploited in an observable fashion, dragging himself to work each day to earn his wages, women’s “work” is hidden from the equation. So while Marx’s original theory does not speak about women’s oppression specifically—an apparent omission that prompts many feminist to reject his theory entirely— Benston makes a feminist appropriation of Marx usable by moving on to explain how women’s exploitation is insidiously hidden under the social arrangements tied to labor relations, through ideas of sexual stereotypes and cultural ideas of what is “normal.”

Benston points out that the social arrangements that make the “nuclear family” seem

“normal” portray the male worker as the only eligible laborer in the family, making it so that it is his wage alone that can buy the commodities necessary to maintain the family unit. The “cult of the housewife” was such during the 1950s that even if a woman worked out of the home it was meant only to supplement her husband’s wages. For most families, the wife’s main relationship to the world of labor-exchange was to perform the tasks necessary for reproduction of his

20 labor—even if she did have a part-time job, her “real job” was to safeguard her husband’s labor power through housework. In most nuclear families it was assumed that after a “hard day’s work” a man should expect to return home to a hot meal and clean house. It was a given that his wife would ensure this all took place, as she was “home” all day. This culturally promoted perception of the home and housework as totally separate from the world of work and wages deflects and dismisses the effort his wife exerted in achieving these tasks as any sort of “work.”

Indeed, economic analysis itself is predicated on this abstraction. Marilyn Waring notes that

“economists usually use labor to mean only those activities that produce surplus value (that is, profit in the marketplace). Consequently, labor (work) that does not produce profits is not considering production” (27). She adds to this, “all the other reproductive work that women do is widely viewed as unproductive” (28). Benston exposes for us how the assessment and perpetuation of market relations are maintained through a deliberate erasure of the critical relationship between “women’s work” and production of value.

Rather than merely accepting that it is “natural” for a woman to perform domestic tasks,

Benston questions why historically women have been discouraged from working outside of the home and why “housework,” or “women’s work” is dismissed as non-work. Benston directs these questions back to the exploitation of laborer by the capitalist. Much feminist theory did not see the point of discussing the oppression of “labor” given that it was presumed this group referred exclusively to men. Yet, in order to understand why capital needs women to be relegated to the role of housewife, Benston realized that the exploitative nature of labor-exchange must be emphasized. She cites the work of Ernest Mandel to remind her readers of the oppression of male laborers to which women’s oppression is tied:

The proletarian condition is, in a nutshell, the lack of access to the means of production

or means of subsistence which, in a society of generalized commodity production, forces

the proletarian to sell his labor power. In exchange for this labor power he receives a

wage which then enables him to acquire the means of consumption necessary for

satisfying his own needs and those of his family. (2)

This passage establishes a system where the male laborer must continually sell his labor if the family wishes to survive. Though Mandel glosses over the notion of “means of consumption”

Benston uses Marxism to serve a feminist agenda by defining the “means of consumptions” as a group of activities that essentially reproduce labor power. Here, Benston notes that Mandel offers no critical account of how, when, and not only where the “means of consumption” becomes labor power but also fails to appreciate how these tasks are an instance of labor. In questioning the processing of the “means of consumption” that result in the production of labor power, Benston synthesizes the theoretical project of Marxism and feminism, describing the exploitation of labor and the double exploitation of women: one cannot simply purchase a slab of raw beef, eat it, and be sufficiently nourished to go back to work in the morning. Effort must be exerted, and time must be spent to transform commodities— “the means of consumption”— before they can be consumed and then turned into a fresh supply of labor. Yet the capitalist has been able to buy labor without paying for the work required to reproduce labor because these tasks are perceived as “non work.” In scrutinizing this gap in the reading of Marxist theory

Benston identifies the hidden location of where women enter into the equation of labor relations, value creation, and the perpetuation of capitalism itself. Capital needs to dismiss the efforts of processing the means of consumption in order to produce fresh labor power as non-value producing so that it does not have to acknowledge these efforts or pay for them.

In revolutionary fashion, Benston builds from Marx’s basic description of the male worker’s exploitation to expose women’s vital relationship to waged labor, noting how the necessity of “women’s work” is deliberately erased from the value creation process. By erasing the significance of “women’s work” and hiding it away in the home she accounts for the “double exploitation” experienced by women. Benston articulates the need for feminist theory capable of drawing on Marxism to expose the position of women within capital:

We lack a corresponding structural definition of women. What is needed first is not a

complete examination of the symptoms of the secondary status of women, but instead a

statement of the material conditions in capitalist (and other) societies which define the

group “women.” (2)

Here, Benston helps us understand that “women” as a category owes its definition, and the subsequent oppression of women to their deliberate and perpetual exclusion from direct market relations. Women are not hidden away to toil within their homes by accident. Capital needs to hide and dismiss the “work of the housewife” in order to earn a larger profit and perpetuate exploitative labor-relations. An important aspect of the previous quote is also that Benston presents her readers with an ontological-shaking point to contemplate: “Women” and all that we perceive to be the “natural” and “normal” characteristics and roles of that group are directly related and influenced by capital. Historically or biologically women are not inherently the

“lesser sex,” but rather simply the sex whose relationship to value-creating and capital has been historically hidden. Having addressed this abstraction, Benston moves to further account for how women, as a group, relate to commodity production, especially the commodity of labor.

Again, citing Mandel, Benston describes the dividing of commodity production into two camps—those which have an exchange value and are therefore socially productive and a second group:

The second group of products in capitalist society which are not commodities but remain

simple use-value consists of all things produced in the home. Despite the fact that

considerable human labor goes into this type of household production, it still remains a

production of use-values and not of commodities. Every time a soup is made or button

sewn on a garment, it constitutes production, but is not production for the market. (3)

According to Marx, capital leads us to believe that certain commodities and aspects of life have

“natural” use-values and occur untouched by the influence of the market. Much of the first chapter of Capital works to refute the idea that pure use-value in the form of commodities or activities exist. David Harvey explains how Marx points out that “you will err, he is suggesting, if you naturalize the value-form under capitalism. . . . This is what the bourgeois political economist have done; they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production” (45-46). This aspect of Marx’s theory allows Benston to expose how there is no such thing as a mother’s “natural” job, instead this is an abstraction perpetuated by society because it is useful. Just as trees or minerals are just “there” for capitalists to seize upon, the duties of wife and mother are portrayed as things that women “naturally” do, and if capitalists benefit from their occurrence it is only because they are clever enough to seize upon the usefulness of something that “naturally” exists. In this way, capital perpetuates the notion that valorizing women’s work is just as silly—and logistically impossible— as remunerating mother nature for the rain which waters crops. Benston dispels this abstraction, laying-out how “things produced in the home” are not some naturally occurring phenomenon,

24 but activities deliberately excluded from having a direct exchange-value, perceived as not being produced for the market merely because they are done in the domestic sphere. Yet if the laborer is meant to return to the market or public sphere with a fresh supply of labor at the start of the next work day then these “natural” tasks represented as being comprised of pure use-value should have an exchange value since they tie directly into the male laborer’s ability to exchange their labor for a wage. They are not intrinsically value-less any more than they happen

“naturally.” Thus, Benston shows how society draws on the idea of both “natural” gender roles and home/market distinctions to delineate between commodities, or activities that are produced directly for the market and those which are not.

Taking a bold step toward breaking with the traditions of the past, Benston and her contemporaries ask: Why is it that a mature and physically capable female finds herself fated for a life of “non-work” at the service of her husband or male head of household? Once more challenging our perception of “natural” roles beyond the influence of capitalistic society,

Benston states that “this assignment of household work as the function of a special category

‘women’ means that this group does stand in a different relation to production than the group

‘men’” (3-4). She allows us to define women, then, “as that group of people who are responsible for production of simple use-values in those activities associated with the home and family” (4).

In this way, we can understand women as a group who are perhaps not significantly different in their laboring capabilities than their male counterparts but who have a “different” relation to production. Rather than being marked as a category because of biology, “woman” emerges as a group of people whose laboring abilities are constantly channeled to activities that must occur within the home but are excluded from exchange-value production and the market. Thus,

Benston concludes: “The material basis for the inferior status of women is to be found in just this

25 definition of women. In a society in which money determines value, women are a group who work outside the money economy. Their work is valueless, is therefore not even real work” (4).

This establishes women’s work as a sort of production—the “work” that is necessary to but occurs “outside of the money economy”—as necessarily being portrayed as non-value producing. And it is this relation to the market—being chained to the sort of work that needs to have its ties to the market hidden—that serves as the site of women’s inferior status. Benston emphasizes that this arrangement is no mere accident: For capital to produce surplus value and in order for the laborer to be able to sell labor power to capitalists, it is necessary for this group, here understood as “women,” to exist perpetually laboring outside of the money economy. It is under this social arrangement that the commodity labor power is reproduced in such a fashion as to allow for the creation of surplus value. In other words, women are not simply exploited as the average laborer, but doubly exploited in her status as “non-worker” outside of the monied economy, despite the vital role her non-work plays in the exchange of labor and value creation process.

Women and the “Reserve Labor Army”

Benston shows us that capitalist accumulation relies upon a group of individuals needing to perform forms of labor that are considered to be “non-work” as well as capital’s need to maintain a reserve army of labor. Explicating the idea of women comprising a “reserve” of laborers, she writes, “when labor is scarce (early industrialization, the two world wars, etc.) then women form an important part of the labor force. When there is less demand for labor (as now under neocapitalism) women become a surplus labor force” (9). Benston goes on to note how women as a labor force are easily pushed in and out of the factory, since “the pervading ideology ensures that no one, man or woman, takes women’s participation in the labor force very

26 seriously. Women’s real work, we are taught, is in the home; this holds whether or not they are married, single, or the heads of households”(9).

For the sake of building towards an understanding of the feminization of labor being discussed in our moment, there are two aspects of Benston’s comments I wish to underscore. First, she references the notion of a reserve army of labor and the necessity of having such a reserve to ensure capitalism’s perpetuation. While I wish to revisit the concept of a reserve labor army and the laborers who are placed into this reserve, note here that prior to the 1970s, it was largely assumed that it was women who comprised this labor reserve. Benston makes clear for future

Marxist feminists that capital needs to restrict a portion of the labor pool from selling their labor openly and equally. Since women have historically occupied the role of supporting their husband’s waged labor, society can draw on women in times of need but must also perpetuate the belief that a woman’s “real job” consisted of activities that took place within the home. This creates a perception that while the woman is at home she is “not working” and if she does hold a job she is merely “pitching in”—working to produce war materials for the men who are at war, or else supplementing her husband’s family-sustaining wages to provide a “better life.”

Affirming this societal presumption during Benston’s era, the U.S. Presidential Commission

Committee on the Status of Women: “At the outset, the Committee reaffirmed ‘society’s stake in strong family life’ and mothers’ primary responsibilities in the home. At the same time, it also noted that many women are engaged outside their homes in endeavors related to their families’ needs and welfare. . . ” (111).

Furthering Feminist Theory: Marxist feminist Dialectics

With a sensitivity towards encouraging feminist discourse to draw on Marxist theory,

Benston discusses her contemporary Juliet Mitchell who states: “Until there is a revolution in

27 production, the labor situation will prescribe women’s situation within the world of men” (4).

This underscores the fact that it is because of market conditions and the arrangement of production and labor that leads to women’s double exploitation. By referencing Mitchell,

Benston aligns herself with feminist thinkers who realize that capitalism’s manipulation of society to suit its own purposes produces all other social arrangements around the status of women. Her usage of Mitchell refuses the idea that “feminist movements” must be placed before and treated separately from labor issues. However, Benston also stridently disagrees with

Marxists who argue that a laborers’ movement should not be intermingled with feminist efforts.

Instead, Benston directs the discussion back to a scrutinizing of household production, noting how this unpaid and unrecognized labor is vital to the perpetuation of the status quo. Illustrating the temporal constraints at play when she wrote her critique of housework, Benston attends to the divide between those feminists who believe women require access to jobs in the open market as a sort of empowerment “magic bullet” and those who add to this caveat a need for wages for housework. Benston situates herself in the latter camp, arguing for wages for housework, suggesting that there are structural limits to the belief that simply “escaping” the confines of the household reproduction will result in the end of gender-based oppression. Benston expresses this stance in the concluding argument of her essay:

Equal access to jobs outside the home, while one of the preconditions for women’s

liberation, will not in itself be sufficient to give equality for women; as long as work in

the home remains a matter of private production and is the responsibility of women, they

will simply carry a double work-load. A second prerequisite for women’s liberation

which follows from the above analysis is the conversion of work now done in the home

as private production into work to be done in the public economy. (9)

The implication here, though not stated so overtly, is that equal access to market sector production does not equate with equality as envisioned by the second-wave of the women’s movement. Instead, she seems to predict a scenario which later feminists would term “second shift labor,” wherein a woman is expected to both earn a wage outside of the home and then come back from “work” only to be responsible for performing reproductive tasks for the household.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ “The Power of Women and the Subversion of

Community”

As the title of their 1972 essay suggests, the idea that a woman’s collective held the potential for political action –systemic rupture even— was increasingly embraced by feminist theory. Similar to Benston, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James focus on the commodity of labor power, its role in wage relations, and how feminism can challenge this dynamic. A next step from the groundwork laid by Benston, Dalla Costa and James continue to emphasize the mystified representation of the production and reproduction of labor power and how it is portrayed and perpetuated as “women’s work.” In the introduction, James writes, “Capital’s special way of robbing labor is paying the worker a wage that is enough to live on (more or less)” going on to describe how, “he buys with the wages the right to use the only “thing” the worker has to sell, his ability or her ability to work”. From this basic Marxist formulation, she explains, “The specific social relation, which is capital, then, is the wage relation. And this wage relation can exist only when the ability to work becomes a saleable commodity, Marx calls this labor power. This is a strange commodity for it is not a thing” (11). James underscores the application of this theory to her purpose:

The ability to labor resides only in a human being whose life is consumed in the process

of producing. First it must be nine months in the womb, must be fed, clothed and trained;

then when it works its bed must be made, its floors swept, its lunchbox prepared. . . . This

is how labor power is produced and reproduced when it is daily consumed in the factory

or at the office. To describe its [labor power’s] basic production and reproduction is to

describe women’s work. (11)

Dalla Costa and James build from Marx’s basic formulation of the value creation process: a laborer must sell their labor, the only “thing” they actually possess, if they wish to live and work another day. The wage is meant to sustain the laborer in exchange for their time working for the capitalist, yet there is a blank spot in this arrangement since labor itself must be produced. Dalla

Costa and James identify that the act of producing and reproducing labor power has traditionally been the role of “women,” thus giving us the description of reproductive activities as “women’s work.” While Benston focuses on the domestic sphere, or the home, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” is especially concerned with the way in which society perpetuated the figure of the “housewife.” Rather than concerning themselves with the physical space that serves to hide the work of women, they emphasize the societal stereotypes that keep women subservient and within the home. They write: “We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume that all women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives” (21). Through appreciating this theoretical emphasis, we can understand the rationale behind second-wave feminism’s push to secure women’s access to the public sector, but also to collectivize as women for the sake of simultaneous political action. Women who held jobs “outside of the home” were far from free and comprised a professional minority and had not accomplished the stereotype-

30 smashing Benston envisioned in simply escaping the home. Hymowitz and Weissman describe laboring conditions in the late 60s and early 70s:

The married woman who worked at a clerical or factory job did not challenge

contemporary ideas about woman’s role. The ill-paid female worker was perceived as

having extended her role as nurturing wife and mother into the marketplace—she worked

to earn money for her family, to make her husband and her children’s life more

comfortable and secure. (323)

Therefore, beyond challenging society’s assumption that a woman’s natural place was within the home, Dalla Costa and James scrutinize the family unit, specifically the role of housewife and mother, regardless of whether or not she sometimes toiled in a space other than the family home.

As the Endnotes collective explicates when describing the stage of capitalist production known as Fordism, the “nuclear family” was not merely the normal household arrangement, but also a basic social unit of consumption critical to capital. In the following passage, Dalla Costa and

James illustrate the relationship of the family to the market and how this relationship plays a critical role in how we understand the figure of the “housewife:”

With the advent of capitalism, the socialization of production was organized with the

factory as its center. Those who worked in the new productive center, the factory,

received a wage. Those who were excluded did not. Women, children and the aged lost

the relative power that derived from the family’s dependence on their labor. (24)

Because of pervasive cultural norms men became the wage laborer within the family, the individual tasked with bearing the brunt of financial responsibility for the others: “It has put on

31 the man’s shoulders the burden of financial responsibility for women, children, the old, the ill, in a word all those who do not receive wages” (24.)

It becomes clear how the familial social arrangement serves to perpetuate stereotypes surrounding “the housewife” by assigning relationships to waged labor along the lines of sex.

Not as a result of biology or “nature,” but because of “pervasive cultural norms” capital can draw on customs, history, and notions of the family to portray women as the supplement to her husband’s laboring ability. The result is a capital-driven and carefully hidden dichotomy between those who are able to earn a wage for their labor on the open market and those whose cultural norms dictate as being unfit to sell their labor directly. This places the adult male as the primary wage earner within the household, the member whose laboring capacity is such that it can reliably sustain the basic consumption needs of the unit. However, it also relies on the assumption that behind every man laboring, unseen and unpaid, is a woman whose chief concern and main “job” is the care and maintenance of the family unit.

In the previous quote women are lumped within the family-unit with “children, the old, the ill, in a word all those who do not receive a wage.” James and Dalla Costa note that capitalism and wage relations are responsible for perpetuating the “exploitation of the wage-less” and draw on their reading of Marx to build a case that demonstrates how, without equal access to equally waged labor positions, those who are exploited will continue to be exploited:

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage, that is,

that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage laborer and his or her direct

exploitation. What has been neither clear nor assumed by the organizations of the

working class movement is that precisely through the wage has the exploitation of the

non-wage laborer been organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because

the lack of a wage hid it. That is, the wage commanded a larger amount of labor than

appeared in factory bargaining. Where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a

personal service outside of capital. (27-28)

In exposing the concept of the “hidden” value and personal service Dalla Costa and James demonstrate feminist theory’s ability to identify gaps in Marxism, as well as Marxism’s unique aptitude to allow feminism a more fulsome critique of society. To reiterate a tenant of Marxism initially utilized by Benston, we must remember how Marx explains that the basic underpinning of capitalism is an exploitative exchange between laborer and capitalist, with the wage serving as the site of the capitalist exploiting the workers’ labor. In Capital, Marx tells us directly:

The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours

does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore, the value of

labour-power, and the value which that labor-power valorizes . . . in the labour-process

are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in

mind when he was purchasing labour-power. . . . What was really decisive for him was

the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of

value, but of more value than it has itself. (Harvey,124)

Critically, it is because of unique nature of the commodity labor-power that surplus value can be created and gathered up by the capital. This commodity and this alone holds the ability to produce not just value, but value above and beyond its own market-dictated worth. What is also unique to labor power is that the laborer needs to be able to reproduce this strange and critical commodity in the time when he is not laboring directly for the capitalist, a time and place that capitalist society wants us to believe exist separately form the world of the factory or office.

There are only so many hours in the day and only so many hours the capitalist is willing to

33 recognize as the “workday” when considering an hourly wage. Capitalist society would want us to believe that what a laborer does on their own time and the home they return to is beyond the reaches of market influence. But building off of Marx’s original theory what James and Dalla

Costa are suggesting is that this perception is a deliberate abstraction. Because of our perception that the “housewife” is a non-worker and that anything within the “home” is beyond the reaches of capitalist society, it then falls on the female family member to reproduce the labor power of her male laborer as a “personal service.” Because a woman is “naturally” concerned with homelife and her family, whatever she does to care and maintain them is implicitly beyond the bounds of market-relations. Yet in light of the previous excerpt from their essay, Dalla Costa and

James make plain that because a laborer does not have the time or the physical stamina to reproduce their own labor these activities have to be done in a place and by a person functioning in a role that is perceived as existing outside of the realm of earning wages. Thus, hidden behind the capitalist’s pilfering of surplus value directly from the laborer is an identical process being enacted upon the non-wage laborers, the women. However, this exploitation is compounded because it is essentially hidden by lack of a wage, creating an arrangement where a woman is

“trapped” and isolated within the home. Even if she enters into the workplace, the role of the housewife awaits her when she gets home, inducing her to complete the tasks necessary to the reproduction of labor without considering this to be value creating “work” at all—she is merely doing what any loving wife and mother ought to do. Without these obscured and deliberately unvalued efforts of the “housewife”— given the vital role that the “peculiar” commodity labor value places in capitalist accumulation—the entire system ceases to function. As Dalla Costa and

James observe, “we have to make clear that, within the wage, domestic work produces not merely use values, but is essential to the production of surplus value” (33).

In making a case for capital’s need for and direct role in perpetuating female subjugation through not just the home but in the figure of the housewife the authors note that it is social ideology necessary to perpetuating market relations that drives women’s secondary status and not some biologically imposed constraint. Instead, from birth until death women are indoctrinated with the cult of the housewife, meant to accept this role and this toil as their predetermined lot in life. As Dalla Costa and James observe:

It is often asserted that, within the definition of wage labor, women in domestic labor are

not productive. In fact, precisely the opposite is true if one thinks of the enormous

quantity of social services which capitalist organizations transform into privatized

activity, putting them on the backs of housewives. Domestic labor is not essentially

“feminine work”; a woman doesn’t fulfill herself more or get less exhausted than a man

from washing and cleaning. These are social services inasmuch as they serve the

reproduction of labor power. And capital, precisely by instituting its family structure has

“liberated” the man from these functions so that he is completely “free” for direct

exploitation: so that he is free to “earn” enough for a woman to reproduce him as labor

power. (33-34)

In this light, one can understand concluding that women can become “free” from the essentially slave labor arrangements within the domestic sphere by a mass exodus into the public sector.

Yet Dalla Costa and James are not so naïve as to suggest that simply allowing women access to factory jobs or other sectors of industry is enough to enact the

“emancipation/liberation” of women. Grasping Marx’s notion of freedom, not with positive connotations in terms of liberty or free will, in the sense that a laborer is simply “free” from the means of production, they are careful to note that, under capitalism, all labor is exploited labor:

Work is still work, whether inside or outside of the home. The independence of the wage

earner means only being a “free individual” for capital, no less for women than for men.

Those who advocate that the liberation of the working class woman lies in her getting a

job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line

is not a liberation from slavery to the kitchen sink. (35)

They gone on to add:

What we wish to make clear here is that by the non-payment of a wage when we are

producing in a world capitalistically organized, the figure of the boss is concealed behind

that of the husband. He appears to be the sole recipient of domestic services, and this

gives an ambiguous and slave-like character to housework. The husband and children,

through their loving involvement, their loving blackmail, become the first foremen, the

immediate controllers of this labor (35).

Here, the authors expose the naivety of viewing an escape from the factory of production hidden within the home as enough to grant female empowerment. Instead, they turn their attention to challenging the structure of family and the usage of familial relations as a means of inducing women to labor in this manner without a wage. Therefore, Dalla Costa and James call for a woman-centric collectivizing that seeks to expose the double exploitation inherent in housework:

Rather we must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure

of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home

as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is not only to stop doing this work, but

to smash the entire role of housewife. (36)

Part of this project of struggle, of smashing the housewife, is to seek a new identity: “In the sociality of struggle women discover and exercise a power that effectively gives them a new identity. The new identity is and can only be a new degree of social power (35-36).

Bearing in mind that it necessary for “feminine work” or “women’s work” to be seen as non-social production occurring outside of the confines of the workday and market, then “the home” does become a place to escape from, as Benston insisted. Given the temporal constraints of this historical moment, the language of breaking out, smashing, and escaping becomes a point of potential systemic rupture, and it is easy to see how the second-wave goal of escaping from the home would be conceived as an unequivocal victory against a system that feeds upon the oppression of women. Dalla Costa and James further this concept by insisting that feminism also must challenge the perception of “feminine,” “domestic,” or “women’s work” as a devalued category of labor, as well as the beliefs indoctrinated in women surrounding the notion of the

“housewife” which suggests that women are naturally better suited to these tasks than full labor participation. In doing so, their theory exposes the value creation process driven necessity of some quotient of potential laborers being held in a hidden basement of surplus value-producing toil, a group historically populated by women. Moreover, they articulate how tasks that have traditionally been hidden away in the home are vital to capitalism, and how if capitalism is to continue to function, the efforts of these women must be devalued, downplayed, and obscured. In order to ensure future generations of “housewives” serving in this capacity capital perpetuates the normalization of sex-based relations to waged labor, seeking to sustain the double exploitation of women that ensures the maintenance of their access to surplus value. To challenge that, Dalla Costa and James call for the radical feminist project of “consciousness raising,” and collectivizing that became a strategy of much of second-wave feminism. They call

37 for second-wave feminists not only to challenge capital by troubling forms of labor portrayed as

“cut off from social production,” but also to communicate with each other and break the isolation experienced within the walls of the house, thus expos the abstractions that perpetuate the exploitation of the “housewife:”

So when we say that women must overthrow the relation of domestic-work-time to non-

domestic-time and must begin to move out of the home, we mean their point of departure

must be precisely this willingness to destroy the role of housewife, in order to being to

come together with other women, not only as neighbors and friends but as workmates and

anti-work mates; thus breaking the tradition of privatized female, with all its rivalry, and

reconstructing a real solidarity among women: not solidarity for defense but solidarity for

attack, for the organization of the struggle. A common solidarity against a common form

of labor. (38)

Building from this they conclude: “To sum up: the most important thing becomes precisely this explosion of the women’s movement as an expression of the specificity of female interests hitherto castrated from all its connections by the capitalist organization of the family” (39).

Dalla Costa and James not only locate the isolation of the home but also the idea of the

“housewife” as the mechanism of female subjugation. They demonstrate how a challenge to the arrangement of housewife as unpaid laborer enacted by a collective of women seeking permanent and equal access to waged labor will invariably trigger a systemic shift in all labor relations. Building on Benston’s theories, they add that it is not enough, for women to simply

“escape” from the home, but, in order to shatter the isolated shackles that historically kept her from the world beyond the walls of the domestic sphere, women must encounter one another and question gender stereotypes and sex-based labor allotments. As the writing of Benston, James,

38 and Dalla Costa tell us, the capitalism-driven stigma against women has been deeply ingrained, making it no easy feat for a woman to enter into jobs in the directly market-mediated sector, with the labor of writing and teaching poetry being no exception. It is from this theoretical foundation and historical moment that Rich publishes the anthology Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law and addresses the Modern Language Association’s committee on the status of women in the profession in her speech “When We Dead Awaken.”

Chapter Two: Gender Stereotypes, Democracy, and American Poetics

“A woman ought not to write. Somehow it is indelicate and unbecoming. She ought to imitate the female birds, who are silent—or if she sings no one ought to hear her music until she is dead.” - Sara Teasdale

American women were granted voting rights in the 1920s and appeared to be “full citizens,” an abstraction critically termed “the emancipation myth” (89) by feminist historian

Angela Davis in her book Women, Race, and Class. Speaking to this issue specifically as it related to the work-place, labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobbler notes that in America it was not until after the labor force disruptions of World War II that “the occupational patterns of women changed permanently over the course of the 1940s: large numbers of white women were now in service, retail, and clerical jobs, and nonwhite women were a growing proportion of the workforce”( 14). As I will discuss in the fourth chapter, this development coincides with shifts in the market for teaching poetry in universities, which is itself a product of the post-war “MFA boom” in the United States.

Yet more broadly, the result of the aforementioned general labor force disruption impacted women’s perception of their own relationship to the direct labor market. Cobble quotes a war-worker, who describes how women “changed as much as the men who went to war. We developed a feeling of self-confidence and a sense of worth” (13-14) that manifested itself in a push for women to have permanent access to market sector jobs as they had in times of war or dire need. Prior to the 1950s women might be understood as only appearing to be equal under democracy. Not until the 1950s, as a result of second-wave feminism, was it possible and acceptable for the average woman to participate in the labor-market, other than as a temporary worker as a member of the “reserve army” of labor who could be hired and fired as necessary

40 due to changes in the labor pool, such as during times of war. The term “emancipation myth” suggests that the right to vote does not directly equate with equality, power, or freedom. From a

Marxist feminist stance, it was not until the second-wave of feminism—which focused specifically on gaining women the ability to participate directly in the labor-market—that

American women gained true “double freedom.”

Marx’s conception of “double freedom” relates to second-wave feminism’s goal of gaining permanent and equal access to waged work—an effort sometimes referred to simply as

“escaping” the home. Democracy, as a capitalistic form of state, is necessarily reliant on a liberal idea of “freedom” that ensures consistency in commodity circulation and labor exchange. Marx tells us that vital to the appearance of equality and “free-market” exchange between citizens is the abstract perception of “double-freedom.” A brief recounting of the two “freedoms” at play here is necessary, in that our American conception of “freedom” is wholly positive and complicates our grasp of Marx’s usage of the term. The first sort of “freedom” in Marx’s formulation is negative and the site of all exploitation of labor under capital. There are two types of individuals by his account: capitalists who own the “means of production”(59) which describe the machinery, materials, and funds necessary to produce commodities, and those who are eligible as a “free labourer”(58) and as such are “free” from the means of production and possess only their labor. It is more useful to think of the laborer being “free” in relation to the means of production in synonymous terms: he is divorced, estranged or cut-off from them: in Marx’s own words, “structurally disposed” (59). Thus, Marx uses “freedom” not as Americans might posit an eagle soaring freely— an aspirational and empowered status— but rather as a body might find themselves free-falling from a deadly height. The second aspect of “double-freedom” has a more positive connotation, in that Marx acknowledges how the laborer under capitalistic democracy is

41 free to sell their labor unlike the feudal serf, the slave, or most women prior to the 1950s. True, the only way a laborer can buy the commodities needed for themselves and their families to survive is to sell their labor to a capitalist every day, but there is some freedom of choice. In

America a laborer can choose whether they want to earn a wage toiling intellectually or physically, as suits their abilities or even their preference. Indeed, an individual even has the freedom to choose to starve if they no longer wish to sell their labor. Therefore, though

American women may have been “equal” under the conventions of American democracy since the passage of the 19th amendment it was not until the era of second-wave feminism when women gained true “double-freedom.”

In what follows I apply this Marxist perspective to women’s inability to publish their poetry or teach poetry in colleges and universities prior to the Second World War as well as its relationship to of second-wave feminism. I argue that just as women’s relationship to the

“means of production” was hidden by the social arrangements which saw them lacking double- freedom and isolated within the home prior to second-wave feminism, a similar effect is recognizable in American poetics. In arguing for a Marxist understanding of hidden social arrangement as related to the lack of a robust canon of American women poetry prior to the second-wave feminism, we can also gain new perspective on the efforts to create courses and texts which we now consider as “Women’s Literature.” Therefore, explicating the interplay of these market, social, and literary factors is the prime goal of this Chapter. For the sake of unifying and clarifying such intersecting social abstraction I suggest a rereading of the poem

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” As a result of the circumstances of the poem’s creation, the content and form of the poem, and especially due to Rich’s own reflections about her poetic and political project at this moment, the poem serves as a contact point for scrutinizing the

42 interaction of the aforementioned elaborate threads. In considering the socio-economic material conditions during which it was written I suggest that we can also gain further insight into the long-term effects of second-wave feminism on America poetry and the creation of Women’s literature courses—ultimately enabling further analysis of the feminization of labor-trend as it manifests in the “death” of American poetry debate. By pausing to consider the societal shifts, driven by market labor relations, we can understand the dialectic process where second-wave feminism both succeeded in “breaking out” of the domestic sphere while also ensnared in the continued push and pull of labor relations between laborer and capital which perpetuates the continued devaluation of women’s work, as manifested by the wage-gap.

II: Gender in American Poetry and the “Labor” of Poetry

In order to understand how gender stereotypes interacted with capitalism specific to

American democracy and the scant presence of American women’s poetry prior to second-wave feminism, an explication of “democracy” as a tenant of a distinctly American poetic aesthetic is necessary. I have previously suggested that the experience of working to meet labor demands during the second-war awoke in American women a sense that their oppression was grounded in gender stereotypes which permeated all aspects of society: the academic world where the job of teaching and writing poetry was ensconced was no exception. In working to create Women’s

Literature courses inherent prejudices in American poetry presented themselves as barriers to women’s access to poetic laurels, primarily through the assumption—which second-wave feminism in the academic job-market confronted directly— that, with a few exceptions, only men were capable of writing “good poetry” worthy of teaching as part of the American poetic tradition. Serving as editor for Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology, Paula

Bernat Bennet describes how, while women had been writing poetry in America—some of which

43 had been published— with the noted exceptions of Bradstreet, Dickinson, and a very few others the majority of this writing was deliberately excluded from the American poetic canon and never privileged as “good” poetry: “From the standpoint of United States literary history, for most of the twentieth century, it has been as if they [American female poets] never wrote, never were”

(xxxiv). She goes on to elaborate:

No group of writers in United States literary history has been subject to more consistent

denigration than nineteenth-century women, especially poets. Beginning with Mark

Twain’s “Emmaline Grangerford” in Huckleberry Finn (1884) and culminating in Ann

Douglas’s scathing analysis in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), their

writing has been damned out of hand for its conventionally, its simplistic Christianity, its

addiction to morbidity, and its excessive reliance on tears. . . . Whether in praise or

blame, this writing—Emily Dickinson’s excepted—has been reduced to on perspective,

that of the conventionally domestic, the “genteel,” the “sentimental.”(xxxv)

Thus, it seems a critical bias against women poets is nearly as firmly established as the American poetic tradition itself. Here we see Dickinson referenced as an “exceptional” woman, whose very tokenism and subsequent canonical career thrived while the writing of her peers and fellow women writers perished.

Yet even Dickinson herself was confined to the domestic sphere, never of course having had the chance to attend, let alone teach, poetry courses in a university setting. Thus, in keeping with all other sectors of industry second-wave feminism in the university sought to gain women equal access to jobs. They did so by using collectivizing tactics deployed by other second-wave feminist movements in which women spoke to one another not just to organize and rally but to explicate the historical stereotypes unique to the jobs they wanted which had previously

44 prevented women from large-scale access. Adrienne Rich and other women fought for the creation of women’s literature, seeking to force the academic equivalent of equal and permanent access to direct labor participation. This required raising consciousness that exposed prejudices that had historically barred more women writers from having their poetry elevated to the

American literary canon, challenging both aesthetic poetic gender prejudice, while pushing against women’s historic exclusion from permanent access to jobs in which they might teach and write poetry as equals to their male peers.

One of the more prevalent tropes in American poetry that reflects this gender prejudice is the celebration of the nation as a Democratic state. In an essay “The American Past” Ed Folsom underscores the importance of this theme, using as an example the writing of Walt Whitman.

Folsom describes the “Leaves of Grass” as “a democratic leveling of reader and author” (13) which he underscores by asserting, “Whitman initiates a poetry that releases the reader from the oppressive weight of tyrannical authority” (14). Folsom concludes that Whitman’s purpose in the pioneering poetic project was to create a sense of freedom from tyrannical old-world authority.

