'Life stories retain their power when theories fade," says acclaimed feminist literary critic, Boston-born Elaine Showalter. When she reached 50 - "a turning-point for most women" - she decided to put a book together celebrating not just the theories, but also the lives of feminists she admired.
Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Picador, £15.99) is the result, a fascinating account, not only of the risky ideas of feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Mead to Simone de Beauvoir and Hillary Clinton, but also of their brave and often blighted personal lives. Many were fearless travellers, accomplished intellectuals, and admirably unconventional in their living habits, but many often had bad luck and/or bad judgement.
Wollstonecraft, for example, author of the groundbreaking Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, ended up dying in childbirth from puerperal fever, which she contracted because the surgeon had not disinfected his hands. Eleanor Marx, the gifted daughter of Karl, fell in love with Edward Aveling, "the most disliked militant atheist, socialist radical, and Don Juan in London", a man of scant physical charms "who did not pay his debts". The unmarried couple set themselves up in London as "the model of a modern Marxist marriage", with Eleanor working in socialist labour activities and writing about the emancipation of women. In reality, Eleanor supported and nursed Aveling, did all the housework in the couple's home, and turned a blind eye to his many affairs. When he secretly married another woman, she took poison.
"These were women of high ideals, but it has always been difficult for brilliant women, a lot of them were attracted to disastrous men," says Showalter tolerantly. "They were willing to take risks though, which makes them more interesting than Mother Teresa types who stood aloof, or Virginia Woolf types who married a safe man rather than live the epic life. To live the fullest life you can have as a woman - in terms of love, sex, work and having children - is not easy, even today. Heroic men haven't had such wonderful lives either - larger than life people are often linked with tragedy. I wanted to make it clear in the book that feminist icons were not perfect, stern goddesses."
With the exception of Eleanor Marx, Showalter doesn't have much time for suicides, many of whom populate the female hall of fame: "You'll notice Sylvia Plath doesn't feature in my book, nor Anne Sexton, nor Marilyn Monroe," she says firmly. "I'm not someone who goes for martyrs. I wouldn't want to romanticise suicide. I more admire the women who deal with adversity. I would not have included Princess Di, for example, if her death had been a suicide."
The one suicide she does feel is deserving of admiration was that of American writer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman at 65, who had lost her husband and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Gilman argued that women's liberation is the prerequisite for the liberation of all human kind, locating the source of women's oppression as the domestic household. Gilman's best-known work is 'The Yellow Wallpaper', a short story written in 1890 about the breakdown of a woman, who, suffering from post-natal depression, is "treated" by being shut up in her room, unable to write or work.
Showalter's approach is not detached and scholarly enough for some of her critics, in that the book includes her own experiences in the exciting, revolutionary feminist world of the 1970s. "The book is partly a statement of my experience as a representative of my generation," says Showalter. "Before us, the intellectual feminist tradition had not been in the universities."
When Showalter was researching her PhD on Victorian women writers in 1965, feminist criticism did not exist. By 1970, after spending the consciousness-raising summer of 1968 in Paris and writing for a journal called Radical Feminism, Showalter was on the crest of the new wave. An assistant professor at Douglass College, the women's college at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Showalter was lecturing on women writers, inviting guest speakers like Kate Millett, and addressing conferences on "Women and the Literary Curriculum": "The changes start because people do things where they are. Women's Studies was not started at Harvard and Oxford. It was started by women wherever they happened to be working. It's not that I was confident in myself, but I had enormous confidence in the truth of the ideas of feminism. When I met Kate Millett, I didn't need to see her on the cover of Time magazine to know she was charismatic and had so much to say." By 1971, Douglass was featured in the New York Times as the centre of the new Women's Studies initiative. By 1972, there were 17 courses in Women's Studies in the US, two of them at Douglass.
Showalter, author of "six or seven books, I can't remember", is now Professor of English at Princeton. Although women academics don't make up 50 per cent of the teaching staff in the universities, at least the concept of taking on just one token woman has bitten the dust. This trap, which Showalter has defined as "the Dark Lady Syndrome", involves the cultivation of only one, talented but ultimately acquiescent woman academic. "I was so delighted when Princeton offered me the job; I wasn't the token one. They offered one to Sandra Gilbert at the same time," recalls Showalter with a chuckle (with Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert wrote the ground-breaking feminist critical volume, The Madwoman in the Attic; the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, 1979). Showalter still notices, however, "a tendency to give the advantage to only a few women academics at a time, making a limited number of licensed spokespeople, without the space for others to make their mark."
