The Mormon Version of Hilary Clinton
I was thinking recently about my experience in grad school and the years shortly after. I blame myself for a lot of my awkwardness and inability to "negotiate" well with other people. Also for my tendency to blurt out exactly the wrong thing in the wrong moment. I was immature in so many ways, though I was also super intelligent in other ways, able to read so quickly and process information, make connections to other ideas, even leap to big conclusions that ultimately made sense. I wrote well and quickly and I was fearlessly confident in myself, something that I alternately despise about that old version of me and wish I could go back to.
In grad school, I wanted to write my dissertation about Sophie von La Roche's fascinating novel Die Geschichte des Fraulein von Sternheim, which was published to much acclaim and with Goethe's approval and help with editing. La Roche wrote a lot of other novels and managed to make a living for a large family doing so, though most of her later works are ignored today. I've always had a fascination for pulp women's fiction, from romance novels to the kind of novels of housewives that La Roche wrote in the late 1700's. I was also really interested in the paternalistic way that Goethe treated her and her novel, as if he of course would know how to write better than she did, and the way that our current standards of good writing indict La Roche, but wouldn't have to if we changed them to values that allowed women to write about their own experiences without being castigated as "boring" or "uneducated."
But in the end, my committee insisted that I devote about half my dissertation to Goethe's novel about male Bildung, Wilhelm Meister, a novel I wasn't very interested in. Looking back, I can see how bad this choice was, because it made it seem like I wanted to be an expert in Goethe and in the Bildungsroman, when what I cared about was minor women writers and gender studies and talk about how to change our ideas of what good literature was. But you make compromises and if I wasn't the best at it, I did manage to graduate with a degree.
Two incidents in grad school that stand out:
1. When I asked the most prominent member of the department about the syllabus for German Romanticism, which included not a single text by a woman, he said we "didn't have time for minor writers." This said everything to me about how the department thought about my field of interest.
2. When another grad student asked the department chair how the female grad students were supposed to find mentors when there wasn't a single tenured woman in the department, we were assured that they'd done an extensive search, but "hadn't found anyone up to our standards." What, on the entire planet? Then they said they were planning to hire assistant profs who were women and "raise them to our standards." Yeah, what happened was that all of the women who were hired at Princeton while I was there quit because their accomplishments were constantly diminished and they were told writing about women "didn't count" for publication credits.
While I'd imagined that Princeton would be this liberal mecca of feminism, especially compared to BYU, where I did my undergrad and M.A., I didn't find this to be true. There were just different rules, different standards about womanhood. I remember hearing a lot about how religion was just a way to keep women in line (with no one considering that an actual, practicing religious person might be listening) and trying to knit in classes (which can help me focus) and being told it looked "unprofessional." So much insistence at Princeton on how there was no sexism, whereas at BYU, a lot of benevolent patriarchy and admission they were sexist, but because that's the way it was supposed to be.
When I went back to teach at BYU, I was still awkward as hell, likely to say the wrong thing, and immature, but brilliant. I remember having a conversation with one of the other professors there at the time. I'd asked him to come in to my Intro to Literature class to have a conversation with me about a big name German writer he was an expert in. I thought it would be useful for students to see that the professors could still disagree about interpreting another writer, but also to see how we did it. He told me bluntly that I didn't want him to come to my class because he'd make me look like an idiot because he knew everything and I didn't. This--uh--wasn't the way I thought about literature and interpretation. I was dumbfounded.
Our conversation then devolved into him telling me that women educated at co-ed schools were intimidated by men and would never come to anything. Only women who were educated at all women's schools learned to speak their minds clearly and articulately. He pointed to Hilary Clinton and asked me who the Mormon version of her was as proof that he was right. I stupidly said something like, "Well, me." (At the time, I thought that graduating with a PhD at age 24 was pretty impressive and that I was managing a career with kids still in my 20s and had aspirations of being a published writer that, as it turned out, weren't all that crazy). Of course, he didn't agree and thought me the most arrogant young whippersnapper he'd ever met.