Speaking of Leaves of Grass, he states, “This would be no sterile aesthetic exercise; it was instead an experiment, Whitman believed, vital to the creation of democracy” (14). Indeed one of the seminal aspects of not just American poetry, but American culture is a sense of pride in the founding of our nation—and through extension, our own national form of poetry—as a celebration of man’s right to be free from the rule of Kings, embracing a merit-based society rather than accepting European classism. However, if we use Marx’s concept of “double freedom” to critique this idea, we see that what Whitman and the American poets who followed him chronologically are praising in verse is not some universal democratizing of humanity, but rather the appearance of freedom for the male citizen-laborer. American poets must be “free” to

45 sell their labor, but possessing this status also requires “double-freedom,” which denotes being disposed from the means of production which Marx reminds us is the freedom to be exploited.

Therefore, while a poet owns his labor—necessary to write and teach others how to write poetry—they do not possess the means of production. In the simplest sense these “means”—in regard to poetry—can be understood as the mechanisms for publications but also possession of the academic and scholarly bodies which determine if poetry is worthy of entering into the cannon, which I will presently discuss. Tying this back to second-wave feminism and its insistence that women were not inherently inferior but instead historically oppressed as a result of gender stereotypes which bound them to domestic sphere, I submit that the bias against women attempting to publish or teach the writing of poetry begins to emerge precisely at the issue of Democratic “freedom” in verse. And though we are accustomed to view the issue of women oppression more heavily in terms of society’s historically evolving gender stereotypes, I insist on the need to assess women’s oppression as a problem of labor under capitalism. Whether attempting to be recognized as a “good” poet or pursuing any other endeavor, prior to second- wave feminism, structurally, it did not matter what sort of labor a woman might sell to those who own the means of production. With a few exceptions, American women did not possess the double freedom needed to participate in the democratic labor market.

The “Labor” of the Poet

In describing the circulation of poetry, the usage of Marxist terminology and theory provides an alternative and perhaps deeper understanding of larger societal dynamics at play in marginalizing women’s poetry in literature courses prior to second-wave feminism. Simply because labor is the product of more abstract intellectual toil does not make it an exception to the general laws of commodity circulation. In Chapter One, Section One of Capital, Marx defines a

46 commodity as “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference” (5). In Marx’s formulation, regardless of how fanciful the

“want” that calls for its circulation and publication, it is theoretically justifiable to consider the labor of teaching and writing poetry as yet another form of commodity production. Prior to a collective body of women banding together in order to gain permanent and equal access to waged labor during the second-wave of feminism, the basic laws of Marxist theory pertaining to labor relations remind us that the labor of teaching and writing poetry was barred to the majority of women under the exact same set of social arrangements and gender stereotypes that occurred in, say, a machinist factory. The nature of each profession carried with it a unique set of gender stereotypes that women looking to enter that field had to confront, and in the case of demanding a space for women’s literature and women professors in academia, second-wave feminists had to confront imbedded notions that women were biologically unequipped with the intellect and artistic acumen necessary to write “good” poetry.

In order to raise “consciousness” about the gender-prejudice against women who wanted to write and teach poetry, second-wave literary theorists did more than seek to ensure women were increasingly granted the double freedom of which Marx spoke, specifically by enabling literary women to hold academic jobs in increasing numbers in the post war years. Beyond that, as part of the project of gaining more universal and permanent access to the academically sanctioned world of poetry, feminist theorists sought to prove that women both had, and could write poetry as “good” as any man’s work. —a literary equivalent of the “consciousness raising” ideology inherent to second-wave feminist efforts. Admittedly, there were women in America who published poetry. Moreover, a select few were recognized as having created poems “good”

47 enough to be entered into the body of canonical American poetry prior to second-wave feminism, of which Adrienne Rich later acknowledge that she was one. To that end, in explaining the careers of a few American female poets, we can reappreciate how the ideology of

“consciousness raising” and “collectivizing” as a means of creating solidarity amongst all women was integral to the effort of creating Women’s Literature courses. This effort manifests in Rich’s prose and feminist poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law” as the poem challenges the gender stereotypes that stymied women’s poetry from attaining equity with that written by men.

Collectivizing, “Consciousness Raising,” and the Creation of Women’s Literature Courses

It was arguably not until the 1960s that a comprehensive body of texts and a poetic tradition that might be considered “American Women’s Poetry” existed. Again, there were a handful of female poets interspersed amongst their male peers in the American poetic cannon, but these instances of published—and academically celebrated—poems by American women were few. Even more rare were women employed as professors of literature. In step with the goals of second-wave feminism, which called for women collectivizing around a shared experience as the result of being barred from the world beyond the domestic sphere, women working within American academic institutions began to create the courses, curricula, and degree programs that we now know as Women’s Studies. Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee begin their anthology Women’s Voices, Feminists Visions with the following remarks:

Women’s Studies emerged as concerned women and men noticed the absence,

misrepresentation, and trivialization of women in the higher education curriculum, as

well as the ways women were systematically excluded from many positions of power and

authority as college faculty and administrators. This was especially true for women of

color. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, students and faculty began demanding that the

knowledge learned and shared in colleges around the country be more inclusive of

women’s issues, and they asked to see more women in leadership positions. (1-2)

These efforts were perhaps most apparent in English departments. Shaw and Lee go on to note that in English courses before the 1970s, “it was not unusual, for example, for entire courses in

English or American literature to include not one novel written by women. Literature was full of men’s ideas about women—ideas that often continued to stereotype women and justify their subordination” (2). Though they reference novels explicitly, the same exclusion can be said of poetry. Therefore, much like in other sectors of industry, second-wave feminists sought to enter into teaching positions in college courses. But given the unique prejudices and exclusion of the profession, they also sought to utilize literature to raise consciousness by articulating an historical experience of being women while addressing the gender prejudices rampant in literature. Such consciousness raising created a space in academia for the analysis and teaching of women’s literature, and by extension, the creation of jobs for women in the writing and teaching of poetry.

Adrienne Rich played a major role in challenging the lack of women’s poetry in collegiate curriculum and the accompanying perception that literature—specifically poetry— written by American women and worthy of scholarly consideration was rare and the result of some “natural” biological intellectual disparity. Reflecting on this need to create a canon of

American Women’s Poetry, Rich notes that the writing of women had been either erased, hidden, or deliberately excluded from the American literary canon. Included in the anthology On Lies,

Secrets, and Silence is Rich’s 1973 essay “Toward a Woman-Centered University.” Here, Rich argues for an academic form of labor collective which not only gives women direct access to the teaching and writing of poetry, but enacts a literary “consciousness raising” by exposing the

49 existence of a women’s poetic tradition deliberately excluded as a result of gender prejudices and not literary merit:

It is now clear that the feminist resistance is underway, that in the struggle to discover

women and our buried or misread history, feminists are doing two things: questioning

and reexploring the past, and demanding a humanization of intellectual interests and

public measures in the present. In the course of this work, we are recovering lost sources

of knowledge and of spiritual vitality, while familiar texts are receiving a fresh critical

appraisal. . . . (126)

The “work” she references here is specifically the effort required to create Women’s Studies and

Women’s Literature courses, which entails both rediscovering “familiar texts” but also creating new ones, in order to challenge the gender prejudice that historically barred the majority of women’s poetry from inclusion in the American poetic canon. As the quote suggests, Rich acknowledges that at least some American women prior to second-wave feminism were indeed poets. After all, the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty is an expert from the sonnet

“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. Yet for Rich these “token” female poets only serve to further underscore the need for both demanding permanent and universal access to waged labor for women as well as literary-based efforts to raise “consciousness” about how gender stereotypes functioned to isolate and oppress women collectively.

It must be noted that Rich had successfully published several anthologies of poetry prior to Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, though the idea of supporting herself as a woman teaching and writing poetry prior would have been virtually impossible. Nevertheless, having already gained a degree of public recognition Rich was aware she had a “special” platform from which to write “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” in order to challenge the gender-prejudiced aesthetic

50 reflected in American women’s verse. Rich focuses the poem on a female figure in the confines of the home and in so did more than simply embrace the ideological goal of second-wave feminism to use “consciousness raising” to form a woman-centered collection. Moreover, the female figure in the poem is written in such a fashion that Rich writes within and seeks to subvert prejudiced poetic conventions, as well as the circulation and publication of the commodity of poetry by drawing on her established status as a “special” woman. Through just the title —“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”—Rich’s feminist challenge to poetic gender prejudice becomes apparent, as she works to chip away at the belief that women were collectively incapable of the skills making them employable as writers and teachers of poetry.

To begin with, Rich boldly appropriates the “male gaze.” This term describes the assumption that an artist working in any medium is a male who observes female figures then renders their bodies as object of art. For the genre of poetry there is a doubling of this effect, in that whether or not one reads the biographical poet as the speaker— or the speaker as a creation of the writer— both are assumed to be male. Instead, Rich’s speaker is identified as not just a woman but a housewife who can speak of a life spent “dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life”(24). The poem is ambiguous as to who is “speaking” the poem at any given time: much critical scrutiny involves attempts to locate a “mother-in-law” or sort the familial ties connecting the various female speakers. However, the speakers are all female, which can be read as suggestive of a collective of women. Indeed, the poem in many ways moves through a collective of women, speaking from various perspectives in a shared consciousness which the omnipresent speaker moves in and out of easily, sometimes as observer and sometimes as participant—“two handsome women, gripped in argument, / each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream / across the cut glass and majolica. . . ”(24). Beyond this “collective” the poem is not just

51 populated by the detritus of the domestic sphere—cut glass and majolica—but as the title implies, it draws its artistic inspiration from these artifacts like a photo album which can be found in a typical American home. The poem boldly insists that this is art: a poem, grounded in the domestic realm, written by, speaking for, and describing the daily life of the average housewife. We cannot ignore this insistence, for the title tells us that the poem takes as its inspiration “snapshots,” presumably from a family photo album.

The poem is heavily populated by women— the reader is confronted with a collective of women. Yet a male presence is never described, only ominously alluded to. The lack of any husbands, sons, or fathers can be read as a deliberate omission: This is a poem by, about, and for women. But though women populate the main focus of the stanzas the rare—though arguably deliberate— use of masculine pronouns or implication of a male presence gives a sense of masculine entities lurking at the peripheries of the poem. For instance, there are moments such as when the speaker asserts “a thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes”(24). Given the near universal domination of heteronormativity in the nuclear family of the 1950s it follows that the “monster” a woman must “sleep” with —both sexually and in the more literal sense—are men. Thus, this moment in the third stanza begins to suggest that beyond merely finding “freedom” beyond the confines of the family home, what is at stake for the collective women described in the poem is the ability to escape the gender stereotypes that historically plot a dismal trajectory for the life of a “thinking” woman.

Rich opens the poem by addressing the female figure referenced as “you,” writing: You, once a belle in Shreveport, / with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, / still have your dresses copied from that time. . . ”(23). We learn that “you” refers to a woman who is well past her youth, and is arguably a “mother-in-law” or at the very least a woman old enough to have a

52 maturing daughter: “Nervy, glowering, your daughter / wipes the teaspoons, grows another way”(23). In deliberate contrast to the great canonical tradition of employing virginal young women as the material and muse for poetry, Rich’s focal female figure in the first stanzas is clearly no fresh maiden. Perhaps in mocking mimicry, Rich draws on the language of a blazon, describing this figure’s previous fairness through genre tropes as old as poetry itself by employing similes of a woman likened to blossoming nature. Moreover, the speaker notes how this figure still has her “dresses copied from that time,” suggesting not only that this mother/mother-in-law is past her debutant days, but that she clings to the appearance of her youth and beauty by continuing to dress herself in a manner deemed socially appropriate to a young Southern belle. This figure is so steeped in the social conventions of previous generations as to appear nearly ridiculous, while also making the blazon and other romantic conventions ridiculous in the process.

The speaker adds to this description the second stanza:

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, / heavy with useless experience, rich /

with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, / crumbing to pieces under the knife-edge / of mere fact,

in the prime of your life. (23)

In tongue-and-check fashion, the mind of this woman is described as “heavy with useless experience,” which challenges us to question both the system whereby a woman’s mind is deemed a receptacle capable of holding only “worthless” knowledge and the categorical dismissal of this knowledge. Indeed, the speaker later identifies merit in this throw-away knowledge, querying a second woman figure, “has Nature shown / her household books to you, daughter-in-law, that her sons never saw?” (25). There is wisdom here, a potential for sisterhood and collectivizing, yet this older woman—like countless generations of women prior—has been

53 forced to the confines of the home, leaving her mind and body to rot. The figure is clearly a relic of past gender stereotypes —gestured to by the reference to debutante “belles” who had no recourse but to use their youth and feminine wiles to win a husband—and is both a pitiable, but also a cautionary figure used to call for the rejection of special treatment granted a select few women in favor of joining the emerging feminist collective. While a “debutante” may be valued and special and sought after in her youth, like a wedding cake she is stamped with a clear expiration date by these same gender stereotypes.

Admittedly, places in the poem seem to undercut reading it as a call for collectivizing and unity among women. Consider, for instance, section six, which describes a moment of potential solitary departure as the speaker stands thus: “Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before / an unlocked door, that cage of cages”(25).While the speaker may eventually flee from confinement—presumably from the confines of the domestic setting that comprise the local of the previous sections—what of the other women with whom the speaker shares a collective consciousness? Presumably—based on the conventions of lyricism and Romanticism which dictate that a flight of imagination restores only the poem’s speaker—this solo departure demands forsaking the other figures. In order to fly from the “cage” the figure in this stanza must necessarily abandon the other women in the poem. The speaker finds herself admitting limitations of feminist collectivizing when presented with this choice: either accept a modicum of freedom or abandon the other women who are shackled to the confines of the home. Having focused the first sections of the poem on the aged female subject, Rich conveys to the reader the abject and hopeless isolation within the home that was the fate of generations of women. In this way Rich’s words function in accord with second-wave feminism’s acknowledgment that for generations of women who lived, toiled, and died within the home, the push to escape from this

54 oppressive existence came too late for them to benefit. Yet Rich’s poem insists that feminism and feminist poetry can and must do better for future generations by “exploding” the gender stereotypes that keep women isolated from one another and relegated to toil inside the home.

Rich arguably uses “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” to push against gender stereotypes which served a status quo predicated on excluding women from jobs teaching and writing poetry.

In particular, the poem challenges the idea that women’s’ minds, limited life-experiences in the domestic sphere, and general lack of formal education could not yield canon-worthy poetry.

Working against these prejudices, Rich fills “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” with a near surfeit of classical allusion: Horace’s “Odes” are quoted—“dulce ridentem, dulce loquentem”

[sweetly laughing, sweetly chatting] ”(24)— and cheekily deflated, as the classical great master’s words are referenced not with existential solemnity, but rather as a meditation inspired by a woman captured, in one “snapshot,” in the inelegant act of shaving her legs. Indeed, the entire poem can be read as a series of “snapshots” taken from the confines of the home and populated by the detritus of housewives’ daily lives. Rich’s poem—as well as her prose— challenge gender stereotypes by demonstrating not just her ability as a uniquely talented poet but arguing for the intellectual abilities and scholarly merit of women in general, while poeticizing a collective women’s experience. While Rich herself has an education that allows her to quote and translate

Horace, the text can be read to assert that all women have the ability to do more than merely embody and personify beauty if given a voice. Perhaps, they may adapt to these more egalitarian gender roles as deftly as they can shave their legs and translate ancient texts.

Rejecting the Role of “Special” Woman: Poetry as Rich’s Site for Collectivizing

Returning to the previously mentioned careers of the few canonical American female poets, Rich describes her sense that the existing sample of American female poets was comprised

55 of only “favored daughters,” “special women,” or “token women.” Rich goes on to detail how these few had to endure the blessing and curse that was their special “luck” of being born to a patronizing father willing to indulge a daughter’s intellect. The same “luck” that gave Rich the initial marginal freedom to publish poetry also required that she write in accord with, never contrary to gender stereotypes relating to women’s “natural” intellectual abilities. In the 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken” Rich reflects: “My own luck was being born white and middle- class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I was indeed ‘special’ ”(from Arts of the Possible, 15). Retrospectively using her own career as an example, Rich makes the point that the presence of a few women within the American poetic canon did not ameliorate the need for women to fight to gain access to the jobs and wage opportunities related to teaching and publishing poetry. Rather, Rich demonstrates how this tokenization enabled a “lucky” few a modicum of apparent freedom, to the greater detriment of women as a collective. Even though Rich herself had educational and publishing opportunities thanks to an “encouraging” father, she suggests that she was highly aware that her words were carefully regulated. If she displeased her father—or any man, really, who had the power to

“criticize” or “praise” her work—then this opportunity would be taken away. Thus, the project of creating a women’s American poetic canon was to facilitate the ability of more than just a few

“special” women from the 1960s onward in gaining access to jobs teaching and writing poetry as well as to empower women to write according to their own sensibilities. As Rich suggests, doing so required bringing “fresh critical appraisal” to “familiar texts” in a way that challenged the gender stereotypes in poetry and society, allowing women freedom not just in the physical world, but in the content of their poems, no longer answerable to the demands of both biological

56 and literary “fathers.” Further explicating the need to collectivize and demand equal access for all women—not just a select, “exceptional” few— Rich wrote about notable female poets published prior to the 1950s, particularly Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson.

In the essay “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet” Rich does not actually analyze

Bradstreet’s poems themselves but rather offers a reflection on how Bradstreet’s father factored into her entrée into the world of published poetry. Remarkably similar to Rich’s own experience over three-hundred years later, Rich confesses “reading and writing about Bradstreet, I began to feel that furtive, almost guilty spark of identification so often kindled in me, in those days, by the life of another woman writer. There were real parallels between her life and mine. Like her, I had learned to read and write in my father’s library; like her, I had known the ambiguities of patronizing compliments from male critics”(from On Secrets, Lies, and Silence, 22). While Rich had indeed published poetry and gained critical renown prior to the start of second-wave feminism, Rich herself often noted that she was limited in the content and form of her earlier poems, both bound and enabled by her role as “favored daughter.” In considering the case of

Rich’s first anthology of poems Kate Daniels writes:

Her first published poetry, which found great favor with the male critical establishment,

was highly formal and recognizably imitative of several of the male contemporary

“masters:” W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Robert Frost. When Auden himself selected

her first volume, A Change of World, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1951, he

described the virtues of her poems in a language that was full of unspoken allusions to

sexual stereotypes. (“The Demise of the ‘Delicate Prison’: The Women’s Movement in

Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” 233)

Daniels goes on to quote Auden’s “praise” in what has become within the poetic community something of a gold standard for back-handed compliments: “[Poems] are analogous to persons; the poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs” (234). In the course of participating in the push to secure women equal access to jobs teaching and writing poetry at the academic level, and through collectivizing with other women by rejecting the

“favored daughter” tokenization, Rich acknowledges that her earlier success was not in spite of— but in many ways the result of —gender stereotypes which continued to oppress all women collectively.

Beyond the career of Bradstreet, Rich—and the bulk of American poetic anthologies that followed—chronologically move to consider Emily Dickinson. Dickinson too can be said to be a

“favorite daughter,” and a woman “lucky” enough to have been born into a household where her father encouraged her reading and writing. In the essay “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily

Dickinson,” Rich details paying a visit to Dickinson’s home in Amherst, explicitly stating “she was her father’s favorite daughter though she professed being afraid of him. Her sister dedicated herself to the everyday domestic labors which would free Dickinson to write”(from OLSS, 160-

161). This observation highlights the impediment posed by gender stereotypes which relegated women to the domestic sphere prior to the second-wave of feminism; this observation also criticizes the handicap imposed on women by the expectation that they perform unpaid domestic tasks which I previously described as “women’s work.” Here, then, is a nexus between Rich’s concerns with being a “special woman” or “favorite daughter” and the need to participate in consciousness raising efforts that serve a feminist collective and rally women to second-wave feminism’s goal of demanding equal and permanent access to the labor market: Women who are

58 allowed some modicum of freedom under the status quo are not “truly free” in that they are restricted by male patronage and gender stereotypes which suggest their unique abilities are the exception, rather than the standard in women. Thus, accepting this role and its appearance of

“freedom” only perpetuates the oppression of all women.

In addressing the role of women in the university in her essay “Towards a Woman-

Centered University” Rich insists, “The exceptional women who have emerged from this system

(academia) and who hold distinguished positions in it are just that: the required exceptions used by every system to justify and maintain itself. That all this is somehow ‘natural’ and reasonable is still an unconscious assumption. . . ”(127). Using the world of academia— a place where both the teaching and writing of poetry are given a wage—as a sort of case-study, Rich draws on the lack of a more vigorous American women’s poetic canon and role for women in shaping

American poetry at a scholarly level to demonstrate that historically the poetic career of “special women” took place at the expense of women as a collective, either systemically—by tacitly accepting stereotypes founded on the assumption of women’s general inferiority—or directly, as in the case of Dickinson’s sister, who performed twice the amount of housework, the effect of which was to enable her sister time to write. Rich explicitly states this conclusion in her speech

“When We Dead Awaken:”

I have hesitated to do what I am going to do now, which is use myself as an illustration.

For one thing, it’s a lot easier and less dangerous to talk about other women writers. But

there is something else. Like Virginia Wolf, I am aware of the women who are not with

us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children. Nearly fifty

years after she spoke, that fact remains largely unchanged. And I am thinking also of

women whom she left out of the picture altogether—women who are washing other

people’s dishes and caring for other people’s children, not to mention women who went

on the streets last night in order to feed their children. We seem to be special women

here, we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would

tolerate, even romanticize us as special, as long as our words and actions didn’t threaten

their privilege of tolerating or rejecting us and our work. (from AOP, 14-15)

Rich goes on to further elaborate: “Every one of us here in this room has had great luck—we are teachers, writers, academicians; our own gifts could not have been enough, for we all known women whose gifts are buried or aborted” (15). Thus, Rich allows us to perceive that instead of only a handful of women having written “good” poetry prior to the second-wave of feminism, the women whose talents were praised in the American poetic canon prior to the creation of

Women’s Literature courses had simply been “lucky” enough to find themselves in domestic conditions which allowed their work to reach a reading public. So while their poems may have circulated beyond the confines of the family home, both Bradstreet and Dickinson—and early in her career, Rich herself—are clearly writing within a status quo, prior to the second-wave of feminism, which confined women to the domestic sphere, accepting gender stereotypes which promoted women’s oppression. I argue that this is the literary manifestation of what I previously describe as the emancipation myth—though women appeared to have had the freedom to publish poetry and learn how to write it, even these favored daughters did not have the “double freedom” necessary to work in this capacity in a sustained or equal manner, and did so within an oppressive male-dominated status quo.

Poetically embodying these beliefs, Rich uses “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” to explicitly challenge the status quo. In the middle stanza, we find an allusion to Baudelaire that can be read as an attempt to directly confront—and refute—grand patriarchs of Western art and

60 thinking regarding the inferiority of the average woman. In the third section the “I” and the other woman antagonize one another:

Two handsome women, gripped in argument, / each proud, acute, subtle, I hear

scream / across the cut glass and majolica / like Furies cornered from their prey: /

The argument ad feminem, all the old knives / that have rusted in my back, I drive

in yours, / ma semblable, ma souer! (24)

Again, rejecting the “special daughter” privilege in favor of creating a feminist “collective” through poetry, this stanza accomplishes two things: first, it establishes that the speaker of the poem, and invisibly the author herself, are well enough versed in the writing of French poet

Charles Baudelaire to quote from his work. Beyond that, Rich plays on Baudelaire’s lines “mon semblable, mon frere” and in doing so both refutes gender stereotypes about women’s inability to grasp canonical poetics and gestures toward a sisterhood among women, even as they argue.

Writing “ma semblable, ma soeur” the speaker of the poem uses her knowledge of the poetic canon not to attack or distance herself from this other woman, but as a means of recognizing and embracing sisterhood. Moreover, the notion that this argument is “ad feminem”—a play on the rhetorical tactic of ad hominem attacks to an intellectual sparring partner—seeks to reject the stereotype of “catty” women, a sex given to competing with and attacking one another for the privilege of occupying the few places reserved for “special” women. Rather than these women driving “all the old knives” into each other’s backs, the speaker implies that perhaps they should find a more deserving target. Again, as with the figure of the “Shreveport belle,” Rich uses the women in her poem to demonstrate the limitations of the roles assigned to women by historic gender stereotypes, calling women to reject the appearance of “freedom” experienced as “special women” or “favor daughters,” urging them to collectivize—and through embracing one

61 another—challenge the gendered status quo, refusing to drive old knives into the backs of one another and instead recognizing a shared resemblance and sisterhood.

The Historical Moment of “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law”

By the time Rich published Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law labor relations and women’s ability to enter the workplace had begun to evolve. In regard to the labor-based efforts and ideology previously outlined, it follows that part of Rich joining the second-wave women’s collective involved using her poetic platform to serve feminist ideological ends. Beyond the

“consciousness raising” that spoke of women’s oppression in the home, Rich’s writing about the labor of creating “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” reveals that she took advantage of a moment of evolving social relations to challenge the gender stereotypes specific to her particular job and to promote solidarity with all women. In a 1998 interview in which the Modern Language

Association hosted a dialogue between poets and “academic scholar-critics,” Rich reflects: “I began seriously writing in a period [the 1950s to late 1960] in American poetry that assumed extreme gender positioning—‘the poet is a man speaking to men,’ as Wordsworth had put it even as he was trying to democratize English poetry”(AOP, 129). In this interview Rich reflects on how—in her earlier career prior to the changes brought by second-wave feminism— gendered aesthetic prejudices dominant in American poetics demanded that she avoid allowing her womanhood to influence her verse. Thus, part of the feminist project of “Snapshots of a

Daughter-in-Law” involves meditating on the limitations of women’s expression within poetry— a project Rich devotes most of her career toward considering. Thus, the initial manifestations of this project are evident in this first blatantly “feminist” of her poems, as she confronts the impediment posed to women writers by poetic gender stereotypes that she previously skirted in her writing.

In the sixth section of the poem Rich encounters the limitations of a woman attempting to work through and against male dominated modes of thought and art. Having exposed the fallacious assumption that a woman cannot inspire poetry beyond a certain age, that the home and “women’s work” do not belong in a poem, and that a women writer cannot command or comprehend the conventions of poetry, Rich—through the speaker—points out the limitations of attempting to write as a woman using male-dominated language and aesthetics. She writes:

“When to her lute Corinna sings / neither words nor music are her own; / only the long hair dipping / over her cheek, only the song / of silk against her knees / and these / adjusted in reflections of an eye” (24-25). This figure, emblematic of all women, may indeed play upon a lute but does so without true ownership of the forms and means of her words or music.

In describing her work prior to the anthology Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law Rich suggests her poems did little to challenge gender stereotypes but instead performed the poetic equivalent of a woman donning a fake moustache: Somewhere the audience knows a woman is speaking, but she is doing so in the manner and pattern of masculinity. Kate Daniels notes as much, observing “Rich’s early task, like that of all talented ‘girls’ in the fifties, was, as one critic has pointed out, to prove that she was as good, as smart, and as capable as a man. This she set out to do immediately by perfecting an early command of the male literary tradition”(233). The operative term here is “male” literary tradition—with the accompanying implication that no such grounds for a “female” literary tradition and female poetics was previously possible. As a feminist and a poet, Rich embraces the opportunity created by the rise of second-wave feminism and with the 1956 publication of Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law begins to use her poems to directly challenge the gender stereotypes rampant in not just American poetry, but Western academia as a whole.

Similar to how Whitman celebrated “double freedom” as a citizen-poet at the dawn of a new age in American poetry, Rich in the mid-1950s seeks to capture in poetry the struggle of women, newly becoming “doubly free.” The need for women to band together and push against structural limitations centered around gender manifests in the speaker/ Rich’s treatment of the previously quoted description of Corinna. “Corinna” refers to a Greek lyrical female poet— one quite unlike Sappho, the most famous female classical Greek poet known for her disruptive verse and sexuality. Deliberately choosing a less radical feminine classical poetess, Rich represents a woman poet working with the male-dominated “words” she is permitted to employ. Presumably she is allowed this handicapped “freedom” to do so because she herself is lovely and pleasing to the “eye” in which she is reflected. The “eye” for whom she adjusts her silk hair is logically male. Given the gender-assigned historical power dynamics of masculine/feminine, “she” does not own the words and music. Historically it is only the male who does, and she uses them at his pleasure and under his careful watch. I suggest that prior to second-wave feminism the position of Corinna was one shared by female poets, in that they did not own the “words” and were merely using them at the pleasure of male figures dominating the literary field. This was

Rich’s—and countless other women’s—experience prior to writing “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-

Law.” Remembering my previous assertions regarding women’s historical lack of “double freedom,” perhaps the figure of Corinna manifests a lack of ownership over the allegorical

“words” and “music” which can be understood as representing women’s historical lack of ownership of both the means of production and their own laboring capacity.

Capital, Labor Relations, and Technology

The ability of a poem to straddle the line between the material and historical—the same dialectic at the heart of Marxism—becomes perceptible in considering how “Snapshots of a

Daughter-in-Law” is enabled by the material conditions of evolving capitalist society, both bound within but also capable of pressing against the constraints of the moment in which it was written. Indeed, the idea of a poem’s ability to speak both from and beyond the historical moment of its creation is a project Rich explicitly engages with in the decades of her career that followed. “Snapshots” illustrates how its historical moment—the early years of second-wave feminism—was a time when women collectively sought to break from the oppression and confinement of the past.

In the first sections of the poem, in accordance with feminist ideology of the day, Rich establishes that the place to be escaped from is the domestic sphere. The speaker of the poem— in the first few stanzas—speaks from the confines of a woman’s daily life, using the poem as site of “consciousness raising” as it describes ceaseless toil of housework, or as Rich terms it

“that cage of cages” (25). The first few “snapshots” the poem describes take place within the walls of the home, more precisely the kitchen and pantry, as the poetic “I” observes another woman who is “banging the coffee-pot into the sink / she hears the angels chiding, and looks out

/ past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky” (23). Disgruntled, confined, and isolated, these female figures can only stare at the world beyond the kitchen window with little hope of escape or respite. Indeed, the following stanza suggests that this inescapable confinement creates in the women a malaise so extensive that it leads to self-injury: “Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm, / a match burn to her thumbnail, // or held her hand above the kettle’s snout / right in the woolly steam” (23). By explicitly describes the domestic setting Rich not only contributes to the “consciousness raising” of second-wave feminism, but also subtly makes the reader complicit in a desire to escape a setting that she has described in unflinching detail, such as chronicling how “the jellies boil and scum. . .” (24). What Rich accomplishes through these

65 details is nothing short of revolutionary: her insistence on including the minutiae of domestic life both demands that the reading public receive verse which elevates the activities and details of housework to the realm of poetry, while simultaneously making the reader aware of and empathetic towards not simply the speaker’s desire to transcend this location, but rather all women’s oppressive experience in being forced to toil endlessly within the home. In writing as a woman and using the detritus of the home as the setting and inspiration for art, Rich works from within an oppressively gendered society. She does so both materially—as her remarks about the writing of the poem describe—and figuratively, through the poem’s content, and as a result is able to expose the oppressive experience of generations of housewives.

Evolving Capital: “Escaping” the Home and the Limitations of Labor Movements

The Endnotes collective—Marxist feminist theorists writing in our present age— articulate how time-saving devices, specifically those relating to household tasks that reproduce labor, began to emerge and become more widely affordable during the post-war years. Their theory observes how “the washing-machine, the indoor water-tap, the water heater—these helped to dramatically reduce the time spent on some IMM activities”( “The Logic of Gender,” 15). The activities these devices streamlined—laundry, cleaning, and meal-preparation—were the sort of labor-reproducing unpaid tasks considered to be “women’s work.” While these labor-saving devices were advertised as “time savers,” from capital’s perspective their prime use was making women more efficient in executing household tasks. By the mid-1950s more and more American women took advantage of having more “free time” to seek employment outside of the home.

And yet, it is the “tapstream”—referenced in both Rich’s poem and The Endnotes collective quote—used in the housewife from the poem to “scald” herself. Retrospectively, this technological advancement is a source of potential empowerment but also potential harm for

66 women. Though theoretically these devices gave women time to earn a wage, it must be remembered that they effectively represented no progress in terms of second-wave feminism’s ideological goal to challenge the gender stereotypes which tied women to the role of housewife.

Drawing on biography, Rich addresses how the writing of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-

Law” was enmeshed in this intersection of enabling, but also constricting, factors experienced by women who were becoming laborers in addition to housewives: “I was writing very little, partly from fatigue, that female fatigue of suppressed anger and loss of contact with my own being; partly of the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children’s constant needs” (AOP, 20). Rich goes on to ruminate:

In the late fifties I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself

as a woman. The poem [“Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law”] was jotted in fragments

during children’s naps, brief hours in the library, or at 3:00 A.M. after rising with a

wakeful child. (22)

Rich describes a condition common to most American women who oversaw household tasks and childcare. She attributes her new-found “ability to write” no doubt to the “consciousness raising” of second-wave feminism which encouraged this articulation of women-centric identity. Already having established a career as a published writer, Rich “finding time to write” meant finding time for paid labor while reproducing both her labor and her husband’s in carrying on household tasks. This trend became increasingly common, as described by American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. The report notes how, “the appeal to the modern young housewife of instant coffee and minute rice is a vivid indication that her time is always short”(82). But thanks to technological advances, a woman now has time-savers that allow her to perform household activities. The report notes that “since ironing is one of the least

67 mechanized and most time consuming of household tasks, she [has] drip-dry fabrics and contour sheets”(82). So, while a woman seemingly has the benefit of technology on her side, these labor- saving devices do nothing to ameliorate the belief that housework and childcare are her responsibility. The 1965 Labor Report states:

At the outset, the Committee reaffirmed “society’s stake in strong family life” and

mother’s primary responsibilities in the home. At the same time, it also noted that many

women are engaged outside their homes in endeavors related to their families’ needs and

welfare, and recognized these outside activities as important and legitimate. (111)

These “outside activities” euphemistically refer to women’s jobs outside the home, and are

“important and legitimate,” in that they relate to their family’s “needs and welfare” through supplementing a husband’s wage, at the very least giving the family a “better life.”

Drawing on theory by contemporary Marxist feminist’s such as the Endnotes collective, I would argue that we must qualify the “victory” of women escaping the home during the second- wave of feminism. While a necessary step in challenging women’s historical oppression, “double freedom” for women meant gaining the right to earn a wage—thus being exploited by capital directly when one remembers Marx’s previously described definition—but also being exploited indirectly, through still having to reproduce their household’s labor. Though years from openly discussing her engagement with Marxist theory, Rich demonstrates a hesitancy in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” about women’s ability to fully “resign” from their role as housewives and mothers. Rich writes: “would we, darlings, resign it if we could? / Our blight has been our sinecure: / mere talent was enough for us— / glitter in fragments and rough drafts. // Sigh no more, ladies. / Time is male / and in his cups drinks to the fair” (26). Given that the previous poem stanza has lavishly described the domestic sphere and the tasks of women, this “it” which

Rich’s female speaker hypothetically asks other women if they would resign from can be read as referencing the historically acceptable, gender stereotyped roles of the housewife and mother.

Rich’s tone here is one of sarcastic irony, conveying how “foolish” it would be of women to abandon such a “cushy” role. After all, “Time,” which Rich figures as male, is a benevolent master, who indulged the women who pleased him by bestowing them with, “this luxury of the precocious child, / Time’s precious chronic invalid” (26). Speaking to this women’s collective— comprised of all manner of women, including the “favored daughter” to which “precious child” refers, Rich goes further: “every lapse forgiven, our crime / only to cast too bold a shadow / or smash the mould straight off. // For that, solitary confinement, / tear gas, attrition shelling. / Few applicants for that honor (26). Here, Rich is laying out both a challenge and a choice to “ladies.”

