Slaves of New York Read Online Free PDF

is positing a
    historical subject. Now, you can say as a Marxist you
    want to dissolve "woman." Without using the word "class," she argued for a more
    complicated view of women as historical subject. Yet she was attacked for this — brutally attacked.
    Then I had written down the words of one of the other students: "Angela Davis said that Elizabeth Cady Stanton's decision to separate a middle-class reformist movement in the name of feminism was implicitly racist—there is such a thing as nonessentialism."
    To this the teacher responded, at least according to my notes:
    It isn't complicated, it's simple: the unreworked biological category, where you locate yourself to take action. The language becomes the primary basis for working things out — in other words, can you top this? The privileging of the complicated.
    I wondered whether the teacher had burst into tears following the attack on her. The two hours of class were devoted to a retelling of the attack, couched in this language which so gracefully circled a subject without ever landing to make a point.
    At the end of the semester I gave an oral report for the Castleton class in which I discussed mysticism and Eastern philosophy and some of the similar themes that emerge in the writings of Virginia Woolf. I had hoped to please the teacher; throughout my lecture she wrote furiously in a notebook. When I finished, she looked up and said, "You're wrong." The other women in the class all turned to catch my reaction. I felt as if I had been electrocuted on a television game show. Anna went
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    on to say that I had fallen prey to a traditional male put-down: placing women in the category of weak, dreamy mystics and thus denying them power. I knew that the most successful reports in class were those which merely repeated what the teacher herself had said; but how could I repeat what made no sense? I found myself arguing, trying to defend my position. I left the class feeling as if my leptons were no longer in orbit.
    That evening I sat in my apartment, on one of Ray's chairs, trying to figure out what had happened. It was strange to find something that had once absorbed me so quickly transformed into musty, foul-smelling words. I thought of Dostoyevsky, chattering away in his icy locker room, seized with the flu or perhaps remembering his near-execution. Charlotte Brontë, trimming her cuticles by the open fire. Florence Nightingale, sanctimonious in her bandage-strapping. These people had lust, infectious greed to live, a passion in life. If smallpox and polio vaccines hadn't been developed, I figured I would have been one of the ones to keel over by now. Maybe I was just tired; it would be good to have a break at Christmas.
    But I didn't feel any different during vacation; by New Year's Day I decided not to go back to Yale.
    Half the reason I had decided to go to Yale was that I didn't get an apartment I fell in love with in New York. The summer before I had landed a job as editorial assistant on a magazine —I would be taking over for a woman who was going on maternity leave in September. I had a whole month to find a place to live, but after several weeks of looking I still couldn't find anything, not even a share. Nell, my mother, came into the city to help me look. She wore her tattered cardigan with holes in the sleeves and her Red Cross shoes, practical for walking. She said that the way to find an apartment was simply to wander up and down the streets until we saw a sign in a window saying apartment for rent.
    "Ma," I said, "maybe that was how you could one time find an apartment, but not anymore." But she insisted, and on the afternoon of the second day we did see a sign on the first floor
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    of an old brownstone on Third Avenue in the twenties. Nobody answered the bell, but we went next door to an antique store and the woman gave us the key to the place and said that she was handling the rental for the landlady.
    The place was fantastic. It held the sediment of