SPAN: September/October 1999

Options for Millennium Woman

CDM:

" . Climate

Change Remedy?

Information for the

21st e-e'n

enrOllrn

ent

COSts·

IndhlidUq/ Distqnce

• Science, social science and public administration magazmes

• Internet access • CD-ROMs • Multimedia Personal computers • Business, management, bankin.g and trade magazmes

• U.S. federal legislative and regulatory information

• Environmental information

• Skilled reference specialists

38-A Jawaharlal Nehru Road Calcutta 700071 (033)288-1200/06 E-mail: lib@usiscal.emet.in Monday to Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Information

lfQ>USA

Mount Road (Near Gemini Circle) Chennai 600006 (044)827-3040 E-mail: refdesk%madras@usia.gov Monday to Saturday 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m

Corporqte IVo nProfit O(,9"' ...• nizq!"

IOns Dqi/y U Se

.

As. 200 qnnu rJS. 200 q qllAs. 350 A nnUq/IA for two S.3,000 s. 350 fo Yeqrs b qnnu I r two rJS. 1 5 q/IAs 5 Yeqrs . ,000 ~ ' 00 q nnUq/IA Or two s. 2,500 Yeqrs for tw o Yeqrs b

4 New Marine Lines Mumbai 400020 (022)262-4590 E-mail: libref@usisbom.emet.in Monday to Saturday (except Wednesday) 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001 (011)331-4251 E-mail: libdel@usia.gov Monday to Saturday (except Wednesday) 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

SPAN

Can Anything

Be Done

About Climate Change?

An Interview withKatie McGinty

Publisher Francis B. Ward

Farmer's FriendA Low-Tech Boon

Editor-in-Chief Kiki S. Munshi

By Arun Bhanot

Pedal Power Revival Editor Lea Terhune Associate Editor Arun Bhanot Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana

By A. Venkata Narayana

In Strictest Overconfidence

By David Stauffer

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar

Hidden in Plain View

By Jacquebne L. Tobin and Raymond

y. Dobard

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library

Globalization, Tradition and Indian Women

By Anuradha Marwah-Roy

The Future Is Ours to Lose Front

cover: Amrita Sher-Gil, Portrait of Sister, 1936, oil on canvas, 93 x 62.5 ems. (with frame), Private Collection, New Delhi.

It was among several paintings restored recently under the auspices of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the National Gallery of Modern Art. Photograph

by Hemant Bhatnagar.

By Naomi Wolf

The Rest of the Story

By Natalie Zemon Davis and Jill Ker Conway

Bruce PeckPrintmaker's Odyssey

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manu-

scripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted. by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

Published

'American Culture Is of a Whole" .

From the letters of Ralph Ellison Introduction by John F. Callahan

Hemingway

By Lillian Ross

Told Me Things

A LETTER

T

FROM

here are always so many topics worthy of space that it is sometimes difficult to choose between them, particularly as we rush toward a new century. This issue of SPAN highlights two important human issues: climate change and the status of women.

Worldwide, governments are struggling to cope with one of the most critical environmental conditions we are witnessing today: global warming. Global warming is caused by a rapidly growing hole in the protective ozone layer around the Earth, the result of excess "greenhouse gases" being released into the atmosphere. Unpleasant and often destructive quirks in weather over the past few years have been attributed to global warming, and there is an international effort to curb activities that contribute to it. SPAN interviews Katie McGinty, currently a research fellow at Tata Energy Research Institute and a former Clinton aide, about one proposed solution: the Clean Development Mechanism. And several clean, gas-free technologies are reviewed in "Farmer's Friend: A Low-Tech Boon," by Arun Bhanot and "Pedal Power Revival," by A. Venkata Narayana.

Women have a lot in common all over the world. Our special package addresses aspects of their struggle historically, both in India and in the United States. In "Women and the Vote," Carole Wagner Vallianos of the League of Women Voters in conversation with Lea Terhune shares ideas about how citizens can participate more effectively in government. Anuradha Marwah-

THE

PUBLISHER

Roy analyzes the dilemmas faced by modern Indian women, who have one foot in a rich and ancient culture and another in a new era of opportunity, in "Globalization, Tradition and Indian Women." Articulate author of The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf offers incisive advice in "The Future Is Ours to Lose," and "The Rest of the Story," by Natalie Zemon Davis and Jill Ker Conway, gives historical perspective to women's struggle for equal rights in the West.