Indeed, she calls on women to escape the confines of the home, to explode the gendered stereotypes of not just American poetics, but of social arrangements and norms tied up in the role of the housewife. Though she may have ironically questioned whether women would want to

“resign,” the poem goes on to outline the consequences of continuing on with the gender stereotypes of the status quo, like the former “Shreveport Belle” of the first stanza, who lived her whole life within “that cage of cages” and as a result felt her mind “mouldering like wedding- cake”(23).

Yet despite the obvious need to escape from the prescribed roles of housewife and mother, a note of trepidation, hesitancy even, enters into the final stanzas of “Snapshots of a

Daughter-in-Law,” both in the warning of the extreme consequences facing those who would

“resign,” in the form of “tear gas, attrition shelling” and centered around the figure of a new, free, and mechanized woman. In the closing moments the speaker encounters a new female figure, freshly arrived in the poem:

Well, / she’s long about her coming, who must be / more merciless to herself than

history. / Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge / breasted and glancing through the

currents, / taking the light upon her / at least as beautiful as any boy / or helicopter, /

poised, still coming, / her fine blades making the air wince / but her cargo / no promise

then: / delivered / palpable/ours. (26-27)

This figure, this “her” who is coming, transcends the confines described at the outset of the poem both physically, as she moves through the air “poised, still coming, / her fine blades making the air wince,” and in the sense of interiority. This figure is the only woman we encounter whose mind is unencumbered by the monotony and isolation of domestic life and gender stereotypes.

Instead “her mind [is] full to the wind” (26). Thus, unfettered by societal, material, and poetic conventions, or gender stereotypes, “she” is able to both soar through the air and plunge through the currents.

This new “she” can be read as an embodiment of the intersection of ideology, technology and changing labor relations that allowed Rich to write the very poem in which “she” appears.

While “she” may indeed fly free, this miraculous “freedom”—in the Marxist sense—must be tempered by the negative aspects of freedom under capital. Specifically, in this moment and in direct reference to the market-related goals of second-wave feminism we must realize that this figure’s flight, this figure’s “freedom,” is the metaphoric equivalent of the technological advances which allowed Rich to create the poem in which we encounter her. This “she” is undoubtedly a modern female figure— a “helicopter” who can move outside of the home as a result of “her fine blades” (26), but Marxist feminist theory qualifies a wholly positive reading of this figure’s arrival. By the middle decade of second-wave feminism, capital increasingly used access to women’s cheaper labor and acceptance of more precious laboring patterns while still

70 needing them to perform the unpaid activities that reproduced the labor power of the family unit.

This market requirement prompted technological advancements which made it possible to employ women as devalued laborers while maintaining their role as the reproducer of labor within the family home. As the previously quoted Presidential labor report notes, technological advances—seen as a boon to the “modern woman”—created time for women to both perform unpaid domestic activities and sell her labor directly to the market:

At the turn of the century, the popular assumption about the dowry of skills a young

woman would bring into marriage anticipated that the young farm wife knew how to

cook and bake, keep the wood or coal stove stoked to the proper temperature; how to can

and preserve the annual yield of orchard fruits and garden vegetables to supply a family

requirement calculated at 125 quarts per person. (81)

After a long list of the “dowry of skills,” the report concludes, “her home was self-sufficient”

(82). It goes on to state: “Today’s image of young married women is very different. It shows suburban mothers reading directions on packages or cans as they cook frozen or otherwise preprocessed food by gas or electricity” (82).Thus both enabled by, and bound by evolving capital—in both the passage above and Rich’s poem—we see “today’s young woman” of the poem’s era described as “very different” from the stereotypical woman of the past.

In regard to “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law” the mechanization which makes the new

“she” capable of flight is provided by the same market-driven society which had previously valued women only for their ability to reproduce labor unpaid within the family home. So, though this new figure has been written by a woman, observed by a female speaker, and carries within her a “cargo” that is “delivered/palpable / ours”—presumably for the use and benefit of a women’s collective— she is as much a creation of capitalist society as all the women who have

71 come before her. She is gendered in a newer, but more abstracted manner—an evolution in gender stereotypes and market-driven abstractions which we must stop and consider in the face of the persistence of the wage-gap and women’s inequality in our present age. Until we question the means and motivation that allows the working woman the “freedom” to fly we overlook how capital inherently hinders our feminist pursuit of equality.

However, during the mid-1950s, just as women were increasingly joining the movement to “escape” from their traditional roles as housewives and mothers, their time was still encroached upon by bearing the full burden of reproducing a household’s labor and caring for children— regardless of how efficiently new devices allowed them to do so. The insidious societal norm dictating that women were by “nature” compelled to perform these tasks was theoretically challenged in the 1970s when some feminists began to draw on Marxist theory in order to explain what we call “second shift labor.” Yet none of this would have been possible without the efforts during the 1950s wherein Rich and other feminists articulated their critiques of societally perpetuated stereotypes, much like what Betty Friedan in the early 1960s conceptualize and laid out in The Feminine Mystique. No doubt drawing from her own experience, Rich’s poem portrays a woman in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” who labors intellectually, challenging gender stereotypes about female inadequacies—here as they relate to cognitive and creative powers— while simultaneously seeing to her “real” job of housework.

The poem’s fourth stanza, after all, depicts a woman “reading while waiting / for the iron to heat,

/ writing, This is the gnat that mangles men, / in that Amherst pantry”(24). While “lucky” enough to live in a house with books to read and at a time in history when electric irons made laundry a less-time consuming task, Rich’s first feminist poem seeks to raise women’s collective consciousness. She not only exposes a woman’s experience of struggling to write poetry while

72 performing her “natural” tasks of housework, but also points to a dialectic bind which I argue requires us to reconsider our perception of the workplace related gains made during second- wave feminism.

With current advancements in Marxist feminist theory informed by global labor trends since the 1950s we can re-appreciate the limitations of a women’s movement that sought to challenge the status quo but did so while working within larger established structures of capitalism. “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” suggests that the political project that inspired

Rich to push against gender stereotypes and the historical oppression of women is far from over, given that even the much anticipated “cargo” being brought by the new “she” is qualified from being read as a culminating victory: “but her cargo / no promise then”(27). This hesitancy, along with the complication previously traced in the concluding stanzas, suggests how the poem can be read as anticipating the need for both future waves of feminism and for the continued effort to challenge gender stereotypes and categories of the “natural.”

Employing a Marxist feminist dialectic demonstrates how women’s labor continues to be shaped by historical prejudices about “natural” sex-based roles, while also allowing for a material challenge to gender-prejudices in a specific historical moment. To that end, section seven of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” contains the rumination, “Thus wrote / a woman, partly brave and partly good, who fought with what she partly understood”(25). In reading this poem from our vantage point today, even while troubling the wholly positive historicizing of women gaining what Marx term’s “double freedom” and complicating the “emancipation” myth, I do not intend to go so far as to say that the efforts of second-wave feminism ought to be dismissed. There were undoubtedly positive results of “consciousness raising efforts” as well as a collectivizing for the sake of political action geared towards seeking equal and permanent

73 access to waged labor jobs. However, we can now reflect that since the start of second-wave feminism capital has needed to adapt, increasingly finding ways to profit from women participating in the labor force. The massive women’s labor collective, as the Marxist theory in this chapter allows, does have the power to shift labor-relations. Undoubtedly this movement changed social factors to the extent that women gained access to jobs, but only—by and large— as lesser paid workers. What has remained intact is the societal belief that a woman’s “real job” is to care for the family and the home, a belief I will consider in the following chapter. Though stereotypes and gender-roles have shifted and evolved in our present moment, the persistently frustrated and increasingly fractious state of feminism in America demonstrates that we must revisit and reconsider the course of our own feminist history in relation to capital’s demands. As a student who benefited from women’s literature courses and the development of American female poetics, I am aware of the debt my own work owes to the second-wave feminism. Yet

Rich herself seemed to call for a project of rigorous and unflinching rereading. In remarks delivered to the Modern Language Association’s Commission on the Status of Women in the

Profession in 1972—the existence of which suggests a sea-change in women’s relationship to

American poetry—Rich reflected on the literary-specific efforts required to achieve the inclusion of women into the world of academia and publication. While not specifically referencing her own earlier poems, Rich’s remarks guide my further application of gender theory and Marxist feminism to her work. Rich states:

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text

from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is

an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we

cannot know ourselves. . . . A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would

take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have

been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how

the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see

and name—and therefore live—afresh. (11)

Re-envisioning Rich’s “feminist awakening” through the lens of current Marxist feminist theory reveals a poem composed at a moment of unique potentiality—an intersection of ideology meeting market-conditions and technological advancements. This moment enables Rich to reject her previous role as “favored daughter” or “special woman,” both in her own home, and in the gender-prejudiced role of American poetic institutions. She pens “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-

Law” to both join and articulate the emerging feminist collective.

Chapter Three: “The New Feminism,” Sex Class, and Rich’s Submersion into Radical

Feminism

The years between the publication of Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law (1956) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) were ones of great change in feminism, sex-based labor relations, and social gender stereotypes. Feminists of the early 1970s found it necessary to move beyond a generalized goal of gaining women access to market sector jobs, thus new women’s labor collectives formed and attempted to enact legislature which would address the continued sexism apparent in the work place in terms of wage gap, precarity of women’s jobs, and lack of access to higher skilled and managerial positions. Whereas women in the 1950s sought to collectively escape from the home—believing that lack of universal and permanent access to waged work was both the site and source of women’s inequality, women by the 1970s participated fully in the labor market but still encountered negative gendered stereotypes and inequality. In the workplace this inequality between sexes was most apparent in reference to a gap in wages and women’s lack of access to skilled and higher paid positions. In a chapter of their women’s history anthology entitled “The New Feminism” Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman write of the

1970s:

Women’s organizations—some new, such as Federally Employed Women (FEW), others

already in existences, such as the YWCA and the National Federation of Business and

Professional Women—also joined the fight against sex discrimination. Following the

lead of NOW [National Organization of Women], these groups lobbied, litigated, and

propagandized for equality in education, employment, and political organizations. Their

goals included government-supported childcare, paid maternity leaves for working

women, and tax reforms that recognized the value of homemaking. (346)

This passage illustrates how gaining access to market sector jobs did not achieve the full equality initially hoped for, demonstrating the inauguration of measures meant to secure equal wages and opportunities within existing power structures. But for some feminists of this era, it became increasingly impossible to imagine equality under the existing status quo, thus the movement split into two distinct camps. Hymowitz and Weissman note:

The women’s rights approach to feminism, which relied on steady organizational work

and traditional reform tactics, was only one part of the contemporary woman’s

movement. The second center of the emerging feminism was far more controversial. This

second focus came to be called women’s liberation or radical feminism. The radicals

were concerned with the underpinnings of sex discrimination, claiming that unequal laws

and customs were the effect, not the cause, of woman’s oppression. Underlying sex

discrimination was sexism, the male assumption that woman’s different biology made her

inherently inferior. Because she could bear children, women were held to be somehow

incapable of the strengths, responsibilities, and power assumed by men. (347)

Though at its core the movement was still guided by efforts pertaining to waged positions outside of the home and to collectivizing around the site of woman as identity marker, the

“radical” branch of feminism, as the quote describes, formed from a sense of increasing dissatisfaction with attempts to reach equality between the sexes through established institutions, methods, and channels. In The Dialectic of Sex Shulamith Firestone—often referenced as the quintessential radical feminist theorist of this era—argued that more “liberal” attempts to end female inequality would inevitably fail. She asserts, “Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps full integration of women into the labor force” (1). The concept of “sex class” is a

Marxist feminist term that uses the lens of market relations to account for a prejudice against women—in the labor market and through extension all social arrangements—which by the 1970s demonstratively ran deeper than just gender stereotypes such as those articulated in The

Feminine Mystique. When Firestone speaks of “sex class” she draws an analogous parallel between biological sex and class systems, connecting them at the site of the perception that individuals are incapable of escaping the economic and political disadvantages of whatever station they are born into. Whereas in feudal Europe, for example, the societal assumption that the “natural” occurrence of birth into a lower class was an insurmountable fact of life for that individual, in capitalist American, Firestone argues, a woman’s gender carried the same social stigma. She goes on to elaborate that women’s perpetual inferiority became so firmly entrenched in society that it is assumed to be “natural.”

It is important to understand that while Firestone does not question whether the practices of sexing bodies is at all influenced by society and assumes the male/female sex binary is a factor determined by “nature” she does challenge the societal perception of women’s inferiority based on the biological differences in the male and female body. She writes, “women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology—menstruation, menopause, and ‘female ills,’ constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males” (8). Assuming biological sex to be concrete, and the prejudice against women as intended to perpetuate male supremacy, her theory of sex class looks to explicate the perpetuation of the historical assumption that women— by nature—are physically, emotionally, and mentally lesser than men. In the following passage

Firestone refers to sexual “determinism” which perpetuates the belief that women are weaker and

78 inferior—she uses the referent “that”—in an effort to expose how firmly sexist biases are entrenched in society:

That? Why you can’t change that! This gut reaction—the assumption that, even when

they don’t know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological

condition—is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fit into

traditional categories of thought, e.g. political, is not because these categories do not

apply but because they are not big enough; radical feminism burst through them. (1)

Using a hypothetical reaction to illustrate how firmly entrenched is the societal stigma attached to womanhood as a marker of a lesser human, Firestone proceeds to argue for an entire systemic overthrow: “though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed . . . To assure elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women)”(11). Society, she insists, is firmly convinced that women are inferior to men, saddled with inescapable biology and biological functions that make them dependent on men, “whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at- large, for physical survival”(8) Thus, historically women are portrayed as the “weaker” sex who will continually draw on the resources and “strength” of men to merely survive. Firestone argues that beyond gender stereotypes, this prejudice against women’s basic biology is historically perpetuated and at the core of capitalist society—thus nothing short of a revolution can free woman from sex class.

Firestone goes on to outline how feminism must pursue the total rupture of capitalism and society if it seeks to see full women’s liberation, explaining in The Dialectic of Sex, how women’s oppression is structurally built into all aspects of social arrangements, concluding that

79 it cannot be fully undone without exploding the arrangement of society entirely. These beliefs lead to the usage of the phrase “radical” to describe a new facet of feminism to which Firestone,

Marxist feminists, and others who began to believe that equality within the status quo was impossible, belonged. Considering how the demands relating to wage equity and childcare were legally pursued by “liberal” feminism but have yet to be enacted in our present moment, perhaps a shift in tactics and goals was indeed—and still is—necessary. But just as arguing that systemic rupture is necessary to achieve true gender equity is viewed as a polarizing stance in our present moment, it was received as extremist and even offputtingly radical during the 1970s leading to further factionalizing and division within the continued push for women’s empowerment in

America.

Rich: Fame and Radicalization

Just as the 1970s marked a time of flux for market relations, American societal arrangements, and feminism, Adrienne Rich’s professional life and politics underwent significant changes. As described in the previous chapter, Rich’s “feminist awakening,” as represented in

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” marked the poet shedding her role of the “favored daughter.”

Rich described her early career as writing while submitting to the male-dominated traditions of

American poetry, aiming to please first her father and later poetic patriarchs such as W.H.

Auden. But then she joined with the growing women’s collective forming at the start of second- wave feminism. “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” challenged gender stereotypes in both its content and creation. Following this poetic and political departure from her early career Rich’s reputation as both a figure in American poetry and feminist activist grew as she published several works of both poetry and prose which are now considered canonical Women’s Literature texts. Accelerating her prominence in both regards, the 1973 publication of the anthology Diving

80 into the Wreck cemented Rich’s place as not just a “feminist poet” but more expansively as a major American poet. This anthology, her ninth, earned her the National Book Award for poetry alongside Allen Ginsberg, creating opportunities to speak at the MLA about the status of women in the field of teaching and writing poetry, which was the occasion of her now famous speech

“When We Dead Awaken.” This moment in Rich’s career indeed marked her as a famous poet and feminist.

What I argue in the following analysis is that Diving into the Wreck also points to the moment when Rich becomes established as not just an influential poet and writing instructor, but also a radical feminist. Based on posthumously released letters exchanged between Rich and poet-critic Hayden Carruth, Michelle Dean’s article “The Wreck: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist

Awakening” provides important critical observations about Rich’s evolving status as an

American poet, educator, and feminist, especially during the 1970s. Dean notes that the publication of Diving into the Wreck and its critical recognition “positioned Rich as one of the foremost poets of her generation and a leading feminist thinker” (4), but also goes on to state:

Until Diving into the Wreck, Rich was still reserved about her politics. Her letters to

Carruth track little feminist reading—Simone de Beauvoir comes up in passing but

mostly as an object of gossip. Gloria Steinem makes no appearances, nor Juliet Mitchel,

nor Shulamith Firestone, nor any of the writers of great feminist tracts. (6)

However, as Dean recognizes, by the time Rich began teaching she “really began to think like an activist when she ventured out into the world of work”(6). By the time Arts of the Possible was released in 2012, Rich indicates that all of these theorists—and eventually Marx’s theory too— came to inform her activism, writing, and teaching. And it was in the 1970s when she began to turn in this more “radical” direction. By the 1973 publication of the essay “Toward a Woman-

Centered University”—which Rich wrote for an anthology entitled Women and the Power to

Change, and whose footnotes read like a primer in multi-disciplinary early Women’s Studies texts—Rich was clearly no longer “reserved” in her political writing. Rather, she is both “tuned in” and speaking up.

Accordingly, Dean’s essay “The Wreck” identifies a sea change in Rich’s politics in the spring of the 1970s, in what Dean describes as Rich’s “full-court feminist response” in a letter to

Carruth, who had complained about his wife Rose Marie:

Think of all that she has invested of herself in you, in your life together. Think of all that

any bright, attractive, vital woman invests in bourgeois marriage, in her husband and

family. Her independence and autonomy are postponed or resigned altogether; her own

spirit is almost continually being asked to take second place to the needs, the will, even

the passing moods, of her man . . . If this sounds like a Women’s Lib rap, baby, it is. (10)

So while Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law is considered to be Rich’s awakening and engagement with a growing feminist consciousness and collectivism, in the years of Diving into the Wreck Rich aligns herself with radical feminism, now as both a “towering figure, an abstracted Great Poet and Important Feminist”(4). Often, as Dean states, Diving into the Wreck is taught as Rich “writing, at the height of her feminist power”(6). I argued in the previous chapter that the 1950s was a moment in Adrienne Rich’s career and in women’s relationship to the labor market—for female poets, in reference to their access to wages for writing and teaching poetry— where Rich was able to utilize a moment of evolving capital, technology, and social relations to use her platform as a published poet to challenge gender types both in and through poetry. Now, in the 1970s Rich finds herself in a position to not just teach and write in such a way as to shape the conventions of American poetry, but to speak both to and for a women’s

82 collective threatened by doubt over its ability to maintain unity and achieve equality within the existing channels and apparatus of petitioning for change. Speaking to this further, in an essay entitled “Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich” (2013) Ange Mlinko notes that Rich’s poetry leading-up to the publication of Diving into the Wreck reflects significant strengthening and deliberateness in Rich’s feminist poetics since Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, replicated in a series of radical changes in her personal life:

[Rich] grew increasingly radicalized through the 1960s. . . . As she was writing the

poems that would become The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970, her family life fell

apart, and in 1970 her husband committed suicide. In the aftermath of the catastrophe,

Rich came out as a lesbian . . . As new movements of liberation and multicultural pride

surged in the 1970s they [poets] generally adopted the rhetorical, free-verse mandate set

by Rich when she forsook artifice as a legacy of the patriarchy. (36)

I argue that we can infer from this biographical information that in this period of her career, typified by Diving into the Wreck, Rich seemingly severs all ties to the male-dominated world of her juvenilia in all aspects of her life: she eschews male-dominated formal poetic aesthetics, she leaves her husband’s home, and she writes adamantly against the strictures of heterosexual love.

Just as other “radical” feminists such as Shulamith Firestone were providing theoretical accounts of the impossibility of women achieving equity without challenging the system itself, Rich seems to be rejecting all the old forms and patterns that she now recognizes as oppressive during her early life.

Based on Mlinko’s observation, I suggest these more personal changes not only serve to track Rich’s radicalism in accord with evolving feminist tactics and ideology, but these personal changes can also indicate shifts in women’s relation to the labor market, given the fact that it is

83 now possible for a woman to support herself without a husband. These changes also indicate accompanying societal gender norms, for by the mid-1970s an unmarried professor of either sex having an apartment near campus no longer seemed exceptional. What sometimes gets lost amidst the salacious and radical evolution of Rich’s private life is that beyond simply representing an irrevocable eschewing of all-things patriarchal, Diving into the Wreck shows that

Rich had achieved enough renown as a poet to gain the canonical status necessary for her works to not only be published, but to allow them to shape the American poetic aesthetic from the

1970s onward. Because she possessed this prominence Rich was now able to bring the radical feminist ideas of rejecting established channels for change to her poetry. She now has an insider’s opportunity to revolutionize the form and aesthetics of American women’s poetry.

By the mid-1970s it had become common enough for a woman in America to teach and write poetry for Rich to influence other poets—evidenced by the adoption of her poetic style, if not always her political project behind it. What Ange Mlinko touches upon when discussing

Rich’s “rhetorical, free-verse mandate” (36), to return to the quote in the previous paragraph, is

Rich’s willingness to integrate politics into her poetry and eschew formalism and the esoteric implication that “art” and “poetry” were not meant to be sullied by the detritus of anything so vulgar as current social issues. In the introduction to The Making of a Poem (2000) Eavan

Boland talks of the traditional attitude, rampant in formal poetry, that a poet ought not to sully such ancient forms with temporal banalities of something so transient as “politics.” Boland notes:

In the societies that produced the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, poetic form was not

just an expression of art, it was also a register of power. The society, and its rulers, which

provided protection for the poet, had real expectations for the product. Wit, learning, and

flattery were all factors of form. The shadow of power lay across it, and therefore poetic

form became a visible part of high civilization; often an ambiguous jewel in the crown of

dominant culture. (xiv)

In pointing out that Rich rejected such formal pieties, I do not mean to imply that she was alone in playing off of the power dynamics latent in poetry, challenging American poetic aesthetics to adapt in a way that more fully reflected the changes in American society. However, she was uniquely poised to do so with a “radical” feminist polemic. I previously asserted that Rich seized on an opening in evolving society to first deploy the explosive force of political poetry in

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” to challenge gender stereotypes and join the growing feminist collective. Similarly Diving into the Wreck sees Rich again turning to poetry, dismantling not just gender, but women’s oppression as grounded in both ancient history and the seemingly impenetrable realm of nature.

While addressing the matter of sex class, which became a locus of increasing urgency for the feminist collective—though only Marxist feminists had articulated it as such—Rich uses free-verse as well as open form in “Diving into the Wreck” with “forensic” precision in an encounter between poet and history that, for the speaker, is a matter of deadly seriousness. In the opening stanza Rich posits the speaker, preparing for this metaphoric “dive” and arrayed for such a mission: “[having] checked the knife-blade, / I put on/the body-armor of black rubber”(22).

The second stanza of the poem gives a sense of the speaker prepared to descend into those depths literally into the ocean, but metaphorically into history. The title tells us that the purpose of this dive is to visit a “wreck.” By definition the word implies both the crisis of a ship sinking, but also that this event belongs to history. The subsequent description of the ship’s sunken remains imply that the “wreck” was something that has occurred in the past—long enough back in the course of history that it has fused itself with “nature” and is now part of the ocean floor. The

85 speaker leaves the surface world to enter the natural element—here the ocean—and does so by means of a ladder.

Bearing in mind the dialogic nature of poetic forms throughout history and this moment of evolving American poetic aesthetics, we might read the latter as a metaphor for a poem itself.

Rich writes, “there is a ladder. / The ladder is always there / hanging innocently / close to the side of the schooner. / We know what it is for, / we who have used it . / Otherwise / it’s a piece of maritime floss / some sundry equipment” (22). Rich and other trained poets who teach creative writing and speak at MLA conferences know all about “the ladder,” a metaphor for the ability of a poem to serve as a site for entrance into the world beyond the surface appearance.

But unless “the ladder” —the poem—is actively used to descend into the past for the sake of discovery, then it serves as nothing but “maritime floss / some sundry equipment.” Rich, it can be argued, is making the case for poetry that is actively used and deployed for whatever purposes are necessary for society in the specific historical moment of its creation. As a feminist seeking to continue serving the women’s collective—one that can seem to agree on little else than

“woman” as an identity to rally around— Rich moves beyond simply pressing against and challenging the gender stereotypes that oppress women but is now using a poem to enact a journey of explorative reconnaissance to gain perspective on the “natural” and “historical” world—the very same factors pointed to as perpetuating women’s continued oppression. Thus, in the 1970s Rich urged in her writing, speaking, and teaching for an American poetry with political potency, choosing free verse in favor of more traditional forms. Now established as a central voice in women’s literature and feminist politics,—as evidenced by Rich’s invitation to speak to the MLA Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession—Rich continues her push in both poetry and prose not just against gender stereotypes as in “Snapshots of a Daughter-

86 in-Law” but also against the historical critical bias that poetry ought to be formal, non-political, and male.

In her speech, “When We Dead Awaken”—later published in Women Teaching and

Writing—Rich sought to explain, “the challenge flung by feminists at the accepted canon, at the methods of teaching it, and at the biased and astigmatic view of male ‘literary scholarship’[which] has not diminished in the decade since the first Women’s Forum”(34). In explicating what would become her often referenced “asbestos gloves” metaphor, Rich describes the efforts she put forth in the 1950s in attempting to establish her validity as a woman writing within a man’s genre. To be allowed to participate in the work of writing and publishing poetry,

Rich observes that she drew on forms steeped in patriarchal history, stating, “in those years formalism was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up bare-handed” (Arts of the Possible,18). Asbestos gloves, in that such “gloves” allowed her to handle weighty material hazardous to her physical self, conjures the image of a woman working in a man’s job, her hands protected by heavy work gloves. This image even feels reminiscent of the Rosie the Riveter figure. Moreover, the metaphor of asbestos gloves might also suggest that the gloves meant to offer a means of protection and enablement are laced with asbestos, and to don them, Rich intimates, is to expose oneself to a poison inevitably harmful to the woman required to wear them in order to work. Prior to the 1950s Rich was much like any other woman who found herself “moonlighting” in a man’s job as a result of labor market shake-ups following the Second World War; she used the forms and equipage inherited from the men who historically held those positions. But in the 1970s, for like-minded radical feminists it was time both in poetry and politics for the “gloves to come off.”

The 1970s clearly marks the beginning of Rich’s role as a teacher of poetry, as well as the beginning of her writing being used as models for teaching students how best to shape their own poetic labors. It was in this capacity as “role model” and teacher of poetry that many poets—me included—first encountered the writing of Adrienne Rich. For instance, Mark Strand and Eavan

Boland devote an entire section to praising the “open form” employed by Rich in their anthology

The Making of a Poem (2000), which was published by Norton and used as a primer in both collegiate and MFA poetry courses. “Diving into the Wreck” is highlighted in the anthology as a model for young poets studying the potential capabilities of open form. In the preface to the poem’s text they write:

‘Diving into the Wreck’ employs subtle yet fierce arguments with the poetic tradition,

while elaborating on and subverting the shadows, plays, and past of canonical power. The

speaker has the authoritative tone of a speaker in the grand tradition. But the enterprise is

entirely different. Whereas poets of the past mediated on the power and eloquence of

expression, this poem—with its open weave of phrase, stanza, vernacular, and off-kilter

music—puts that voice at the service of powerlessness and silence. The form challenges

the past while adding to it: This is a poem that mixes a panorama of the narrative, the

lyrics, and the dream convention to achieve its powerful conclusion. (287-288)

What the student gleans, then, is that this is a poem of finesse and moxie, a poem that assumes for itself the permission—now celebrated in American poetry in the decades since the 70s—to play with and against classical forms, tropes, and devices. In discussing the practices of anthologizing American poetry, Ellen Bryant Voigt, citing the work of Alicia Ostriker, describes the 1970s as the inauguration of “an extraordinary tide of poetry by American women in our own time with an increasing proportion of that which is explicitly female in the sense that the writers

88 have chosen to explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their exploration” (129). The essay goes on to note, “the most influential figure among this number seems to be Adrienne Rich” (129).With the fame and critical reception of Diving into the

Wreck we see the beginning of Rich’s establishment as a seminal figure in the American

Women’s poetic tradition, a writer who can also be neatly historicized via her ties to the political movements seeking equality between the sexes during the 1970s in the world of poetry production, just as her sisters-in-arms fought for sex equity in other job markets.

Feminism and Motherhood

Traditional criticism, such as the above referenced essays, has considered Rich’s Diving into the Wreck as the height of her feminist project and poetic powers. In illustrating this point,

Alice Templeton notes:

Much of Rich’s earlier poetry treats themes about women’s lives—the dissatisfaction

with marriage, the conflicts between motherhood and the creative life, the loss of female

community— yet these earlier works cannot be called ‘feminist’ in the same way that

Diving into the Wreck is . . . Rich’s poetic project is not consistently directed by a

feminist vision until Diving into the Wreck. . . .While the body of Rich’s poetry up until

the 1970’s prepares the way for the sustained feminist hermeneutics in Diving into the

Wreck, critics generally agree that it is Rich’s strongest feminist volume, though many of

its themes are not new for her. (33)

Not only had Rich established herself as a women writer and feminist poet, but her career from this moment onward is seen as irrevocably interwoven with a desire to wield poetics to a political— and in the case of her middle-decades, specifically feminist—end. Biographically, by

1966 Rich embraced the access to waged labor won for women by feminist efforts of the

89 preceding decade, accepting a teaching position at Swarthmore college and later as an adjunct professor in the Division of Writing at Columbia in 1969. Though I will address the plight of the adjunct instructor in the following chapter, it is only as a function of feminization and the labor crisis in academia in our present moment. Speaking of Rich’s teaching position in this era,

Michelle Dean notes, “these were her first excursions back into the real world after her sons were grown, and her early remarks on teaching are flavored with a feeling of new freedom” (6). And yet, it must be noted that though her husband killed himself in 1970, when she started teaching and worked on poems published in Diving into the Wreck Rich was still married to Conrad, who was a full professor in the economics department of Columbia. Her first teaching job was in the role of an adjunct, whose nefariously low paying and precarious role within the University are in keeping with the labor-pattern of women across all sectors of industry during this era. It must also be noted that while Rich became “famous” as a feminist poet, teacher, and lesbian after the publication of this anthology, she was still able to speak as a mother, albeit one who was no longer tasked with caring for children as hers were no longer small children by the start of the decade. Yet the market related uniqueness of Rich’s circumstances and the manner in which they complicate her relationship to the “average woman” are points I will return to at length.

Regardless of her own complicated relationship to market sector jobs and the “promotions” that are represented by receiving National Awards and transitioning from part-time to full-time faculty, Rich firmly sought to draw on biological commonalties to forward the ability for

“woman” as an identity marker to serve as a rallying point for political action and collectivizing as the women’s movement became increasingly entrenched in the liberal/radical divide.

Societal Shifts: Capital’s Adaptations and Anti-Feminist Backlash

In attempting to assess the evolution, successes, and failures of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s sociologist Miranda Mies wrote Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, seeking to further elaborate the challenges to the ideology that women had interests in common with one another which was vital to mobilizing empowerment-focused collectives at the start of second-wave feminism:

In several countries, particularly the USA and West Germany, conservative governments

launched a virtual attack on some of the half-hearted reforms achieved under the pressure

of the new women’s movement, above all on the liberalized abortion laws. This roll-back

strategy with its renewed emphasis on the patriarchal family, heterosexuality, on the

ideology of motherhood, on women’s ‘biological destiny,’ their responsibility for

housework and childcare, and the overall attack on feminism had the effect that women

who had hoped that women’s liberation could come as a result of legal reforms or

consciousness-raising withdrew from the movement or even became hostile to it. (15)

In the early 1970s it became apparent that in the push for equality between the sexes, feminism encountered a number of evolving societal forces and push-back. Under the pressure of evolving labor relations that increasingly saddled women with both needing to earn a wage and perform the duties of mother and wife, plus shifting societal perceptions of what it was to be— not just a

“feminist” but also—a “woman” the unity of women’s collectives of the previous decade seemed to waver. I do not mean to suggest here that the early history of feminism in the United States was without factionalizing or differences over the aims and tactics of the movement. However, the era of second-wave of feminism—the 1950s and 1960s— a common goal emerged of seeking universal access for waged labor, using consciousness raising to “explode” the role of

91 the “housewife,” encouraging women to join a feminist collective necessary for market based, political action.

In contrast, the 1970s might be perceived as a time where the tail end of second-wave feminism attempted to reassess the “gains” women had achieved in the terms of waged labor and reconsider the way gender stereotypes had re-formed now that the “housewife” of the 1950s was no longer the standard role for American women. Why was it that women were still stuck caring for the house and the home, now referenced as “second shift labor,” in addition to being paid less and taken less seriously than male laborers in the labor pool? In response to these queries and perhaps as an attempt to reorganize and reunite for the sake of political mobilization, a significant hallmark of feminism in the 1970s was a newly focused emphasis on the issue of

“motherhood” and how it related to both women’s identities and—for Marxist feminists especially—the market’s response to the women’s labor collectives of the 1950s and 1960s. For

Marxist feminists, the “handicap” of motherhood was most evident at the site of labor valuation in theory, but in practice most women agreed that motherhood carried a negative stigma in the working world. After all, even if women might not entertain the idea that a full labor revolution was desirable and necessary, most could agree that the difficulties of motherhood and the injustices of less wages for equal work were shared oppression women largely held in common.

During the 1970s and 1980s Marxist feminism began to use compound terms, such as

Firestone’s “sex class” or Maria Mies’ “capitalist-patriarchy” to convey a growing sense that some deeper site of women’s oppression lay beneath gender stereotypes, which mandated that women—though now working as much as men—were still less valuable workers, still tethered, though no longer confined, to the domestic sphere. As Mies asserts: “If we do not want to fall into the trap of moralism and individualism, it is necessary to look below the surface and to come

92 to a materialist and historical understanding of the interplay of the sexual, the social and the international divisions of labor”(11). Conservative social institutions regarded feminists as selfish, neglectful mothers, and less than “true women.” In response, many feminists of this era sought to foster an honest and inclusive discussion about the highly personal experience of what it meant for individual women to be mothers. As previously noted, even more “liberal” women’s labor organizations found themselves confronted with sexism that originated from some other perceived disadvantages beyond gender stereotypes which forced women to reproduce labor outside of the waged economy. In other words, it was becoming apparent that while women

“escaped” from the home, the duties associated with it awaited them at the end of their shift at a paying job. This “disadvantage” became increasingly linked to motherhood, namely society’s supposition that through biological determination women were workers second, and potential or actual mothers first. Indeed, the reforms and measures sought by even the most “liberal” of feminists—those seeking to push for equality through established channels—all pertained to the relationship between having children and the handicaps that doing so appeared to present for a woman’s laboring ability. As noted previously, “liberal” women’s labor organizations sought legal reform pertaining to childcare and maternity—they still do. Regardless of a feminist’s belief about the ability to end sexual inequality without major social shake-ups, the focus on woman’s child-bearing capacity as an excuse to devalue and keep casual her labor—though the critical articulation of these specifics belonged to Marxist feminism alone—began to emerge as focal point of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Whether or not one had read Marx, or believed that capital and patriarchy interacted to an extent which hopelessly oppressed women,

American women in the 1970s observed that though they could now leave the role of

“housewife” for several hours and earn a wage, they were incapable of leaving their womanhood

93 at the door each morning and could not avoid carrying the “natural” role of housework- performing spouse and mother to the office each day.

