RESCHEDULED: Tonight's Event with Barbara Smith, Due to Weather

Tonight’s event with Barbara Smith and Susan Arbetter will be RESCHEDULED to Tuesday, March 31^st , same time (7PM, note early start time) and same location (Milne 200, Downtown Campus).

 

Barbara Smith, pioneering activist, will discuss the new book, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (2014). The book, edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks, combines historical documents with new interviews to uncover the deep roots of today’s “identity politics” and serves as an essential primer for practicing solidarity and resistance. Smith, organizer, writer, and publisher, has played key roles in multiple social justice movements. She is Public Service Professor in the School of Social Welfare at UAlbany, and a former member of Albany’s Common Council.

 

Cosponsored by SUNY Press and Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy

 

If you would like to attend the rescheduled event, please RSVP to Rockefeller College Director of Communications, as space is limited:

 

Mary Huntmhunt@albany.edu

 

More about Barbara Smith:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/smith_barbara15.html

 

 

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Women Should Be 52% of Everything-- Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt, who opens our Visiting Writers Series on January 29th is a regular visitor to the NYS Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga.

Her last visit to UAlbany, however, was in 1992. Here are some quotes from her interview on that occasion with the late Tom Smith:

"I would be in favor of equal representation of women in Congress even if women voted identically with men on every issue, because it's a fairness issue. I would be in favor of women being 52% of everything as well, from police officers, to doctors, to college professors and in government too. That's an equality and justice issue."

"I think people are shaped by economic, social and cultural forces. I don't believe in the essentials of virtue, but it is interesting that there is the [widespread] notion that women are more virtuous. This belief that women are more virtuous than men never leads to the obvious question-- why aren't they in charge then?"

More about Pollitt's upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/pollitt_katha15.html

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The Feminine Mystique at 50

 

Gail Collins (who visits Tuesday) wrote the Introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (pictured above), published February 2013.

Here's a bit of the introduction:  "Every writer yearns to create a book that will seize the moment — to perfectly encapsulate the problem of an era before other people even notice the problem exists. Of course, that almost never happens. Mostly we’re happy if we can manage to explain, in an interesting way, something people already know is going on. But Betty Friedan won the gold ring. When “The Feminine Mystique” emerged in 1963, it created a reaction so intense that Friedan could later write another book about the things women said to her about the first one (“It Changed My Life”). If there’s a list of the most important books of the 20th century, “The Feminine Mystique” is on it. It also made one conservative magazine’s exclusive roundup of the “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,” which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed."

More in the New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/the-feminine-mystique-at-50.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

More about Gail Collins' visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/collins_gail13.html

Picture: Betty Friedan (UPI).

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Against the Sci-Fi Boys' Club

Fantasy author Damien Walter writes about why the male culture of science fiction needs to open its doors to women.

He highlights a number of female masters of the genre including Margaret Atwood (who visited the Writers Institute in November 2005), Alice Sheldon, Madeline Ashby and Tricia Sullivan.

"There's a logical fallacy in this club's claims that it welcomes women members, which is rather like the rhetoric of the well-schooled military officer. Of course they want women in the army. It's just, well, a soldier must be physically strong, naturally violent and preferably have a todger so you can pee standing up. Any woman who fulfils those criteria is more than welcome to take the king's shilling!"  More in The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/07/hard-sf-women-writers

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Man and Woman: "Two Halves of One Thought"

Margaret Fuller articulates her view of man and woman in her 1845 feminist manifesto, Woman in the 19th Century.

"By Man I mean both man and woman; these are the two halves of one thought. I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either. I believe that the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other. My highest wish is that this truth should be distinctly and rationally apprehended, and the condition of life and freedom recognized as the same for the daughter and the sons of time; twin exponents of a divine thought." More.

John Matteson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his double biography, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2007), will present his new biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller (2012) today at UAlbany and the State Museum.

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Neither Male Nor Female

"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."

--Margaret Fuller, Woman in the 19th Century (1845)

Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson will visit today to discuss his new biography of radical 19th century thinker Margaret Fuller who died in a shipwreck off Fire Island at the height of her powers at the age of 40.

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In Celebration of "Difficult Women"

Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson comes tomorrow to discuss Margaret Fuller, one of the great "difficult women" of the 19th century.

"Arrogant, condescending and vain, Fuller was (as she knew altogether too well) the best-educated American woman of her time. In The Lives of Margaret Fuller, John Matteson tells us that Ralph Waldo Emerson thought she exhibited 'an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others'; Nathaniel Hawthorne found her, as Matteson puts it, 'exquisitely irritating'; and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed her acidly. Habituated to deference from others, she was unaccustomed to dealing with people on an equal footing, and she bristled when she did not receive the respect she thought was her due."

Read more in Mary Beth Norton's review of Matteson's new book in the New York Times.

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Margaret Fuller: Too Fierce to Fit In

"Fuller was the recipient of her father Timothy's ambition. A brooding thinker who was disappointed that his first child was female, Timothy gave his daughter an incredibly rigorous education that left her with nightmares and robbed her of her childhood. And though she was lauded as a prodigy, she was keenly aware as she matured that her father rued his role in developing her mind. She suffered from spinal curvature and migraines and was plain-featured, nearsighted, an unmarried mother at age 38, in love with an Italian man a decade younger and regularly criticized in private and public for her inability to be deferential in the slightest degree. Fuller was, quite simply, too fierce to fit in."

So writes Laura Skandera Trombley in a review of John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer visits on 3/22.

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Margaret Fuller Has Her Own Facebook Page

Feminist firebrand Margaret Fuller, who drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850, has her own Facebook fan page.

John Matteson, who visits the Institute 3/22, has been featured prominently on the page in recent weeks with the publication of his new biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller.

Also featured are quotes from Fuller's correspondence and her newspaper columns in the New York Daily Tribune, such as this 1845 assessment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (known locally for his evocation of the Normanskill valley in his poem, "Hiawatha"):

"We must confess a coolness toward Mr. Longfellow, in consequence of the exaggerated praises that have been bestowed upon him. When we see a person of moderate powers receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows..."

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Woman of the World

"Margaret Fuller, a woman of great talent and promise, had the misfortune to be born in Massachusetts in 1810, at a time and place in which the characteristics of what historians have termed 'true womanhood' were becoming ever more rigidly defined. Well brought-up women like herself were to be cultured, pious, submissive and genteel. Fuller, by contrast, was assertive and freethinking. She was also — and to some extent, still is — a difficult person to like. "

The Lives of Margaret Fuller by Pulitzer winner John Matteson (who visits on March 22nd) is reviewed by Mary Beth Norton in the New York Times.

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