I just learned about a new collection of essays by Susan Sontag, titled On Women. Here is a short blurb from the publisher: “A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism.”
Sontag died in 2004; this is a collection of writings from the 1970’s. The Atlantic has a review of it by Katie Roiphe. In Roiphe’s description of the collection, it mirrors things I have been thinking about: how past feminist ideas can inform today’s. What is, or what should be, the dialogue between the past and the present in both intellectual thought and felt experience?
This has been on my mind because I am writing two projects that involve looking forward, while simultaneously backward, in terms of feminism and women’s rights. One project is a memoir; the other a documentary about women artists from the past and present. I can look over the span of decades I’ve lived and see the changes. I have felt and drawn the changes.
When I look at a cartoon drawn by a woman in 1920’s, I wonder if the artist was dealing with similar concerns as we are now, or, possibly, how things have shifted. Sontag writes about women and age; Helen Hokinson— a cartoonist for The New Yorker in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s— drew about it.
This one above shows a daughter not comprehending her mother’s experience. It’s a funny cartoon, we are laughing at the young person’s presumption. I also feel the stereotype cast towards the older woman. At least the daughter says, “yet.” I think this scenario could easily happen today.
Another one by Hokinson is telling about the sexism of her time, this one from the 1940’s. Yale allowed women admittance in 1969, decades after this was drawn, so it doesn’t hold entirely true for now. However, we know unconscious bias still exists in some old institutions (not singling out Yale!).
From all that I have read about Hokinson, she tried hard not to stereotype the women she drew in her cartoons. Rather she wanted them to be endearing, characters who tried their best in modern, sometimes confusing circumstances. Women who pushed through the stereotypes to be who they felt they could be.
Helen Hokinson is one of my favorite artists of the early New Yorker. Two decades ago, I wrote an article about her for the magazine, called Leading Ladies, which they published in 2002.
Dobbs will be seen in historical retrospect as the feminist second stage booster to Roe’s lift off launcher. Reopening reproductive autonomy may well reopen the question of just why women need men anyway. Some day the idea of equality in a man’s world will seem quaint as women have to struggle to integrate men into a woman’s world. When biological destiny the the implicit threat of physical domination are subtracted from the equation women are formidable in ways that will make difficult figuring out he to integrate men. (For the avoidance of doubt, that’s not my victim statement or attempt to excuse men from their own parallel rethinking.)
I subscribe to a coupla, three, four, or sigh more left leaning political-slash-cultural writers. But sigh, same old, same old, yawn. Not yours Donnelly. Not yours. Love the fresh take on even the oldest cartoonists.