Feminist economics theorist Marilyn Warring comments on the complicated yet inescapable nexus between women’s identity and motherhood in relations to the market. In If

Women Counted: A Woman’s Reckoning she writes,

The basic definitions and concepts in the male analyses of production and reproduction

also reflect an unquestioned acceptance of biological determinism. Women’s household

and child care work are seen as an extension of their physiology. All the labor that goes

into the production of life, including the labor of giving birth to a child, is seen as an

activity of nature, rather than as interaction of woman with nature. (28-29)

The issue of the reproduction of labor—the sorts of unpaid activities that go into the creation and reaction of labor power each day as discussed by Margaret Benston, Maria Dalla Costa, and

Selma James—is a different, though related, issue than reproduction in the sense of childbirth.

The distinction between the two types of reproducing labor—both the unpaid domestic work that goes into reproducing labor power and the work of giving birth to and raising what in effect are future laborers—is a debated and complex site of discourse, and one beyond the scope of my argument at present. What I wish to underscore about Waring’s analysis is that the site of critical feminist discourse shifts in the 1970s after women enter the workforce full-time: while the plight and oppression of the “housewife” was one feminists sought to explicate and raise consciousness about at the beginning of the second-wave, two decades later the abstract yet pervasive idea that women were marked by nature through biology as mothers first and any other job or role second became a prime focus of discourse and theory. While some gender stereotypes—such as the

94 happy housewife of the 1950s—had indeed fallen away as women entered the labor market in large numbers, sex-based prejudice clearly persisted.

I argue that phrases such as “sex class” and “capitalist-patriarchy” represent, at the very least, a discursive awareness in the 1970s that in conjunction with gender stereotypes, women’s oppression had deeper, more abstracted, and insidious roots. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler famously offered feminists a way to talk about gender as “performative”—a superficial set of characteristics and behaviors that society assumes to be assigned to either masculine or feminine.

She explains, “originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex” (8). Gender—and accompanying stereotypes such as the “cult of true womanhood,” or “the feminine mystique”—had by 1970 been exposed as societal stereotypes and challenged by second-wave feminism in its early decade. In the 1970s, despite having escaped from the confines of the family home, women found themselves still restricted from accessing the same channels of political or economic power as men. It was not until 1990 that

Butler provides a critical account of the sex/gender binary and how society both shapes and allows for alternations and adaptations to what is “normal” for the latter. Thus, I suggest how retrospectively we might entertain that feminism in the 1970s sought to expound on the second half of Butler’s gender/sex binary— beginning to consider that the “source” of women’s secondary status lay deeper than just their historical relegation to the domestic sphere, and was tied-up to women’s sex as an unmovable identity marker bound up in biology and “nature.”

Having seemingly achieved the goal of “exploding” gender stereotypes that kept women isolated in the domestic sphere, feminism in the 1970s sought to challenge society’s perpetuation of

95 motherhood and biology as handicaps by exposing this bias. In the subsequent chapter I will discuss the difficulties of seeking equity by further explicating a perceived “handicap” in the labor market, but again, this theory did not exist in the 1970s. Talking of the evolution of feminism, Butler also notes:

For feminist theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents

women has seemed necessary to foster the political viability of women. This has seemed

obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which women’s lives

were either misrepresented or not represented at all. (2)

The need to counter misrepresentation, or lack of representation, in regard to the personal and political ramifications of motherhood became a significant aspect of latter second-wave feminism. In the 1970s, as women experienced continued—albeit evolving—forms of oppression, despite universal access to the labor market, feminism sought to find new strategies to collectivize and unite over what it meant to be a “woman,” beyond what history prescribed.

Therefore, feminists of the 1970s sought not just new critical approaches—such as re- appropriating Marx—but also new tactics.

Staying in step with the evolving ideology and tactics of the “new feminism” which critically examined the experience of motherhood as a site of oppression, Rich’s writing, both poetry and prose, engages with women’s complicated status as “bearer of children.” She publishes Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, in 1976, speaking against cultural norms. In the chapter “The Primacy of Mother” Rich encourages feminists to come to terms with both history and the contemporary dialogue surrounding motherhood. Rich writes,

“Prepatriarchal religion acknowledged the female presences in every part of the cosmos” (107).

She goes on to outline the occurrence of empowering female deities in this prehistoric tradition,

96 noting, “The Great Goddess is found in all water: ‘the sea of heaven on which sail the barks of the god of light, the circular, life-generating ocean above and below the earth. To her belong all waters, streams, fountains, ponds and springs, as well as the rain’” (108). Rich suggests that if feminists delve deeply enough into history, challenging what the patriarchy tells us is a “natural” and not social arrangement, women can perceive the societally constructed aspects of their sex- based oppression. If feminists can rediscover a tradition of worshipping female deities, what other female power lies beneath the surface of male-biased history? Perhaps this conviction informs her decision to use the metaphor of diving into the sea to encounter a wreck, which she describes as “the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”( Diving into the Wreck 23). Just as Shulamith Firestone used the vague referent

“that” in talking about biological sex, here Rich points to “the thing”—arguably the site of women’s oppression, the much mythologized and deeply sunken biological handicap of a woman’s biology, and its stigmatized relationship to childbearing.

By the 1970s women had succeeded in “escaping the home,” and still they found themselves confronted with more barriers and impediments to equality with their male peers in the workforce—perhaps explaining why feminism today continues to draw on notions of a “glass ceiling.” And confoundingly, what society and the market suggested as the reason for these additional barriers to equal wages and equal participation was a seemingly inarguable and unsurmountable “natural” obstacle: women’s biological ties to motherhood. The Endnotes collective uses the retrospective advantage of our present historical moment to explicate capital’s ability to adapt to using devalued and more casual women laborers, made possible on a large scale by technological advances. They account for how the perpetuation of a wage handicap for women is made possible by essentializing a main biological difference from men, namely the

97 ability for women to have children. Obviously not all women can or will have children and fertility is not an issue for the span of a woman’s laboring years, yet these distinctions are not made or noted on a woman-by-woman basis. In a section of the essay dedicated to changes in labor relations and women in the 1970s, the Endnotes collective term this era as “1970s: the real subsumption” (15). The idea of “subsumption” describes how by the 1970s the combined wages of both adults in a nuclear family had to cover, pay for, or subsume the cost of technology and services that allowed labor to be reproduced for the entire household. Notably, it was now assumed that both husbands and wives held employment outside of the home. This

“subsumption,” according to the Endnotes collective relates to time-saving devices like vacuum cleaners or fast-food meals that by the 1970s were readily available at a price-point that was considered generally affordable. In being able to “afford” these items, previously considered luxuries, the average middle-class couple could both work outside the home, as all of the wife’s time was no longer necessary to reproduce labor. They write:

Advances in productivity make these commodities more and more affordable, and some

of them—particularly ready-made meals and household appliances—slowly but surely

became affordable with the wage. Nevertheless, some IMM activities are more difficult

to commodify at a price low enough to be paid for by every wage. Indeed, even if it is

possible to commodify childcare, it is not possible to make advances in productivity that

would allow its cost to become even cheaper. Even if the nourishing, washing of clothes,

and so on, can be done more efficiently, the time for childcare is never reduced. You

cannot look after a child more quickly: they have to be attended to 24 hours a day. (15-

16)

Bearing in mind the technological advances discussed in the previous chapter, it becomes apparent that no matter how rapidly innovations in time-saving devices developed that might allow women to both perform the tasks necessary to reproduce the labor of the household and also work for a wage, certain “activities” are seemingly impossible for technology to streamline or ameliorate. Childbirth, gestation and childcare, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters, are cardinal examples of activities that cannot be done more quickly. Since a laborer only has so many hours in the day—only some of which the capitalist will pay them for—regardless of how quickly she can cook or do laundry, by seeming virtue of the bad luck of “natural factors” women are inevitably handicapped by time constraints associated with the biological ramification and social expectations of motherhood. Motherhood, in terms of capital, will always be a liability to the woman-as-laborer because it will always be a drain on her time. Given this formulation, it hardly seems fair to fault a capitalist for not wanting to spend the time training a woman, or being reluctant to place her in a job with ample opportunities for advancement if she is only going to get pregnant, or be continually diverted by her responsibilities to her children.

Sex and Solidarity: Evolving Feminist Ideology and “Essentialism”

Confronted with something seemingly as “concrete” as the “natural” handicap presented by the physical limitations of pregnancy and the “biological” imperative to nurture and rear offspring gestated in one’s body, many feminists expressed frustration and anger—it was during this era that ideas of “feminist rage” began to emerge in the American lexicon—that they were invariably marked as “less equal” because of existing, historically derived perceptions of motherhood. In Of Woman Born, Rich sheds light into feminism’s shift in ideological emphasis which encouraged women to both own and explicate the frustrations of motherhood: “In a living room in 1975, I spent an evening with a group of women poets, some of whom had children. One

99 had brought hers along, and they slept or played in an adjoining room. We talked of poetry, and also of infanticide” (24) and goes on to add:

We spoke of our own moments of murderous anger at our children, because there was no

one and nothing else on which to discharge anger. We spoke in the sometimes tentative,

sometimes rising, sometimes bitterly witty, unrhetorical tones and language of women

who had met together over our common work, poetry, and who found another common

ground in an unacceptable, but undeniable anger. (24)

In the depicted scenario we find women joining together, sharing a common labor—poetry—and a common handicap to that labor—motherhood. Rich and her cohort looked to language in order to gain purchase on the building sense of anger over being tethered to their biological role as

“child bearers” and also to further strengthen a sense of collectivism, of solidarity. Interestingly, the women mentioned bond less over the shared site of their role as poets, and less even as women who now work both within and outside of the family home, but as mothers. The event that Rich describes, in which a group of women look to articulate and self-define the experience of motherhood—even if it involves the seemingly taboo expression of an “unnatural” anger and frustration towards one’s children, illustrates a tactic for coalition building that became prevalent in feminism from this era onward—making “the personal” “political.”

The “Personal” as “Political”

In the foreword to Arts of Possible, Rich notes this discursive turn in feminism, writing in

1971 of a growing sense that“the accurate feminist perceptions that women’s lives, historically or individually, were mostly unrecorded and that the personal is political” (2), a phrase that often appears in Women’s Studies courses. The idea of the “personal” being “political” involved

100 women speaking of their private experiences—especially those centered around motherhood— arguably to reinforce women’s solidarity. Attempting to use the sheer number of women in

America, gathering or collectivizing together for a common political goal, has been a tactic of feminism since early suffragettes sought to draw strength by demonstrating their ability to amass potential voters. Addressing this seminal aspect of feminism, Judith Butler states, “to the extent that we understand identity claims as rallying points for political mobilization, they appear to hold out the promise of unity, solidarity, universality” (Bodies that Matter 140). The logic is as follows: Women as an “identity” serves as a “natural” and even intuitive rallying point for feminism. To wit, American society still speaks of some political issues of “women’s issues,” especially reproductive rights. The biological aspects of womanhood necessarily deal heavily with the body, and therefore the most intimate or “personal” of experiences, making it a logical progression that motherhood and childbirth fall into this purview. Just as feminists in the 1950s spoke to one another about their experiences of oppression within the home, feminists of the

1970s were encouraged to speak to another about even the most “personal” of experiences for the sake of political mobilization—topics, which at the time had been seen as socially unacceptable to discuss. Of this tactic, Rich notes, “Feminism has depended heavily on the concrete testimony of individual women, as testimony that was meant to accumulate toward collective understanding and practice” (AOP 2). Thus, just as women spoke to one another in the

50s about the intimate realm of the home, in the 70s feminist dialogue became even more intimate in speaking of motherhood and the body.

“Diving into the Wreck” evidences a sensitivity towards the idea of taking the bodily and highly personal, engaging with it, and then using this insight to serve a larger “political” purpose.

The writer/speaker experiences the limitations of her physical body beginning in the third stanza:

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“I go down. / My flippers cripple me, / I crawl like an insect down the ladder / and there is no one / to tell me when the ocean will begin” (22-23). As already established in the first two stanzas this information finding mission is framed as a solo endeavor and the act of encountering the ocean must be done alone. For instance, the fourth stanza states, “I have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep element” (23). I suggest that this “deep element” is the murky and fluctuating interplay of history and nature. Though “the sea is another story / the sea is not a question of power” (23) in diving below its depths and focusing on the physical body, the speaker finds power through knowledge both of history and herself. In staying focused and objectively encountering biological limitations—speaking as she does so—the diver in the poem adapts and is able to proceed.

Nature has seemed to naturally “gift” the shadowy figures with advantages in this realm: the narrator encounters denizens “who have always lived here” (23) and navigate the water easily, “swaying their crenellated fans / between the reefs” (23). In the face of this reminder that the woman diver is “naturally” disadvantaged the speaker has a moment where she wavers from her goal. In the fifth stanza, the speaker acknowledges: “And now: it is easy to forget / what I came for” (23). I suggest that we might read the speaker’s rumination as an acknowledgment that women are entering uncharted waters during the 1970s, in that they are now increasingly aware that in the 1950s and 1960s women workers may have been merely “visiting” realms previously barred to women. These aquatic figures, described as “so many who have always / lived here”

(23) might be understood as men, and just as a human has no “natural” place in the ocean, so too might it seem that women cannot venture deeper into the entrenched social arrangements that mitigate power and equity. Yet to achieve permanent and true gender equity, much like the diver who nearly forgets her errand once she is so far out of her “natural” element but manages to

102 refocus, Rich can be read as encouraging feminists to ignore the suggestion that a woman in the workplace, the university, or any other seat of power is as unnatural as a human in the deep ocean. Instead, the diver demonstrates the importance of remembering her purpose and pushes down further into the depths.

Metaphorically mirroring this moment in the fifth stanza of “Diving into the Wreck,” in response to the awareness for the need to explore the deeper locus of women’s persistent oppression, as well as a need to adapt for greater collective solidarity, the personal became political in the 1970s. And what could be more “personal” than the functions, frustrations, and overall experience of creating, gestating, and rearing children? This tactic relied on the assumption that despite differences in class, color, or theoretical leaning, “nature” and “biology” had already created a collective identity for feminism, if for no other reason than patriarchal society viewed sexual difference as a reason for positing women as less powerful or valuable than men. In this way “woman” as an identity marker and political rallying point became essentialized, largely because it provided feminists a focal point toto galvanize their efforts. It also provided capital an established excuse to devalue a large portion of the labor pool. Even

Shulamith Firestone contributed to this sex-based essentializing as she emphasized the need for women to embrace their shared biology and re-committee to a feminist agenda. Describing the historical oppression of women as “the massacre,” she calls for a recommitment to the feminist collective, envisioning a scenario wherein “the first women are fleeing the massacre, and, shaking and tottering, are beginning to find each other. Their first move is a careful joint observation, to resensitize a fractured consciousness” (1-2).

Rich’s Pedagogy and Prose: A Multi-Genre Approach

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By the 1970s Rich no longer wrote as her children napped, but she was well on her way towards a full-time career as a professor of creative writing and spoke often of her students as analogous to her own offspring, sometime referencing pupils as “her kids.” In the essay

“Teaching Language in Open Admission” she chronicles her experience teaching with the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program at City College in New York, a program meant to educate “disadvantaged” black and Puerto Rican students. Describing her pedagogical stance, Rich reflects: “My job, that first year, was to ‘turn the students on’ to writing by whatever means I wanted—poetry, free associations, music, politics, drama, fiction” (OSLS

55). This quote illustrates Rich’s willingness to exhaust genre limits in service of a pedagogic or political necessity. In perceiving the divisiveness amongst liberal feminists, radical feminists, and women increasingly hesitant to identify with feminism at all, Rich’s prose and poetry of the era evidences a writer attempting to communicate about women’s continued oppression—an issue too enormous to explicate sufficiently in any one mode of discourse. There can be no doubt that Rich was aware and extremely critical of women who, frustrated by evolutions in labor relations and encouraged by shifting societal pressures, embraced liberal feminism or else dropped-out of the movement all together. Yet, I suggest that in the 1970s she saw language as a possible means of drawing them back into the feminist fold.

Carrying through with a reading of the metaphoric dive as an exploratory mission in which a brave single speaker encounters history and nature in the service of a feminist collective, the sixth stanza states: “I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail” (23). I argue that though the “treasure” that is still within grasp is feminist unity and ultimately the end of women’s oppression, the “damage that was done” refers not only to the historic inequality but

104 also, suggestively, to the divisiveness plaguing second-wave feminism during the 1970s. Shortly after publishing “Diving into the Wreck,” The New York Review of Books asked Rich to write a response to The New Chastity, and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation, a 1972 book by Midge Decter with the content sufficiently evident in the title. Rich later noted that this request, and the article, that resulted from it, germinated the ideas fully explicated in Of Woman

Born. I suggest that it also led to the emphasis she comes to place on the need for feminism to find new ways to enable women to speak with each other, despite differences in experience or even larger political leanings. As Rich puts it in “The Antifeminist Woman,”

Even within the women’s movement this fragmentation can be seen, and is hailed with

satisfaction by its critics: See, those women are fighting each other! But there is a

difference between diversity and fragmentation. Fragmentation is endemic in patriarchal

society and is in no way unique to the women’s movement. But women of our time,

having different experiences to bring to the movement, are in serious, affectionate, and

difficult struggle with each other as they attempt to sort out the new materials and the

long-buried feelings in which the women’s movement is so rich. (82-83)

Perhaps working not just as a feminist, but also as an educator committed to creating texts meant to further understanding of what it meant to be a woman in American society, Rich continues to demonstrate a willingness to render the personal as political in both Of Woman Born—where she speaks of her experience as mother and poet—and “Diving into the Wreck.” Just like the speaker in “Diving into the Wreck” Rich’s multi-genre approach to further feminism demonstrates her belief that indeed “the words are maps” (23). In her texts of the 1970s we can see a writer attempting to encourage women to collectivize through various methods—whether by making her biographical “personal life” political in Of Woman Born, or “diving” into the historical roots

105 of women’s perceived biological inferiority in a determined effort to further the ideology and objectives of feminism. I suggest that by drawing on the previous historical context of shifting societal factors, confronted with a divided women’s movement, Rich uses her imagination and voice as an established poet to brave the “wreck” of history—that is, the long buried feelings and deeply entrenched sexual prejudices—to claim what the poem alludes to as “treasure.” In doing so, the poem can be read as presenting feminism with this “rich” and “new material” (24)—a definition of womanhood not curtailed by sex class, free from the myths perpetuated by capitalist-patriarchy.

“This is the Place”—Locating a Site for Women’s Continued Oppression in the 1970s

A large portion of poetic criticism points to “Diving into the Wreck” as evidence of Rich at the height of her political and poetic feminist hermeneutics. For instance, Templeton in The

Dream and the Dialogue references several critical assessments in support of her own assessment that, Diving into the Wreck, “ is Rich’s first openly feminist volume, though many of its themes are not new for her” (33). Additionally, Templeton goes on to references the work of

Jane Vanderbosch, agreeing with how Vanderbosch, “describes the volume as Rich’s first explicit attempt to define reality according to a “ ‘feminist aesthetic’ ” (33). If we follow along with the bulk of criticism that appreciated “Diving into the Wreck” in terms of a broad definition of feminism, then similar to the same “consciousness raising” and collectivizing ideology apparent in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Rich here might simply be seen as again using her poetic voice in solidarity with other women.

Looking to the content of the poem, there is undoubtedly ample material to unpack in appreciation of Rich’s feminist poetics, but to suggest that “Diving into the Wreck” is merely a poet working in the same vein—albeit with more authority and political intent—is to miss the

106 nuanced shift in the focus of feminist ideology between the 1950s and 1970s that informs the moment of the poem’s creation, as well as Rich’s control and command of her identity as a feminist and poet. Going beyond the surface to reread the poem through a consideration of both

Shulamith Firestone’s theorization of “sex class” and of evolving societal relations and shifts in capital, Rich’s poem offers present-day feminism more than just an alternative or challenge to a literary history steeped in patriarchal bias, as Templeton’s summation of critical discourse asserts. In contrast, I suggest that “Diving into the Wreck” shows Rich using her poetic powers to address what she—and other feminists, whether radical or liberal—felt was the barrier society represented as the insurmountable proof of women’s inferiority: their “natural” biology and its assumed ties to motherhood. The Endnotes collective describes how capital, and its continual need to devalue labor through whatever channels deemed socially acceptable, is responsible for the still existent bias against women in the workplace. And this is still the same issue that feminism in the 1970s looked to confront. The Endnotes collective observe that, given historical prejudices and societal impression of what is both “normal” and “natural,” women under capitalism will always be oppressed:

Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as “those who have children” (see

Addendum 2) and once this social activity, “having children,” is structurally formed as

constituting a handicap, women are defined as those who come to the labour-market with

a potential disadvantage. This systematic differentiation—through the market-

determined risk identified as childbearing “potential”—keeps those who embody the

signifier “woman” anchored to the IMM sphere. (10-11)

The idea of “those who embody the signifier ‘woman’” refers to the fact that, for the purpose of the labor market, a worker only has to be recognized as someone who can get pregnant and will

107 require time-off for maternity leave, additionally requiring accommodations for childcare to signal to a potential employer that they have a “handicap.” This allows us to perceive, now, that under capital “women” will inevitably be treated as a works seen as less than ideal, unable to work the same as a man regardless of education or training. The theory of the Endnotes collective suggests how continuing to insist on being identified as “women workers” might continue to give capital an excuse to devalue women workers—but this is an idea I will engage with at length in the final chapter.

As a footnote to the section quoted from “The Logic of Gender,” the Endnotes collective provides a clarifying “addendum 2: on women, biology and children,” which acknowledges that

“the definition of women as ‘those who have children’ presupposes a necessary link between 1) the fact of having a biological organ, the uterus 2) the fact of bearing a child, of being pregnant

3) the fact of having a specific relation to this pregnancy ” (11). In terms of the labor market, what this means is that capital is happy to perpetuate the assumption that being a “woman” is tied up with motherhood and childbearing. Capital perpetuates this essentializing of sex-organs and biology because it provides a firmly and historically established justification for devaluing a large portion of the labor pool, even if not all women can or will get pregnant, and despite birth control technology and availability. Yet during the 1970s the evolution in feminist theory and ideology was not equipped to consider how capital could use the very galvanizing commonality of women’s ties to motherhood and childcare as a means of devaluing labor. Shulamith Firestone and other “radical” feminists drew on Marxist theory to challenge an entire social structure and mode of commodity circulation to decry the rationale that women’s biology made them interminably inferior, giving us the concept of “sex class.” And while this term and theory was a necessary building block, as was the politicizing of the burdens of motherhood, it allowed for an

108 element of essentializing that later waves of feminism had to revisit. Still, the shift in ideology from emphasizing “housewife” to focusing on “motherhood” and biology was a necessary response, given that large-scale entrance to the labor market did not succeed in ending gender stereotypes or women’s oppression. Problematic though we may now see this sort of biological essentialism, 1970s feminist discourse made it apparent that beyond historic gender stereotypes some deeper factor, with roots in both nature and history, lay at the heart of women’s continued oppression.

Rich, looking to further the aims of feminism, draws on her poetic powers to perform a fuller metaphoric examination of the more insidious, deeply submerged site of women’s continued oppression. Critically, this project is often attributed primarily to the prose work Of

Women Born (1976) which Michelle Dean regards as being “among the first to articulate the ways in which the biological facts of procreation had been used as a justification for patriarchal control” (“The Wreck” 11). However, there is also evidence of this project—three years prior — in Rich’s poem. “Diving into the Wreck” opens with a lone figure poised and ready to descend into an oceanic dive: if we are reading to confirm the feminist-bent of the poem Rich’s opening line—“First having read the book of myths, / and loaded the camera ” (22)—offers us much to unpack. To begin with, the “book of myths” refers to any canonical text from Western culture— even the Old Testament, where women are first vilified in the representation of Eve’s responsibility for the consumption of forbidden fruit and subsequent loss of paradise. Suggesting an allusion to Genesis, Rich uses the term “the ribs of the disaster” (24) in describing the physicality of the wreck—thus alluding to Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, and the Judeo-

Christian subsequent blaming of Eve for the “disaster” of original sin. Moreover, Rich uses the reference to this book as “myths”—not dogma or fact, which lends the metaphorical dive the rest

109 of the poem describes a sense of myth-busting and fact-finding. Indeed, the camera is brought along, then, for the purpose of recording verifiable evidence to be compared to what is suggested in these myths. I suggest that since the 1970s were a decade when the societal beliefs of a preordained, natural, and biological marker of women’s inferiority became increasingly scrutinized, Rich’s poetic speaker is allegorically diving into not a generalized “history.” The dive becomes more than just a dive into the “history of language” either, but instead is a deep- dive into the ontological history of Western civilization that perpetuates women—specifically women as potential bearers of children— as the lesser sex.

Speaking of this biased ontological tradition, In Bodies that Matter Judith Butler unites the philosophical origins of feminist language analysis with an understanding of the bodily or material conditions which confront women in daily life. More specifically Butler draws on Luce

Irigaray’s feminist appropriation of Plato, where she accounts for the philosophical origins that relegate the feminine to the role of the passive, the natural, and the acted-upon. Butler quotes

Irigaray’s: “ The receptacle, she ‘always receives all things, she never departs at all from her own nature and, never, in any way or any time, assumes a form like that of any of the things that enter into her’ “ (22). Butler goes on to expand upon Irigaray, “This means that he—remember the

Forms are likened to the father in this triad—will never be entered by her or, in fact, by anything.

For he is the impenetrable penetrator, and she, the invariably penetrated” (23). From this Butler moves on to conclude: “The logic of non-contradictions that conditions this distribution of pronouns is one which establishes the ‘he’ through this exclusive position as penetrator and the

‘she’ through this exclusive position as penetrated” (23). As Butler shows, Irigaray demonstrates just how far back the “myths” about women’s inferiority stretch by tracing these origins as far back as to Plato. A feminist rereading of seminal philosophy creates an approach to

110 comprehending the interplay of society, linguistics, and female-oppression that is especially valuable in considering Rich’s project in “Diving into the Wreck.” Indeed, this approach shows how the figure in “Diving into the Wreck” who penetrates the surface of the water succeeds in beginning to expose the mythos of women’s “natural” and historical weakness—the very act of penetrating flies in the face of the “natural” arrangement Butler drawing on Irigaray outlines wherein a female can only be penetrated and never the penetrated.

Even though the speaker appears to be alone—we learn she is “having to do this / not like Cousteau with his / assiduous team / aboard the sun-flooded schooner / but here alone (22)— what she knows to be lying beneath what “nature” conceals is a manmade construct, the wreck itself. Arguably, this metaphor can be understood as suggesting that the speaker—and through extension, Rich—has come to realize that the seemingly untouched façade of nature conceals something created by society, existent through some indeterminant amount of history. Even seemingly along and far from the reaches of society, mankind has exerted its influence on the natural world in the shape of the wreck. The speaker takes on this perilous expedition alone and tells the reader she has come to explore this wreck, to bring back evidence, which we can hold up in comparison to the “book of myths.” The purpose of doing so—of being able to compare myths to her own experience of nature and personal exploration—is in service of a feminist collective.

Undertakings such as this “dive” hold the potential to empower all women who are historically oppressed because of the sex-biased content of “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear” (24). Through personal explorative undertakings the speaker gains a new metaphoric perspective on the “wreck” which give her the chance to challenge and counter the narratives, or myths, which constitute the societal tradition of women’s oppression.

111

Recall that “Diving into the Wreck” follows chronologically after “Snapshots of a

Daughter-in-Law,” the poem that signals Rich’s “feminist awakening.” This allows for us to consider how the latter poem ends with the speaker standing atop a cliff, watching as a mechanized modern woman flies across the waves bearing an ambiguous cargo, while the later poem opens as the speaker prepares to dive below the surface of the water to explore a wreck.

Considering the fragmentation and frustrations of second-wave feminism leading up to the

1970s, we might read this “wreck” to be the helicopter-woman of the 1965 poem. Like the earlier efforts of second-wave feminism, this figure faltered short of the goal, crashed, and was consumed by the waves. Now the speaker of a later poem must descend if the cargo promised in

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” as “palpable / ours”(27) is going to be claimed. “Diving into the Wreck” is not just Rich—now a full-court feminist and full-time poet—writing feminist poetry with more strength and surety. Instead, this is the poem of a woman committed to the ideals of feminism looking to encounter the flux of elaborate social relations, knowing full-well how fraught this undertaking will be, given the backlash feminism has experienced. Thus, the speaker/diver anticipates a perilous endeavor—one that requires weaponry in the form of “the knife-blade” and “the body-armor of black rubber” (22)—but is undeterred in her mission to

“explore the wreck” (22).

And yet, as Rich’s writing and reflection from the 1970s onward forces us to consider, perhaps “Diving into the Wreck” must be also be read in our moment as foreshadowing Rich’s growing sense of hesitancy towards the methods and political aims of feminism—which she explicates in her final essay collection Arts of the Possible. Even in 1972, before she began to directly criticize the effectiveness of feminism as explicitly as she would in the last decades of her life, Rich expressed the firm belief that feminist approaches to language had to be continually

112 scrutinized, evolved, and revisited. In 1978, Rich touches on one of the essays that appear in her collected anthology of prose On Lies, Secrets, and Silence and reflects, “I was trying to articulate the intense process of self-education, of reading and thinking, and of collective experience and perceptions, which marked the turn of the new decade for me as for so many other women. It was, of course, only the beginning of a process still continuing and which I conceive as endless” (69-70). A feminist reading of “Diving into the Wreck” undoubtedly demonstrates Rich’s break from formalism and serves as an explication of the perils of a woman attempting to find her voice within the constructs—language being foremost—of patriarchy. Yet, following Rich’s directive to see the process of reading and thinking as an “endless” process of rereading of the poem, we are invited to use present theory and expose how “Diving into the

Wreck” demonstrates a shift to a more radical type of feminism than Rich had previously employed in her poems, or, for that matter, embraced in her personal life. There is a moment especially interesting in the 8th stanza where Rich plays with gendered pronouns, writing “we circle silently / about the wreck / we dive into the hold. / I am she: I am he” (24). While I am not suggesting that “Diving into the Wreck” already reflects or even anticipates Rich’s later turn to

Marxism, the play of gender pronouns here does suggest a hesitancy to embrace the essentializing aspects of “radical” feminism that later morphed into the ideology which excluded transwomen, positing those born as men as universally the enemy of sexual equality.

At the start of the 1970s Rich—now an established voice in not just American poetry but also American feminism— uses “Diving into the Wreck” to explicate the experience of womanhood in an evolving society. Moreover, she uses poetry itself as a means of finding solutions to the increasingly fractious state of the women’s movement and explore the depths of language’s relationship to society. As Marxist feminists of this era such as Shulamith Firestone

113 emphatically argued, a women’s collective necessarily had to challenge women’s status as biologically inferior— understanding the origins of women’s oppression involved going much deeper than the sensuous experiences of our daily life. For Marxist feminists this required considering what lay below the surface, specifically at the level of labor relations, which is theorized as dictating all other aspects of society. Though I do not suggest that Rich, at the time of writing, intended “the wreck” encountered in her poem to be a metaphoric manifestation of

Marx’s theory of labor relations, I do suggest that in writing the poem Rich evidences a sensitivity to the limitations of language to form feminist collectives, and establishes a precedent for her increased sense of the inability of any branch of the women’s movement to challenge the power structures existent under capitalism without challenging capital itself.

In the previous chapter I suggested that Rich was able to use her place in the socioeconomic order—entering and establishing herself as a poet who was a “dutiful daughter” or special woman” and then taking advantage of that position to negotiate her own voice and directly challenge patriarchal gender stereotypes in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” In a similar fashion, I have suggested in this chapter that Rich uses her role as influential American poet and preeminent feminist writer in an attempt to discursively unify the increasingly fragmented and contentious factions of feminism in the United States in the early 1970s. With a sensitivity to both woman’s seemingly inescapable link to the biological—a perception as old as the species itself, given the “natural” fact that women bear children and thus are somehow less powerful—and a sensitivity to the belief that “feminist consciousness” must be translated into action, Rich poetically dived back into the murky depths of poetry and language in the quest for some insight to guide feminism into its next stage. Just as in the scene depicted in Of Woman

Born where a group of women look to their craft, seeking to find language to express a building

114 sense of frustration and explicate the seemingly inescapable fact of “nature” which serves as the site of their continued inequality, Rich again turns to the language of poetry to further feminist understanding and empowerment. In the poem’s central metaphor of submersion, the speaker descends via the “ladder,” but despite thinking she is nearing the ladder’s end continues to find

“rung after rung” (“ Diving into the Wreck” 22). In a similar fashion, women of the second wave of feminism escaped gender stereotypes and the domestic sphere only to find sex-based prejudice and further “glass ceilings” impeding sexual equality. There appeared to be—and still seems to be—no conceivable end to the steps feminism must take to gain sexual equity: it is just as necessary now as it was in the 1970s for feminism to reappraise the impediments to our purpose.

I argue that using Adrienne Rich’s words as “maps” we might consider the contents of the poem in terms of market related labor struggles facing women in the early 1970s, thereby allowing us to descend further into the “wreck” that is the elaborate sex-gender matrix as manipulated by capital.

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Chapter Four: Global “Feminization” of Labor and the “death” of Poetry Debate

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the relevant theory from Marxist feminism and poetic pedagogy since the 1970s as a means of placing the “feminization” of labor in conversation with the “death” of poetry discussion in America. From these theories, I will then move on to suggest how the profession of teaching poetry is evidencing the effects of feminization due to a crisis of reproducing labor relations in this particular sector of industry, which impacts laborers of either sex. While I will be primarily discussing the status of creative writing courses, the symptoms of destabilizing and devaluing the job of professors can be extrapolated and observed more generally through English departments and perhaps all of the humanities. To that end, for the sake of continuity and brevity supporting data and Rich’s commentary on the matter has been proved in Addendum A at the end of this text. Placing these two theoretical discussion in direct contact is the prime focus of this chapter: In previous chapters I have discussed the idea that “labor issues” are quite clearly central to feminism and now in reference to “feminization” I suggest that for poetry the historic stigma against women in the profession must be an issue all poets rally against.

Guy Standing talks of “cultural determinants” which served as challenges to female labor- force participation, noting that they can be unique to each type of industry. He observes that female labor force participation has historically been curtailed and manipulated by various socially constructed factors: “Cultural determinants of [women’s labor force] participation have been widely cited, notably religions and patriarchal ideology” (Global Feminization Through

Flexible Labor 587). As I have been arguing in the previous chapters, patriarchal ideology against women participating in teaching and publishing poetry was rampant prior to second-wave feminism. In order to gain access to market sector jobs related to the teaching and writing of

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American poetry, Rich and other second-wave feminists challenged the patriarchal ideology entrenched in academia and American poetic aesthetics, creating “women’s literature” as a separate but aspiringly equal branch of the American poetic canon. However, this chapter will demonstrate that given capital’s increasing need to devalue labor the presence of women as poets and poetry instructors in the academy has resulted in the feminization of the profession, as in any other job. It is crucial to bear in mind that what drives the feminization trend and its expansion is a need for capital to lower overall labor costs. Having said that, I draw at length on Standing’s theory to demonstrate how women in the workforce have served as a means to achieving this lowering of labor costs.