I like to think that I've proven that young version of myself just a little bit right, these days.
In grad school, I wanted to write my dissertation about Sophie von La Roche's fascinating novel Die Geschichte des Fraulein von Sternheim, which was published to much acclaim and with Goethe's approval and help with editing. La Roche wrote a lot of other novels and managed to make a living for a large family doing so, though most of her later works are ignored today. I've always had a fascination for pulp women's fiction, from romance novels to the kind of novels of housewives that La Roche wrote in the late 1700's. I was also really interested in the paternalistic way that Goethe treated her and her novel, as if he of course would know how to write better than she did, and the way that our current standards of good writing indict La Roche, but wouldn't have to if we changed them to values that allowed women to write about their own experiences without being castigated as "boring" or "uneducated."
But in the end, my committee insisted that I devote about half my dissertation to Goethe's novel about male Bildung, Wilhelm Meister, a novel I wasn't very interested in. Looking back, I can see how bad this choice was, because it made it seem like I wanted to be an expert in Goethe and in the Bildungsroman, when what I cared about was minor women writers and gender studies and talk about how to change our ideas of what good literature was. But you make compromises and if I wasn't the best at it, I did manage to graduate with a degree.
Two incidents in grad school that stand out:
1. When I asked the most prominent member of the department about the syllabus for German Romanticism, which included not a single text by a woman, he said we "didn't have time for minor writers." This said everything to me about how the department thought about my field of interest.
2. When another grad student asked the department chair how the female grad students were supposed to find mentors when there wasn't a single tenured woman in the department, we were assured that they'd done an extensive search, but "hadn't found anyone up to our standards." What, on the entire planet? Then they said they were planning to hire assistant profs who were women and "raise them to our standards." Yeah, what happened was that all of the women who were hired at Princeton while I was there quit because their accomplishments were constantly diminished and they were told writing about women "didn't count" for publication credits.
While I'd imagined that Princeton would be this liberal mecca of feminism, especially compared to BYU, where I did my undergrad and M.A., I didn't find this to be true. There were just different rules, different standards about womanhood. I remember hearing a lot about how religion was just a way to keep women in line (with no one considering that an actual, practicing religious person might be listening) and trying to knit in classes (which can help me focus) and being told it looked "unprofessional." So much insistence at Princeton on how there was no sexism, whereas at BYU, a lot of benevolent patriarchy and admission they were sexist, but because that's the way it was supposed to be.
When I went back to teach at BYU, I was still awkward as hell, likely to say the wrong thing, and immature, but brilliant. I remember having a conversation with one of the other professors there at the time. I'd asked him to come in to my Intro to Literature class to have a conversation with me about a big name German writer he was an expert in. I thought it would be useful for students to see that the professors could still disagree about interpreting another writer, but also to see how we did it. He told me bluntly that I didn't want him to come to my class because he'd make me look like an idiot because he knew everything and I didn't. This--uh--wasn't the way I thought about literature and interpretation. I was dumbfounded.
Our conversation then devolved into him telling me that women educated at co-ed schools were intimidated by men and would never come to anything. Only women who were educated at all women's schools learned to speak their minds clearly and articulately. He pointed to Hilary Clinton and asked me who the Mormon version of her was as proof that he was right. I stupidly said something like, "Well, me." (At the time, I thought that graduating with a PhD at age 24 was pretty impressive and that I was managing a career with kids still in my 20s and had aspirations of being a published writer that, as it turned out, weren't all that crazy). Of course, he didn't agree and thought me the most arrogant young whippersnapper he'd ever met.
I like to think that I've proven that young version of myself just a little bit right, these days.
mein lieber Gott! schreckliche Geschichten. Ruth Angress war nicht mehr in Princeton, nehme ich an. Und der BYU Prof., wer immer er war, war/ist ein Arschloch.
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