PARTISAN REVIEW
215
less poetry then, but they did read more fiction, and take fiction
more seriously. It's hard sometimes to communicate about ideas in
the limited vocabulary currently acceptable in conversation.
People's unwillingness to look up words they don't know has
reached mammoth proportions. Large amounts of time spent with
people who don't know how to do much besides roll ajoint does
inspire me with nostalgic respect for the work ethic (real know–
ledge about how to do things, like fix machines that break, build
walls that stay up, speak Spanish, put in a well, look up something
in a library, design a computer language), but I think that know–
ledge of at least manual skills is beginning to spread. Further,
people coming of age now
tend
to be less hierarchical in their
ranking of blue-collar, white-collar, black-coat work .
But I can't summon up any honest nostalgia for the fifties. In
the fifties when I got pregnant I couldn't get an abortion, had to
do it myself at eighteen and almost bled to death. In the fifties I
was at the mercy of a male culture terrified of sex and telling me I
was either frigid, a nymphomaniac, an earth mother, or stunted
with penis envy, and there were no women's experiences available
to compare with mine. In the fifties nowhere could I find images
of a life I considered good or useful or dignified. Nowhere could I
find a way to apply myself to change the world to one I could live
in with more joy and utility. Nowhere could I find a community
to heal myself to in struggle. Nowhere could I find space in which
affluent white men were not the arbiters of all that was good and
bad. I could not grow anywhere but through the cracks . I was not
for
anyone, my work burped in a void . I learned survival but also
alienation, hostility, craziness, schizophrenia. Not until the slow
opening of the sixties was I able to think I might begin to cease to
be a victim, an internal exile, a madwoman. I might become an
adult. I might be useful, I might speak and be heard, listen and
receive. I might be delivered finally to a sense of a past that led to
me/us (Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, Susan B.
Anthony, Rosa Luxembourg, Lucy Stone, Louise Michel). I might
live in a community, however tacky and bleak at times, however
scattered and faddish. I might conceive of my living and my work–
ing as a project forward in a struggle, however long and difficult
and unlikely, tending toward a more humane society. Of course