Much has been written and argued about the status of American poetry—why it is “dying” and what or who should be blamed. Joseph Epstein, in attempting to discern “Who Killed

Poetry,” notes:

The neglect of poetry by major trade publishers is sometimes blamed. Capitalism generally

comes in for its share of lumps, sometimes for encouraging supermarket bookselling

techniques, sometimes for holding up the wrong models: What kind of country is it in which

Lee Iacocca is better known than A.R. Ammons? Everything, in short, is blamed but the

drinking water. (6)

In contrast to Epstein’s downplaying of the role of capitalism in the so-called demise of poetry, I shall indeed “blame” capital—but will do so by unpacking the labor relation trends which allow for certain jobs and sectors of industry to be devalued and destabilized—that is, to be

“femininized”—under the present “world-system” of labor and commodity circulation.

Considering the “debate” from this perspective circumnavigates the slippery terrain of attempting to account for a supply and “demand” model of poetry, for what metrics might be

117 applied to a form that can be administered via a multitude of medias and can be commodified in a multitude of ways? Therefore, my proposed analysis of the “death” of poetry draws on Marxist feminist theory to focus on a crisis of labor rather than a hyper-specialized and ambiguous market of commodity circulation, which would rely on “supply side” analysis that Marxism refutes. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to serve as a theoretical bridge, articulating the evolutions of capital in the time between “Diving into the Wreck,” where, as I say in the previous chapter, the emphasis was on women’s shared sex-based identity and “An Atlas of a

Difficult World.” In the next chapter I discuss the complex relationship between feminism and the labor market in the 1990s, demonstrating how the poem explicitly figures poets as feminized laborers who find themselves as part of the growing and non-sex specific group of laborers who experience immiseration as a result of expanding labor-devaluation and destabilization which

“feminization” allows. I argue that in response to changing labor relations, Rich’s aforementioned poem evidences her attempt to evolve a feminist poetic aesthetic in line with a much-needed new feminist collective identity equipped to push against the evolutions of capitalist society that still perpetuate sex-based inequality. My reading is guided by Rich’s call that poets writing after the 1990s must “work out our connectedness, as artists, with other people who are beleaguered, suffering, disenfranchised, precariously employed workers” (AOP 104). In terms of Standing’s articulation of what we can understand as “feminized” labor, poets—who are assumed almost universally to now be teachers of poetry—can be seen as experiencing this method of devaluing labor and reproducing exploitative labor relations between capital and labor.

The teaching and production of American poetry in the university is uniquely suited to tracking the conditions necessary to a feminized job-sector; indeed, I will be identifying this

118 profession as experiencing feminization. Rich and other second-wave poets fought for not only women’s acceptance into jobs teaching and writing poetry but also for s category of “women’s literature” as a way of undoing the general erasure of women’s writing from academic curriculum. However, this absence—with the exception of a handful of “exceptional women—of a woman’s literary tradition formed a culture in academic poetics historically biased against women poets, and created the conditions through which capital could devalue labor: as evidenced by the wage-gap wherein women are still paid less than their male counterparts capital now has the option of hiring women workers for less wages and also replacing the wages traditionally granted to men with lower pay under the inducement of job competition.

Historically, women have been assumed to carry a “high social cost” with their labor.

This is largely due to the assumed “natural” stigma resulting from the potential labor-market

“risk” of becoming pregnant and subsequent labor-related effects of gestation, childbirth, and childcare. In “The Logic of Gender,” the Endnotes collective fully explains the assumption that women’s labor has a “higher price:”

What the female gender signifies—that which is socially inscribed upon “naturalized,”

“sexuated” bodies—is not only an array of “feminine” or gendered characteristics, but

essentially a price tag. Biological reproduction has a social cost which is exceptional to

average (male) labour-power; it becomes the burden of those whose cost it is assigned to—

regardless of whether they can or will have children. (13)

The concept of biological reproduction as having a “social cost” means that it is assumed that society—either through family structures, heterosexual marriage, or the welfare state—must find a way to support a woman during the time pregnancy and childbirth/rearing impede her laboring capacity. Yet, more than simply being a “woman’s issue,” capital plays upon the stigma of

119 women’s labor to both perpetuate the sex-based wage-gap but also to “feminize” labor in general—since women are more likely to leave a position because of pregnancy and since capital can thus justify paying her less. Once given access to equally trained but lower priced labor, capital hires women at lower rates thus devaluing labor in that job market. In times when a labor market hired only a few “exceptional women” it might hire them at commiserate rates, should they manage to achieve positions such as a tenure-track job: capital had not yet evolved to formulate an established way to devalue labor at the site of a “woman professor” as these incidences were initially rare. However, as second-wave feminism gained women more universal access to previously “masculine jobs” the feminization trend became viable, as I will presently explain. Ironically, because second-wave feminists used women’s shared sex as a rallying point in entering the labor force, capital was able to lay the grounds for a way of justifying hiring women at lower wages and in more precarious jobs while also planting the seeds to use this access to cheaper labor to devalue and destabilize jobs historically held by men. Given the changes I will articulate in the global labor market, capital began a process of eroding stable and higher paid jobs, replacing them with precarious and devalued forms of employment. Thus, even women who had in the post-war years managed to find close to pay equity—such as Rich and her cohort— will now find the stable and high-paying positions in their sector of industry shrinking.

I argue that the present conditions surrounding American poetry result from both the post- war MFA boom and the creation of “women’s poetry,” leading to a perfect storm of converging conditions that allow for the feminization of a profession. As I will demonstrate, now that those who publish poetry almost universally teach, the proliferation of American MFA programs has created what we might consider as an academic Ponzi scheme. Though MFA enrollment

120 numbers continue to increase, leading to the need for more instructors to teach students, these students, when they graduate with the MFA, increasingly find themselves in labor market where good tenure track jobs have largely vanished, only to be replaced by feminized forms of precarious labor. The issue is two-fold: the industry needs more student enrollment to stay afloat, but in enrolling more students ultimately produces more people vying for jobs, at precisely a point in larger global labor market trends when these secure and well-paid jobs are vanishing. I will return to fully considering the nexus between feminization and the penalty for labor seen as having a “high social cost,” but suffice it to say here that by the 1980s capital had evolved so that devaluation and destabilization might now be applied to teachers and writers of poetry, regardless of sex as a result of the “feminization” of labor trend we are presently witnessing.

Globalization

In describing the “feminization” of labor theory, Standing, in “Global Feminization through

Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited,” outlines key labor trends since the 1970s. Standing begins by articulating major shifts in capital’s access to the labor pool, citing technological advances such as faster transportation and methods of communication. In addressing the emergence of a global labor pool, he writes:

From the 1970s onward, partly as a consequence of actual and incipient industrialization of

some parts of the developing world, labor rights in industrialized countries became

increasingly perceived as costs of production to be avoided in the interest of enhancing or

maintaining “national competitiveness.” (d) In the past few years, there has been a

“technological revolution,” based on micro-electronics, which inter alia has permitted a

wider range of technological-managerial options in working arrangements, which again

means that cost considerations of alternatives have become more significant determinants of

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allocations and divisions of labor. This has affected patterns of employment in industrialized

and industrializing economies, and the international division of labor, accentuating

tendencies to allocate to where labor costs are lowest (which depends on wages, nonwage

labor costs, productivity, and supporting infrastructure.) (584)

As a result, a capitalist is no longer limited by geography in choosing who they employ. The prompting and usage of technological advancements give capital wider access to labor and furthers commodity circulation as part of the progression of capital’s evolution—as seen, for instance, when the dawn of the railroad had a similar effect within the continental United States.

As a result of advanced technology making oceanic liners faster and cheaper the “boom” resulting from sped-up commodity circulation in the United States was made possible by hiring the cheapest form of labor, via the Irish and Chinese who immigrated in larger numbers on these boats and worked to build the rails. Just as technology reshaped labor pools in America in the

1800s, Standing notes that the now global market bears characteristics unique to our historical moment and must be considered as such. As with previous chapters it becomes necessary to discuss the phases of development capital has undergone since the 1970s; evolutions driven in service of the unending goal of devaluing labor so as to accumulate surplus value.

The theory of globalization—a discourse involving the increasing connectedness of cultures, politics, and economies in the years since the Second World War—draws on a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Drawing on Marxism, Immanuel Wallerstein, in World

Systems Analysis, offers a critical account of present-day commodity and labor circulation as a result of globalization. As the title indicates, the book is meant to offer a Marxist account of

“world-systems.” “Globalization” might be understood as the idea that all aspects of human society are interlinked because of technological advancements, whereas “world-system analysis”

122 focuses primarily on how capital has shaped these developments as an inevitable progression, and as part of its pursuit of “endless accumulation.” Wallerstein draws on Marx’s theory of surplus value, underscoring how the struggle for access to surplus value is ever present and ongoing: “The imperative of the endless accumulation of capital had generated a need for constant technological change, a constant expansion of frontiers—geographical, psychological, intellectual, scientific” (2). Technology, which allows us to interact with people across the globe, did not merely “happen”—it is fueled by the needs of capital to meet the conditions necessary for its perpetuation. No other need is more requisite than continually securing the accumulation of surplus value. Indeed, the impetus of “endless accumulation” is what differs between a barter economy and capitalism. To clarify, Wallerstein notes:

Endless accumulation is a quite simple concept: it means people and firms are accumulating

capital in order to accumulate still more capital, a process that is continual and endless. If we

say that a system “gives priority” to such endless accumulation, it means that there exist

structural mechanisms by which those who act with other motivations are penalized in some

way, and are eventually eliminated from the social scene, whereas those who act with

appropriate motivations are rewarded and, if successful, enriched. (24)

Capitalists, either people or firms, are continually pursuing more and more “capital” in the form of surplus value, which allows for purchasing larger portions of the means of production, ultimately yielding even more surplus value. Wallerstein acknowledges: “Capital is an extremely contentious term. The mainstream usage refers to assets (wealth) that are or can be used to invest in productive activities” (92). In other words, “capital” in much theory since the 1980s is used to represent possession of the means of production, the possession of which renders a person a capitalist. While initially confusing, Wallerstein uses “capital” in the sense of having “start-up

123 capital,” meaning a stored-up quotient of value needed to purchase and hold the means of production, which allows us to more accurately consider value negotiation in our historical moment. Wallerstein’s favoring of “capital” over “dollars” or “money” is elastic enough to address the ambiguity of value in circulation that encompasses, not just varying national currencies, but manifestations such as bitcoin.

The technological advancements that facilitate a global circulation of technology and labor impact this push-and-pull in that the collective wages of a household, according to the laws of capital, need only cover a socially acceptable standard of living for the laborers who comprise it.

Just as Standing points out, Wallerstein too emphasizes that the idea of “standard of living” is negotiated in accord with a wide range of societal factors and varies greatly from country to country. Therefore, the individual countries set the standard for how far the exploitation or stripping of excess value from laborers can go in order to maintain basic standards of survival.

Within the labor market, laborers are often required to compete with one another, as David

Harvey notes, stating that Marx’s account of “excessive competition between workers drives productivity up and wages down, quite possibly below the value of labor-power” (A Companion to Marx’s Capital 242). Bearing in mind that a capitalist now has access to laborers in countries with widely varying degrees of a “livable wage,” a global market means that labor can be devalued and made precarious through what Guy Standing describes as “feminization of labor” facilitated by globalization since the 1970s. In needing to keep pace with firms with local access to labor in developing economies, states such as in America—with an historically established standard of living requiring far greater wages than the third world—must find creative ways to devalue and shed labor in order to stay competitive. Thus “feminization” and perpetuating a sexed wage gap became a vital, and thus increasingly prevalent, means of devaluing labor.

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Global “Feminization” of Labor In describing the “feminization” of labor I draw primarily on the work of Guy Standing, but it is crucial to acknowledge that this concept was originally pioneered by economist Ester

Boserup in her book Women in Economic Development. Indeed, Boserup’s data and analysis were seminal in facilitating Standing’s later ability to articulate “feminization” as a global trend resulting from capital’s ability to draw on laborers from around the globe under one system.

However, as important as this acknowledgment is, recent scholars including Nazneed Kanji, Su

Fei Tam, and Camilla Toulmin have persuasively articulated the limits of Boserup’s formulations, especially in relation to contemporary work done to identify the laboring patterns described as “feminization.” They allow, as they put it, that “feminization of the labour force is slightly contrary to Boserup’s analysis, which suggested that when larger global industries gradually drive home industries out of business, women would lose their jobs” (vii-viii). While acknowledging her contribution, I draw primarily on the work of Standing, who, it is important to note, explicitly addresses, and persuasively to my mind, Boserup’s original account was contrary to the actual labor developments in the intervening decades. Even so, in Standing’s work “feminized labor” describes a trend in forms of employment, security, and other characteristics of jobs that has little to do with a laborer’s biological sex, but instead draws on the societal stigma related to jobs and laboring characteristics associated with female workers in the decades between the 1950s and the turn of the millennium. Standing elaborates on this further:

The era of flexibility is also an era of more generalized insecurity and precariousness, in

which many more men as well as women have been pushed into precarious forms of

labor. Feminization arises because available employment and labor options tend

increasingly to characterize activities associated, rightly or wrongly, with women and

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because the pattern of employment tends to result in an increasing proportion of women

occupying the jobs. (583)

Because jobs or activities marked as “women’s work” have been historically perceived either as valueless or non-work, the market can justify devaluing and destabilizing positions associated with women’s labor. This observation considers the effects of a global labor market in tandem with changes in women’s laboring patterns since the 1950s, describing how they coincide in such a way as to facilitate the increasing devaluation and destabilizing of jobs that historically supported a family via one wage and were positions held by those hired for the duration of that laborer’s working years. Of course, these jobs were held primarily by men. However, in the decades between the 1950s and the present, these jobs either became associated with women or employed high volumes of women, making them sites for capital to devalue and destabilize labor.

Considering the effects of capital as a world system, Standing looks to account for the effect that shifts in women’s laboring patterns have in a global capitalist system, demonstrating how prejudices against women laborers or jobs commonly held by women have expanded opportunities for capital to devalue and destabilize labor. As a result of this gradually increasing trend, we can now see this “feminizing” effect on jobs that were associated with men and considered to be stable only a generation prior. He explains:

A type of job could be feminized, or men could find themselves in feminized positions.

More women could find themselves in jobs traditionally taken by men, or certain jobs

could be changed to have characteristics associated with women’s historical labor force

participation. The characteristics include the type of contract, the form of remuneration,

the extent and forms of security provided, and access to skill. (583)

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Standing’s usage of “feminization” is twofold. First, “feminization” means employing women in jobs traditionally held by men, which functions as a way of devaluing labor because of the fact that it is still almost universally acceptable to pay a woman less than a male, in any waged position. Secondly, “feminization” occurs when jobs which were previously secure, with set hours and solid terms of employment, are now made seasonal or more casual—what Standing describes as “precarious.” This ties into the idea of “feminine” labor in that women have historically been either members of the labor reserve—hired and fired as demand in that field dictated—or, since the post-war years, seen as workers who do not require jobs that are stable and high-paying enough to support their families, as their husbands were assumed to be earning wages sufficient to support the household. In accord with the theorization of Guy Standing, I argue that the stigma of “wife and mother” provided a convenient handicap for capital to continue to devalue women’s labor, creating an impossible situation for women seeking liberation through established channels. The more that feminists argued for women needing to speak about the burden of their sex, especially motherhood, the more firmly entrenched capital’s excuse to devalue women’s labor became. This is because after decades of full labor force participation, in conjunction with technological advancements that facilitated globalization and world systems of value and labor negotiations, the postwar economy not only relied on women in the workforce, but relied on the stigma against her labor to compete with other businesses and capitalist around the globe. Thus, any position where women’s employment numbers spiked in the post-war years as permanent employees—such as in academia—became a place where feminization could be enacted.

Standing creates the elastic theory of “feminization” in the hope that it too might adapt alongside the nefarious evolution of capital and capitalist society in the years to come. Therefore,

127 in our present moment, “feminization” describes how jobs which previously guaranteed a set salary, benefits, and employment until retirement are now subject to “layoffs,” “early-retirement incentives,” or “down-sizing.” While it is true that women now “compete” with their husbands for jobs as a result of shifts in women’s access to education and training, it is even more important to understand that devaluation and destabilization of these formerly stable jobs are facilitated by the American consumer economy model which assumes a “nuclear” family is supported by the wages of both laboring adults. Our grandfathers may have needed a stable 9-5 job so the family didn’t starve, but the overwhelming majority of modern fathers rely on a wife earning a substantial part of the household income. Laying off a man with seniority and removing his accompanying paycheck is no longer as socially unacceptable as it once was— it is assumed that his wife is earning a living or might even be the one earning the family supporting wage. However, this creates a scenario wherein both adults can be justifiable paid less as society now assumes that two paychecks combined function to support a family. Also, as a result of feminization, in circumstances where one married partner makes a truly “live able” wage they still lack the surety that this job will be guaranteed during their laboring years and offer a pension that can support them into retirement.

“Subcontracting” in the University

The crisis of labor relations has been present at all stages of capital’s development but feminization in our present era seeks to use shifts in workforce composition, technological advancements, and globalization as a means of using women’s participation in labor market to lower overall labor costs and destabilize jobs. One symptom consistent in jobs experiencing feminization is the expanding use of “subcontracting.” Standing explains:

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As noted earlier, through an increasing emphasis on cost-cutting competitiveness,

globalization has also meant a search for ways of lowering labor costs, meaning that

firms have put a greater premium on workers prepared or forced to take low-wage jobs.

In industrialized and industrializing countries, firms have turned to forms of labor

offering the prospect of minimizing fixed non-wage costs. As a result, they have turned

increasingly to casual labor, contract labor, outsourcing, home-working and other forms

of subcontracting. (585)

In regard to the “feminization” of university teaching positions, one can consider the trend wherein universities rely increasingly on contingent or non-tenure track faculty to teach English courses, as the following graph providing by the American Association of University Professors demonstrates:

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This data demonstrates an undeniable tend within the university labor market to increasingly rely on contingent, part time, and graduate student faculty, who solidly meet Standing’s criterion for

“feminized workers.” And once given access to this sort of labor, an industry is ripe for feminization.

While it cannot be argued that a tenure-track job is in any way precarious, the theory of feminization—in conjunction with the proceeding data—demonstrates that once a sector of industry begins to hire feminized workers it will increasingly shrink the number of wage-stable and long-term positions: This has been occurring in the academic labor force. And though most instructors teaching masters students are tenured faculty, it is arguably only a matter of time before the practice of hiring contingent or NTT instructors to teach composition and creative writing courses at the undergraduate level floods upper level and graduate courses as universities struggle to maintain profit in the humanities. It is also common practice for MFA programs to secure “visiting writers” who hold no long-term appointment but are hired to teach either a semester or even just a few workshops. Though poetic culture often praises programs that offer students a chance to work with a wide variety of poets, from the perspective of Standing’s theory this is a demonstration of forms of subcontracting, which indicates a job-sector either experiencing or primed for feminization.

Once there was undoubtedly a position in English and writing programs thought of as

“masculine” in that it came with entitlements, long-term security, and a “family supporting” wage. And at some point, after the second-wave of feminism women held these roles. Yet just as women appear closer to reaching parity in academia, both the Marxist feminist concept of feminization and reports from the profession indicate that the most secure and well-waged jobs are disappearing. A gender-equity report also produced by the American Association of

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University Professors observed such a trend: “As noted in the AAUP’s 2006 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, the proportion of full-time appointments among all faculty positions has been declining over the last thirty years”(“ARESP”). While it may at first appear as a move toward achieving sex-equity, I argue that universities increased hiring of women is evidence of feminization. The gender-equity report also notes:

Throughout this [thirty-year period] women have more frequently held part-time

positions than have men. At the national level, women constituted 39 percent and men 61

percent of full-time faculty in 2005-06. Thirty years ago, women were 22 percent of full-

time faculty, (1976) and ten years ago they made up 32 percent. This gradual increase in

the representation of women among full-time faculty does indicate some progress.

However, observers have suggested it is just a matter of time until women faculty reach

parity with men. (“Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession”)

Again this seeming feminist “victory” becomes problematized once the report goes on to observe

“even given an extremely optimistic hypothetical projection based on equality of hiring and retention rates between men and women, the researchers concluded that it would take 57 years for women to reach parity with men and make up 50 percent of the full-time faculty”

(“ARESP”). Once capital begins to enact feminization on a specific job it will proceed devaluing and destabilizing the position to the greatest extent it can. Based on Standing’s theory and these projections I argue that by the time women would attain equal representation in tenure track jobs these stable, well-paying will no longer exist, having been replaced by contingent and precarious forms of labor.

Even now, while tenure jobs are still stable, evidence of the wage gap is undeniable. In women faculty, even in tenure track rolls, capital has access to cheaper labor. Recall that one

131 mechanism whereby feminization allows for the devaluing of labor is the perpetuation of the sex- based wage-gap: The 2019 gender-equity report released by the AAUP demonstrated that, “this year’s report shows that 93 percent of all reporting institutions pay men more than women at the same rank” (“Gender Equity Report”). Though this move toward equity in holding tenured and stable jobs might initially demonstrate that women have finally found equal footing within the ivory tower in regard to feminization it merely demonstrates that capital has found another way to devalue labor.

Academic Institutionalization of Poetry: The Post-War MFA Program Boom

While the “death” of poetry debate is perhaps as ancient as the form itself, American discourse around the topic moved beyond lamenting some perceived degradation at an aesthetic level and expressed concerns more specific to the post-war era, including the relationship between poetry and the monied economy. An exemplification of this discussion is Joseph

Epstein’s publication “Who Killed Poetry?” which I quoted earlier as referencing how capitalism has sometimes been blamed for this “crime.” When the essay was written in 1988, as its title suggests, there was no longer a question of whether American poetry was dying. Instead, Epstein asserts that poetry is not merely deceased but has been murdered—and someone is necessarily to blame. The essay opens by describing a noticeable downturn in poetry’s metaphoric “well- being” since the 1950s, and Epstein’s language unintentionally invites us to consider poetry’s

“death” from a Marxist feminist perspective—not as a crisis of cultural viability or artistic merit but as a crisis in labor relations and, indeed, class distinctions evidenced in one particular field.

He describes the exclusive club of American poets and their readers prior to the 1950s: “Modern poetry, with the advance of modernism, had become an art for the happy few, and the happy few, it must be said, are rarely happier than when they are even fewer” (1). Conversely, they are

132 increasingly “less happy” as their ranks swell. Epstein’s account of the “death of poetry” coincides historically with what feminist poetic theorist Alicia Ostriker references in her book

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America as a sea change in the number of women working in poetry. By way of introducing this anthology she writes:

My subject is the extraordinary tide of poetry by American women in our own time. An

increasing proportion of this work is explicitly female in the sense that the writers have

chosen to explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to

their exploration. These writers are, I believe, challenging and transforming the history of

poetry. (7)

I, too, believe that this “tide” of poetry by women who insisted on the critical recognition and academic appreciation of a distinctly “women’s” poetics changed and transformed the status of women’s verse and women in academia. However, bearing in mind the specter of

“feminization,” this change must be considered not entirely as liberatory for women but also disempowering for them, at least in regard to the increasingly loss of stability of poetry’s labor market. By entering the labor market as a collective that was organized on the different-but-equal capabilities of women, this influx of women gave capital an established excuse to pay women less than men and to stagnate at associate rather than earning the pay bump that comes with promotion to full professor. In gaining access to an enormous tide of cheaper labor, the industry became suspectable to feminization, as this meets one of the main criteria Standing ascribes as providing the conditions necessary for destabilizing and devaluing a particular sector of production; in this instance, the profession of teaching and writing poetry.

While Ostriker goes on to establish a chronology for her analysis: “I take 1960 as an approximate point of departure” (7) Epstein, taking this same decade as a point of departure,

133 seems to believe that since the end of the Second World War, poetry decreased in quality to the point of actually dying off because poetry became professionalized, that is, it became a profession through the credentialing offered by the MFA and university employment that the degree made possible. The main point of Epstein’s argument is this: “Whereas one tended to think of the modernist poet as an artist—even if he worked in a bank in London, or at an insurance company in Hartford, or in a physician’s office in Rutherford, New Jersey—one tends to think of the contemporary poet as a professional: a poetry professional” (5). Though he never directly blames women poets, it must be recognized that the professionalization of poetry coincided historically with the emergence of women poets who wrote under the banner of

“women’s poetry,” as well as with the inclusion of poetry in college curriculum, the push for equity between sexes in university teaching positions, all of which happened during this era in

America. While it is in no way my intent to support any argument that “blames” women for killing poetry, these converging factors enables me to argue that the mechanisms of feminization and a “cultural” prejudice specific to American poetics allowed the influx of women writers into the poetic labor pool to set into motions capital’s need to “kill” poetry as a way of shedding labor in a saturated labor market.

Further reading into this “debate,” Dana Gioia penned a touchstone essay—and later a book of similar name and topic—entitled “Can Poetry Matter,” which figured poetry by 1991 as so firmly on its proverbial death bed that he opens his analysis with the unquestioned assertion that, “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group” (1). Not only does poetry lack relevance in the broader intellectual community, but our era is posited as being distinctly different from points in American history when poetry

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“mattered” to the general public. He offers the assertion that the status of poetry is now a far cry from Whitman’s era of the “citizen-poet” or the good old days when “Frost’s A Further Range sold 50,000 copies as a 1936 Book-of-the-Month Club selection” (21). Poetry’s impotence and isolation, he implies, is the result of poetry being cordoned off in lecture halls and classrooms, thus fostering a sense that poetry is written, not any longer to contribute to a discourse relevant to the general public, but to secure the academic jobs among poetry professions who work in universities. Yet beyond assertions that the only individuals concerned with poetry are those

“isolated” within the halls of academia where it is taught and drafted, a Marxist feminist analysis of poetry’s demise looks beyond the public’s perceived increase or decrease in a demand for poetry. Instead, it offers an explication of the destabilization and devaluation in a particular job sector and directs focus back to a crisis of labor.

Gioia returns to the issue of the university’s relationship with the professionalization of poetry, challenging the belief that the proliferation of poetry degrees, programs, and courses can be considered signs of a “healthy” American poetry. He argues that despite the fact that there are multitudes of students enrolled, this disguises the connection between such programs and poetry’s death:

Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the

production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate

students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these

groups have gradually become the prime audience for contemporary verse. (2)

For Gioa this point is made in service of his larger assertion that MFA programs have killed poetry: growing and perpetuating a sense that poetry “lives” exclusively through and in the collegiate classroom has resulted in the majority of contemporary American verse too esoteric,

135 too widely produced, and too isolationist to matter to anyone who isn’t paid or paying tuition to read it. He is in no way alone in this belief. Yet, from a labor relations perspective, the problem with American poetry is not a matter of who feels moved to read poetry or whether poetry courses have degraded an aesthetic that develops best outside of course work. Instead, the problem with American poetry, as his argument at least enables us to consider, stems partly from

MFA programs and the oversaturated labor pool they create. Academic poetry professors need graduate students to instruct and these professors use their own works as models and objects of study. Additionally, any humanities department in any American university that is not privately funded needs high enrollment to remain profitable. Yet the more students who enroll and complete an MFA, the more saturated the market becomes as these poets must find more students to teach in order to find academic jobs that make use of their educational training.

Compounding these matters is the fact that the days in which poets need not have studied the craft professionally at some stage in their life are as long gone as the ambiguous concept of

“life” that poetry in American was said to once possess. While some poets, of course, have “day jobs” or may never have sat through a single workshop, the process of publishing poetry requires the submission of a cover letter and biography—sometimes even a photograph. The University of Michigan, for instance, encourages MFA students seeking academic positions, publication, or paid prizes to list the schools and faculty poets they have worked with—perhaps as a means of demonstrating that young talent has been properly nurtured by the right people. After investing several years of post-secondary education into studying the craft one can argue that the goal of most MFA graduates is to find a way to “make a living” as a professional poet. While some publications come with cash awards, and there are fellowships and even a smattering of paid reading gigs, the most dependable and desirable way to earn a living in the profession is to

136 secure work as an educator. If one invests in a degree—through time or financial investment or both—one typically expects to secure a job in that field. But here emerges a catch-twenty, as

Gioia notes, since a poet’s primary identification—and employment responsibilities—are no longer with the writing of poetry but with teaching:

Initially, the multiplication of creative-writing programs must have been a dizzyingly

happy affair. Poets who had scraped by in bohemia or had spent their early adulthood

years fighting the Second World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs. . . . But

a clear-eyed observer must also recognize that by opening the poet’s trade to all

applicants and by employing writers to do something other than write, institutions have

changed the social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator. In social

terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. (15-16)

This shift from poet to teacher, according to Gioia, has negative consequences and resulted in poetry’s demise because universities tend to emphasize quantity and not quality of poetic output by using publications in evaluating job performance. Tasked with teaching loads, he implies that perhaps poets themselves have abdicated the responsibility of rigorous review of their own work, allowing mediocre poems to circulate in the pursuit of staying employable.

When this “professionalization” of poetry became the rule rather than the exception, women also began to flood this labor pool. For most participants in the “death” of poetry debate the influx of women writers was never meant to factor into any explanation for poetry’s demise.

Yet as Ostriker and other women’s literature theorists and historians argue, Rich and her peers fought for and tentatively “won” a place for women’s writing and women instructors in this era.

But in having to continually defend their work to critics and established poets on the basis of it being women’s poetry, they actually created the specifically gendered conditions where their

137 wages and ultimately their very profession would be penalized under capital; because they were women they could be paid less, and once universities began employing workers saddled with these constraints the profession became open to feminization.

As with any sector of industry, women entering academia and the professional world of poetry in massive numbers gave the market access to cheaper labor. When this initially occurred the poetry job market was “booming” as new programs sprung up around the country and jobs for poets emerged within English Departments. Yet, as Marx has argued, capital will hire more labor in an expanding field and once that labor pool becomes saturated it will seek to expel or

“set free” labor to remain profitable (Capital 235). What this theory suggests in the context of the specific job of poet and professor is that as a result of evolving capital the initial post-war expansion of MFA programs could not sustain profitability and, after reaching a tipping-point, required that line of production to find ways to cut labor costs. As Standing’s theory of feminization allows us to perceive, the business of writing and teaching poetry was one such sector which met the criteria for feminization and was necessitated by a saturation of the labor pool.

Despite the fact that both Epstein or Gioia neglect to account for gender dynamics in their analysis, both demonstrate that poetry’s murder stems from a proliferation of MFA programs and increasing numbers of graduate students enrolling in and graduating from these poetry programs with expectations of securing jobs teaching in programs similar to the one in which they were trained. Unlike previous moments in American poetic and social history, studying in a program then teaching and writing in a similar program has become the expected career trajectory of a poet. This runs contrary to a history in American poetry of some of our most “famous” or

“major” poets prior to the 1950s holding jobs in virtually any profession other than education.

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Gioia’s essay goes on to recite how “the modernists exemplified options that poets had for making a living. They could enter middle-class professions, as had T.S. Eliot (a banker turned publisher), Wallace Stevens (a corporate insurance lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician) (17). He goes on to add another option: “Or [they] could live in Bohemia supporting themselves as artists, as, in different ways, did Ezra Pound” (17). Today, instead, poets are meant to both write and teach the business of writing poetry, which of course requires sufficiently enrolled courses full of future poets.

As the critics previously mention, there are legions of graduate students enrolled in MFA and even PH. D programs dedicated to poetry. These graduate students are almost exclusively trained by tenure track faculty. But beyond the craft courses, students are also given the chance to get hands-on job training in becoming writing instructors: English department and writing programs commonly allow funded students to “work” as instructors in undergraduate courses. As a Colby Fellow at the University of Michigan, for instance, I taught a course in creative writing—and also basic composition—to undergraduates and considered it not just sufficient compensation for my own tuition and living expenses, but also a necessary curriculum vita achievement that would help me someday secure a tenure-track job. Surprisingly, the fact that I needed to supplement my stipend—as it was a generous but certainly not live-able or family supporting wage—never made me feel my position was precarious or devalued. However, with no long-term contract and a salary of $14,000 a year, the University of Michigan had access to devalued labor and deployed graduate students and other contingent faculty to teach undergraduate courses. In accord with Standing’s theory, this is the definition of feminized labor evident through subcontracting, which demonstrates that MFA programs facilitate access to devalued and destabilized labor. And, to repeat, regardless of how well-published they may have

139 been, the labor report I cited above states that the female tenured faculty who taught the similar courses I did, or courses in which I was a student, were paid less than their male counterparts— another way of deploying devalued labor.

As the previously outlined theory of feminized labor asserts, the functioning of capital requires any firm—including universities—to finds the means to devalue labor in order to stay profitable and competitive. Once a firm in a specific profession can access labor that is devalued and destabilized it will increasingly replace stable and well-waged positions with those roles. By deploying lesser paid tenured female faculty in conjunction with the “feminized” force of graduate students, non-tenure track, and contingent faculty, the profession of poetry and English departments in general are now places where feminization can and has taken hold.

Sexism’s Role in Poetry’s Demise

Despite the fact that by the mid-1980s women’s literature had been recognized as an object of study and that women themselves gained access to the full spectrum of academic jobs teaching and writing poetry, Alice Ostriker observes the persistence of the uniquely poetic prejudice against women working in the profession:

What has not changed is that most critics and professors of literature, including modern

literature, deny that “women’s poetry,” as distinct from poetry by individual women,

exists. Some women writers agree. Some will not permit their work to appear in women’s

anthologies. The superficial plausibility of this position rests partly on the

unacknowledged conviction of our culture that “woman poet” means “inferior poet” (8-

9).

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Women poets not only had to both confront but also ban-together over their perceived

“difference” meaning that although women secured these jobs and now hold them in increasing numbers, women’s poetry, and even women poets serving as professors, are still saddled with the biases against women’s labor evidence by being paid less. Complicating the labor saturation of poetry further was an evolution in the direct relationship between American influential poets and the role of poets as educators, which both requires more students trained to work as professors yet demands that these future-hires be employed in destabilized and devalued fashion.

Therefore, more than women entering the labor pool and more than the proliferation of

MFA programs, I argue that capital is one of the primary culprits in having “killed” poetry, given its continued feminization of the profession. Poetry of the post-war years can be said to focus primarily on an academic audience, perhaps because those who wish to teach poetry must learn to read it in the classroom if they hope to have a viable career in the profession. Additionally, established poets who are also instructors are mindful of the need for verse to use as teaching tools. Add to this the fact that in order for these programs to stay profitable these programs must maintain high enrollment numbers. After second-wave feminism, though women poets broke into the ranks of faculty in order to do so they had to challenge “cultural” biases specific to poetry which resulted in making the case for their labor as equal but “different.” This emphasis on the gendering of poetry, it is important to understand, allowed for their labor to be devalued as a result of established biases against women in the workforce. Lastly, all of these shifts occurred at a time when there was a concretizing of the nexus between poet and poetry instructor. This amalgam of factors now allows us to consider how American poetry’s demise, in our present historical moment, is the result of the “feminization” of American poetry.