We have lavish cultural offerings this month, as well: an art feature on Bruce Peck, American printmaker, whose great inspiration is South India; a nod to Ernest Hemingway's birth centenary in "Hemingway Told Me Things," by Lillian Ross; fascinating letters by Ralph Ellison, whose recently-published Juneteenth is stimulating literary debate five years after his death; and an excerpt, with photos, from Hidden in Plain View, the story of secret codes sewn into quilts that helped slaves escape along the routes of the Underground Railway.

One last word. We are greatly encouraged in our efforts by your letters. Although we do not run letters to the editor, we do receive many letters and we read them. We appreciate them all, praise and blame alike, and thank you for writing them. As always, we hope you enjoy the issue.

Can An g Be Done About Climate Change?

The Clean Development Mechanism is one idea

As the millennium winds down we are called upon to examine the past, compare it to the present, and look ahead to the future in a singularly breathtaking way.

Mementos of weighty events from 1900 until now swirl around us in the electronic and print media. Millennial stock-taking leaves us with plenty of pluses, but there are minuses that could knock holes in the achievements of the 20th century if they are not addressed, and addressed quickly.

One of those 20th-century downers is knocking a large hole in the ozone layer as you read this. It-along with other derelictions caused by human shortsightednessis causing erratic monsoon patterns in India, drought and unusually hot summers in North America, and devastating floods in East Asia. Himalayan and Andean glaciers are retreating and becoming thinner.

The weather has altered so dramatically and so fast that it is no longer only grandmothers who complain that no season is what it used to be.

International acknowledgment of the gravity of global warming came when a number of countries signed a climate change agreement in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It was a non-binding agreement to curb activities that contributed to global warming, that is, the release of "greenhouse" gases that dissolve the ozone layer of the Earth's atmosphere and consequently raise the temperatures down below.

Another international treaty on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, was proposed in 1997. In the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized developed countries assume legally binding obligations to significantly reduce greenhouse gas pollution, and within a spe-

cific time frame. Developing countries are not similarly obliged, but the United States insists, before it will ratify the treaty, that developing countries must agree to "participate meaningfully" and realistically in addressing climate change. "Many previous threats could be met within our own borders, but global warming requires an international solution," said President Bill Clinton in a 1997 speech.

Out of the Kyoto Protocol has evolved a scheme to facilitate this participation: the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Clean Development Mechanism?

Basically, it's money. It is a way of financing plant and equipment upgrades; bringing investments in power, water and infrastructure, in human resources, and restoration of forest or agricultural resources for participating developing countries. Through the CDM the developing country will receive capital investment, while the developed country investor will receive credit for some share of the pollution reductions achieved.

So what's in it for the investors? Buying credits for greenhouse gas reduction through investment in developing countries would, theoretically, come more cheaply than chalking up the same number at home.

In India objections have been raised that India, in the end, could be short-changed if the unfoldment of the CDM is not carefully monitored. One concern is that India not be left holding the bag when, after selling its emissions credits, it is time for India to become accountable for emissions reduction.

Others worry about dumping of obsolete technologies. And in any case, some scientists argue that the goals for reduction set

out in the Kyoto Treaty fall far short of reality requirements.

According to CDM proponents, now is the time to raise questions. \:. " In November 1998, par- \'" ties to the climate change , treaty agreed that the ,,~ mechanisms and modalities governing the CDM should be in place in the year 2000. A decisive meeting is coming up later this year.

Enter Katie McGinty, personable, pretty and sharp as a tack. She is currently a senior visiting fellow at the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, and her aim is to build bridges between the U.S. and India on sustainable development issues. Prior to arriving in India in November of last year, McGinty served as a senior White House adviser on environment, natural resources and sustainable development. Earlier, as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, she helped coordinate environmental policy. Her history of service in environment-related positions with the Clinton Administration and before that with then Senator Al Gore, along with her academic background in law, science and technology, make her a high-powered instigator of dialogue and partnerships. Governmental, nongovernmental, academic and private entities in India are all cogs in the green wheel, and since she and her husband Karl Hauskar-also a research fellow with TERI-have been here, she has been getting acquainted with the players, and the Indian situation.

What motivates you to spend a year in India,Jar away from Washington?

The first purpose in being here really is to learn and to understand the environmental, sustainable development challenges from the perspective of one of the largest and most important countries of the world, that being India.

