Honoring Marianne Whelchel, Professor of Literature and Women's Studies, On the Occasion of her Retirement from the Faculty of Antioch College
Since I came here in 1994 Marianne has been my mentor, my closest colleague, my friend. I've grown to rely on her for everything that one relies on close colleagues for: she lends me books and articles, she gives me advice on my syllabi, she encourages me to present my work at conferences, she edits my unwieldy drafts and always offers impeccably correct and sensible guidance to me as a writer. She listens patiently to my complaints about the College (obviously, a really important attribute in a colleague). She also forces me to buy clothes--my limited wardrobe repertoire would be even more limited if Marianne didn't take me shopping and make me buy shirts that aren't black once in awhile. (A skilled photographer, she's very sensitive to color). She tells me when I need a haircut. She always calls and checks up on me when I'm sick. She shuttles me back and forth to the airport. She has fed me innumerable times. I would have to say that I consider her one of the most completely honest people I've ever met, and I know she will give me her unvarnished opinion about any subject. She lacks ego almost to a fault, and is incredibly kind, immeasurably generous, supremely modest about her own learning and accomplishments.
Since 1977 Marianne has been the backbone of the Literature Department. She has inspired hundreds, perhaps thousands of Antioch students over the years. Her knowledge of the subjects she teaches--U.S. Literature, African-American Literature, Women's Literature, Contemporary U.S. Poetry--is amazingly wide-ranging. One of her strongest assets as a teacher is her excitement for these subjects; her love for all forms of poetry in particular has remained intense and she brings a freshness and sense of discovery towards the texts she teaches which is rare at any stage of a career. Open-minded, always receptive to new ideas, she loves to look at literature in new ways. And she is an incredibly supportive and caring professor who really listens to, and goes out of her way for, her students.
Knowing her both as a person and as a colleague makes it harder for me to think about how to sum up in a nutshell the importance of her Antioch career for the purposes of this occasion. But I decided to begin on a personal note because thinking about Marianne's retirement lead me to think about the nature of female friendships, especially friendships that evolve from mutual work and mutual goals and commitments, or what could be called 'professional friendships.' I became interested in thinking about the uniqueness of these kinds of relationships, the high degree of supportiveness and collaboration, the slipperyness between the personal and the professional which characterizes them (do male colleagues actively encourage each other? shop together? bring over soup when one of them has the flu? rely on each other for advice on fashion as much as for advice on where to send an article for publication?). The uniqueness of women's professional friendships seems appropriate to highlight when thinking about the career of a long-time feminist activist and scholar like Marianne.
Since the entrance of women into the professions is a very recent historical phenomenon, only about 100 years old, we should take a minute to reflect on how recent female professional friendships are as well (this also applies to male-female professional relations). Even here at Antioch, an institution which has long sought to pioneer gender equality, it has only been in the past decade that a rough parity has been reached in terms of number of female and male faculty; that's only one benchmark, but it remains a useful one. The academic discipline of literature reached a 50-50 ratio in my generation of graduate students, but of course representation of women in the sciences and in fields like math, philosophy, economics and political science lags far behind. But fortunately, the once-shocking view that males and females can and should work together harmoniously in professional settings is now for the most part taken for granted, and collegial friendships between women are expected rather than an occasion for surprise.
Probably the first writer to comment on the comraderie and esprit de corps (I use these words deliberately) of female professional friendships was Virginia Woolf, who, in a famous excerpt from A Room of One's Own, which some of you probably remember, recalls reading a novel by a young women writer who describes a couple of women named Chloe and Olivia who work together in a laboratory and become friends. Woolf comes across the phrase, “Chloe liked Olivia.” Thinking about the implications of this simple sentence gives Woolf pause: “Chloe liked Olivia,” I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature...” Woolf goes on to emphasize the fact that until the nineteenth century women were almost entirely represented vis a vis their relations to men; she points to the absence, in the tradition of European letters, of female friendship and colleagueship: “All these relationships between women, I thought, I rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unrecorded.” She then calls for the writers of the future to take up the multitude of women's relations to each other, including the new (in the 1920's when she is writing) arena of professional relations, as well as other largely unexplored areas of female life experience: “All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded.”
Woolf's call, interpreted broadly, usefully sums up the agenda of progressive literary critics and historians for the past thirty years. This agenda encompasses both the lives of women as a category, gay people, and the lives of all those people who have historically been perceived to exist on the fringes of Europe or seen as marginal to European high culture. In literary studies this has meant a shift from equating English-as-an-academic discipline with English as literature from Great Britain, to studying Literature in English, with its accompanying commitment to expanding the traditional canon of literary studies to include works by writers from multiple traditions and from all over the world.
Marianne has been at the forefront of this movement. She has continually struggled to advance progressive agendas within the discipline of literature, placing African American literary traditions and the literature of Jews, Hispanics, Asians, and South Asians front and center of the way American literature is studied at Antioch. Due to her efforts, the Literature Department at Antioch College defined itself as Literature in English, with an actively multicultural mandate, years before most other literature programs.
And the recording of previously overlooked lives and experiences is of course one of the major motivating forces behind the young “interdiscipline”of Women's and Gender Studies. I want to take this opportunity to remind us of the many years of hard work that went into the creation of academic spaces for the study of women's texts and women's lives. I want to commemorate the stubbornness, the doggedness, the pushiness, which were unfortunately necessary to establish this new academic field—the struggles which were necessary to establish Women's Studies even at progressive institutions such as our own. The struggles which were necessary to maintain the field whose contributions and accomplishments we now largely take for granted.
Specifically, I want to take this moment to honor Marianne Whelchel's major part in this struggle, her twenty-seven years of work to import gendered perspectives across Antioch's curriculum; her long-standing commitment to the institutionalization of feminism; her fight to create a high-quality Women's Studies major at Antioch; her fight to keep it going despite all of the obstacles.
Marianne's teaching has inspired generations of students to think differently about the what the relations of men and women can be, and what the possibilities for women can look like. Her long career in both Women's Studies and Literature has centered around the passing on of life stories which have been left out of standard historical and literary-historical accounts. Many of her classes take their inspiration from the arena of women's literature. She has developed innovative ways to teach non-traditional forms of literature and history, including oral narratives and testimonial literature; she has designed new kinds of courses around 'unofficial' archival documents such as letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and oral testimonies. Marianne has organized and participated in (and stimulated her students to participate in) numerous women's history and memoir projects, projects which found methods of listening to voices which would otherwise have remained unheard and unrecorded.
Marianne was instrumental in founding Antioch's excellent and acclaimed Women's Studies abroad program in Europe. So I also want us to acknowledge her foresight in conceptualizing Women's Studies in international terms, her work to incorporate analyses which theorize the effects of class, race, and nation; to see what feminism looks like from the perspective of women in the so-called third world.
Marianne has been much more than a colleague. So most of all, I want to thank Marianne for helping to make my life and career as a woman who studies literature professionally not only possible but unremarkable, something that can go without saying. I want to thank her for fighting to keep the doors open for female academics across the disciplines, for making our presence less unusual, less remarkable. I can't say this strongly enough: All of the women in this room who are in the 20's, 30's, and 40's owe the feminists of Marianne's generation a tremendous debt. And lastly, I want to thank her for promoting and sustaining a vision of gender equality which (on my good days) I believe we are ever closer to attaining. And that's a real victory for humanity.