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While poets and other professors cannot hope to stem the development of run-away capital nor magically erase the ever-present crisis of reproducing exploitative labor relations, there are certain aspects of feminization that are sites in which laborers can join together and seek to remove certain mechanisms. One such “site” is to challenge access to cheaper labor as a result of the wage-gap that exists between both men and women and between tenure track and contingent faculty: Poets and other academics, whether employed as tenure track or contingent faculty, here have a chance to work together to challenge the stigma against the laboring capacity of women and adjuncts by demanding wage equity and seeking to eradicate and expose the persistent cultural biases against women—and adjuncts—in the profession, which as a result of feminization can effect men as much as women. Though this is an argument I will later return to—and one I suspect I will dedicate my entire career to making—I suggest that sex-based differentiation in poetic aesthetics and the profession of poetry on the whole is only aiding and abetting the feminization which has killed American poetry.

Conclusion: Toward “An Atlas of a Difficult World” and the Rise of the Abject

Prior to the Second World War, when poetry was romanticized as having been a passion project for men earning wages elsewhere, the status of American poetry was considered vibrant and strong—at least according to most academics concerned with the “death” of poetry. But somewhere in the post-war years the jobs as creative writing instructors—which had initially been a boon for male poets—became a messy affair that required the nurturing of young talent while finding time to create publishable work. They had to adapt to these professional shifts, all while competing with a swell of women poets who had never before been able to access employment as professors in such massive numbers and could no longer be forced back into the labor reserve as a result of the efforts of second-wave feminism. Considering that both Dana

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Gioia and Joseph Epstein see the “death” of poetry relating to the increasing proliferation of creative writing courses and programs, American poetry’s labor issue can only become exponentially worse as enrollment numbers and programs expand in an attempt to use high enrollment to enhance profit. But again, these numbers are not signs of a “healthy” sector of production. Bear in mind that once capital finds a way to devalue labor and deploy cheaper and more precarious labor, it will never reverse this trend of its own volition: I argue that left unchecked the “feminization” of poetry will inevitably and lethally undermine not just some debatable “health” of one art form but will also ghettoize the role of collegiate instructor so that those who enroll in the hopes of becoming professors are already finding the positions available for hire to be a far-cry from the security of a tenure-track job in the next few decades. Consider that in further trying to track down who “killed” American poetry, Epstein bemoans the surfeit of students being trained as potential poets:

Today there are more than 250 universities with creative-writing programs, and all of these

have a poetry component, which means that they not only train aspiring poets but hire men

and women who have published poetry to teach them. Many of these men and women go

from being students in one writing program to being teachers in another—without, you might

say, their feet, metrical or anatomical, having touched the floor. Many colleges and

universities that do not have formal writing programs nonetheless hire poets to teach a

creative-writing course or two. (3)

This illustrates how the more students who take creative writing courses—or worse—graduate with advanced degrees in creative writing the more saturated the labor pool becomes. In describing how universities now have the option to hire a “trained” poet/instructor to “teach a creative-writing course or two” he is describing the lot of a contingent faculty member who must

143 cobble together various teaching assignments to survive, which is evidence of subcontracting and feminized labor. American poetry, as he notes earlier, is no longer an exclusive club for the masculine “happy few.” As the Shakespeare reference indirectly assumes, this “band of brothers” is increasingly unhappy as there are now simply too many potential laborers in the field, laborers who must accept lower wages and less stable jobs as well as women who historically have been paid less.

To underscore a basic tenant of Marxist theory, the notion that there are too many eligible laborers in a particular field indicates a red flag. Marx identifies how capital is always in some state of crisis in the pursuit of endlessly reproducing itself—one of its main pressure valves is to first draw laborers in, develop a line of production, and then expel labor when that line becomes oversaturated. The idea that sectors of industry experience “booms” followed shortly by “busts” is illustrative of this characteristic. Following the Second World War, when America emerged as the leading global hegemonic state, a symptom of this affluence was the creation of new jobs in a broad range of sectors; poetry and MFA programs being one such instance. However, as with all first-world industries, capitalists are required to find ways to reproduce labor relations that allow it to stay apace of the globalized race for surplus value. As previously explicated, Guy

Standing’s theory informs us that the market’s present mechanism for addressing this oversaturation issue is not as simple as firing laborers, but to gradually replace them with

“feminized” labor.

In the context of poetry, this might be exemplified precisely when Epstein suggests that

“many colleges and universities that do not have formal writing programs nonetheless hire poets to teach a creative-writing course or two,”(3) and goes further to describe how “the course in writing poetry has also become a staple of the community-college and adult-education menu”

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(3). Thus, a far-cry from the security, benefits, and wages offered by a tenure track position—the positions that emerged shortly after the Second World War where creative writing programs allowed poets to “suddenly secure stable, well-paying jobs”—laborers working in the business of teaching and writing poetry are now increasingly expected to work piecemeal, taking employment from a variety of universities with whom they are not concretely affiliated and accepting courses on a semester-by-semester basis with little surety of a continued position.

It is critical to note that the implication of those arguing for the “death” of American poetry has been that the creation of creative writing programs has had a hand in murdering the aesthetic merit and cultural relevance of an American poetics. Though not directly stated, these critical discussions include a sexed bias that does not simply ignore but erases the relationship between second-wave feminists making efforts to secure for women a place in American poetry and the decline in poetry’s perceived “health.” Yet, statements from critics such as Gioia making universal assertions that those who become professors in the post-war years “had spent their early adulthood fighting the Second World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs” exposes a blind spot in this discourse that demonstrates an ambivalent erasure for the influx of women’s labor triggered by second-wave feminism. I argue that a refusal to address the way

American poetry specific stereotypes regarding women’s poetic laboring abilities not only allowed capital a site for devaluing all laborers in the business of creative writing but obscured the mechanism through which capital could do so and which all levels of professors of either sex ought to rally against. While the cultural prejudices specific to American poetry made the argument for women as “different but equal”—partially to readdress years of deliberate sex- based inclusion in the poetic canon, as I will fully explicate in the final chapter we now enter a moment where the notion of sex defined poetic aesthetics has become counter-productive. To

145 clarify, there was a distinct need for women to demand entrance to any market sector job as

“women” workers, but I argue that this sort of identification only further entrenches sex difference which is not merely an excuse to continue to devalue women’s labor, but to feminize an industry.

It is certainly logical to ask that if teaching poetry is so precarious why don’t poets simply follow the example of the great American poets of the past, such as Wallace Stevens who was a corporate attorney, and get a better day job? If enrolling in an MFA program allows a student to be used as subcontracted and devalued labor, perhaps they would be better served skipping this “training” entirely? But one must remember that just as labor market conditions evolve, expectations about who can actually gain access to the mechanism of publication have as well. In “Can Poetry Matter,” Gioia goes on to argue that poetry has become the snake that eats its own tail, in that the creative writing programs which first seemed like a boon to the health and growth of poetry in America have created a circuit wherein only students of poetry read poems, and writers of poetry write for the audience of their students and their academic peers. Gioia states, “most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students” (8). This gestures toward the difficulty a poet encounters in attempting to publish or have their work discussed unless they are somehow connected to the profession of academia driven poetry. The poet, like any laborer, is free from the means of production, and so they must play by whatever rules the profession requires to access the means to publish and receive critical reception. Though possible, the post- war MFA boom has created professional conditions which implicitly require poets to receive formal training.

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The essay goes on to note that, aside from being required to belong as a card-carrying member of this “subculture” of academic teachers and writers, “like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy” (10-11). I suggest that in order to be eligible for publication one must now have academic affiliation of some sort with an established writing program, and in order to work in the profession one must publish. Yet, the more similarly trained poets one competes with, the less likelihood there is for noteworthy publication, and those without a strong publication record are eligible only for contingent and non-tenured track work.

Avoiding the entirely subjective aspects of discussing some “decay” in American poetry’s aesthetic merit, the theory created by Marxist feminism gives us new ways to conceive of the relationship between the market, sex, and lingering gender-prejudices in our present historical moment as they pertain to the profession of teaching and writing poetry. This allows me to suggest that poetry has been “killed” by capital, and has been facilitated largely by the continued perception that female professors labor is somehow “different”—which means less valuable and therefore waged less—than the labor of any other poet, haunted as it is by the historical and social bias against women in the labor market. While Epstein’s essay attempts to discern who “killed poetry” and Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter,” tracks a marked devolution of American poetics between the years immediately following the Second World War and now, both essays imply that the emergence of too many “poets” is largely to blame. We cannot forget that this is the time frame in which second-wave feminism allowed women to enter the world of academia, pushing for positions in English Departments and writing programs. I suggest that not

147 only did women enter into the “booming” business of creative writing at this time—contributing to an increasingly saturated labor pool—but that they brought with them stigmas about women’s

“real” jobs, which allowed capital to devalue and destabilize the role of creative writing instructor/English professor via “feminization.”

Drawing on the theory explicated in this chapter leads to chapter five, where I offer a

Marxist feminist reading of “An Atlas of a Difficult World.” This rereading suggests not only how Rich’s increased engagement with Marxist theory places her ahead of a version of feminism associated with sex-based essentialism, but also speaks to the “feminization” of poetry and the potential for it to have an “after life,” if indeed it has truly died. As I will explain, many perceive this poem to indicate a shift in her writing as a sort of regression or at the least a departure from feminist political poetics, focusing instead on citizen-poet more so than feminist-poet. However,

I believe the poem offers an evolution which challenges both readers and feminists to reconsider what we conceptualize as the guiding ideology and collectivizing identity that serves as a rallying-point for a feminist collective: I also argue that such an evolution is vital to feminism’s future, if it hopes to counteract the advances and adaptations of capitalism’s deployment of sex and gender in our present age, which made feminization possible. By considering “An Atlas of a

Difficult World” through the lens of Marxist feminist theory, I hope to model a Marxist feminist hermeneutical approach that not only serves feminism, but might ameliorate the effects of the

“feminization”—or death—of poetry articulated in the previous chapter by allowing the poem to show us how problematic it has become in our historical moment to allow sex to set the limits for feminist collectives and define a subject for feminism.

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Chapter Five: Rethinking “Difficult” Poetry: “An Atlas of a Difficult World” as a

Framework for Adapting Feminist Ideology and Aesthetics

“I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I / couldn’t write it off. You’ll say / I read you always, even when I hate you.” –

Adrienne Rich, “Negotiations”

“An Atlas of a Difficult World” might be described as a “difficult” poem. Comprised of thirteen separate sections the poem spans distance, time, and subjectivity as it moves through a modern American landscape. The work might be described as emblematic of a point in Adrienne

Rich’s career where both her relationship with feminism, her politics, and her polemic were greeted as “difficult” rather than revolutionary. While there can be no doubt that in her lifetime

Rich secured her place in the American poetic canon and experienced professional recognition for having done so, one finds evidence of a tendency to pass over Rich’s later writing, placing more emphasis on the significance of her earlier works and “middle decades.” Of this tendency,

David Wojahn—in comparing Rich’s later verse to that of Whitman—observes:

The conventional wisdom has it that Whitman’s later poems are weak and self-imitative,

and I fear that even many of the readers who count themselves as Adrienne Rich

partisans are apt to make the same sorts of characterizations of Rich’s most recent period,

the one which begins, roughly, with the 1991 collection, An Atlas of [A] Difficult World.

(69)

Wojahn goes on to critically celebrate Rich’s poem but does so in accord with the majority of favorable criticism of this era and volume, focusing on Rich’s polemic as primarily concerned with interrogating American identity, rather than the primarily feminist bent of earlier works.

Further illustrating the “conventional wisdom” Wojahn references regarding Rich’s loss of potency in the last decades of her life and writing, Alice Templeton discusses the tendency,

149 specifically in reference to “An Atlas,” to frame the titular poem and others in the anthology as somehow less realized works than Rich’s earlier writing:

Compared to the poems in The Dream of a Common Language, which ask to be

evaluated as revolutionary acts of choice and will, the poems in An Atlas of a Difficult

World may seem like regressions to a poetry of statement and observation, asking to be

evaluated in terms of their depth of emotion and their truth of perception. Many of the

poems are inconclusive descriptions that avoid making cognitive claims or moving

toward action; instead they are satisfied to convey the shapes, forms, and tones of life.

Each poem resembles a landscape of experience, and together they create a cartography

of the United Sates and of living in “the difficult world.” (154)

In this chapter I will argue that “An Atlas of a Difficult World” is neither a regression, nor a poem satisfied with simply cataloguing the “shapes, forms, and tones of life.” I agree with

Wojahn, who goes on to conclude “Rich has surely not ‘mellowed’ in old age, for she continues to write in a manner of sustained ferocity”(69). But unlike Wojahn and other critics who focus on the democratizing, Whitmanesque, or citizen-poet merits of the work I heartily argue that “An

Atlas of a Difficult World” is a poem of powerful feminist poetic polemics. I suggest that the

Marxist feminist theory discussed in the proceeding chapter allows us to understand this poem as far from Rich being “satisfied.” Instead it is a work of perhaps deliberate “difficulty,” with just as much feminist intent and potency as any of her earlier works. This is in contrast to a sense amongst many feminist critics that while “An Atlas” speaks to the political situation in America in the 1990s Rich is more concerned with her responsibility as a “citizen poet” than a leading voice of feminism, more concerned with American identity than feminist identity. Speaking against this, Maggie Rehm notes:

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Both as a poet and a as a public intellectual, Adrienne Rich returned repeatedly to two

paired questions: What is the role of the poet? What is the role of poetry? A key

contributor to ongoing feminist conversations about accountability, privilege, and power

throughout her career, Rich shaped and re-shaped her responses to these questions; this

article traces some of that engagement, arguing that though her focus shifts and sharpens

over the decades, she has been throughout what we might best called a “citizen poet.”

Rich herself used this term in an interview with Bill Moyers in the 1990s when

discussing the final section of “An Atlas of a Difficult World”. . . .(684)

I agree with Rehm’s emphasis on the nuanced polemic at work consistently throughout Rich’s writing, though we diverge in our choice of poems which serve a feminist end. For Rehm, the greatest evidence of Rich engaging with gender, feminism, and American politics are found in poems such as “Fox,” and “In Those Years” which Rehm goes on to evaluate further. When speaking of “An Atlas of a difficult world, Rehm quotes Piotr Gwiazda’s observation that the poem is, “an extended inquiry into the nature of patriotism in the time of war.” (qtd. 684) but does not elaborate on the purpose or central ideology around which this poem seeks to connect citizens. Neither does she delve into the possibility of a distinctly feminist political project at work in “An Atlas of a Difficult World.” My argument is this: While Rich may have expressed her desire to function as a “citizen poet” and speak about the politics of America in the 1990s in

“An Atlas of a Difficult World,” she does not do so at the expensive of speaking for feminist concerns or a feminist collective. My sense is that even for critics who do not view “An Atlas” as somehow regressive or simply not as potent as Rich’s earlier works, there is an oversight in considering how the poem seeks to serve feminism-specific goals and a feminist collective—an oversite rendered visible through the lens of Marxist feminist theory. Rehm goes on to describe,

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“Albert Gelpi, Wendy Martin, and Annalisa Zox-Weaver note Rich’s attentiveness in her poetry of bearing witness”(684), a sort of passive observation and recording effort. Yet I suggest, in the analysis that follows, that the poem is not passively witnessing nor just poetically theorizing connectedness but seeks to serve as a feminist rallying-cry.

In this regard, I read “An Atlas” in contrast to the sense evident in discourse amongst

Rich’s peers as well as students, mentees, and critics which suggest that towards the end of her professional life Rich wavered in her role as a guiding voice for feminist poetics. The goal of this chapter is to offer a Marxist feminist reading of “An Atlas of a Difficult World” which suggests how Rich’s increased engagement with Marxist theory suggests a stance that is most assuredly feminist but works against essentialism and collapsing of intersectionality. Rather than emphasizing an America identity over a feminist identity, Rich interweaves both, thus showing the reader through the poem how to comprehend a more expansive subject for feminism. This shift in her writing is not a regression: far from it. Instead, the poem illuminates an evolution in collectivizing and ideology which challenges both readers and feminists to reconsider who might be served by feminist political action and who can participate in a feminist collective. I argue this evolution is vital to the movement’s future if it hopes to counteract the advances and adaptations of capitalism’s deployment of sex and gender in our present age. As the feminization of labor trend suggests, women seeking workplace equity—while forced to argue for themselves as

“different” but equal workers —allows for the reinscription of sex-based wage handicaps as well as feminizing sectors where women became employed in large numbers in the post-war years.

I also suggest that reconsidering “An Atlas of a Difficult World” through the application of Marxist feminist theory not only serves feminism but might be a step towards ameliorating the effects of the “feminization”—or death—of poetry articulated in the previous chapter at the site

152 of reengaging a broader readership beyond academics and other poets. In response to the critical and academic discussion that American poetry has been murdered, specifically in regard to its inability to engage with a reading public beyond the ivory tower and the MFA cohort, Vernon

Shetley discusses the need for “difficult” poetry. After the Death of Poetry considers T. S. Eliot’s dictate that modern poetry needed to be difficult in order to accurately reflect the difficulties of modern life. However, Shetley argues that poets in the post-war years seized on this directive to such an extent that in the decades since American verse has become so obscure and esoteric as to be inaccessible to anyone other than the narrowest of audiences: “Today poetry itself, any poetry, has become difficult for even the more ambitious general reader as the habits of thought and communication inculcated by contemporary life have grown to be increasingly at variance with those demanded for the reading of poetry” (3). While one would imagine that the converse would be true—that a more “approachable” poetry would help resuscitate the relationship between poet and reader— Shetley goes on to state: “I hope to persuade the reader [of his book] that only by increasing the level of intellectual challenge it offers can current poetry once again make itself a vital part of intellectual culture” (4). It is important to note that Shetley sees a vast difference between poems that are deliberately “obscure” compared with those that offer the sort of

“difficulty” required to revitalize American poetry:

Poetry ought, then, to present its readers with exempla of the kind of mind that

continually guards against passing fictions upon itself, that reflects on the operations of

its own language and weighs them against a tough standard. Poetry can offer us images of

the activity of making language authentic, whether that involves rejecting a phrase that

“first enhances, then debases,” or mining clichés for the core of vitality that remains

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there. But poetry can also warn us against the temptation to imagine that we have arrived

at an absolute and unassailable lucidity. (192)

The writing career of Adrienne Rich undoubtedly demonstrates that she was concerned with interrogating and pushing against the operation of language, and therefore her poetic and political valuation of exploring its limitations posits her as a strong candidate for penning the sort of poetry Shetley calls for.

Moreover, I argue that instead of abandoning feminism or reverting to what Templeton describes as a poetics content to convey “shapes, tones, and forms” Rich offers the reader a map of the landscape of America rendered both familiar and deliberately ontologically challenging as she asks the reader to reconsider what lies beyond the mere images and physical locations the poem navigates, challenging what we assume to be as “lucid” or “concrete” as geography. “An

Atlas of a Difficult World” is a poem that grapples with unclear vision, and that which is not immediately lucid. Fog, darkness, and low clouds are reoccurring motifs which prevent the poem’s speaker from perceiving the landscape as a whole: the idea of “fog” and “closed-in” weather is evoked four times in the final stanza of section one alone. Yet the speaker attempts to provide enough landmarks and details to allow the reader—to whom the poem is dedicated—to see through the miasma. In this fashion, similar to Marx warning his readers of the mystification created by taking our sensuous experience of commodities as concrete—assuming “unassailable lucidity”—I suggest that Rich’s “An Atlas of a Difficult World” serves as more than an imagist mapping of America. The work is not simply a locale poem, for the speaker tells us, “I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural. . . ” (6). We may have been lured in to reading, assuming we know what Rich is after—a “politics of location” focused on images and American identity—yet the speaker informs us that the poem has a deeper project. I argue that by applying

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Marxist feminist theory we might fully appreciate Rich’s feminist political polemic against capital in the present age and use it to expand our ontological conceptions of what can be considered as such.

Speaking of the works of Marx, Rich writes, “sometime around 1980 I felt impelled to go back and read what I had dismissed or felt threatened by: I had to find out what Marx, along the way of his development, had actually written” (AOP 4). While she did not find this material easy reading, Rich gained fresh perspective for both her poetry and her feminist politics, using an interesting descriptor for his theory in ruminating, “what kept me going was the sense of being in the company of a great geographer of the human condition; and, specifically, a sense of recognition; how profit-driven economic relations filter into zones of thought and feeling” (4).

While “An Atlas of a Difficult World” may indeed be a “map” of America, we fail to allow Rich to assist us in peering through the miasma to gain a stronger sense of the geography of oppression, and its relationship to sex-based inequality, enacted by capital in our present historical moment if we consider her later work in accord with the bulk of existing criticism. We must remember that the map is a mural, and one composed of “faces” as the poem shifts from human subjects, speakers, and a broad range of lived experiences. Like Marx but working as a feminist in the age of capitalist world systems and evolved labor markets Rich can be read as adjusting feminism’s goals and collectivizing ideology, doing so by working as a geographer of the human condition in modern America. If we put aside the bias that to become a Marxist is to cease to be a feminist, and that to focus on locale is to lose sight of the political, we perceive the full potential of the poem.

In the foreword to Arts of the Possible Rich speaks of a change of perspective, which caused her to observe how, “a feminism that sought to engage race and colonialism, the global

155 monoculture of the United states corporate and military interests, the specific locations and agencies of women within all this”(3) was at odds with, and “being countered by the marketing of a United States model of female—or feminine—self-involvement and self-improvement, devoid of political context or content”(3). In making such observations Rich is not supporting the assumption that she had ceased to be active in feminist politics and poetry. Rather she describes a shift in the popular concept of feminism which could be called “neoliberal” or “pop-culture” feminism. For instance, he brand of feminism which celebrated the “women’s march” protesting

Trump’s election in Glamour Magazine by selling forty-dollar coffee table books in commemoration, evidenced in our present moment.

Rather than abandoning an attempt to end sex-based inequality Rich demonstrate an awareness of how capital could and had seized upon any positive changes earlier feminist efforts had made in order to serve its own ends. Perhaps just as Rich “radicalized” in the 1970s, her focus on the geography of oppression was yet another attempt to adapt the tactics, ideology, and theory of feminism in accord with the changing nature of capitalist society. Thus, the poem helps us to perceive the expanding immiseration of increasing capitalist oppression as it devalues labor and continues to stigmatize women’s labor and “women’s work.” Moreover, in challenging its readers to look beyond the surface appearance afforded by our senses we might conceive of an alternate feminist subject that can strengthen and reunite a feminist collective that has proved incapable of achieving further progress towards equity. In considering the people perhaps more than just the places Rich’s “atlas” serves as both a warning and rallying point. In working out the physicality of our material differences and distance, while recognizing a common source of oppression. Rich’s poem creates a “we” that feminized workers, those forced to carry out tasks considered as “women’s work” because of their societal status, and women of all experiences

156 and backgrounds can participate in. Thus, Rich’s work can yet again inaugurate discourse and offer insight that can refocus the goals and tactics of feminism in a revolutionary manner. But to peer through the miasma to convey this information asks much of the reader. As I opened with, this is a “difficult” poem to navigate.

As if acknowledging how much she is asking of the reader, the final section of “An Atlas of a Difficult World” is entitled “Dedications,” suggesting the entire work is indeed dedicated to the reader. The final section opens with the line, “I know you are reading this poem / late, before leaving your office” (25) going on to envision twelve scenarios in which the reader might find themselves when encountering Rich’s words. These scenarios span a wide swath of lived experiences in America, ranging from young mother, to immigrant, to youth, to the elderly.

Choosing non-gendered pronouns such as “I” for the speaker, and “you” for the reader, Rich’s dedication suggests a poem meant for a reader and a collective far more expansive than one any of her earlier “feminist” works attempted to integrate. Rich, through the speaker of the poem, demonstrates an understanding of what is at stake for the reader of the poem, acknowledging that

“I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn / between bitterness and hope”

(26). In the subsequent rereading I look to demonstrate that the “bitterness” the reader experiences can be understood as the expansion of the “abject,” immiseration, and the global feminization of labor. Conversely the “hope” Rich provides is a way to peer through mystification and abstractions to grasp our connectedness as increasingly exploited labors and in so doing forge a stronger and reconstituted subject for feminism. However, to uncover our collective consciousness as feminists involves reconsidering how capital’s evolutions must be met by evolutions in our conception of feminist collectives and strategies, adapting what we think of as qualifying for not just feminist poetry but the subject for feminist empowerment.

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Bearing in mind my previous argument—that American poetry is not simply dying but is more precisely experiencing the spread of feminization—the idea of a “difficult” poem matters to the potency of not just feminism as a political force but also the potential for an American poetic future. In creating a poem which seeks to further engage and challenge the reader, in accord with Shetley’s assessment that challenging verse has the potential to resurrect American poetry as a vital and potent social force, Rich is essentially breathing new life into both a movement and an art that have been strangled by the evolutions of capital in the last fifty or sixty years.

Rich’s “Politics of Location”

In scholarly discourse and personal reflection, Rich is sometimes represented as having lost her passion for deploying poetry to further feminism in favor of being focused on global affairs and domestic race-relations. For instance, critics such as Piotr Gwiazda interpreted “An

Atlas of a Difficult World” to indicate a shift away from the feminist-driven poetry Rich had become known for. He explains, “The 1980s mark an important change in Rich’s poetry from the predominantly feminist focus of the previous decade to a sustained interest in the paradoxes of

American history” (165-166). The implication seems to be that Rich is more concerned with the broader concept of “American politics”—imperialism, racism, economic inequality—rather than

“women’s issues.” Indeed, in her brief memo to the Whitehouse in which she refused the

National Medal for the Arts, Rich made no explicit reference to sexual inequality, introducing her reasons for refusal by stating, “over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country” ( AOP 99). She goes on to elaborate how this influenced not just her decision to refuse the award, but her poetry:

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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—

in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of

power that holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are

widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token

artists while the people at large are so dishonored. (99)

Yet choosing to center her politically charged decision to turn down the National Medal for the

Arts because of America’s increasing tendency toward racial and economic oppression does not mean that Rich’s message somehow ignored the continued presence of sexual inequality. Instead,

Marxist feminist theory allows us to consider how these issues are all dialectically bound to and originate from capital’s structural reliance on women’s historic oppression as well as its need for societal perpetuation of gender stereotypes and women to be handicapped by societal biases pertaining to sex’s effect on their labor power. Just as a global capitalist world system has caused us to reconsider where commodity value is negotiated and the manner in which labor relations can be reproduced, such as feminization, I argue that Rich was merely ahead of her time in anticipating the needs of feminism’s quest to end sex-based inequality. In focusing her poetics and politics on explicating the accelerating exploitation of a more seemingly random sector of

“the people at large” for society and capital to “dishonor”—or, to use a Marxist feminist term,

“devalue”—Rich demonstrates a continued concern with the way the history of sex, gender stereotypes and prejudices, and the reproduction of labor are functioning in the present age.

Adding to a sense that Rich had somehow abandoned feminism, or waned in her powers and politics towards the end of her career, we might consider the comments of friend, fellow feminist and poet Marge Piercy who bluntly dismisses Rich’s work after the 1980s by saying,

“there are poems that feel whole and clear. . . but many poems feel as if they are coming apart,

159 with occasional wonderful lines or images but not with the strength or coherence of her middle period. I suspect academics will make careers out of explicating the later poems, but I will never reread and again read aloud many of those poems” (60). Though Piercy’s essay, “The Journey of

Adrienne Rich” does not specifically anchor this critique to “An Atlas of a Difficult World” it serves to described the general sense that Rich’s career had a distinct arch, and that from the

1980s onward her feminist poetics—if not her poetic power more generally—markedly fizzled out.

In contrast to the poems previously discussed in this project which are canonized as examples of feminist political poetry, “An Atlas of a Difficult World,” as Templeton and

Gwiazda allude, is typically categorized as part of Rich’s project of contributing to and considering poetics organized around a “politics of location.” This term might be understood as the tendency in Rich’s later poetry to emphasize geographic locale, highlighting power, racism and its impact. Rich discussed this poetic project of her later works deliver in the 1985 speech

“Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” a term that critics ascribe to this poem and others of her later years. Necessarily, it would be impossible to ignore the importance of place in “An Atlas of a Difficult World”— Part Two reads nearly expository in its effort to visually orient the reader in the cartography of America. Yet I argue that though “An Atlas” is undoubtedly concerned with location, American global aggression, and economic oppression these issues are not the full scope of Rich’s poetic political project. Reading “An Atlas of a Difficult World” as simply grappling with a problematic landscape fails to consider the way in which it exposes the mystifications of late stage capitalist American society’s intersection with sexual inequality.

Challenging and Evolving Feminist Aesthetics, Ideology, and Collectives

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In 1997 Rich was invited to attend a conference at Rutgers University, as part of a panel entitled “Poetry, Feminism(s) and the Difficult Wor (l) d.” Considering that Rutgers has a well- regarded MFA program, and that —as the title implies—the focus of the panel was not merely feminist poetics, but encapsulated a nod to the honored speaker’s recent anthology, one can imagine the reaction when Rich decried both MFA-produced poetry and “women’s liberation.”

She remarked:

In this confused and embittered country, poetry is being made and sought at points of

stress, at moments of emergence, by unpredictable voices, in unpredictable places. By

contrast, a deadly sameness still pervades the poetics of well-known and prestigious

literary magazines, and the products of MFA programs, where poems are produced as

commodities in the academic marketplace. (AOP 116)

Perhaps refusing to mince words out of the implied flattery of titling the panel after An Atlas of a

Difficult World, Rich continues:

I want to give a brief acknowledgment to this panel’s title, “Poetry, Feminism(s) and the

Difficult Wor (l)d.” I take it that poetry—if it is poetry—is liberatory at its core. Not

revolution itself, “but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I believe there can be no

women’s liberation under capitalism. Women’s liberation—a more concrete and

expressive term than “feminism”—will both deliver and be brought to birth by any

genuine emancipation movement. (116)

The idea that “any genuine emancipation movement” at earlier parts in Rich’s career may have been taken to refer specially to women’s “emancipation,” but given the emphasis she had placed on racism and economic oppression, it may have been assumed that she was speaking more

161 broadly of “emancipation” that privileged oppressed laborers in general, instead of women.

However, the speech also suggests that Rich felt “feminism,” especially feminist attempts to use poetry politically, had become conscripted into the status quo. Rather than abandoning feminism,

Rich perhaps was simply seeking new terms and definitions to achieve the end of sex-based oppression.

Bearing in mind the misassumption—described in Chapter Two—that Marxist feminists privilege workers’ rights and ending capital over “women’s issues,” to many feminists and poets it may have sounded as if Rich was criticizing and abandoning both teaching poetry and feminist collectives in favor of a more general emphasis on “emancipation.” Though Rich had always been concerned with the relationship between racism, class, and oppression by the 1980s and

1990s many would have identified “politics of location” and the emphasis on geo-politics as her primary concern. But as I argue, these concerns are not at odds with a passionate dedication to feminism, but instead evidence of a Marxist feminist stance which seeks to engage the reader in an evolving feminist collective that can counter the market’s exploitation of women’s labor and the devaluation of jobs performing what has been posited “women’s work.

Rich herself acknowledge how difficult it would be to conceptualize the need for a modern women’s liberation movement that sought to emancipate a broader collective of “the people.” Yet to explain this ideological stance Rich synthesized Marxist theory with feminism in

“Notes Toward a Politics of Location.” She revisits the fractionalization and difficulties of second-wave feminism during the 1970s, specifically those relating to linguistics and theory, reflecting:

Even as we shrugged away Marx along with the academic Marxists and the sectarian

Left, some of us, calling ourselves radical feminists, never meant anything less by

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women’s liberation than the creation of a society without domination; we never meant

less than the making new of all relationships. The problem was that we did not know

whom we meant when we said “we.” (69)

The usage of the collectivizing “we” addresses the difficulties of the subject for feminism in our present historic moment, but also anticipates the difficulty young feminist found in uniting with previous generations of feminism and being included in their “we” as the galvanizing tactics of the 1970s which focused on a shared sex created a sense of essentializing which many feminists found difficult to encounter.

Feminism and Essentialism

Shortly after Rich’s death in 2012 Cathy Park Hong, who was selected by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women’s Poetry Prize, confessed that, “I had a period when I reacted against her in college. This was when multicultural relativism was having its swan song in the late 90’s. I was taking a feminist lit theory course and the pronoun we was poison. Don’t include me in your we” (3). By 1980s women’s studies theorists and feminist more broadly perceived the need to account for “intersectionality”—meaning how not just sexuality, but race, physical differences, economics, and a multitude of other identities created additional site for oppression for an individual woman. Thanks to the work of bells hooks and others we now have the advantage of this term, as well as a more expansive site for the feminist subject that allows for those seeking to end sexual inequality to unify without essentializing any one monolithic and homogenized experience. Hong further elaborates on the source of her adverse reaction to by-now canonical feminist poetry, stating “ it was a reaction against white bourgeois feminism who assumed their plight was universal. What about working-class women? Marxist? Queer? Chicano? The disabled? We cannot speak for each other with all our differences. Don’t assume your common

163 language is mine” (3). Indeed, Hong offers an accurate enough retrospective critique of the

1970s emphasis on the commonalities of shared biology and the burden of motherhood, failing to allow for a full appreciate of experiences in the shared collective consciousness which was

“white bourgeois feminism.” In expressing her dissatisfaction with the tendency towards sex- based essentialism I discuss in chapter three, Hong collapses several identities and widely differing stances, experiences, and attitudes, demonstrating the need for a more rigorous discussion of feminist identity, ideology, and collectivizing.

Moreover, it was not just younger feminists and poets of Hong’s generation “reacting” against the ontological organization of a feminist subject. Judith Butler critically accounts for the way in which sex, though related to the material body, is still heavily shaped through discourse.

Seeking to evolve our conception of sex as shaped only by nature and biology, she asks her readers, “consider first that sexual difference is often invoked as an issue of material differences.

Sexual differences, however, are never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices” (Bodies that Matter xi). This allows us to look critically at feminist language meant to collectivize and articulate goals in a more critical fashion. Though neither Butler nor I argue that there is no true material differences between sexes, when focusing on language organized around articulating that difference we must bear in mind that sex is not as simple as a biological fact— a mere “function of material differences.” Considering Butler’s theory language about “women” points us to revisiting seminal feminist texts and works by their authors. Butler does indeed warn how leaving our discursive patterns of “women” uncriticized might make feminism function —rather than revolutionary— as part of “a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms” (xii). In other words, perhaps

164 in continuing to insist on political platforms as “women’s issues” or segregating a corpus of literature as “women’s literature” feminism might now serve to propagate the “norms” which fuel the wage gap and feminization. But if we challenge our discourse, ideology, and collectivizing practices we may begin to ameliorate the effects I have been tracking between feminization, the death of poetry, and continued sex-based oppression.

Feminist Aesthetics

In our present age feminism now has an established and accepted place in society, having lost many of its “radical” connotations. One can even buy t-shirts that proudly state “feminist.”

