Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota
"Feminism's Phantoms: A Modern(ist) Ghost Story"

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, that consummate feminist-modernist, Virginia Woolf, was haunted by phantoms the ghosts of Shakespeare's suicidal sister and the slain Angel in the House kept interrupting
professional women's time. My talk questions the periodizations of modernism and feminism. How might a vernacular modernism--corporate, industrial, mass-mediated--exceed the bounds of the aesthetics and practices usually associated with high modernism? Pushing the dates of modernism ahead, or stretching them behind, means thinking about who gets to be modern, how the modern and modernism get contaminated by popular culture; why, even as feminist inquiry has unsettled so many received categories within cultural history, periodization remains fairly intact despite Joan Kelly‚s famous 1970s question: "Did women have a Renaissance?" This talk raises questions about segmentation and recurrence and considers the problematic of circulation˜of money, bodies, genres, forms, media, lives. Calling attention to chronology, tropology and topology˜the times, themes and spaces of feminism and modernism˜I examine what happens when leftist American women brought modernism home after the fact. This working women‚s vernacular modernism, found in the work of Caroline Slade, a novelist (who began as a social worker), Esther Bubley, a photographer, Meridel Le Sueur, an actress/activist turned writer, and Tess Slesinger, a screenwriter (who began as a novelist), calls into question the conventional wave theory of feminism. Each reworks the iconography of prostitution within mass-mediated forms for an audience broadly conceived as American. Two had careers (just barely) in the 1930s--still within the conventional time frame of modernism--but produced the bulk of their work throughout the 1940s: Slade published one novel in 1937, following it with four others during the 1940s; Bubley did not make a photograph until 1940. Le Sueur began writing in the
1920s, produced her major work during the 1930s and continued her career thorough the Cold War years as a children‚s book author until rediscovered by 1970s feminists. Slesinger, also, began writing in the late 1920s, her career cut short by her untimely death in 1945 of cancer. She moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s to help create a distinctively American politically-inflected popular culture. These women and many others vivify the ghosts and Angels haunting Woolf‚s scenario of feminism and modernism; yet theirs is a history barely recognized within American feminism.

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