Without consciously intending to, I have recently been reading mostly nonfiction works by and about women, a few of which touch on the political issues of our day. The women chronicled in these books made widely differing marks on their times, and with a few striking exceptions, most succeeded on both society’s terms and their own, though not without great effort and significant cost. Together they show that the past 100 years or so have been perhaps a unique era for (almost entirely white) women.Personality and Opinions
Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers tells the story of a mother and daughter whose work may be familiar: Katharine Briggs (1875–1968) and Isabel Briggs Myers (1897– 1980). I know few educators, of whatever age, who cannot rattle off their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) score and who don’t use its four letters as a tool somewhere, whether for party chatter or school and organizational analysis. Emre has accessed a large (though incomplete) mass of biographical and institutional material, allowing us to understand how a popularized and largely distorted version of Jungian typology, which began as a mother’s effort to understand her own children and their friends, played a significant role—only now diminishing—in the growing fields of personal psychology and organizational thinking.The Personality Brokers reveals that the Briggs’ success was a combination of unflagging determination and the patronage of key figures, the most prominent of whom was Henry Chauncey, of SAT and ETS renown. Chauncey believed that the MBTI “would do for personality assessment what the SAT had done for cognitive testing,” and he defended the test against the data-driven doubts of many ETS psychometricians, who saw the test as “little better than a horoscope.” But even after ETS severed its connection, the Briggs duo would find new patrons among both profit-driven publishers and career academics.
I don’t know if any of the dozen women profiled in Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion ever took the MBTI, but I can imagine them skewering its pretensions. In a book review, American poet Dorothy Parker once wrote, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,” while British author Rebecca West claimed that “our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism.” In addition to Parker and West, the women profiled include Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, and Janet Malcolm.
As Dean notes in her all-too-brief chapters, these women came up in a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything. Nonetheless, they forced their way, through the brilliance of their writing and their commitment to their craft, into practically every major publication of their day. (I stopped counting after 25, ranging from Vanity Fair to the Partisan Review to the National Review to The New Masses.)
“These women were all oppositional spirits,” writes Dean, “and they tended not to like being grouped together. For one thing, some of them despised each other.” But one notable thing almost all shared was a difficult, often deprived childhood; their fathers were absent or womanizing, or mentally or physically ill.
Despite such beginnings, these women not only inspired current writers, such as Rebecca Solnit and Claudia Rankine, but they created their own classics, including West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and many more. These mini-biographies are both an inspiration and an impetus to read the works of—and read more about—their subjects.
Going Their Own Way
Laura Thompson’s The Six explores an entirely different milieu. Her subjects, the six Mitford sisters, are as familiar to British readers as Dean’s are to Americans. Born to a minor aristocratic family during the first two decades of the 20th century, the sisters held status and affluence that, though diminished by an eccentric father, never pushed them into serious want.Thompson captures their range of enthusiasms with a striking analogy: “One can chant the careers of the Mitford sisters in the manner of Henry VIII’s wives, thus: Writer, Countrywoman, Fascist, Nazi, Communist, Duchess.” As the list suggests, three sisters stood largely apart from the great events of the midcentury, while three flung themselves immoderately into its cataclysms.
Nancy, the eldest, was the Writer: 21 books, including eight novels, a nonfiction collaboration, four historical biographies, a play, and numerous collections of letters and essays, almost all of which are still in print. (Three other sisters contributed 28 more volumes, including Jessica’s exposé, The American Way of Death.)
But the lives of Diana, Jessica, and Unity overshadow the sisters’ literary achievements. Diana, who left her first, aristocratic husband for the fascist leader Oswald Mosely, vehemently supported Hitler, was interned with her husband as an enemy sympathizer, and apparently never reneged on or regretted her actions. Thompson calls her “quite possibly one of the most enigmatic women who ever lived.” While sister Unity, whose middle name, Valkyrie, and birth in Swastika, Ontario, were foreshadowings (or preordainings?) of a life Thompson says “should be the subject of an opera.” She became Hitler’s close companion and attempted suicide when her two nations declared war in 1939. (She was returned to Britain in a severely disabled state and lingered for nine more years.) Then there was Jessica, whose leftward political leanings led her and Unity to “divid[e] a room in half, decorating one side with hammers and sickles, the other with swastikas.” She made perhaps the most shocking move of all, becoming an American, though still a sharp critic of capitalism.
These sisters compel our attention, while they escape, in memory as in life, any effort to sum up their story.
The last work, Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, differs from the other three in a number of ways. Its six women come from several nations, span three centuries, and include novelists, journalists, and visual artists. Unlike our other writers, Elkin inserts herself significantly into this memoir-cum-artistic and sociological analysis.
The book is built around a single topic, one almost as elusive as the book’s title. What is a flâneuse? A female flâneur. Not clear yet? The masculine version, in both grammatical and genetic terms, is “one who wanders aimlessly,” usually in a city, but with an observant eye, assessing and remarking on all he sees.
Elkin’s point is that women have rarely had the freedom to wander freely, to be the observer and not the observed. These gifted women challenged that constraint. She tells the stories of writer George Sand, who wore shapeless men’s clothing in order to pass freely in 19th century Paris; Martha Gellhorn, who was the first great woman war correspondent; and Agnes Varda, who made nearly 50 films about many subjects.
Elkin’s own wandering eye, together with her intellectual excursions into the past, offers exactly the insights one might expect from a flâneuse: Why do Parisian and other urban buildings use female caryatids as anonymous supports? Why do Japanese clothing stores offer “little-girl clothes for grown women”? Why are there “twice as many statues of dogs in Edinburgh as there are of women”? She also wryly, though perhaps not completely accurately, observes of New York, “how can you wander on a grid? The avenues go up and down and the streets go left and right. Once you know it, you know it.” Such questions should cause both men and women to wander, whether in cities, books, or the arts, with a more discerning eye.
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