The “success” of the women’s movement in America has become so well-established that there is talk of whether or not we still need a movement or the “f-word” any longer, based on the assessment that women are now “equal” or at least seemingly equally represented in all job sectors. These discussions tend to avoid issues like the wage gap or concepts such as feminization. In academia and poetry women are undoubtedly better represented than before second-wave feminism. Indeed, by the late 1980s women’s literature and women’s studies courses, as well as women’s literary magazines, were common enough that many argued against the maintenance of categories such as “women’s poetry” or even a “feminist aesthetic” in literature at all. Kate Daniels describes the debate pertaining to the “existence or nonexistence of a contemporary women’s movement in poetry” (Twentieth-Century American Poetry 242) noting that significant women poets of the post-war years ranging from Elizbeth Bishop, to Sylvia Plath, to Louise Bogan recoiled from the very thing second-wave feminists had to fight for to earn academic curricular inclusion, namely a distinct “equal but different” canon of American women poets. There is heavy debate about the application and viability of “feminist aesthetics” in literary criticism today, causing fracture over issues ranging from its socio-political efficacy,

165 whether or not disciplines such as philosophy, history, or sociology should be used as models, but especially whether or not this category of literature can now be said to serve as an emancipatory practice. While the creation and identification of an American women’s poetics was vital to the efforts of second-wave literary-minded feminists, around the start of the 1980s there emerged a sense that women had outgrown sex-based poetic categorization.

Such is the extent of the debate amongst feminists at the literary level it prompted an entire book of theory by Rita Felski which seeks to describe the various factions now contesting the relationship between writing, sex, and feminist politics in the hopes of breaching several of the larger theoretical divides. Feminists and women poets initially needed the results won by second-wave feminism, such as the creation of theory that allows us to critically address women’s writing and a body of text we can examine as feminist literature. However, in our current moment of feminization and an increasing crisis to reproduce labor relations I argue that continuing to frame “women” as an identity marked by nature and beyond social manipulation significantly curtails our ability to grapple with the evolutions in capital since the second-wave era. While not the intent of this analysis, I hope to use the theory presented here to argue in the future that some of the most potent “feminist” poetry of recent years has been written by men or masculine identify poets. Bearing in mind Butler’s theoretical framework, language has power and when we discuss a poet as “equal but different” on the basis of her sex we perpetuate a perceived labor handicap which functions as a tool for oppressing women and devaluing labor.

In our present moment—faced with the global feminization of labor and the continued inequality between sexes—we must acknowledge the necessity for second-wave feminism to essentialize some sort of general sex-based women’s collective as the subject seeking agency and empowerment via feminism’s political aims. But capital has evolved so that it now uses an

166 unwavering notion that women are marked by nature as handicapped laborers and uses this to devalue labor overall. If we do not pause to discursively consider and challenge society’s ability to influence our conception of what arrangements are beyond its manipulations, we risk error of perpetuating the same misconceptions that allowed society to assume that housewife and mother was the “natural” role for women. Instead, we must reconsider who can work within feminist aesthetics and who should now be framed as individuals able to participate in feminist collectivizing.

Felski assumes that the heart of feminism, feminist discourse, and coming to terms with the continued application of “feminist aesthetics” in women’s literature is anchored in “women” as a shared identify marked by nature and beyond society—and the market’s—influence. This is the very sort of discursive unconscious reinscription of sex, and the accompanying sex-based biases, that Butler and Marxist feminist theory cautions against. Felski states,

Moreover, the development of feminism as a theoretical discourse and the growth of

women’s studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s encouraged women to

explore a range of different intellectual traditions and theoretical paradigms, drawing

upon such diverse sources as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. Feminism can in

fact be understood as an example of a “postmodern” worldview which is fundamentally

pluralist rather than holistic and self-contained, embracing differing and often conflicting

positions. Consequently, unless one is to attempt “the discovery of a Platonic ideal form

of feminism and the exposure of rival theories as pretenders,” it becomes impossible to

offer anything other than the most general definition of feminism. I thus adopt Alison

Jaggar’s formulation, which defines as feminist all those forms of theory and practice that

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seek, no matter on what grounds and by what means, to end the subordination of women.

(13)

I find this assumption to be both problematic and self-limiting for not just feminist reading practices and feminist aesthetics, but feminism itself. My subsequent reading of “An Atlas of a

Difficult World” works in contrast to essentializing theory such as the above passage by Felski, who despite taking into account Marxist applications of the relationship between art, the market, and society continues to make the assumption that a group the market uses as the “woman” of the world is beyond the manipulation of social relations, and by extension the needs of capital. I do not mean to argue that there is no biological truth to some demarcation of sexes, but rather that capital wishes to obscure an entire picture of who are now the “women” in society— devalued, exponentially exploited, and stigmatized by society. While Felski talks about Marxism and plurality, the continued emphasis on “women” marked by biological sex and not stigmas against their labor and work historically associated with them does not consider and therefore can never hope to counter capital’s need for devaluing women workers, and the prejudice against either forms of employment or workers now saddles with tasks considered to be “women work.”

The continued subordination of women exists—in this age of reproductive technology and mechanization in almost all sectors of industry—because capital can use it to devalue labor.

The theory of feminization and the widespread global devaluing and destabilizing of labor demonstrate that capital can and will evolve to create labor relations which allow it to steal as much surplus value as possible, and one of the preconditions for capitalism is that some portion of the potential labor market must be exploited in the fashion which we have historically associated with women. I suggest that Rich sensed—if not precisely the same nexus I have been tracing between advancing capital and feminism —a dire need for feminism to evolve, or else

168 become another mechanism used by capitalist society to perpetuation exploitation and systemic oppression.

In the foreword to Arts of the Possible Rich is in many ways reflecting on her life and career— in addition to the essays included in the anthology—saying “a burgeoning women’s movement in the 1970s and early 1980s incited and provided the occasion for them, created their ecology. But, as I suggested in ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location,’ my thinking was unable to fulfill itself with feminism alone” (1). As I have previously pointed out, Rich expresses chagrin at how the tactics of making “the personal political” have lost their revolutionary potential, giving her “the rueful sense of how one period’s necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of a later time” (2). Rich clearly sees little potency in a feminism that clings to the tactics and ideology of the 1970s and 1980s, observing that, “by the late 1990s, in mainstream

American public discourse, personal anecdote was replacing critical argument, true confessions were foreground the discussion of ideas” (2). I suggest that with this critique of feminism in mind, Rich set out to give feminism a new map— “An Atlas of a Difficult World”—that challenges readers to step outside of aesthetic and ideological expectations of what a political feminist poem sought to accomplish. The effect is a poem that pushes the reader to engage in a

“discussion of ideas” which Shetley feels American poetry so desperately needs. To foster a discussion that shifted the focus from essentializing politics or academic disciplinary debates,

Rich once more turned to verse to challenge feminist collectives, ideology, and aesthetics to adopt what we now can understand as a Marxist feminist stance. For if Rich was indeed unsatisfied with “feminism alone” she looked to the theory of Marx.

Rich goes on in the foreword of Arts of the Possible to explicitly state, “I’m not sure that

I could have read Marx with so much patience and appetite had I not participated in the

169 inevitable shortcoming of the feminist movement in the United States” (5). Yet in articulating the idea of the “inevitable failure” of American feminism Rich is not—as some critics and feminist literary scholars might argue—abandoning feminism in favor of a more general “laborers” movement. Instead, “inevitably failure” suggest that Rich understood how any partial challenge to labor relations, enmeshed as it was in the difficulties of feminism in the 1970s that forced women to argue for a place as “different but equal workers” is “inevitably” stymied by elaborate structural and systemic form of oppression obscured and perpetuated by abstractions of capital.

In the last decades of her life Rich is not abandoning feminism but critiquing it and seeking ways for it to evolve beyond the obstacles it encounters under capital. I argue that Rich’s remarks— and her poetics—are evidence of Rich as a writer and teacher who embraced a Marxist feminist approach to systemic rupture and created difficult poetry that was ontologically challenging enough to evolve the movement to which she devoted her life.

In Blood, Bread, and Poetry Rich offers a chronological recounting of her life experience, her career’s progression, and the relationship both had with efforts for women’s liberation. Speaking specifically about feminist poetics and women’s writing, she acknowledges the need for a feminist aesthetic in earlier years, stating “women have understood that we needed an art of our own: to remind us of our history and what we might be. . . (56). However, by 1983

Rich realizes that simply seeking women’s “equality” through established channels and under the capitalist status quo is not only impossible at a structural level, but that this ideology limits the potency of feminism. She acknowledges the necessity of past ideology and tactics, moving on to note:

But we were—and are—living and writing not only within a women’s community. We

are trying to build a political and cultural movement in the heart of capitalism, in a

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country where racism assumes every form of physical, institutional, and psychic violence,

and in which more than one person in seven lives below the poverty line. The United

States feminist movement is rooted in the United States, a nation with a particular history

of hostility both to art and to socialism, where art has been encapsulated as a commodity,

a salable artifact, something to be taught in MFA programs, the requires a special staff of

“arts administrators”; something you “gotta have” without exactly knowing why. As a

lesbian, feminist, poet, and writer, I need to understand how this location affects me,

along with the realities of blood and bread within this nation. (56-57)

Here is evidence of Rich searching for a “we” feminists such as Hong—all feminist—can participate in without collapsing their unique identities and intersectionality of oppression. In considering the “material” constraints we experience with our senses— blood, bread, location— in conjunction with the historic systemic oppression unique to American Rich charts an aesthetic and political stance adapted to counter the evolutions of capital

The “Abject”

Since the 1970s theory such as the works discussed in chapter two emerged, synthesizing

Marxism with feminism, exposing capital’s need for women’s structural oppression. As part of this project Marxist feminist theory, such as the works discussed in chapter four, explicates how capital profits through the devaluation of anything considered “women’s work.” Capital has always needed that which was once called “women’s work” to be performed unpaid and portrayed as valueless: This critical aspect of value creation cannot and has not changed. Instead what has altered as the result of globalization and changes in women’s labor force participation are the groups of people who we perceive as being useful only in performing the most abject of tasks—women’s work. We now exist in a moment where feminism must reconsider who the

171 market uses as the “women” of the world and the Endnotes collective gives us theory that allows us to expand this category beyond simply looking at a worker’s sex. I read the new feminist creative being articulated in “An Atlas of a Difficult World,” especially in section five, as an explication of experiences of the “new” women of the world. These “women” are those systemically oppressed so that their only employment options are to take up the work and labor patterns historically associated with women or posited as “women’s work.” It is my argument that the “we” Rich had in mind when writing “An Atlas of a Difficult World”—the “we” in which she encouraged young feminists and all individuals structurally oppressed and marginalized by capitalism to participate in might be better articulated when considering those individuals who are now associated with “the abject” either through sex or forms of employment.

This “we” shares the exponential oppression experienced by workers of any sex who are structurally marked as “other” or handicapped in some way, so as to be tasked with the “abject.”

The term “abject” is used by the Endnotes collective in order to explicate the current tendencies in capital to force groups of individuals into situations of double or hidden exploitation, taking on the role historically assigned to women. While the term is perhaps left intentionally vague so as to evolve with the market and society, the Endnotes collective offers a working definition of the “abject” as necessary labor-reproducing tasks, but specifically “what no one else is willing to do” (17). “The Logic of Gender” begins its analysis of gender, sex, and who society assumes must execute the “non work” that is required to reproduce labor by finding a more precise term for what had previously been called “non work,” “housework,” or “women’s work.” In our present moment, and given capital’s evolution since the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the

Endnotes collective take into account how technology as well as a reliance on women’s cheaper but full-time participation in the labor market no longer makes it correct to assume that

172

“housework” is done within the home, or that it is the female member of a nuclear family required to do so. We now have the ability to hire any number of services to clean, do laundry, or even shop for groceries and most “average” families have enough combined income to pay for some or all of these activities out of their wages. Also, it is more acceptable for household tasks to be performed by partners of either gender. Using the terms “directly-market mediated activities” and “indirectly market-mediated activities,” the collective explains this more precise terminology:

The production and reproduction of labour-power necessitates a whole set of activities;

some of them are performed in the directly market-mediated or DMM sphere (those that

are bought as commodities, either as product or services), while others take place in that

sphere which is not directly mediated by the market — the IMM sphere. The difference

between these activities does not lie in their concrete characteristics. Each of these

concrete activities—cooking, looking after children, washing/mending clothes—can

sometimes produce value and sometimes not, depending upon the “sphere”, rather than

the actual place, in which it occurs. The sphere, therefore, is not necessarily the home. (4-

By causing us to reconsider the concrete demarcations of public/private, domestic/ market, this section demonstrates that “housework” or “women’s work” can and often is performed outside of the home and can be done by a paid laborer who is not a member of the family unit. When one pays for any of these activities out of their own wages they are “value producing” in the sense that the value of this work is recognized by the exchange of money, unlike when mom cooks you diner because she loves you, and it is done free of charge.

173

It is important to note that “the abject” is slightly different than simply referencing IMM activities, in that, “the concept of the abject grasps the specificities of these activities and the process of their assignment in our current period” (17). I suggest that it might be conceptualized as a “remainder” of tasks needed to reproduce labor— that which workers must either perform, pay for out of their wage through direct-market mediation, or find some individual willing to take care of. The essay goes on to note, in regard to IMM or indirectly market-mediated activities, there are certain activities that cannot be paid for through wages, simply because they are too difficult to quantify and regulate. The Endnotes collective explains:

Within the directly market-mediated sphere, reproductive tasks are performed under

directly capitalist conditions, that is, with all the requirements of the market, whether they

are performed within the manufacturing or the service sector. Under constraints and

command of capital and the market, the production of goods and services, regardless of

their content, must be performed at competitive levels, in terms of productivity,

efficiency and product uniformity. (5)

Because capital drives competition between laborers and firms, this means that when tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry are mediated directly by the market they must meet certain standards of time based efficiency, must be done with a degree of uniformity, and are in competition with all other entities selling these services and goods to perform them faster and cheaper. Conversely, if the market is not directly regulating these things, there can be more laxity in these standards—you get what you pay for if you hire a college student to clean rather than a professional cleaning service but the rates will be cheaper.

Through causing us to consider that the home and market are now inextricably meshed, and that labor reproduction can occur as either IMM or DMM, this challenges assumptions at the

174 heart of our culture and requires a deep degree of cognitive reframing via example. To that end, think of the difference between the cookies one can buy at a grocery store in contrast to your great aunt’s “famous cookie” expected at family gatherings. The former will always be of uniform size, produced under regulated conditions (presumably relating to sanitation and inspection), and at a set price. Conversely, your Aunt’s cookies differ in that they may been more costly to produce as she likely does not have access to bulk food purchasing. Her cookies most likely have taken longer to produce as we can assume that she is not in possession of an industrially mechanized kitchen. And of course, her kitchen and cooking utensil bear no guarantee of a centrally regulated sanitation inspector. Her cookies will also be far less uniform than directly market-mediated produced cookies, but all of these differences are acceptable as you did not have to pay her for them. Yet these cookie commodities are still mediated by the market, albeit “indirectly” since capital permeates all aspects of society—at a material level she paid to purchase the ingredients and power her oven. The market mediates these “IMM cookies” further if your Aunt had to find time away from her paid job to plan, provision, and produce these cookies. So, while some commodities and services are mediated directly by the market, indirectly all goods and services are mediated through the market, albeit in more hidden fashion.

As technology advances and society evolves the market is able to directly mediate an accelerating amount of activities that previously belonged to the IMM sphere, such as the examples already listed. Yet no matter what technological advances are made and what new social arrangements become acceptable, certain activities cannot be regulated. Some necessary tasks cannot be done more efficiently and require an inflexible amount of time to complete. The

Endnotes collective explains:

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The indirectly market-mediated sphere has a different temporal character. The 24-hour

day and 7-day week still organise [original spelling] the activities within this sphere, but

“socially necessary labour time” (SNLT) is never directly a factor in that organisation.

SNLT applies to the process of abstraction occurring through the mediation of the

market, which averages out the amount of time required within the labour process to

competitively sell a product or service. (5)

This leaves us with a remainder of activities which are those that cannot be completed in a set amount of time. Because of this inherent inability to be governed by time-based efficiency regulations and resistance to technological advances the market cannot regulate such activities through competition —measures such as bankruptcy or the firing of “inefficient workers” which keeps firms offering services at the lowest rates possible with maximum efficiency. The main example of such a problematic activity offered by the essay is child-care. They continue, “when it comes to the care of children, for example, even if some activities can be performed more quickly, they have to be looked after the whole day, and this amount of time is not flexible” (5).

In the previous chapter I explained how this demand on a laborers time—childcare, child gestation, and recovery after birth—formed the historical basis of women’s perceived handicap as wage-earning laborers. If capital cannot directly regulate an activity and integrate it into the profitable world of waged labor, it will portray that activity as non-work simply because it has no way of regulating and profiting from it directly. And as Margaret Benston, Selma James and

Mariarose Dalla Costa allowed us to understand, anyone tasked with the activities capital structurally posits as value-less “non-work” are doubly exploited, both as potential laborers in capital and as unpaid or devalued laborers whose value creation is hidden. Women have historically been marked by society, seemingly as the result of “nature” as those whose time is

176 claimed by the responsibilities of reproducing labor and the reproduction of future laborers via childcare. As has always been the case, capital makes it appear as though these activities, which we might now consider as IMM activities, have no inherent value. This abstraction lies at the very heart of capitalism, as the hiding of the value created by these tasks is critical to surplus value creation.

Capital runs on the hidden value of IMM activities and uses society to disparage these works while obscuring the nexus between “value-less” work and value creation itself—one has only to think of the deeply ingrained bias that a housewife never really “worked” a day in her life. As a result of the stigma of performing “value-less” tasks any individual who performs these duties becomes marginalized and perceived as deficient by society. If we are rigorously self- introspective we must acknowledge that there are social biases and assumptions about people whose “natural” abilities—intellect, work-ethic, morals and still race—have lead them to occupy positions viewed as being the lowest on the social rung such as senior care nurses, cleaning people, and migrant crop workers. Such “stereotypes” about being naturally marked out for devalued or value-less positions are unsettlingly similar to those which second-wave feminism had to confront regarding women’s intellectual and physical laboring capabilities. Perhaps

American society’s greatest cultural myth is that there is a natural order in our “meritocracy.”

Part of our belief in capitalist mythology is the notion that working hard and livingly virtuously results in wealthy and affluent. But this bias blames individuals who cannot “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and in so doing, covers up the structural reliance on exploited and devalued labor within a capitalist Democracy—if everyone could attain equal status then the entire capitalist system of value creation would collapse .Thus, similar to biases historically assigned to both “women’s work” and women in the workforce, groups forced into economic situations

177 where they must rely on IMM activities for their livelihood become further stigmatized and these positions become further viewed as debased. In our present moment one has only to think of the plight of the “illegal” immigrant, demonized for “stealing” jobs but forced—due to the legalities enforced by the state—to perform the sorts of tasks few “citizens” are willing to undertake.

The Endnotes collective allows us to understand more broadly how this expansion of devalued and debased labor has morphed to encapsulate a more ambiguous swath of the labor pool than just women. Since the 1970s, as a result of women’s sustained full labor-force participation society has evolved to the extent that both adult partners within a nuclear family unit are assumed to be earning a wage. Returning to the example of childcare, the Endnotes collective describes the societal and wage-based oppression of those people tasked with an IMM activity. They note that since the most recent economic “crisis,” countries are less inclined to pay for childcare and eldercare which forces workers to either find a way to perform these IMM activities or else pay for it from their own wages:

With the current crisis, all signs indicate that the state will be increasingly unwilling to

organise IMM activities, since they are a mere cost. Expenses in childcare, elder-care and

healthcare are the first to be cut, not to mention education and after-school programs.

These will become DMM for those who can afford it (privatization) or lapse into the

sphere of unwaged indirect market-mediation—therefore increasing the abject. (16)

When an activity becomes part of “the abject”— that which cannot be regulated directly but must be done—it is handed off to those parts of society forced to work for the lowest wages.

This is because all wage-earning workers needs to have their labor reproduced but must use their own wage to do so. Therefore, most households must rely on the cheapest way to reproduce their laboring power—the lowest cost for IMM activities available— since the capitalist is already

178 stealing value from their laborer through an exploitative wage never meant to cover the costs of reproduction. Consider the collective’s further observation:

This work can also be performed by the cheapest labour possible; that is, by women

whose wage will be lower than the wage of a working mother. But in this case, IMM

activities are simply deferred to the lowest-paid strata of a population. Therefore the

problem is not reduced. Rather, its negative effects are redistributed, often to poor

immigrants and women of colour. (16)

For instance, while I— a white, cis-gendered, college-educated woman—will be paid less than a man of similar privilege and training, there is an undeniable hierarchy of exploitation and devaluation beyond what I might experience. For instance, women of color are largely paid less than their white peers. Moreover, as increasing numbers of women attain higher levels of training and skill— driving up the cost of their labor —the reassignment of IMM activities requires a more ambiguous and expanding group of individuals whose labor is cheaper than the woman who historically would have performed these tasks. I in no way am arguing that women seeking wage-equity and access to historically higher-paid positions ought to be blamed for capital seeking new groups to bear a labor-handicap or using markers beyond sex to relegate people to the reserve labor army or IMM sphere of production. However, as the wage is increasingly unable to cover privatized reproduction of labor and governments increasingly refuse to subsidize or organize activities such as child and elder care capital requires more than just “women” to perform what has historically been women’s role in value creation. Thus those who could not afford advanced education, people within and previously held in the prison system, illegal immigrants, those marked as “addicts,” and anyone unfortunate enough to bear the myriad of other markers which allows society to portray them as “less than ideal” laborers,

179 citizens and ultimately lesser humans, allows the market to push them into performing IMM activities in order to survive.

Seeing the Map and the Mural

In turning to “An Atlas of a Difficult World” I offer a reading of the poem as one where

Rich seeks to identify, expose, and make the reader conscious of the myriad subjectivities of those who are being encapsulated by the fluid and expanding category which we might think of as the new “women of the world:” those who carry-out the abject tasks critical to capital’s perpetuation and are now viewed as having handicapped or stigmatized labor. The association with “abject” tasks has historically been linked to women, and as a group in the labor force the haunting of this history is evident in the persistence of the wage gap as well as the assumption that nature and biology constitute a handicap organized around the potentiality of motherhood.

However, ending sex-based inequality can no longer function as challenging gender stereotypes or attempting to raise awareness about women’s experience of oppression. The wage-gap and the

“rise” of the abject call for further consideration of how feminists might best conceive of our place within the capitalist system in our present age. The Endnotes collective observes:

Indeed, we can say that, if many of our mothers and grandmothers were caught in the

sphere of IMM activities, the problem we face today is different. It is not that we will

have to “go back to the kitchen”, if only because we cannot afford it. Our fate, rather, is

having to deal with the abject. (17)

This creates a very real challenge to modern feminism, if for no other reason than the concept of

“the abject” and the proposed reframing of both sex and gender are ontologically difficult. But seeking new theory allows for a more fulsome solution to women’s persistent inequality, which

180 is necessitated by the fact that though progress has been made a “women’s movement” has virtually failed—and faces serious back-sliding—in America. While this issue covers all sectors of industry, as a literacy critic I hope to evolve feminist discursive practices and ontological conceptions at the site of revisiting and growing our approach to feminist reading practices and feminist aesthetics. How we talk about feminism, the way we teach women’s literature, and even a conception of who “we” are as a feminist collective is our profession’s greatest weapon against the status quo. By organizing a new collective around individuals who are “dealing with the abject” feminism might develop a consciousness and collective that does not simply shunt “the abject” on to other groups of people. As the feminization of labor trend clearly shows, failing to do so will only replicate the frustrations and deficiencies of other “waves” at best, and at worst facilitates the expansion and consequences of the global devaluation of labor through

“feminization.” Speaking specifically to the situation of English departments—and perhaps the humanities in general— if feminism does not account for confluence of feminization of labor and the wage gap in our profession then we may not witness the mere “death” of poetry but the demise of the professorial role as we know it.

By focusing on the inescapable reliance of capital’s need for the unpaid execution of tasks that comprise the “abject” we can consider the connectedness of women, feminized workers, and laborers in the IMM sphere. This theoretical stance allows us to discern how capital and the society organized around its continuation allows for—and structurally requires— the debasement and oppression of laborers marked as deficient in their laboring capacities and thus oppressed as less “valuable” humans. Precisely as Rich’s earlier works “Snapshots of a

Daughter-in-Law” and “Diving into the Wreck” sought to use poetry to create a feminist

181 consciousness and collectivism in their respective historical moments, “An Atlas of a Difficult

World” continues on with this feminist political project.

In various chapters I have read both with and against the critical work of Alice

Templeton, and I agree with her treatment of “An Atlas of a Difficult World” as Rich working to evolve the political power and collectivizing ability of poetry:

Rich implies that the individual reader, in the act of reading An Atlas of a Difficult World,

can experience collective being in revolutionary complex ways. The act of reading poetry

itself defies the delusion of innocence and the damage of a solipsistic individualism,

while it holds the promise of revolutionary political change. (172)

It must be noted that Templeton makes these marks in reference to her study of the entire anthology and not just the title poem. We additionally differ in that her work in The Dream and the Dialogue focuses primarily on Rich’s usage of romantic tropes and subjectivity.

Nevertheless, our considerations coincide in that she—and other critics—have made efforts to track the manner in which Rich experiments with and against her place in feminism and the

American literary canon, for the purpose of serving political ends. I by no means attempt to suggest that I am alone in seeking value and merit in this work. But going beyond other readings

I argue that “An Atlas of a Difficult World” takes on deeper significance in the areas of feminist poetics and politics when considered as an attempt to explicate women’s and other oppressed

American’s relationship to “the abject.” It has been my project to use Rich’s “touchstone” feminist works as well as a later poem that the bulk of criticism tends to overlook as a test-case for validating the use of Marxist feminist theory in the critical reception and teaching of

American poetry. Here, I endeavor to focus on selected sections of the twenty-three-part poem to demonstrate the efficacy of this theoretical approach as a means of rereading Rich and

182 discovering the feminist voice in a poem we overlooked as a result of too narrow definitions of feminism and feminist aesthetics.

“An Atlas of a Difficult World,” Section One: Intersections of Women’s Oppression

The first stanza of part one, section one of the poem manifests on the page more like a block of prose than the linear arrangement visually expected of poetry. Yet this stanza’s continuity forces the reader to place the voices encountered in this section in proximity and relation to one another: there are no stanza breaks to offer psychic and visual separation. This causes the reader to contemplate what commonalities are shared by the speakers, and the most immediate answer is that they are all women. We encounter first a “dark woman” (3) who is

“listening for something” set against the backdrop of “THE SALAD BOWL OF WORLD”(3) in such a way that when the poem describes crop planes “dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by hand”(3) we might conclude that this woman is one of the workers tasked with the tedious work of hand-picking crops.

Next, the poem shifts to “the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching / planes dusting rows of pickers” (3) outside of “the hospital at the edge of fields” (3). The result of this crop-dusting, the poem unflinchingly reveals, is “prematures slipping from unsafe wombs” (3).

One imagines that the nurse has been hired to staff the hospital which services the community of the first women, picking berries as the latter takes her break overlooking the fields in which the former toils. Both figures are women but more than shared sex they share being tasked with activities that technology cannot make more efficient, activities we might term “the abject:”

Some harvesting is still too delicate to be mechanized and we do not have technology that accelerates the gestation of a child, and childbirth is still a lengthy and exhaustive process.

Moreover, if a child is born “faster” they bear a number of health and developmental risks as a

183 result of this prematurity. While the picker undoubtedly experiences a more manifest physical oppression, one imagines the psychic toll of a nurse working in a profession organized around not just the exhaustively time consuming process of childbirth but also caring for those who lack the money to utilize the technology advances which may the process safer and easier. A survey by the University of San Francisco, by Elizabeth Fernandez, discovered:

Women giving birth in California can face a huge cost difference in their hospital bills,

according to a new UC San Francisco study. The study found that California women

giving birth were charged from $3,296 to $37,227 for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery,

depending on which hospital they visited.

Add to these costs the fact that the poem explicitly discusses the delivery of “prematures,” which is the antithesis of the sort of “uncomplicated vaginal delivery” described above. One can imagine how much more extensive fees associated with these complicated deliveries are. Add to this that regardless of whether or not the nurse in the poem is paid commiserate to other childbirth nurses—though one may presume that hospitals with wealthier clients offer better pay—she undoubtedly is tasked with attempting to care for complicated premature births without the technological benefits medical insurance and spending power can provide. Therefore, her job most likely entails numerous fatalities, and she must bear this emotional burden, as women who are migrant workers surely do not receive entitlements such as healthcare and cannot afford lifesaving procedures or technology. Thus, the poem’s opening stanza begins with, but moves beyond the sex-based commonality of women, focusing on people whose jobs are impacted by low-paid and precarious positions and deal with tasks which cannot be streamlined or made more efficient by technology. While the nurse may not be working in a precarious or feminized profession—though she is undoubtedly subject to the historic bias which assumes higher paid

184 doctors are men whereas less paid nurses are women—she experiences the toll of caring for people to whom medical technology is unavailable because of preventive costs and lack of entitlements. The nurse’s job with its specific ties to childbirth and gestation not only alludes to the historical bias against women as a result of their reproductive capabilities, but portrays a world where the push to ensure a cash crop’s viability supersedes any concern for the welfare of the young of “dark woman” and anyone else capital is able to burden with IMM activities.

Still within the same stanza the poem shifts its locale “elsewhere,” presumably to a household that has purchased the hand-picked berries, for here the reader encounter a new figure:

“at the sink // rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market” (3). This third voice states, “I can lie for hours / reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard” (3) which suggest a certain middle-class affluence that allows for these leisure activities. The lines that follow use the introduction “one says:” followed by various statements, making it debatable as to whether or not there is one new voice speaking in the stanza or if these statements should be attributed to the nurse, dark woman, or figure washing berries in their kitchen sink, respectively.

But this blurred subjectivity prompts us to consider that these voices function almost as a chorus—comprised of differing individuals yet speaking collectively.

“One” might refer to “one voice” or else could be used as an impersonal pronoun, as if there is a third voice introduced but speaking with detachment: arguably this voice emerges as a narrator consistent through the sections but does so in a disconnected way that does not overwhelm the consciousness of the other figures. This narrator or speaker describes days spent reading and writing, describing the difficulties of a time spent isolated but devoted to writing:

“One writes: mosquitoes pouring through the cracks / in this cabin’s walls, the road / in winter is often impassible, / I live here so I don’t have to go out and act” (3). Implicit in this statement is a

185 sense of guilt, discontent and isolation: There is a self-critical awareness that the speaker knows they ought to “go out and act” but does not. Bearing in mind the significance of the home as a site of isolation and oppression in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” the poem opens itself to the ironic appreciation that the speaker of these statements—if not Rich herself, than a persona perhaps similar to her— has the ability to act and leave the home but is psychically incapable of doing so. They have time and opportunity to write, without any indication of household tasks encroaching on this ability but find no fulfilment in the process. Writing is instead posited, for this isolated speaker, as the opposite of going out and acting—a passive pursuit that has no potency beyond the walls of the home.

In placing these voices alongside one another, but in close linear proximity and interconnectedness, Rich creates both consciousness for these various experiences of womanhood as well as a women’s collective—without collapsing the intersections of oppression experienced as a result of age, race, or economics. While the isolation of the third voice details what might be termed “first world problems”—insomnia; “sleep comes hard” and malaise; “I’m trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing”(3) —this is allowed to be an oppression similar in kind, though varying greatly in degree to the experience of the voice that describes the precarity of reproducing their labor towards the sections close: “I never knew from one day to the next where it was coming from: I had to make my life happened day to day”(3). From a

Marxist feminist perspective “it” is the money to buy the commodities necessary not just to work, day after day. In trying to buy these commodities, this is the process that allows a worker to labor but also to survive. Thus, while the voice using the pronoun “one” who does not “go out and act” might speak from the advantages of what Parker Hong described as “bourgeois white feminism” in this stanza there is space for this experience of oppression alongside the other

186 forms and experiences of oppression faced by the other female figures and those in precarious and devalued labor situations.

Another figure, termed specifically “poet” is introduced in the second stanza of this section. We encounter a young man in a writer’s workshop hoping that the poems he’s produced

“have redemption stored / in their lines, maybe will get him home free” (4). Regardless of sex, here too Rich is showing us a precarious worker as he agonizes over whether or not his labor will be deemed sufficient. Just as the first stanza shows IMM activity that cannot be streamlined by technology, poetry cannot be written more efficiently as the process remains impervious to technology’s ability to make production of a commodity or service more efficient. Furthermore, the poet is described as having a “frugal beard he’s grown to go with his poems,” the verb evocative of the agrarian landscape depicted in the poem’s opening moments and suggestive of a labor who is mindful of their wages potential inability to cover the expenses necessary to continue laboring and living. The effect of reading looking for the building of a collective of those tasked with “the abject”—the “women” of the world— suggests a poem of more than just images, but offers a cumulative interwovenness and unity between the speakers and figures the poem touches upon. Thus, the poet figure is akin to any other precarious laborer agonizing over whether or not their efforts will yield a fulsome enough harvest to guarantee security, get the

“home free.” Just as the first voice articulates the difficulties of never knowing “where it was coming from day to day,” the poet shares in this oppressive experience and merits a place in

Rich’s new feminist collective.

So too does the teacher that we next encounter in the second stanza—for how does one instruct young minds more efficiently or find ways for minding children during the school day more quickly? Teaching at any level runs the risk of becoming part of the “abject” because of the

187 job’s historic association with women and the tasks inability to be done “more quickly”—an occupation ripe for feminization. The trends I outline in the previous chapter, while specific to academia, are manifesting in the elementary and secondary levels of education. For instance, in

Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania State Educators Association (PSEA) cautions its members about recent austerity measures enacted by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. They warn: “DeVos pushes to expand federal vouchers and cut education spending.” The organization goes on to caution union members that these measures will affect pay and job stability as federal funds shift to encourage privatization:

Her voucher bill is a brazen scheme that would invest $50 billion in private school

vouchers over 10 years. Meanwhile, DeVos backs Trump’s proposal to cut education

spending by $8.5 billion in 2020, eliminating more than two dozen programs that help

public schools, including teacher development, academic support and enrichment, and

after-school activities.

PSEA is right to be concerned that a shift towards private schools and lack of federal funding will have ruinous effects on wages and job security.

Regardless of whether or not one accepts that kindergarten through high school education stands to become or is becoming a feminized profession, the children these educators instruct experience the result of more households being unable to purchase the means of consumption and the shrinking of welfare programs. In this section of “An Atlas” we learn that the teacher’s pupils come from precarious households: “the eight-year-old faces grey. The teacher knows which children / have not broken fast that day”(4). Marked by the “natural” misfortune of being born into poverty, these children are slated for the same sort of precarity, dehumanization, and hard labor as the figures in the first stanza, the poet, and the teacher. Regardless of sex, it seems

188 likely that these children will find themselves in the cycle of poverty that marks them as the new

“women” of the global labor market.

