Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
(Dr. Perry is Professor of Literature and Women's Studies in the Department of Humanities. Naomi F. Chase, assistant director of the News Office interviewed her recently on the evolution of women's studies at MIT. Professor Perry will also discuss the subject, and coming signs of changes in the field at the Women's Forum on Monday, Nov. 4, at noon in Killian Hall.) NFC: A recent study of smoking habits shows young black women smoking less than young white women, apparently because they are less concerned about their weight. What would Women's Studies have to say about that? RP: It would say you can't generalize across race any more than you can generalize across class. It might show that the issue of weight is more salient to women's body image in white culture, and a different kind of body type is considered sexy and womanly in black culture. Women's Studies have become much more complicated with the recognition that gender interacts with historical period, nationality, ethnicity and class in different ways in different contexts. The driving motive in Women's Studies is to make clear what the experiences, perceptions and contributions of women have been, always paying attention to historical periods, national boundaries, ethnicities. NFC: So women's feelings about their bodies can be different at different periods in history or in different cultures. RP: Yes. Or their feelings about other issues. Here's another important example. What may have been liberation for white middle class women in the mid-70s, i.e. getting out of their houses and going to work, was not necessarily liberation for black women who have usually worked outside the home and have usually been responsible for taking care of their families, as well. For some black women, liberation may well be the luxury of staying home and raising their children peacefully, rather than having to always balance working, household duties, childrearing, self-education, etcetera .The definition of what is liberation is always related to context. Here's another example. Several years ago I was teaching an Introduction to Women's Studies class to a small group of seniors; a couple of black women and four white women. At a certain point in a discussion of black and white identity formation, we got onto mother-daughter relationships. The black women in this class and one of the white women adored their mothers. The other white women were quite ambivalent. The white woman who adored her mother came from an all-female household. Her mother had several daughters by different men but she had never married, and was the sole support of her family. That was true of the black women as well. We theorized, on the basis of what the ambivalent students were saying, that their ambivalence was due to the message they got from their mothers about accommodating to male domination within a family setting. The women whose mothers did not have to accommodate to male authority were the ones who unambivalently respected their mothers. They understood that their mothers worked very hard to put bread on the table and to raise them and they respected and admired them. Those women who watched their mothers accommodating to male power felt ambivalent about their mothers' lessons about what it meant to be an adult woman. We did a totally unstatistical, methodologically imperfect study, asking everybody we knew how they felt about their mothers. It seemed to corroborate our conclusions that family configurations in black families set a different kind of standard when the maternal head of household who is the breadwinner is not in a subordinate relation to a particular man. The messages she gives her daughter are not ambivalent about what it means to be in the world as an adult woman. However, I'm hesitant to generalize those ethnic differences beyond these people in my classroom. NFC: How much can you generalize about anorexia from the study on smoking and women's bodies, especially if you don't regard anorexia as only a contemporary phenomenon. RP: But it's also not a cross-cultural phenomenon. NFC: It seems to exist in cultures that are heavily patriarchal where women have a difficult time finding a place for themselves. For instance, Saint Catherine of Sienna, who was anorectic, starved herself to death at the age of 33 in 14th century Italy. RP: When I was in China in '87, I found that people did not understand eating disorders. They were curious about sexual practices in the US, because Chinese culture is much more straight-laced about such things. But eating disorders! They couldn't believe such a thing existed anywhere in the world. It's not a current problem in China or a historical one, I think. NFC: Why is Women's Studies important for MIT students? RP: The special focus of Women's Studies at MIT has got to be the relation of gender to the practice and theory of science and engineering. When I started this program in 1982, there was an interest in changing the gender constituency of the undergraduates. NFC: What was the ratio of men to women then? RP: When I first started teaching here in '73, I had two women in a class of 20. It was 10 to one, or less. The Women's Studies program was born at the same time as the administration became interested in increasing the proportion of undergraduate women. And to the extent that Women's Studies made the Institute a more hospitable place for women, it was very important. For instance, my classes were used in a film to recruit women students. I felt that it was important to develop MIT as the country's central source of information on gender and mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering. Our library, the Women's Studies Research Room, has a complete collection of monographs on subjects such as women and math, women and technology, women and engineering, women and science, collected systematically by Marlene Manoff in the Humanities Library. With the aid of UROP students, we've also put together bibliographies on women and mathematics, reproductive technologies, gender and science, and of course bibliographies from our conference on women and computers in 1984. NFC: Your next conference is on gender and environment. RP: Yes, for May '92. We're waiting to hear about funding but our premise is the pragmatic recognition that the people most directly affected by the degraded environment and who interact most directly with it are women. The overwhelming majority of human beings are dependent on a woman for maintenance and subsistence, and those women must wrest that maintenance and subsistence from the earth in whatever form they find it. In Africa they're responsible for gathering water and fuel. In coal- mining towns in America they're responsible for keeping the sheets or plates clean as the coal dust filters over