She has observed "changes in the aspirations of women students - they are much more adventurous and pragmatic now". Her own daughter was a foreign policy speechwriter for Clinton before she was 30: "I feel positive about the changes in women's lives. My daughter travelled with Clinton all over the world, including the Middle East, and Dublin and Belfast." And yet: "It has been a revelation to her that she has many of the problems I had when I was a young mother." Showalter says one positive development has been the growing willingness of fathers to get involved with their children: "I was lucky, my husband gave me a lot of wonderful support, but many of my contemporaries were not so fortunate." She refers to her husband, fellow academic English Showalter, as her "co-adventurer".
Showalter has always been controversial - her last book, Hystories, raised the hackles of ME sufferers because she defined ME as an "hysterical disorder" - and her first, seminal book, A Literature of their Own: from Charlotte Brontδ to Doris Lessing (1977), made her some enemies in the sisterhood. She daringly suggested that Virginia Woolf's ideal of a room of one's own could just as well become a tomb if a woman didn't set herself the long-term goal of entering the mainstream literary tradition and competing on an equal level with men. How does this sit with Showalter being one of the first to establish and support the discipline of Women's Studies, which is surely a further ghettoisation? "Women's Studies isn't a tomb, it's a plateau at the moment. Women still want it and are not prepared to give it up," says Showalter thoughtfully, who compares the subject's progress with that of African-American Studies. She feels the latter "has a bolder, more visible leadership. Harvard has invested a lot of money in the area, and its department of African-American Studies is headed by Henry Louis "Skip" Gates. He writes for the New Yorker, makes documentaries with the BBC, and is a really visible international figure. For both subjects, of course, heading for integration is the ultimate goal, but it will take time."
As for the fortunes of women novelists, many of whom were forced to apologise for themselves and assume male pseudonyms in the 19th century, surely there has been a vast improvement? Yes, she believes, but: "Women writers are still not as widely respected or as widely read in either Britain or America. The prevailing culture still devalues things that interest women, such as the family and relationships. Novels about wars, politics or even sport have a greater chance of success. These priorities are ironic, because the people who actually buy the novels and read them are predominantly women."
She notices another irony in that, although certain countries have awarded positions of political power to women - she mentions the names of Mary Robinson, Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto - those same countries "are not necessarily where women have the most freedom".
Tellingly, Showalter stopped writing essays on feminist criticism in 1989: "They had outlived their usefulness ... The stage was being cleared for the next act." Enter the age of celebrity culture, the time when the invention of the self becomes an exercise no longer ideological, but a contrived pose for a camera. The icons of this era are accepting of this inevitable turn of events and are able to turn it to their advantage: Camille Paglia (a "solo shock-trooper of popular culture"), Oprah Winfrey (who "has arguably done more for literary culture than any intellectual of the century"), Princess Di ("who achieved independence at enormous cost"), Hillary Clinton (who is "able to balance the personal and the political"). "The women I admire have come to terms with celebrity culture and its costs. Hilary Clinton had to survive her life being exposed in cruel ways."
The sheer number of women and their achievements which Showalter manages to include in Inventing Herself is impressive, not least the amount of feminists whom she herself has known and worked (as well as clashed) with: Rebecca West, Juliet Mitchell, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Heilbrun, Toril Moi and Germaine Greer. The criteria she uses for deciding who is included as a genuine feminist icon includes "a passionate attitude towards living", and the capacity to live an "autonomous" and "rule-breaking" life. Yet, many of these women chose loveless or faithless relationships; many lost or neglected their children. Divas, dupes, bulimics and hypocrites, they may have done their best "to live the fullest and most meaningful lives in their historical circumstances", but whether one would want to actually emulate them is another story. For me, the most inspiring part of the book is when Showalter recalls herself, aged 29, in the midst of the hurly-burly of anti-Vietnam demonstrations and gay pride marches, managing to finish her PhD and give birth to her son.
Now that's what I call a role model.
Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage is published by Picador at £15.99 in the UK
