Jennifer Baumgardner

“Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” professors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar mused in their 1979 bestseller The Madwoman in the Attic. A classic of feminist literary theory, Madwoman “investigated the centuries-long identification of authority with masculinity” to reveal a feminist subtext embedded in the literature of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and other Victorian stars. Coining a term, they described the “anxiety of authorship” for women—a conflict between their domestication into feminine “goodness” and the unruly, even rageful energy that creation both stirs up and requires.

Forty years later, Gilbert and Gubar still have dick on the brain. They open Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination invoking the Trump-inspired women’s marches of 2017, asking “must the president have a penis?” (Yes.) Although Hillary Rodham Clinton (not known particularly for her writing) is named as the Platonic ideal of second-wave potential, the book itself examines, more generally, the role of literature in the feminist upheaval of the late 1960s and beyond. (This was the movement that shaped the authors, who met as graduate students at Indiana University in the early 1970s, having “never studied women writers, women’s history,” or been “taught by a female professor.” They team-taught a class in literature by women, which became the The Madwoman in the Attic.)

Still Mad examines how broadsheets, pamphlets, best-selling polemics, and poetry functioned to create the women’s movement as it spread the word of feminism beyond big cities, provoked insights about the female condition, and modelled women wielding that ink-stained penis as they expressed themselves professionally and artistically. Unlike the Victorian era shut-ins of the first book, droves of women writers began to take up space in the world, literally and rhetorically. Perhaps because of the sheer number of writers included—Still Mad spans from 1950s-era Sylvia Plath to present-day Rebecca Solnit—the book’s encyclopedic profiles can feel a bit arbitrary. I learned on page 66 that Joan Didion’s Vogue’s Prix de Paris award was more prestigious than her guest editorship at Mademoiselle, that Jacqueline Bouvier won the Prix de Paris the year earlier, and that Bouvier’s essay recounted her desire to become “a sort of ‘Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century,’ watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” (Wait, what?) I found these trippy details charming and memorable, but they didn’t cohere into a theory with any vigor.

In order to tame this trove of minimally related figures into an arc, the chapters are organized in chronological cadres, roughly linked to themes. “The Sexual Revolution and the Vietnam War,” for example, bops between Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown, examines Susan Sontag vs. Joan Didion vs. Betty Friedan, and pits Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto against the early writings of radical feminists like Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Intriguingly, they don’t examine the exhilarating SCUM Manifesto as the full-throttle satire I think it is. I mean, if anyone was free of a female inferiority complex, it was Valerie “the ‘male-artist’ is a contradiction in terms” Solanas.

For me, a feminist writer born in 1970, some of the historical narration and context was familiar, which brought out my hairsplitting side. How Steinem is lumped together with Gurley Brown, for instance, didn’t quite gel. Yes, both were New York media stars who modeled sexual freedom and having a career, as Gilbert and Gubar note. But saying “both were raised by single mothers in Depression-era poverty” obscures the fact that Gurley Brown, like Betty Friedan, was more than a decade older than Steinem. Meanwhile, Gilbert and Gubar deprecate Gurley Brown’s grooming routine—dieting “that kept her … pencil thin” for example—as evidence of her devotion to selling a “deliberate performance of femininity.” But Steinem’s thinness, “miniskirts,” and dyed blonde “long hair” render her merely a “photogenic” embodiment of the sexual revolution. Similarly, a fascinating section on Lorraine Hansberry’s political mentoring of and friendship with Nina Simone includes a reference to Simone’s “undiagnosed mood swings”—which sounds like something you could treat with Midol instead of the bipolar disorder Simone had.

Occasional prudishness aside, Still Mad offers a subtextual theory—as palimpsest, perhaps—of the ways in which being bisexual or a lesbian or what we would now call neurodiverse (or “mentally ill”) is a feature of many these writers, the magic ingredient rather than the albatross to overcome. How brain chemistry or whatever it is that makes one queer sufficiently pulled them out of believing they are or could be “normal women.” Once rendered an outsider, the lacy shackles of acceptable womanhood were revealed as a tacky construction of some dick with a pen.

“Must madwomen necessarily create madmen?”

—Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, Still Mad

Jennifer DeVere Brody

It has been forty-two years since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, the landmark study penned by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who again enter the “frayed” world of feminisms to champion “the feminist imagination” (emphasis added) in this lengthy new book.  Over the course of 400 pages, readers are introduced to approximately forty individuals, most of them writers, who, to varying degrees, engage with “feminism,” which is understood by the authors as “a desire, a vision, a yearning, a fantasy…sometimes tragically at odds with reality but sometimes comically opening up the improbable possibility of alternative reality.” The authors frame the book as a response to the election of Donald J. Trump as president in 2016 and, more pertinently, the fact that the historic campaign of Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, did not win the presidency. 

As the epigraph taken from the epilogue suggests, the book’s central question remains the agon between “mad women and mad men.” Gilbert and Gubar are justifiably “still mad” about the patriarchy that played a part in the outcome of the election and, indeed, about their own experiences of sexism, such as “being mistaken for the secretary”—events that occurred when they began teaching at Indiana University in the 1970s. They argue that it is “second-wave feminism” that “feminists today have begun channeling [into] the rebellious rage of the madwoman we studied, a female figure incensed by patriarchal structures that have proven to be shockingly obdurate.” This statement forgets the other(ed) aspects of this figure (race, class, gender, country of origin, medicalized madness, to name only a few) that perpetually complicate grand narratives of feminism.  It is clear that Gilbert and Gubar have taken note of changes within and beside feminism, as they include a diverse range of feminists, such as trans writers and activists Janet Mock and Leslie Feinberg, queer theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Judith Butler, Black feminists from Audre Lorde to Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Gilbert and Gubar, whom I first encountered when I was in the ninth grade and a budding Black feminist interested in Victorian studies as well as the Black arts and culture, have been lauded for their “pioneering” work in women’s studies.  There is no doubt that their writing partnership has been a model of collaboration too often devalued in academia. I commend them for sustaining this partnership and collective writing voice over so many years.

Still Mad must be read as part of the growing list of titles focusing on feminist rage that have been published over the last several years (including those featured in this wonderful Short Takes series), from Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Female Anger, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage, and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger to just-published works such as La Marr Bruce’s How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity.   Unlike these texts, however, Still Mad somehow manages to marginalize differences, even as (or perhaps because) it strains to be “inclusive.” The book unevenly champions an eclectic array of individual writers (which includes composers/lyricists such as Nina Simone and Beyoncé, visual artists such as Judy Chicago, and poets such as Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, and numerous others). The breadth of citation too often overwhelms; I wished for more attention to how various modes of feminist action create change.

The opening sentence of the book’s introduction glibly quips, “Those who can’t march, write.” The authors explain that, “with [their] various disabilities,” they were unable to attend the Women’s March in 2017 but wished to “stand in solidarity.”  This well-meaning book serves as their political act of solidarity. While I did attend the march that January—where a diverse collective of protesters of all ages, genders, types, and abilities put their bodies on the line as a means of registering dissent even in an era in which the protest “march” may no longer be politically efficacious—I underscore that response, in whatever guise, is indeed our responsibility as feminist activists. The book’s conclusion, “White Suits, Shattered Glass,” praises our first female, feminist speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi (who is “still mad, for good reason”) along with other political officials who wore “the white suit,” from Shirley Chisholm to Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Vice President Kamala Harris.  While I can agree with their praise for highly competent, centrist female politicians such as Harris, Clinton, and Pelosi, the text made me wonder about what feminist power, ideologies, and freedom might look like.

While the authors explain why they wrote the book, they do not say explicitly for whom it was written.  Whom did they imagine to be the audience for this work? And who are the mad women referenced in the title?  A clue comes when the authors write, “unlike the central characters of [Jane] Austen, [Charlotte] Brontë, and [Elizabeth] Barrett Browning [about whom they wrote in their first book], the heroines of feminist fiction do not end up living happily ever after in committed heterosexual relationships. Maddened, unhappily married, divorced, or single, they offered their authors the opportunity to evaluate the institution of marriage during a period when divorce rates surged, at least in part because the traditional relationship between the sexes was being so defiantly attacked by feminists.” They miss the chance to discuss other aspects of marriage as an inherently racist and classist institution that protects property rights over civil rights, an omission that is symptomatic of how the authors treat intersectional issues throughout the text.

