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The Double X

Voices from the past help to close the generation gap in modern feminism

The meetings existed only on the pages of their poems and essays, in my head and on the pages of the senior English thesis I was writing, but it was the best I could get. Especially since one of the women I talked to, Emily Dickinson, has been dead for more than 100 years.

I met with the three women -- the 20th century poets Adrienne Rich and Alice Fulton, along with Dickinson -- to discuss, through prose and poetry, what it means to be a woman and a poet of our respective generations. Emily Dickinson's poetry was published for the first time in 1890, four years after her death. Rich published her first book of poetry in 1951, while Fulton began publishing her poetry in book form in the mid-1980s. In 1996, I am only beginning to send my poems to literary journals.

Listening to feminist poets across generations taught me a lot. The work of Dickinson, Rich and Fulton reflects their level of development as poets, which is higher in each case than mine. Their longer experience as poets gives them insight I do not have about our mutual craft. But their experience isn't just longer than mine. Each poet has had a particular experience coming of age as a woman poet because she was born at a particular time.

The condition of American women has changed hugely since Dickinson's time. Dickinson could never have had the time to write more than a few poems if she had married, much less the 1,775 she did write in the 36 years between her first known poem and her death. Not marrying caused a significant loss in social status before and after her death, and some of Dickinson's poems ponder her preference not to marry. They reflect an experience of womanhood and poethood I could not imagine on my own.

The situation of the woman poet has changed more subtly from Rich's coming of age as a poet, to Fulton's coming of age, to mine, than between Dickinson's death and the earliest of Rich's poems, but there was much to learn in that history. As a feminist, I am always striving toward change in women's lives. Without knowing where we have been, I will never understand where we're going. Without talking to older feminists, I will never know where we have been.

Feminists of all professions need to meet across the generations to listen to each other. Most of the feminists older than me to whom I get the chance to talk are my mother or my professors. In the first case, there is too much history, too many emotional stakes, for free discussion of politics. In the second, there is too much power difference, too much formality. Feminists of all ages need to seek out less loaded spaces for discussion.

Emotional investment in one another and differences in power will always be a factor when women of different generations get together to talk. Older feminists have a certain authority by virtue of their greater experience, but they're vulnerable too, because their hard work will be for nought if we don't take the torch.

Feminists cannot afford to permit the sexist media's choice of young feminists' reactions to the so-called feminist establishment to represent all feminists under age 25. Nor can we permit the older feminists' reaction to the media's pet young feminists, whose poorly argued and poorly researched treatises resemble the arrogant rebelliousness of an adolescent, to represent the second wave of feminism's attitude toward younger feminists. We need to be creating our own dialogues instead of dialogues officiated by Time Magazine.

Divisions along any line damage a political movement like feminism. The generation gap is no different. Without talking to one another, we'll never understand the differences between growing up before the 1970s surge in feminism and growing up after it. If we don't listen to older feminists, younger feminists will waste time and energy reinventing the wheel. If older feminists don't listen to us, they will never see the vehicles we make on their wheels.

Last week I had the chance to have a face-to-face discussion about feminist issues with two women who were 5 to 10 years older than me. (One thing we didn't discuss was their precise ages.) It took place in a coffee shop, and we were all wearing comfortable clothes. Such meetings should be taking place all over the world all the time.