Invisible man and invisible women: The sex/race analogy of the 1970s

Women's History Review

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 31-53

  Hogeland, Lisa Maria ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27344457809     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612029600200106     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. I want to thank Alison Rieke, Stan Corkin, and Bonnie Dow for reading early drafts of this essay, and Susan Freeman for research assistance
2. Jane Gallop (1992) Around 1981: academic feminist literary theory, p. 93 (New York: Routledge)
3. Susan Koppelman Cornillon, (Ed.) (1972) Images of Women in Fiction: feminist perspectives (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Popular Press)
4. Gallop, Around 1981, p. 91
5. Cheri Register (1975) American feminist literary criticism: a bibliographic introduction, in Josephine Donovan (Ed.) Feminist Literary Criticism: explorations in theory, p. 23 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky)
6. bell hooks (1982) Ain't I a Woman?: black women and feminism (Boston: South End Press)
7. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott & Barbara Smith (Eds) (1982) All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: black women's studies (Old Westbury: Feminist Press)
8. I want to make it clear here that I am expanding and refining Gallop's argument; her three chapters on feminist literary criticism and theory in the 1970s in Around 1981 are the very best readings of this material I have encountered. For an important critique of Gallop's reading of Conjuring in Around 1981, see Ann duCille (1994) The occult of true black womanhood: critical demeanor and black feminist studies, Signs 19, pp. 591-629
9. duCille specifically critiques the gesture of the I-used-to-be-a-racist version of a "critical apologia" (pp. 612-617); see below for a discussion of the sex/race analogy in But Some of Us Are Brave
10. A sampling of the metaphors of politicized invisibility includes these: 'Consciousness-raising' (1973) in Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine & Anita Rapone (Eds) Radical Feminism, pp. 280-281 (New York: Quadrangle), which asks, "Do you ever feel invisible?" under the topic of sex and sex-roles
11. Dale Spender (1982) Invisible Women: the schooling scandal (London: Writers and Readers)
12. Robin Morgan (Ed.) (1970) Sisterhood is Powerful (New York: Vintage) which has a section subtitled 'Invisible women: psychological and sexual repression'
13. Alicia Suskin Ostriker (1986) Stealing the Language: the emergence of women's poetry in America, p. 65 (Boston: Beacon) which cites Joyce Carol Oates's collection, Invisible Woman, and Robin Morgan's poem, 'The invisible woman', as specific examples of women poets using "the figure of invisibility as a feminine attribute."
14. Florynce Kennedy (1970) Institutionalized oppression vs the female, in Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful, pp. 500-501. Kennedy argues that she was refused admission to law school, "not because I was black, but because I was a woman", and suggests that black women may have the leverage of race to redress discrimination by sex: "I leaned on the ethnic angle, saying that some of my more cynical friends thought I was being discriminated against because I was a Negro ... . Law-school admissions opened the door just wide enough for me, but not for my friend Pat Jones, who was a Barnard graduate, with a slightly higher law aptitude level and slightly lower undergraduate average, but white."
15. Lisa M. Walker (1993) How to recognize a lesbian: the cultural politics of looking like what you are, Signs 19, p. 878
16. Introduction, in Koppelman Cornillon (Ed.) Images of Women in Fiction, pp. ix-xiii
17. Alice Echols (1989) Daring to be BAD: radical feminism in America, 1967-1975, p. 37 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
18. John D'Emilio & Estelle B. Freedman (1988) Intimate Matters: a history of sexuality in America, p. 311 (New York: Harper)
19. Echols, Daring to be BAD, pp. 122-124
20. Marge Piercy (1970) The Grand Coolie Damn, in Morgan (Ed.) Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 492
21. Naomi Weisstein (1970 reprint edition) 'Kinder, Kuche, Kirche' as scientific law: psychology constructs the female, in Morgan (Ed.) Sisterhood is Powerful, pp. 228-245, exemplifies the importance of the analogy to a more general audience in its 1969 publication in Psychology Today under the title, 'Woman as nigger'
22. Weisstein's essay attacks the sex-based assumptions of clinical psychology, but only briefly draws the analogy at the end, when she compares the list of appropriate female traits to "a typical minority group stereotype of inferiority" (p. 244 in Morgan); the Psychology Today version of the essay inserts the phrase 'woman as nigger' at this point
23. Piercy, The Grand Coolie Damn, pp. 482, 489