“Intersectionality,” a term first deployed by legal studies scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1990s, is said to be a concept that “eventually arose out of identity politics.” They leave much of the critique of racism to others. Section 8, for instance, ends with a long quotation from Toni Morrison about the inherent racism of patriarchy that sits without comment, critique, or elaboration from the authors.  Indeed, throughout the book, the authors voice their concern for the shift from “literary writing to philosophical discourse” and in so doing tend to represent “queer theory,” “intersectionality,” and other key theories in a reductive manner. For example, they assert that Toni Morrison's work is like Anzaldúa's borderlands and that intersectionality is like mestiza consciousness, analogies that obscure more than they reveal.

I think the book might have succeeded more had it been a succinct polemic composed of sections from the introduction and conclusion. In its attempts to render specific historical moments legible, the book is long on short mentions of popular culture, policy, law, and sociopolitical and other forces. The epigraphs for the text, from Barbara Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, bell hooks, Eavan Boland, and Helen Reddy, respectively, epitomize the hodge-podge approach, which perhaps aspires to be a welcoming, patterned crazy quilt but instead leaves a heap of threadbare scraps. The chapters are organized into chronological sections highlighting specific decades: from “Stirrings in the Fifties” and “Eruptions in the Sixties” to “Revisions in the Eighties and Nineties” and “Recessions/Revivals in the Twenty-First Century.” This organizational strategy appears in the work of other writers—August Wilson’s play cycles come to mind—but here, selections feel arbitrary. This book’s many potted biographical accounts compose the core of the text, and excerpts from literature appear without enough context. In the short section on the brilliant poet Gwendolyn Brooks, for example, the longest quotations come from the poem written from a racist white female employer’s perspective, and, surprisingly, Brooks’s haunting poem “Abortions Never Let You Forget” is not mentioned.  There are numerous moments of unconsidered collision, such as the transition between a discussion of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye that becomes a reading of Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. For me, sadly, the book proved reductive rather than generative, although I can imagine that because it does contain so many facts, many readers will learn from it.  For example, they write: “The metaphors of feminism—of awakening, enlightenment, illumination, epiphany, conversion, revival—sound spiritual, and the movement did exert a force not unlike that of a religion.” I wondered about these six metaphors and why there was not a similar catalogue of “madness” that would be more in line with the title of this tome.  In the end, I found this to be a maddening text—full of tidbits and tirades, told through the conjoined voice of passionate feminists whose premises left me frustrated.

Laura Green

For some graduate students in literature in the 1980s (myself among them), the 400+ pages of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic, which first appeared in 1979, thrillingly demonstrated the “amplitude and awe” (to borrow from Emily Dickinson) to be found in nineteenth-century women’s writing. Gilbert and Gubar linked the canonical but isolated figures of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and the Brontës in a tradition of protofeminist resistance to patriarchal definition through witty, impassioned, and detailed close readings.  With their 1990s trilogy No Man’s Land, Gilbert and Gubar extended that feminist canon into the twentieth century, with greater historical range and a more diverse cast of characters. 

Still Mad—another 400-page tome—again takes up a twentieth-century history, centering on North American (largely US) women writers from the 1950s to the present day.  It is organized by discussions of the biographies and selected works of “representative women—poets, novelists, dramatists, singers, journalists, memoirists, theorists—who seemed especially charismatic to us.” With its rapid summaries and selection principle of “charisma,” the survey seems aimed at a general rather than an academic audience. The result is breathless and sometimes jolting, like a hot-air balloon ride in a strong wind. The landscape is fenced into decades, from “Stirrings in the Fifties” to “Recessions/Revivals in the Twenty-First Century.” Minor characters whirl by like distant trees: Phyllis McGinley celebrating the suburbs (1950s), Erica Jong shouting something about zippers (1970s), Camille Paglia being silly about urination (1990s, bless her heart).

More substantial figures—Diane Di Prima, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Susan Sontag, Alison Bechdel—loom up among them, creating odd juxtapositions. In a section on the 1970s titled “From Marilyn French to Toni Morrison,” French’s once-scandalous novel The Women’s Room (about which I remember only the protagonist smearing ketchup in her underwear to mimic menstrual blood), a howl of white middle-class women’s despair, appears alongside The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s devastating study of how white racism, and the novel’s prepubescent protagonist’s “internalization of white standards of beauty,” destroy Black innocence.