everything. It's the grass-roots organizers around environmental issues-not the policy makers, and not the researchers-who have noticed more defective births in their communities, that people are getting lung disease, that the water tastes funny. And it's women who tend to do the organizing around these issues. One of the things we're interested in doing is identifying those specific areas in which women and environment intersect. NFC: And what are they? RP: We want to look at : women's lives in rural and urban environments, the relation of women to institutions, and the place of women in the environmental movements. For example, the motivation energy for many of the conservation movements in America often comes from hunters and fishermen who want to maintain wilderness areas for sport. That's a different kind of group and a different kind of emphasis than Save The Whales. Another connection is the gendering of nature itself. There are some eco-feminists who draw parallels between the domination of women and the domination of nature, between the attitudes which appropriate to individuals the resources, including the reproductive resources, either of women or of the natural world. NFC: Kirk Sales makes a similar point in The Discovery of Paradise, his new book about Columbus, describing the European patriarchal attitudes about man's right to dominate nature which became American attitudes. RP: Right now I am working on the late eighteenth-century period in England, when the notion that common land which was lying fallow and which had been commonly available to people for planting small gardens, grazing cattle, and keeping pigs, could now be appropriated by large land-owners for capitalized production and big-business agriculture. That's when the process of enclosure, which had been going on for centuries, accelerated, culminating in new enclosure acts. A quarter of England's arable land was enclosed in the eighteenth century. Both the land and any animals living on it were commodified for sole use of single individuals. I do believe that some of our American attitudes about the ownership of land and the notion that you can do anything you want to the land you happen to own comes from the attitudes born in that period. NFC: That's Sales' point, that those attitudes were reflected in the development of capitalism. RP: Right. This was the first time there was big money in big agriculture. And so people with enough capital to hire labor and buy equipment took land which had existed for common use for centuries and put it to production. There's a big debate in the historical literature about whether that was progressive and ultimately good or regressive and ultimately bad. It does signal an attitude about owning land and doing whatever you want to it, not being responsible for keeping it fertile or maintaining or passing it on to other generations. It's the short-term, get-what-you-can attitude that was consolidated in the second half of the eighteenth century. NFC: Sales sees that idea of what one can do to nature related to the Western myths of origin where man is born into and thrown out of Paradise into a world of sorrow. He compares that with Indian myths of origin where people emerge from a world of sorrow into Paradise. RP: I think that's a fascinating framework for cultural comparison. NFC: Your field is the eighteenth-century novel. RP: All my work has been about the relation of gender to the production of art, and the period I know most about is eighteenth-century England. My first book was on the early part of the century, and the book that I'm now writing is on the second half. NFC: Particularly as it reflects the restructuring of the family? RP: Yes. The working title for my new book is Novel Relations: A Social History of the Novel and the Family in England, 1750 to 1810. In that period about 1,500 novels were published in England. Very few critics have tried to map that production. The same authors are repeatedly studied: Sterne, Smollett, Fielding, and Richardson. But of these 1,500 novels, maybe 1,000 were written by women. I think nobody has studied the fiction of that period because they weren't at all interested in women authors who were automatically relegated to a Grade B status. Originally I was interested in the ways in which men and women might use the narrative form differently and the different themes or plots or character types that would surface. After reading 40 or 50 novels, I ended up feeling that everybody writing in that period was writing about family relations because the kinship relations were being significantly altered. NFC: What was changing them? RP: For one thing land enclosure, which entails a restructuring of class. This was also the period when England's empire was established, when it took India and Canada, and maintained a standing army for practically the whole second half of the eighteenth century. That's what made agribusiness. A standing army required food, as well as uniforms and transportation. This was the beginning of industrialization, mechanized spinning and weaving, when the first fortunes were being made in manufacturing. Class and gender roles were being significantly restructured and so was the psychological meaning of family. NFC: From what to what? RP: Take the attitudes towards women's sexuality and maternity. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, women were still considered sexual creatures, lusty, and interested, as they had been in the Renaissance and earlier. By the end of the eighteenth century what we think of as Victorian attitudes were already in place, and the mark of a good woman was to be asexual and not interested in physical relationships. And similarly, although motherhood obviously is eternal-I mean it is the oldest profession-the end of the eighteenth century saw similar Victorian attitudes about motherhood-maternal self-sacrifice, endless patience, kindness, all that stuff that modern women often feel burdened with. So the notion of an ideal mother appears concurrently with the desexualization of women. My most recent article is about the reversal of those attitudes and their interrelationship. That's saying it much too simply and reductively, but it's clear in reading the literature of the period that those were the terms of debate. NFC: Did the work of your parents influence your work? Your father was an anthropologist. RP: Yes, so this kind of vocabulary and way of thinking cross-culturally feels quite natural. NFC: And your mother? RP: My mother is a biologist who turned psychologist. My parents had a standing argument all during my growing-up years about nature-nurture. My mother believed that most things were inborn and my father believed that everything was environment. And I guess I am uncomfortable with either view when it denies or dismisses the other.