Part one, section two shifts drastically into a depiction of domestic abuse, with the speaker seeming to want to refuse to bear witness to, or relay the events that unfold— “I don’t want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake, / tore up her writing” (4). Yet if this poem is looking—like Rich describes in her description of the Marxist manifestos— to undue the robotizing effects of capitalism, then this too must be recorded and factor into the collective consciousness. The scene unfolds to describe the outright violence that can accompanying the intersection of poverty and female oppression, for we learn the setting is what American’s often view as the poorest of housing: “I don’t / want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer / how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck / and backed it into her”(4). Again, the poem refuses to collapse intersectionality, reminding the reader that female oppression and economic oppression create a debasement the speaker would wish to ignore. Yet this figure is not some flat trope organized around stereotypes that portray the poor as less able, less intelligent.

Instead, like the bearded poet and the writer/speaker this woman too has a love of letters, as evidenced by the reference to “her writing.” The figure functions not as an outlier but links the other people the poem has described thus far: she shares in precarity through lack of wealth just like the hungry students, experiencing oppression and physical suffering. She also casts a light onto the fraught relationship with what Americana suggests is the surety and safety afforded in the “home,” highlighting how—though not in all lived experiences for women but in many— the home is still a site of oppression. Here is the very situation of “a thinking woman” sleeping with

“monsters” which Rich details in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” And though penned four decades later, this poem details a woman’s attempts to flee. But like the speaker/writer who is

189 incapable of “going out” this woman cannot escape the home either, though the result is inarguably more catastrophic than just discontent and inaction. In this way, the reader is reminded the home and its historic connections with women’s oppression has not been magically erased in the years between the poems: whether a women physically cannot leave or is psychically burdened by her nexus to the domestic sphere the “escape” envisioned by second- wave feminism is somehow still incomplete.

As the section progresses, the speaker again states, “I don’t want to know” but this time in reference to the “wreckage, dreck and waste”(4) that enshroud the setting of this domestic crime. The motif of impediments to visual clarity, which a Marxist would categorize as

“abstractions” becomes a major trope that also serves to unify the seemingly loosely bound sections of the poem. Through the poem, the speaker tried to see past or through these visual obstructions, and here pushes against their desire to stay blind and numb, resigning themselves to peer further as they state, “but these are the materials” (4). I suggest this is the speaker, and through extension, Rich’s pledge to the reader: No matter how dense the fog or dreck that attempts to obscure the facts, no matter how comfortable it might feel to turn a blind eye to the different forms and sites of suffering in our nation, the speaker will turn to the “material” conditions of our present historical moment and push through the abstractions in order to chart our connectedness with the oppressed and devalued laborers who, as I suggest, a new feminist collective must unify.

The last two stanzas and sections of part one describe a landscape choked by visual impediments, describing a Pacific coastline “floating its fog through redwood firs and over / strawberry and artichoke fields” (4) seeing the narrator “walking in fog” through a landscape that is “fogwreathed” with “roads / closed in wet weather” (5). Again, I suggest this fog, darkness,

190 and wet weather is a metaphor for the abstractions prevalent in America which makes it seemingly impossible for us to work out our connectedness, hiding the forms, mechanisms, and systemic oppression needed by capital. But just as connectedness and collectivization were strengths of second-wave feminism and similar to the commitment to raise consciousness as in

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” the speaker echoes that of the voiced Rich created in “Diving into the Wreck.” Both speakers, and poems, resign themselves to complete a fraught undertaking, for the sake of furthering a feminist collective.

Section II

This section reads like a moment of atmospheric clarity, as if the narrator is viewing

America spread out beneath them on a cloudless day. It opens with a precise mapping of the major features of the landscape: “Here is a map of our country: here is the Sea of Indifference”

(6) establishing the notable elements of the landscape that marks America’s unique social history. The speaker continues,

This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms / this is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy /

this is the cemetery of the poor / who died for democracy This is a battlefield / from a

nineteenth-century war the shrine is famous / This is the sea-town of myth and

story when the fishing fleets / went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the

pier/ processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares. . . (6)

Remembering that the narrator has qualified these observations in saying, “I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural” (6) it becomes possible to discern how the section lays- out the material conditions of our geographic, cultural, and economic connectivity. But as the

“map” is more than just a way of charting a politics of location. In a moment devoid of mist,

191 fog, or darkness the speaker points out the spreading effects of feminized jobs and discursively unifies the poor who die for democracy with farmers who have been foreclosed upon and unemployed fisherman. More so than a map of America, the mural shows the effects of capitalism on the people living within American borders in the present. The speaker notes how

“the people” suffer, while “the capital of money and dolor whose spires / flare up through air inversions” (6). The usage of air inversion—referencing days when pollution-driven air quality alerts make the very atmosphere oppressive and dangerous—evokes the fog and mist of early chapter, here with a source. And that source is quite clearly “the capital of money” or more simply, capital. Our ability to see the map of our country, to work out our connectedness as oppressed laborers is prevented from the mystifying and abstraction “fog” which “the capital of money” and the society tied to it requires.

This is in contrast to a reading by Joshua S. Jacobs who sees the fog as part of Rich’s project to organize American civic identity around “countermonument,” ascribing a positive connotation to the role of the fog throughout the poem. He states, “in fact, the fog acts as both text and monument, allowing Rich to be more direct in evoking a peopled landscape in which both her subjects and their historical setting have a specifically poetic voice for their experience”

(734). Rather than obscuring, the fog creates a surface for inscription that touches on a multitude of subjects, who require their own “countermonuments” for representation within the national narrative. Yet my Marxist feminist reading argues that this fog is an abstraction of capitalist society, preventing the new feminist collective from working out our connectedness since we cannot accurately see the system and grid that binds us. Jacobs goes on to consider a drive the speaker of the poem undertakes past locations such as Angel Island and Alcatraz, which I address at length later. Still emphasizing the positive effects of the fog, he builds on the theme of

192 this poem as “countermonument” Jacobs ultimately concludes: “Driven with this witnessing act in mind, though, the road itself becomes a countermonumental figure—not reserved for Rich alone—which traces unrecognized connections of the unmonumented to the culturally central”

(734).Yet I argue that Rich draws on the fog as part of the project to create a speaker who is touching on these unrepresented citizen for a purpose more active than simply witnesses the

“unmonumented” lives in America. Instead I suggest that Rich is identifying and acknowledging the growing experience of those tasked with the abject, those marked-out for oppression, and that subjectivity of the poem moves and expands to call upon and rally individuals into a new feminist collective.

Feminism has historically relied on consciousness-raising to articulate and expose the gender stereotypes and sex-based prejudice from which women’s inequality originates. In this poem, and in section two specifically, Rich can be read as showing that feminism can still draw on these established collectivizing tactics and that poetry has the power to reach a broad audience and influence American politics. However, to remain potent we must evolve our aesthetics, reading practices, and language to account for the evolutions of capital in a way that we can perceive both the map—the material conditions— as well as the mural. In reconstituting a subject for feminist political action, Rich’s poem exposes how feminism can but also must encapsulate a growing and profound category of feminized labors, women, and those forced into

IMM activities. With each section the poem expands to show us a more fulsome subject for feminism while reminding the reader that though this map/mural shows our unity, “these are small distinctions / where do we see it from is the question” (6). This last line holds a caveat to uniting not merely as laborers, but also as feminists through a stance which refuses to collapse the intersectionality of sex, gender, capital and oppression in present-day America. But to do so

193 requires those who will consciously participate in this collective to interrogate the material— the sensuous world of capitalist America. Women are oppressed to varying degrees, yet we share a kind of market-driven exploitation with more individuals than those who bear the sex-based stigma of womanhood.

Section Three

Section Three sees the scope of the poem narrowing from the previous sweeping view of

America to the confines of a family home, anchored around the speaker sitting “at this table in

Vermont, reading, writing” (7). I read this section as one which comes to terms with the history of feminism, and the ways in which “womanhood” has taken on a different sort of structural oppression since the start of second-wave feminism. This section is in many ways evocative of

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” with a similar moment of kitchen-contemplation, given that

“Snapshots is largely focused “in that Amherst pantry” (“SD” 25). One may even read this section of “An Atlas” as a present-day revisiting of the site of the house as still, to some extent,

“that cage of cages,” (“SD” 25) with the past imposed like a palimpsest upon the present. Section three opens with a description of, “two five-pointed glass candleholders, bought at the / Ben

Franklin, Barton, twenty-three years ago, one / chipped / —now they hold half-burnt darkred candles, and in between / a spider is working” (7). This section and this home are caught-up in the past, left in a state of haunted-ness, decay, and isolation. Just as I have previously argued that

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” constituted an interrogation of inherited gender-roles as well as an articulation of the “value-less” tasks considered to be women’s work, section three offers a revisiting of these themes at least two decades later, as the purchase date of the candlesticks indicates. The speaker spends this section ensnared in “ a memory of pushing / limits in youth”

(7) which the speaker no longer attempts to do. Instead, they sit passively, alone with the past.

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Bound by this growing sense of stagnation and inertia the speaker’s vision is obscured: “in darkness below I cannot see” (8) as night comes on and “the room has lost the window and turned into itself” (8). The ghosts of the past— and their gender roles—come alive now:

Two teapots, on broken-spouted, red and blue / came to me with some books from my

mother’s mother, my / grandmother Mary / who traveled little, loved the far and strange,

bits of India, Asia / and this teapot of her was Chinese or she thought it was / —the other

given by a German Jew, a refugee who killed herself. (8)

Despite the fact that these women are dead and gone, despite the fact that the teapots are defunct and damaged the speaker refuses to discard them, along with the imperatives dictated by older generations. In focusing on the image of a teapot, the section recalls Rich’s usage of a woman depicted as trapped and isolated within the home in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” “banging the coffee-pot into the sink / she hears the angels chiding” (“SD” 23). Though the speaker in “An

Atlas of a Difficult World” has demonstrated an ability to travel and perceive life beyond the walls of the home, they are paralyzed by the inability to simply discard the remainders of these metaphoric manifestations of women’s past oppression. I suggest the speaker here can serve as a representation of the status of feminism in America: though women of a certain class are technically able to leave the home, presumably having moved beyond the oppression of early generations, the inability to cast aside the “ghosts” of historic stigmas and stereotypes continue to linger and create stagnation and a sense of the inability to act.

Furthering this, the speaker describes unseen voices: “I hear / conversations that can’t be happening, overheard in the bedrooms / and I’m not talking of ghosts. The ghosts are here of course but / they speak plainly” (9). This voice is attributed to the wind, as the speaker observes

“that the wind has changed,”(9) and moreover, “it has a voice in the house”(9). It is this voice,

195 which forces its way into the home, and overrides the ghosts of the house which forces the speaker out from the isolation of the home, moving them to action even if it is just having

“stepped out onto the night-porch”(9). I suggest that the wind can be understood as a metaphoric representation of the colloquial “winds-of-change,” and it is this potent, vital, and present force that moves the speaker to resume action, driving away the effects of the haunting. It is this wind which is the antidote to fog and abstraction, and I suggest that the voice of this wind is the voice of a new feminist collective.

No longer a moment of entrapment within the home, reeling in nostalgia of long-dead women and their housekeeping advice to keep useless pottery because “’you will always use if for flowers,’” she instructed when she / gave it” (9) this wind causes the speaker to turn her focus to the spider. As the reader contemplates, the spider has been working at her intricate web, suddenly “she comes swimming toward me / (have I been sitting her so long?) she will use everything, / nothing comes without labor, she is working so / hard and I know”(10). Yet despite this moment of solidarity and empathy with the long-laboring spider, the narrator pauses to consider, “But how do I know what she needs?” (10). In choosing to turn their attention from the ghosts—prompted by the wind—to the spider and her “hard work” this section might be understood as encouraging feminism to move beyond the ghosts and voices of women past and focus instead on the determination and toil observable in “the spider” who represents those who need feminism in the present age. Adding to this suggestion is the speaker’s hesitancy, pausing to question the presumption that they can assume to speak for the spider, that they know “what she needs.” This question, which is rhetorical—the spider is never given personification to the extent that she might reply—resonates throughout the rest of the poem and stands as an inducement for feminists to recognize the inability to uniformly prescribe who needs feminism

196 and what is needed by members of this new collective. Furthering this, the speaker imagines the spider might need, “maybe simply / to spin herself a house within a house, on her own terms / in cold, in silence”(10). Feminism, then, can no longer be about one prescribed goal or one way in which to be a “woman” or a feminist—instead the movement must encapsulate a wide spectrum of choices suited to individual lived experiences. Moreover, the spider is deliberately gendered as “she” which causes the reader to reconsider our conception of who the “women” in the world are. Society rarely bothers to gender insects and would consider the work of spiders as valueless.

Yet the speaker deliberately identifies the spider’s efforts as “labor” causing use to consider which activities are privileged as work and what individuals are valued as laborers.

Section V

I read this section as Rich explicitly describing the markers placed on groups of people who now can be considered the “women” of the world. The list includes people marked out by their race or other perceived “natural” markers society accepts as justifying forcible barring from

DMM participation. Given that poetry is meant to use the concrete to discuss the abstract, Rich focuses on geographical locations, using poetics to allow us to comprehend society and history’s influence on perception of various groups within America. For example, the speaker begins,

“catch if you can your country’s moment, begin / where any calendars ripped off: Appomattox /

Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon. . .”(12). These moments— anchored in politically connotated geographic locations—are perhaps the anti-holidays of the

American historical calendar, representing instances where society either enacted violence against groups of people or else related to a historic “othering” from which prejudice originates.

For instance, both Appomattox and Selma speak to the long history of racism in America where our society believed that nature had marked out people by the color of their skin as lesser

197 humans, justifying slavery. The entire system of slave labor relies on individuals violently deprived of the ability to sell their labor, instead positing them not as human laborers but as part of the means of production, “owned” by plantation masters much as a capitalist in the north might own a factory or tools.

Los Alamos evokes the war between America and Mexico which solidified a border politics which we still experience, as well as a set of stigmas and prejudices inherited from the time. In our present moment Mexican immigrants are often given the most miserable of tasks— the abject—and paid a pittance to do so. Worse, Mexicans attempting to seek asylum or enter the country without legal sanction are treated in unspeakable fashion, both of which suggest how this historic and locale specific prejudice creates a society where it is acceptable to devalue and dehumanize the labor of anyone who was born in Mexico, a boundary no less “natural” than the border between our countries which present politics seeks to portray as iron-clad.

Moving on, Saigon airlifts evokes the Vietnam War and touches upon prejudices against

Asian immigrants or Asian-based labor markets, which allows for their labor to be devalued both globally and in America. The Marxist feminist theory of Guy Standing underscores that as a result of the globalization of labor feminization is fueled largely in part by exploitation of workers in Southeast Asia, noting “the average social wage is lower in much of Southeast Asia than elsewhere. By this is meant that the individual money wage needed to meet a socially acceptable subsistence is lower” (“Global Feminization” 593). In America, this means that when we are able to afford cheaper goods at big box stores such as Walmart this is because someone in

Southeast Asia is barely surviving on the wages they are paid to produce these commodities.

Moreover, there is a societal sense that no matter how exploited a worker of Southeast Asian origin after coming to America, they still “have it better” than if they had not been allowed to

198 come to the United State. Additionally, perhaps “Saigon” can also be extrapolated to call attention to the stigma against those who returned from Vietnam maimed both physically and mentality, marking them as unfit or handicapped laborers, adding them too to the new collective

Lastly, the speaker shifts in the final stanza of this section to a drive through Southern

California, marking how there is a “fog / prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz” (12). But peering through the abstracting fog, the speaker ruefully observes, “no icon lifts a lamp here / history’s breath blotting the air” (12). Undercutting the notion of the “American dream” Angel island and the influence of history are further evidence of the exploitation and devaluation of immigrant labor. These people are able to come to the capitalist Democracy of America, but in exchange they are often forced to rely on the most “abject” of tasks in order to survive.

Moreover, in naming perhaps one of the most infamous prison in America, the speaker illuminates how those who are incarcerated, or have served a prison sentence, are perpetually marked by incarceration and forcibly withheld from mainstream labor participation.

What this section allows us to consider about American society is our conditioned biases against groups of individuals. When we see someone reduced to homelessness, we perhaps subconsciously assume they can’t hold a job because “something is wrong” with them, and rarely consider how capital relies on the structural oppression of some section of potential laborers and requires reasons to withhold them from labor force participation entirely. When black men are confined to the penal system for years and then stigmatized as possible employees when the do re-enter society, we are witnessing a deep-seated racism marked by locales such as

Appomattox and Selma that remind us the social history we might wish to ignore. When we assume that a person is incapable of holding a stable and life-sustaining job and therefore reduced to homelessness, we fail to see what handicaps their labor bears as a result of

199 experiences such as the trauma of serving their country. If we assume that illegal immigrants are marked as other by “nature,” in all of these instances we are guilty of perpetuating the same prejudices that second-wave feminism sought to expose as they related to women in the work force—that “nature has marked them as less equal laborers. Just as the women speaking in section one and the sections that follow belong to a growing collective of experiences and subjectivities, so too do the people represented by the locations the speaker shines a light on in this section for they are experiencing an historic based systemic oppression in which women share.

Towards a Conclusion

The explication of this poem—looking for evidence of Rich’s attempts to dispel the fog representative of capitalism’s abstractions, sensitivity for intersections of privilege and oppression for women, and a re-framing of who is “feminized” by the expansion of the abject to the extent that they ought to participate in feminism’s collective—is a task that far exceeds the scope of this analysis. Neither do I presume to offer a definitive rereading of “An Atlas of a

Difficult World” through the lens of Marxist feminist theory that addresses all possible threads of discourse or unpacking. Instead the purpose of this project is to demonstrate the efficacy of revisiting Rich’s later works in the context of a poet firmly dedicated to margining Marxist theory with feminist politics, leaving us with a legacy of reading practices and maps sufficiently

“difficult” to evolve alongside the shifting nature of capitalist society as its approaches totality.

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Conclusion

As I mentioned at the outset of the previous chapter, section thirteen of “An Atlas of a

Difficult World” is entitled “Dedications,” and speaks directly to the reader. In addressing a wide swatch of lived experiences in 1990’s America Rich underscore the need for feminism to expand to form a new collective that unites workers oppressed and immiserated by the expanding category of the “abject” in attempt to end not just sex-based inequality but as a means of countering the effects of capital’s cruel and chaotic global effects on labor under the world system. As I argued in the previous chapter, Rich reshapes collectivity for feminism and explodes the notion that a feminist subject is marked by sex alone. Beyond simply challenging us to evolve our conception of who feminism serves, the final section of Rich’s poem directly invites the reader to participate in the new feminist collective. “An Atlas of a Difficult World” is a distinctly American poem, contemplating the duties of a citizen-poetic and exploring the politics of location, however these aspects are not enacted at the expense or exclusion of Rich’s feminist poetic polemic. I have argued how from housewife, to mother, to working woman the

“you” in feminism has evolved alongside the composition of the labor market in America. But by the 1990s—and in our present moment—the “you” of feminism needs to shift and adapt once more and it is to this new and more potent feminist collective that “An Atlas of a Difficult

World” and the final section of the poem speaks.

Rich writes, “I know you are reading this poem / late, before leaving your office / of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window / in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet / long after rush-hour”( 25). Drawn in by the intimate address of second person, it is as if

Rich now peers from behind the lens of poetry and shifts the speaker’s gaze to consider what material situation the reader, themselves and others, might occupy while reading the previous

201 twenty-four pages. We might recognize ourselves, and are moved to consider the lives of others, resulting in an effect that is gripping, made more potent by the strategic enjambed—Rich

“know[s] [we] are reading this poem.” (25) The speaker, and through extension Rich, has been working as map and mural maker to connect us, and now invites herself from the pages into our offices, bedroom, or waiting room. In a poem I have argued is interested in creating a collective,

Rich linguistically reaches out to the reader and invites them to participate in the evolved feminist collective she has discursively created, dedicating her efforts in the last twenty-three pages to us.

On January 31, 2017 the journal Women’s Studies published a missive entitled “Dear

Adrienne: At This Hour—” which laments the present state of American politics and global events as “endlessly horrendous” (720). The article, penned by prominent feminist activist and theorist Susan M. Gilbert, goes on to exclaim: “I want to invoke Adrienne Rich, our older sister in righteous combat: ‘Adrienne! Thou shouldst be living at this hour,’ for certainly America hath need of her” (720). But despite being silenced by death, I have argued that Rich continues to speak to those who wish to continue the “righteous combat” inaugurated by second-wave feminism if we apply Marxist feminist theory to her works, especially “An Atlas of a Difficult

World.” Gilbert goes on to comment:

I cannot predict what might occur in the next few months. . . . But it’s bad enough right

now, bad enough so that Adrienne Rich, who was in so many ways our spiritual and

intellectual leader, would have found profound ways to protest. As she did, throughout

her career, especially starting with her magnificent writing in the sixties and seventies.

But if I swerve toward the late works—for instance, what is probably my favorite among

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her late poems, “An Atlas of a Difficult World”—I am reminded that all she wrote was

not protest. No, it was celebration. (720)

Gilbert describes the poem as “one of the most Whitmanesque poem[s] of our time”(720). But more than simply celebrating our country—a capitalist Democracy—we can push further than appreciating this poem as Rich writings as a citizen-poet. Gilbert believes that Rich as “citizen- poet” practices a “patriotism”— quoting Rich as describing how “a patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country / as she wrestles for her own being”( qtd. 721). However, being satisfied to frame this poem simply as wrestling for the soul of the country fails to recognize that this poem also wrestles for the aims and ideology of feminism, and in doing so, ironically, might just be the feminist rallying Gilbert describes our moment as sorely needing.

In this project I have drawn on Marxist feminist theory that articulates how capital has always required “women’s work” to be seen as valueless, next charting how capital relied on the devaluation of women’s labor after they joined the work force. Then, I noted how at increasing rates since the 1970s the theory of Standing and the Endnotes collective describes how capital now draws on these historically established mechanisms to enact the feminization of global labor. Therefore, it becomes clear that over the decades feminism has had to confront gender bias and societal sex-bias which we blame on “nature,” creating a situation wherein women had to rally around sex as what marked them as “equal but different” laborers, inadvertently dragging gender stereotypes and sex bias into the labor market along with them. In our moment, where the movement is still confounded by the wage gap it is apparent that the feminism must reconsider its tactics and collectives. Marxist feminist theory allows us to perceive the relationship between society and capital’s need for the valueless reproduction of labor, whatever name we might now give to what has historically been “women’s work,” regardless of who performs it, and where it

203 is done. Undoubtedly women still share a site of oppression through our shared sex. However, the stigma against women and “women’s work” is now deployed by capital in a way that feminizes a much wider range of laborers and posits more than just women as the “women of the world” —to be oppressed, ill-used, and stigmatized. Technology cannot—at least for now— ameliorate the features of tasks such as childcare, education, or other activities that cannot be mediated by the market directly, tasks that comprise the “abject.” Until we find ourselves in a society imagined only in dystopian fiction where the old are disposed of when their laboring power wane and future laborers are gestated in robotized wombs, society will find ways to mark individuals as “other,” forcing them to carry-out the duties of the abject. Capital runs on the group historically composed of women toiling as unwaged workers to reproduce labor, and uses feminized labor and the wage gap to maintain profit—it will and it must as long as the system seeks to function, otherwise the accumulation of surplus value comes to a screeching halt. While women may now have better access to education, training, and the highest paying jobs we risk attaining equity at point where global labor has been devalued and made precarious to the extent that these coveted jobs have been replaced by feminized labor.

I argue that seeking to achieve the end of sexuality inequality will be impossible if we fail to consider the relationship between labor-relations and the women’s movement—not only will looking to achieve equity within an intrinsically sex-prejudice system fail to fully empower women, what gains we do achieve will occur at the expense of shunting off the forms of oppression experienced by our mothers and grandmothers onto different portions of the population. I suggest that Rich, though not explicitly stated, perhaps arrived at a similar conclusion as evidenced by her efforts during the last parts of her career to integrate Marxism with not just a feminist polemic but feminist poetics and aesthetics as well. As a part of the

204 anthology A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society Rich included an introduction she penned meant to induce “new readers” to familiarize themselves with the works of Karl Marx, Rosa

Luxemburg, and Che Guevara. After drawing on components from their works Rich concludes:

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-

deceiving life. Patience, open eyes, and critical imagination are required of both kinds of

creativity. The writers gathered in [the anthology] Manifesto all speak emotionally of the

human condition, of human realization not as losing oneself within a mass collectivity but

as a release from the numbed senses, the robotization of advancing capitalist society. (67)

Rich clearly sees language as the antidote to the abstractions of capital and allows that artist creativity is not just passively ruminating or witnessing but is akin to revolutionary action, that it has “serious revolutionary” potential. More so than just a general laborer’s revolution, it is my sense that Rich calls for a feminist revolution that sees sex inequity as more than just a

“women’s issue.” I argue that if we do not appreciate Rich’s ambiguous subjectivity and narrative fluidity between sections of “An Atlas of a Difficult World” as undertaking the sort of project she herself describes as admirable in the works of Marx, Luxemburg, and Guevara we are failing to perceive its full revolutionary potential and power.

While Rich’s “politics of location” undoubtedly factors into the geographical sweeps of the poem—as indicated by the title— perhaps the “Atlas” at the heart of this poem is not simply meant in the cartographical sense. It also allows for a subtle allusion to the “Atlas” myth: a figure structurally required to bear up the burden of supporting the world, irrevocably slated to do so for the course of humanity’s time on the planet. Rich, informed by her reading of Marx, is looking to awaken our “numbed senses,” demonstrating the structural necessity and subsequent misery the capitalist “world” system levies upon the individuals required to hold it up. Rich

205 speaks of the ability for “critical imagination” to counter the disciplinary and mystifying effects

“of advancing capitalist society,” creating a poem of great “difficulty” which requires us to use our imagination to connect the seemingly diasporic and divergent snapshots of the human condition the sections of “Atlas” relays to the reader. I believe that this “map” can allow us to constitute a more evolved and potent feminist stance. Perhaps, too, it can guide us in shaping a more relevant and vital poetic pedagogy equipped to redress the present state of American poetics.

Rich speaks to us, from the pages of the final section as those who belong to the new feminist collective: men and women, old and young, all united in our oppression though experiencing it from different material and metaphoric “locations.” Some of us find this poem after toiling “in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet / long after rush-hour. . .” (25) perhaps logging overtime as a way of making ends meet. Some of us are in real physical danger, forced to “sleep with monsters” as we read “in a room where too much happened for you to bear / where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed. . .”(25). Some of the “you” to whom the poem is dedicated are marked by the new “natural” factors which stigmatize groups in society: “I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light / in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age” (25) perhaps “counted out” as a result of their race or economic class. These are the faces that compose the “mural” I discussed in the previous chapter, and the faces which we must critically consider as potential subjects for feminist collectivizing and empowerment. For as this section goes on to detail a variety of situations of oppression in which the “you”—the reader—is experiencing the effects of global capital which manipulates feminization and sex-bias to devalue all labor, we, the readers, are united in our oppression but also in our utopic yearnings. Despite the conditions of their lives the

206 reader has turned to poetry to counteract the numbing effects of capital Rich described in A

Human Eye, evidencing a shared desire to seek more than an existence of laboring, reproducing labor, and buying the commodities we need to live until the day we die.

The poem ends with the often-quoted lines, “I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else / left to read. . .”(26). Given Rich’s death there is truly is nothing more to

“read” from her in our present moment. She can no longer lend her voice and her vision to guide feminists frustrated with the status quo who are alarmed by what we see on the news and cannot offer words to discursively confront the border crisis and other humanitarian catastrophes presently enacted by our nation against women and minorities. However, in rereading her works through a Marxist feminist gaze we can reconsider the role of American poetry, the feminist collective, and our treatment of sex within academia. Perhaps there is “nothing left to read” because rather than Rich having moved away from feminism or moved beyond it during the last decades of our life, our present moment is a time in which we—the readers, the feminists, the

“women of the world”—need to reread. And after having consulted our Atlas, we must navigate the difficult world of global labor and find our strength in our new collective.

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Addendum A:

In the 2019 book The Adjunct Underclass, Herb Childress writes:

Tenure-track faculty—the people we think of when we’re asked to consider the idea of

“college professor”—are hired with the intention of permanence. They teach and engage

in scholarly life; they set the course of the curricula within their departments and set the

core of the curricula for the entire college. . . . They receive significant investment in

their ongoing development, with professional memberships, conference travel, research

equipment, and information resources available to them with paid sabbaticals offered for

the development of particularly promising research. (19-20)

And yet, courses must be taught, and essays must be graded, so those activities—the less describable tasks necessary to teaching—must be done by some instructor. Given that, much like childcare or childrearing, a student cannot be “taught to write” faster, this job falls on the shoulders of “feminized” workers. Someone must still do the lesser-valued work—such as teaching intro to writing courses—to free the tenured faculty to teach higher-level courses, conduct research, take sabbaticals, or go to curriculum meetings, etc.

Adrienne Rich describes specifically how this arrangement had functioned—reflecting on post-war and older arrangements—in English departments prior to second-wave feminism. Not only does the following quote speak of the more general labor arrangements historically in place in universities, but perhaps illustrates the inevitably feminizing effect of second-wave feminisms’ push for a place for women’s literature and women professors:

The university is above all a hierarchy. At the top is a small cluster of highly paid and

prestigious persons, chiefly men, whose careers entail the services of a very large base of

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ill-paid or unpaid persons, chiefly women: wives, research assistants, secretaries,

teaching assistants. . . .the hidden assumption on which the university is built comprise

more than simply a class system. In a curious and insidious way the “work” of a few

men—especially in the more scholarly and prestigious institutions—becomes a sacred

value in whose name emotional and economic exploitation of women is taken for

granted. (“Towards a Woman-Centered University,” from OSLS 137)

Rich uses terms which the Marxist feminist theory discussed in this project should signal as crucial: “ill-paid and unpaid” workers who enable the male professor’s ability to produce

“work,” which is perceived as having “sacred value.” The idea of the university as having more than “simply a class system” can also be read as pointing towards Firestone’s work on “sex- class.”

Significantly, in describing this arrangement Rich is describing conditions prior to the

1960s. In the decades since, the male English professor could no longer rely on this historic arrangement, just at a point in the evolution of American poetic academic institutionalization which required any writing instructor to spend time both producing “valuable” work and

“reproducing” the future laboring pool of poets. Therefore, as with other “feminized” jobs, I suggest that academia adjusted to women’s presence as professors in English departments not as menials but as workers insisting on functioning as “equal but different.” This created a situation where the “women’s teaching work” of the department—that which was portrayed as being of lesser value and upon which the role of professor has historically been built—had to be assigned contingent or adjunct faculty and graduate instructors.

Rich perhaps extrapolated the above reflection based on her own experience working as an adjunct professor in 1968— a point in her personal life where her husband Conrad was a full

209 professor at Columbia and presumably still drawing the majority of the wage that supported the family. Throughout her career, Rich moved from contingent/adjunct instructor in the 1960s, to visiting professor in the 1970s, to a full-time professor. But just as she—an emblematic second- wave feminist pushing for women’s access as faculty in universities— reaches a position where she can access the job of a full-professor of creative writing, the American Association of

University Professors’ statistics shows those jobs becoming “feminized.” I suggest this evidence is viewable in the chart listed as “Figure One” which shows that from the mid-1970s onward universities began to hire more contingent, adjunct, and non-tenure track faculty while the number of tenure track positions began to shrink.

One may infer that the problem intersects and compounds with second-wave feminism in that “adjunct” was traditionally never meant to be a family-supporting wage— a perfectly acceptable job for a woman in the 1960s as it was initially a position for retired males who had previously worked in other fields outside of academia. Herb Childress describes a 2014 report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce entitled The Just-in-Time Professor:

Traditionally, adjuncts were experienced professionals who were still working in or

recently retired from the industry outside of academia, with time on their hands to teach a

class or two at the university or community college. Adjunct work supplemented their

income; teaching was not their main job. (qtd. 212)

Remembering the comments in the “death” of American poetry debate earlier in chapter four, the

“traditional” assumption about adjuncts could presumably describe the precise conditions of male poets who had historically been assumed to hold other “day jobs” such as Eliot, Stevens, etc.

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Overall, my inference is this: after the initial post-war MFA boom in conjunction with second-wave feminism’s push for women’s access to jobs and curricular inclusion in the English department Rich and other women took jobs as adjunct faculty. In this capacity they worked to support predominately male professors, so that the latter had time to write and develop professionally. This provided the mechanisms Guy Standings describes as conditions necessary to feminizing an industry. As the post war “boom” began to recede— especially after the 2008 recession— capital’s tendency towards a crisis of reproducing labor relations prompted the second aspect of feminization: replacing “masculine jobs” with “feminized” laborers. In the case of English and writing, this means hiring more contingent and adjunct faculty instead of offering tenured jobs.

It is difficult to track earlier job-force trends specific to creative writing programs prior to the early 2000s—even Rich held jobs in positions euphemistically entitled “writing core” instructor. It was common to see “poetry” teaching jobs listed more vaguely as “special topics lecturer,” etc. However, after the recession of 2008 which exacerbated the trend toward feminization and precarity, (see table 1 and 3) Emily Lu’s publication for the Association of

Writers and Programs Job list demonstrates evidence of a marked decline in tenure-track jobs and a shift towards hiring feminized laborers in the form of contingent or adjunct faculty.

Interpreting the data, Lu notes:

MLA’s recent announcement is worrisome. Figures, calculated from tabulating ads in the

2009-10 Job Information List and comparing the totals to those from the 2008-09

academic year, show a 20% drop in job announcements from the previous year. This

year’s 20% decline follows an alarming 26% dive in jobs between 2007-08 and 2008-09,

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the largest single year drop since MLA has published these figures. At 1,100, the number

of jobs announced this year is one of the smallest figures recorded. The all-time low of

1,075 jobs advertised occurred in 1993-94. Although academic job announcements in the

AWP Job List database grew from 474 listing in 2008-09 to 593 in 2009-10, tenure-track

creative writing job announcements fell 20%. The decline in tenure-track creative writing

openings was more than 30% over the two-year period from 2007-08 to 2009-2010(see

table 1). (Lu)

Exacerbating the data and analysis Lu provides, consider the information provided by the

Association of Writers and Programs (see second table, referenced by as table 3) which highlights the disparity in pay between faculty of different rank. The disparity is most notable when comparing Full Professor with Adjunct/ Instructor:

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As the previously referenced Figure One shows, between 1975 and 2015 the percentage of tenure track jobs in contrast to reliance on contingent faculty has shifted drastically in favor of hiring contingent faculty.

Collectively, I cite these statistics to support my argument that we might track a marked trend towards hiring “Feminized” contingent or adjunct faculty in favor of offering tenure track jobs. In the academic culture of “publish or perish”—especially evident in Creative Writing where publications are the basis of a potential hire’s employability— the effects of working as a

“feminized” contingent worker creates a nearly inescapable bind. When a poet is given a position in which they must find other jobs in order to “cobble together” a livable wage, they are increasingly unable to find the time to produce poetry, attend and hold readings, or write the scholarly criticism that is necessary to make them a viable candidate for tenured or full-time positions. Moreover, the most reputable poetry prizes require significant reading fees, which can represent the entirety of a tank of gas to drive to various colleges or an internet provider utility bill. This perpetuates an academic underclass of feminized faculty whose labor—much like women prior to the second-wave of feminism—is the undervalued and exponentially exploited work on which the system is built.

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Figure One

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