In this and later sections Gilbert and Gubar devote sustained attention to Morrison’s critiques of white feminist racism. But they maintain a distant, reportorial relationship to such critiques. Of Morrison’s ambivalent response to the trial of O. J. Simpson, they write, “Morrison risks polarizing her readers to drive home her belief that Black rights cannot be subordinated to women’s rights.” Is that “belief” peculiar to Morrison? Gilbert and Gubar never quite acknowledge that the distance from second-wave feminism sometimes claimed by Morrison (and, elsewhere in the study, by figures such Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Nina Simone) poses a challenge to their insistence that “taken together, [these figures] subvert the standard caricature of the women’s movement as white, middle-class, and elitist.” They prefer to end sections on notes of optimistic concession: “All of [Morrison’s] work suggests that the historical circumstances of Black women have produced problems notably different from those faced by white women and that feminism must become suppler.” Missing, here and elsewhere, is an acknowledgment that white women’s racial privilege is part of “the historical circumstances of Black women,” and that, as today’s generation of activists might phrase it, “suppler” is an odd way to spell “antiracist.”

I worry, in other words, that the balance of Still Mad tilts too much toward the “still” of nostalgia—for the moment of “Awakenings in the Seventies” (the title of section III) when second-wave feminism’s insights were galvanizing and its limitations less apparent. But I am grateful for Gilbert and Gubar’s continued insistence on the importance, beauty, and revolutionary potential of women’s writing, and for the range, breadth, and diversity of this ambitious survey.

Sandra M. Gilbert (photo by Peter Basmajian)

Susan Gubar

It isn’t easy to respond civilly to the strange mess of misinformation and misinterpretation presented as “takes” on our book Still Mad by Jennifer Baumgardner, Jennifer DeVere Brody, and Laura Green.  Although we appreciate close reading of our work, we are disturbed by what seem to be closed-minded misreadings. All three critics do, here and there, summarize aspects of Still Mad, but as in the famous parable of the blind philosophers and the elephant (is the elephant its trunk? its tail? its feet?), no one has much interest in comprehending the whole.

Perhaps these miss “takes” arise from an assertion that Baumgardner and her coauthor Amy Richards summarized in their 2000 book Manifesta: “The presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted.  For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely notice we have it—it's simply in the water.” Having struggled with the presumptions and prejudices of patriarchal culture, from the daddies-know-best of the fifties to the male (and female) backlashes of the eighties and the blaring misogyny of Donald J. Trump and his ferocious base, most women today would not take feminism “for granted.” If feminism is in the water we drink, we do notice it, and we are grateful for it as a thirst-quenching gift. 

To be sure, Baumgardner’s smug statement was issued twenty-one years ago, and perhaps she too did notice sometime during the last decade that feminists of all ethnicities, races, and sexual orientations were on the march again, in protest against the misogyny of a president who declared that when he wanted women, he just “grabbed them by the pussy.” But we are certainly taken aback by her surprisingly vulgar screed, which—elaborating on her coy title “Pen Island (One Word)”—accuses us of “having dick on the brain.” Yes, we discuss penis envy, but we also explore debates about clitoral and vaginal orgasm in the new disciplines of sexology and psychoanalysis.  As scholars of the feminist imagination over the last seven decades, we inevitably explore issues of gender, sexuality, and transsexuality.  

If we are stunned to discover from Baumgardner that we have “dick on the brain,” it is disturbing to learn, from Jennifer DeVere Brody, that we “glibly” quip, “Those who cannot march, write.” This last sentence was not a joke about our inability to attend the 2017 Women’s March but rather an acknowledgment of serious physical disabilities. Those problems motivated us to support the resurgence of feminism in the twenty-first century by writing about its expanding contours while also seeking to understand why a competent and seasoned female candidate had been defeated by a corrupt huckster.