24. See Shulamith Firestone (1970) The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 37-42 (New York: Morrow), for a different strategy; where Piercy invites politicos into sisterhood, Firestone attacks and tries to shame them into sisterhood
25. Redstockings (1970) Restockings's Manifesto, in Morgan (Ed.) Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 600
26. Echols, Daring to be BAD, p. 145. Echols, p. 153, rightly points out the limitations of Restockings's "pro-woman line" and of consciousness-raising: both rest on assumptions of the universality of women's experience, thus ignoring differences of race and class, among others
27. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 122, emphasis original
28. For a later and quite differently nuanced version of 'whiteness = maleness', see Marilyn Frye (1983) On being white: thinking toward an understanding of race and race supremacy, in her book The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory, pp. 125, 119 (Freedom: Crossing Press), where she suggests that white women's "radical feminism is treacherous to the white race as presently constructed and instituted in this country"; note as well her reference to Invisible Man as "a book of considerable value to feminists" in this essay
29. Cheryl Clarke (1981, 1983) Lesbianism: an act of resistance, in Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua (Eds) This Bridge Called My Back: writings by radical women of color, pp. 128-137 (2nd edn, New York: Kitchen Table) makes this point; see below
30. Todd M. Lieber (1972) Ralph Ellison and the metaphor of invisibility in black literary tradition, American Quarterly, 24, p. 86
31. Ralph Ellison (1972 reprint edition) Invisible Man, pp. 4-5 (New York: Random House; first published 1952, New York: Random House)
32. I want to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for Women's History Review for a provocative suggestion that the cruelty of scopophilia, of women's hypervisibility as feminist film scholars theorized it in the 1970s (see, for example, Laura Mulvey [1975] Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 16), cross-cuts my examples of invisibility
33. Ellen Morgan (1978) Humanbecoming: form and focus in the neo-feminist novel, in Cheryl L. Brown & Karen Olson (Eds) Feminist Criticism: essays on theory, poetry and prose, p. 276 (Metuchen: Scarecrow)
34. That feminist fiction required defending again the charge of 'propaganda' is amply demonstrated by the book reviews of the period; see, for example, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (1973) Novels with anxious moments (review of Surfacing by Margaret Atwood), New York Times, March 7, p. 41, where he characterizes Surfacing as "mere anti-masculine propaganda"
35. and Anatole Broyard (1978) Two Heroines (review of Rachel, the Rabbi's Wife, by Sylvia Tennenbaum and The High Cost of Living by Marge Piercy), New York Times Book Review, January 22, p. 14, where he suggests it isn't "fair for authors to push them [male characters in novels] around or malign them just to make a point or put across a message"
36. For a fuller account of reviews of feminist fiction in the decade, see Lisa Maria Hogeland (1994) 'Men can't be that bad': realism and fenminist fiction in the 1970s, American Literary History, 6, pp. 287-305
37. Register, 'American feminist literary criticism', p. 23
38. Realist novels of the decade with important references to invisibility and to Invisible Man include Dorothy Bryant (1972) Ella Price's Journal (Philadelphia: Lippincott), which links invisibility with both aging and with freedom
39. Joyce Carol Oates (1973) Do With Me What You Will (New York: Vanguard), which links visibility with marriage
40. Margaret Atwood (1976) Lady Oracle (New York: Simon & Schuster), similar to Bryant in linking invisibility to freedom
41. and Marilyn French (1977) The Women's Room (New York: Summit), especially its opening scenes
42. James Tiptree, Jr [Alice Sheldon] (1977 reprint) The women men don't see, in Pamela Sargent (Ed.) The New Women of Wonder, pp. 176-217 (New York: Vintage)
43. Joanna Russ (1975) The Female Man (New York: Bantam)
44. Sarah Lefanu (1989) Feminism and Science Fiction, p. 9 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
45. See Ursula L. Le Guin (1979 reprint) American SF and the Other, in Susan Wood (Ed.) The Language of the Night, pp. 97-99 (New York: Putnam); Le Guin qualifies this assumption that aliens represent "the sexual Alien, and the social Alien, and the cultural Alien, and finally the racial Alien", suggesting that it is more potentially than actually true; most SF has been, from a political perspective, "brainless regressivism"
46. See also Joanna Russ (1973) Images of women in science fiction, in Koppelman Cornillon (Ed.) Images of Women in Fiction, p. 91, for a similar argument, which concludes, "There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women"
47. Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction, p. 7
48. For a discussion of the effect of the Tiptree pseudonym, see Ursula K. Le Guin (1979 reprint) Introduction to Star Songs of an Old Primate by Jane Tiptree, Jr, in Wood, The Language of the Night, p. 182: Tiptree withdrew 'The women men don't see' from Nebula Award consideration in 1974 because of the "false pretenses" involved in "the evidence it gave that a man could write with full sympathy about women"
49. Tiptree, 'The women men don't see', p. 191
50. Marleen S. Barr (1992) Feminist Fabulation: space/postmodern fiction, pp. 40-41 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press) argues that readers ought to see a relationship between 'The women men don't see' and Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction
51. while Barr's is a provocative recasting of literary history (and itself a fabulation of that history, given that Hurston's stories remained uncollected and out of print until Alice Walker published the Hurston Reader in 1979 and Spunk: the selected stories appeared in 1985), her argument that "Ruth and Althea use women's invisibility to demand women's visibility" can also serve to underline the importance of reading Tiptree's text in relation to Ellison's
52. See also Barr (1993 reprint) Science fiction's invisible female men: Joanna Russ's 'When it changed' and James Tiptree's 'The women men don't see' in her Lost in Space: probing feminist science fiction and beyond, pp. 59-66 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press; first published 1985, Restant, 11, pp. 433-437), which takes its epigraph from Invisible Man, but does not develop the comparison
53. Ellison, Invisible Man, pp. 5-7
54. Russ, The Female Man, p. 181
55. Register, 'American feminist literary criticism', p. 18 identifies "augment[ing] consciousness-raising" as one of five "functions" that "literature must perform" in order "[t]o earn feminist approval"
56. Rosalind Coward (1985 reprint) This novel changes lives: are women's novels feminist novels? in Elaine Showalter (Ed.) The New Feminist Criticism, p. 231 (New York: Pantheon, first published 1980, Feminist Review, 5) creates a category of ambiguously feminist novels for which "consciousness-raising ... sometimes provides the structure" (p. 231)
57. Rita Felski (1989) Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: feminist literature and social change, p. 167 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) describes fiction's use of consciousness-raising in developing "an oppositional women's culture" (p. 167)
58. see Hogeland, 'Men can't be that bad', pp. 298-300, for a discussion of the limitations of the consciousness-raising novel
59. Carolyn W. Sylvander (1975) Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and female stereotypes, Negro American Literature Forum, 9, pp. 77-79
60. Alice Walker (1983 reprint) In search of our mothers' gardens, in her In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: womanist prose, pp. 231-243 (New York: Harcourt; first published in 1974 in Ms Magazine)
61. Mary Rohrberger (1989 reprint) 'Ball the Jack': surreality, sexuality, and the role of women in Invisible Man, in Susan Resneck & Pancho Savery (Eds) Approaches to Teaching Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, p. 130 (New York: Modern Language Association)
62. See also Yvonne Fonteneau (1990) Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: a critical reevaluation, World Literature Today, 64, pp. 408-412 for her discussion about women in Invisible Man and in critical accounts of the novel
63. Carolyn Heilbrun & Catharine Stimpson (1975) Theories of feminist criticism: a dialogue, in Donovan (Ed.) Feminist Literary Criticism, p. 72
64. Jo Freeman (1975) The Politics of Women's Liberation, p. 28 (New York: Longman)
65. Ellen Pence (1982) Racism - a white issue, in Hull et al (Eds) But Some of Us Are Brave, p. 46
66. Tia Cross, Freada Klein, Barbara Smith & Beverly Smith (1982) Face-To-Face, Day-To-Day - racism CR, in Hull et al (Eds) But Some of Us Are Brave, pp. 52-56
67. Chrystos (1981, 1983) He saw, in Moraga & Anzaldua (Eds) This Bridge Called My Back, pp. 18-19
68. Introduction, in Moraga & Anzaldua (Eds) This Bridge Called My Back, p. xxiv
69. Mitsuye Yamada (1981, 1983) Invisibility is an unnatural disaster: reflections of an Asian American woman, in Moraga & Anzaldua (Eds) This Bridge Called My Back, pp. 36-37
70. Cheryl Clarke (1981, 1983) Lesbianism: an act of resistance, in Moraga & Anzaldua (Eds) This Bridge Called My Back, pp. 130-131
71. Clarke also cites Firestone's analysis of racism from The Dialectic of Sex in an approving, if qualified, way, pp. 135-136
72. Ed Cohen (1991) Who are 'We'?: gay 'identity' as political (e)motion (a theoretical rumination), in Diana Fuss (Ed.) Inside/Out: lesbian theories, gay theories, p. 74 (New York: Routledge)