While writing and literature were my constant companions, speech was still troublesome for me. I had difficulty completing sentences when I spoke. Putting words together and saying them seemed an enormous task. I felt like a stutterer, though I wasn’t. Even in conversation with my husband and friends, this inability to articulate haunted me. I didn’t think I belonged with the academics and scientists I was meeting. My husband came from a prosperous family, and I wondered if my class origins embarrassed him. Yet I was comfortable with writing.
I wanted to go on for my Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley. While I was taking classes to prepare for a “Permission to Proceed” exam, the university’s drive to mold graduate students to think a certain way became more apparent to me. I was having problems connecting with the literature and the interpretations they wanted. I didn’t voice, couldn’t voice, these opinions readily. I began to feel cramped and restricted. How could I be a writer and in academia? It seemed contradictory. One had to conform to the demands of one’s field.
I did well on the written exam and I was about to take the oral exam. I entered a room of men in suits joking and slapping each other on the back. They asked me questions. I was too brief, too quiet, I had too little to say. I felt odd, out of place, somehow hypocritical, and writhed in my discomfort. I didn’t like the questions, and I knew the old boys club was not happy with my answers. I froze again and again, trying to articulate my thoughts. The room seemed small; the men surrounded me. Were they ridiculing my inability to express myself? I wanted to leave. They smiled; I could try again.
A new adviser was assigned to me for my next attempt. He was young and loved poetry. He even turned me on to a couple of books by lesbian poet Eleanor Lerman, who became important to me as I explored my sexuality. Strange—did he sense I was a lesbian then? When we met shortly before the next P.P. exam, he questioned me casually about what my father did for a living. I said he was a maintenance man, then a locksmith, and that we were very poor as I grew up. He puffed on his pipe. Why was he interested in these details about my class origins right before my exam?
The day arrived. I was more nervous the second time. The new committee consisted of two women and two men, in an attempt at equity, but they were all “men in suits.” They pointed to the armchair. I felt like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann in a chair three times my size. Words wouldn’t come. My adviser shook his head regretfully. The chair awarded me a master’s degree in comparative literature as a consolation prize. My academic career crashed.
I fell into a deep depression. I was not smart enough, not good enough for Berkeley. I hadn’t learned the survival skill of giving the professors what they wanted. What did they know of what teemed inside of me? What did they know of my desk in the furnace room and the stormy ocean painting? What did they know of my struggles with language or my desire to make the world a better, more just place? I found a way forward, a way out of my discomfort with speech, by coming to terms with myself.
“I think that wild love between women is so totally inconceivable that to talk or write that in all its dimensions, one almost has to rethink the world, to understand what it is and what happens to us,” wrote feminist Nicole Brossard in The Aerial Letter.
My life was changing rapidly. It was 1976, the women’s movement was at its peak, and my buried sexual feelings for women were coming out in my dreams and my writing. Something was not quite right. I was a professor’s wife, but what about my own life? I hadn’t had children for reasons of my own. The pill made it possible to wait, and I wasn’t sure about my marriage. I had never wanted to get married, only to get away from home. I was translating a book for a Russian professor I knew in New York, but I had no idea what I wanted to do after that. I was taken care of by my husband, so I didn’t have to rush into anything.
I was terribly unsettled in my settled life.
I worked silently—a quilt frame took up most of the room, my books lined one whole wall and my desk faced the window. To relieve the stress of studying, I had taken up quilting. It was soothing. I could think. The small flowered border I freehanded came out well. The woman next door played the Elton John song “Daniel” on the piano. Was that the only song she knew? Did it have some meaning for her? I’d never even met her—there was no sense of community in this suburban Stanford University neighborhood in the hills.
What was I doing there? The daughter of immigrants who lived in a Bronx basement apartment, my father working two jobs and my mother keeping us children fed and clean and attending to the apartment building. I had abandoned my origins. I had skipped over middle class, which my parents worked so hard to become, and gone straight to upper middle class. My husband’s father was an airline executive with a house in Atlanta and two vacation homes.
As I quilted, I thought how meaningless this all was—the isolation, the money, and the status. I was about to come to the biggest turning point in my life. I was twenty-five. I would soon be leaving all of it—the comfort, the quiet, the money, the woman playing “Daniel.” When I had doubts, Auden would help me: “Get up and fold your map of desolation / Act from thought should quickly follow / Or what is thinking for.”
In the sixth year of my marriage, I traveled to the Soviet Union with a group of people who I later learned were socialists. They taught me much about global politics, society, and life. I met my first lesbian lover in that group. She was from San Francisco, and we talked about my “failure” at Berkeley, my life as a wife, the future of capitalism, and many other things. I decided to leave my socially acceptable life for the marginal life of a lesbian. There was no turning back. I left my husband and moved to San Francisco. Becoming an activist, I joined the movement. I was rethinking the world.
Yes, it was all about power and class—those in control decided who would get the degrees, the money, and the privileges. As I learned to express my ideas, I found that people wanted to hear them. This encouraged me to articulate my thoughts. I joined with activists who had dreams of a better world and wanted to transform this one. Even the way I was beginning to think about history, in class terms, was empowering.
The act of working to change the world we lived in, my world, also forced me to use speech. I used language for social change. I, who hadn’t been able to complete a sentence, was speaking before large groups. I learned how to make long speeches, give classes, express ideas clearly, concisely, and give others space to talk as well. I became a leader. I even ran for mayor as a socialist. I had unwittingly become comfortable in English. It wasn’t magic, it was self-confidence. I was valued as an equaclass="underline" that is the story of my empowerment. My life as a woman activist gave me the gift of speech!
My written language was also cultivated by the political work I did. I wrote journalistic and publicity pieces, I even translated documents from Russian and Serbo-Croatian for Pathfinder Press and other publishing projects. Finding like-minded people to share the delights of translation to cull an important text was what I had wanted for so long. I felt valued and I was making a contribution to the world.
I was suddenly completely myself. I was a lesbian, a writer, an immigrant’s daughter, an activist. I was respected for who I was. I had blossomed, and speech did not fail me any longer. I loved the challenges of language, of words, of speech.
“Integration with one’s context, as distinct from adaptation, is a distinctively human activity. Integration results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and to transform that reality,” wrote Paolo Freire.