Still Mad is a history of the enormous impact North American women writers had on the evolution of feminism from the 1950s to the 2020s. Poets, novelists, songwriters, polemicists, memoirists, theorists, and dramatists provided the women’s movement with words, images, and ideas that helped analyze and combat patriarchy. We see our writers as inspired by “the feminist imagination” because they were envisioning what had never been: societies and cultures based on equality between the sexes. For this reason, too, we emphasize dystopian and utopian fantasies in which women writers lay bare the horrific nature of misogynistic structures or picture egalitarian states that might be brought into being.

To narrate that history, Still Mad studies the creative works of figures from Sylvia Plath, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Hong Kingston to Toni Morrison, Eve Sedgwick, Alison Bechdel, and Claudia Rankine while also dissecting the conflicting dynamics that shaped literary careers both on and off the page. For, confronting the contradictions and tensions that pressured them, creative women addressed the paradoxes all women faced (and most still face) in their efforts to go beyond the either/or binaries of domesticity and ambition, family and profession, partnership and career, child-rearing and paid work. That at every step of the way feminists were met by backlashes often spearheaded by white women led us to trace a second history, one that explains why Trump was a speaker at the funeral of that infamous antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly.

Although Baumgardner appears to believe that we primarily discuss “broadsides” or “pamphlets” in Still Mad, we turn our attention in the book to major poetry cycles, prize-winning novels, and celebrated theories. We also do not “lump together” Helen Gurley Brown and Gloria Steinem, but rather contrast the former’s fun-loving, marketable form of liberation with the latter’s antiracist and antihomophobic activism. Nina Simone did not use the word “bipolar” to define herself in the ’60s, so we honored that decision. Nor did we meet, as Baumgardner claims, “as graduate students at Indiana University.” (We were newly hired faculty members, who had already earned PhDs and done some publishing.)  Finally, about Baumgardner’s last incoherent  sentences, we never did and never would associate lesbianism or bisexuality with mental illness, as she seems to do.

Jennifer DeVere Brody argues that we forget “other(ed) aspects” of the “madwoman.” However, one of the contentions of Still Mad is that, despite the often-held view that gender was the only signifier of difference in literary women’s works from the ’50s and ’60s, female authors were not only meditating on gender (even before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique) but also foregrounding race and class. We demonstrate that in the ’50s and ’60s such figures as Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Nina Simone explored the complex pressures that would be defined as “intersectionality” in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Brody says we “leave much of the critique of racism to others,” and we hasten to agree. We are, after all, literary critics happy to praise writers from Gloria Anzaldúa to N. K. Jemisin for their pioneering analyses of the injurious structures imposed by race, class, ethnicity, and gender identifications, as well as sexual orientation. Whereas Brody wants a “succinct polemic,” we sought to produce a capacious intellectual, social, political, and aesthetic history. Still, we are mystified by her enigmatic claim that we fail to discuss “marriage as an inherently racist and classist institution that protects property rights over civil rights, an omission that is symptomatic of how [we] treat intersectional issues throughout the text.” Marriage as an inherently racist and classist institution? Even same sex marriages?  Even marriages between people of color?  This is a skull-cracking riddle!

In the last response, Laura Green argues that we “never quite acknowledge that the distance from second-wave feminism” claimed by some women of color poses a challenge to our insistence that “taken together, these figures subvert the standard caricature of the women’s movement as white, middle-class, elitist.” Quite right! We believe that feminists—white and Black, gay and straight, trans and nonbinary—have always critiqued feminism from within and from without, at greater and lesser distances, and that they have thereby stretched it into new shapes to address emerging problems and possibilities. Some of these women, like Susan Sontag, produced major feminist polemics even while denying that they were feminists. Green is right, too, that Still Mad is aimed at a “general rather than an academic audience.”

In fact, in one of the later sections of our book we point to the danger of feminism getting trapped in an ivory closet, as it did in the ’90s, when a schism emerged between poststructuralist thinkers inside the academy and activist feminists outside it. Yes, we want Still Mad to appeal to readers both inside and outside the academy, including people old enough to remember the origins of the second wave and people young enough to want to learn about those origins. That the foremost scholarly feminist journal in America would sponsor the derogatory comments we have addressed here troubles us. In the ’70s, feminists bent on building coalitions decried what was called “trashing.” An analysis of its predominance? It was easier to attack one another than to face the forces that continue to keep all of us down.