Amy Richlin (University of California, Los Angeles)
I left Yale in the spring of 1977 with an incomplete dissertation to take up a job that turned out to be temporary. Five years as a VAP in a hostile job market changed my mind about who I was. Women who had emerged from grad school with the first burst of Second Wave feminism in the early 1970s had felt this even more severely and founded the WCC to look for strength in unity. My experience politicized me – made me able to see the point of the WCC. As a VAP I hung back from active involvement, but after my first tenure-track job began (fall 1982), radiant with new security, I gave a paper on the 1982 WCC panel, crashed the board meeting, and plunged into its work. What I’m proudest of are the issues of the WCC Newsletter I edited from 1986 through 1990.
Two in particular, the “Is Classics Dead?” issue of spring 1988 and the “Survival” issue of fall 1988, speak directly to the present moment in our field. The first arose in response to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, the war cry of the all-dead-white-men, zero-sum curriculum. I sent out a questionnaire; respondents included Allan Bloom himself, along with conservative scholars like William Calder. Asked about the high attrition rate among young scholars, several respondents explained that it was no loss (for Darwinian reasons), and one pertinently asked how I knew the rate was so high. A good question; to this day, the SCS does not track such numbers. A question about Classics’ potential displacement by multi-cultural studies elicited incredulity.
The “Survival” issue has on its cover the Tenniel illustration of Alice dragged along by the Red Queen, with its text: “‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’” Along with the “Survival” survey, this issue reminds me of all we were doing: running the questionnaire for APA candidates (previously just a list of names); running a blacklist of departments with no tenured women, also of departments with cases pending against them for sexual harassment or discrimination; keeping a referees’ and reviewers’ list (so editors couldn’t say they didn’t know of any qualified women readers). The responses to the “Survival” survey highlighted three problems: women were straightforwardly treated as less valuable than men; sexual harassment was not punished, but complaining about it was; balancing work and child care.
In those years I kept a card on my desk with a picture of a woman printer and the line, “The freedom of the press belongs to those who control the press.” Running the Newsletter taught me that we are not alone and that we could change things; and we did. I still keep the card there.