Within that effort of trying to learn, we are trying to bring in some new ideas as to how to meet some of the environmental challenges in a way that enables several objectives to be met at one time. So even as progress is being made to clean the environment, progress can also be made simultaneously to provide economic activity and fuel economic growth. Within that whole area there are several projects that we have undertaken. One is in partnership with several automobile manufacturers here, especially within Delhi, to begin an inspection and maintenance program where the citizens of Delhi will patticipate voluntarily. The approach will be one that would open their eyes to the benefits personally to them in improving the efficiency of peIformance of their scooter, and, publicly, in terms of cleaning up the air. The details are less important than the general thrust, that by stitching together new and sometimes unlikely partnerships and coalitions, new answers to challenging problems can be had.

The Clean Development Mechanism falls within that rubric as well.

It is essentially a tool through which partnerships can be formed between businesses in the developed, industrialized world-the U.S., Europe and Japan-and governments or businesses in the developing world through which three objectives are achieved: one, the sustainable development objectives of the developing country partner are advanced. Cleaner technology, more efficient industrial processes, more reliable energy sources, for example. At the same time the local environment is cleaned as there is a move away from dirty, more inefficient technologies toward new technologies that can be had through this CDM partnership.

And third, the global environment also benefits as improving the efficiency at a

local level also reduces global greenhouse gas pollutants. So, the CDM is a tool through which partnerships can be forged that achieve all three of those objectives.

The interest on the part of a business in Europe, the U.S. or Japan is the fact that these partnerships can also help that company achieve their obligations under the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gas pollution in the most cost-effective way.

Explain the incentive for developed countries to spend time, money and energy on such a proposal as the CDM. First, the Kyoto Treaty recognizes that industrialized countries have contributed the lion's share of the greenhouse gas pollution problem that the planet now faces. Second and related to that, the treaty recognizes that developing countries have contributed a relative small share to date of greenhouse gas pollution, and that share of the pollution problem will likely increase as developing countries continue to grow their economies.

Taking those two things together, the treaty first requires the developed world to significantly and quickly reduce greenhouse gas pollution. And in the case of the United States, in real terms, the reduction in emissions is likely to be on the order of 30-40 percent from where emissions would otherwise be by the year 2010. Europe and Japan face similarly exacting emissions reduction schedules. In terms of the developing world, given the relative insignificance of the contribution those countries have made to greenhouse gas pollution to date, the treaty does not require any reduction in emissions on the part of the developing countries.

However, also recognizing that developing countries need to and want to pursue a sustainable economic development path, the Kyoto Treaty also then provides a mechanism, a clean development mechanism, whereby the industrialized countries can help meet this significant obligation to reduce pollution by investing in cleaner technologies in the developing world.

Where are the teeth in the Kyoto Treaty? How will it be enforced?

One of the top priorities of President Clinton and Vice President Gore in formulating the Kyoto Treaty was to change it

from a voluntary treaty to one that would be legally binding among the parties to the treaty, so that when this treaty is ratified, and comes into full force and effect, it is a treaty that will have with it a full implementation regime, which regime will have attendant to it penalties of one kind or another for parties that fail to meet their obligations. In the United States it's likely that the treaty would be implemented through legislation that would be similar to a Clean Air Act, for example, where caps are established for greenhouse gas pollution, and industries are required, either by cleaning up their own particular factory or by partnering with other factories, to reduce their emissions to the level set in that cap, and that would come with all the full force and effect of the variety of domestic environmental laws that we have. So this is a treaty that when it is in full force and effect will have a robust implementation regime attached to it.

What has been the reception in India to these proposals? Do you see the government creating a national policy framework to deal with climate change issues?

The business community has realized very quickJy that the Clean Development Mechanism does present a win-win for the industrialized world and the developed world, for the economy and for the environment. Organizations like the Confederation of Indian Industry, for example, have identified this as a top priority and are working now quite well and effectively to try to further bring attention to the opportunities that the Clean Development Mechanism presents to India. Within govemment circles, I think that there is an open mind about looking at this issue in a fresh way, and reflecting further on the opportunities that might be presented for India. I think it's fair to say that until recently the issue has been given a lower level of attention. It has not been a top priority, which is understandable given the press of all kinds of other issues that constantly demand the attention of various ministers and ministries. But now I see a renewed interest in at least thinking through the issue again and identifying what India's particulat路 viewpoint might be with regard to it. Among the nongovernmental organizations, I think

the resources that are necessary to address problems at a local level to help alleviate the air, water, land pollution problems that villagers face. To help restore degraded forest lands or waste lands, to provide funds for micro-enterprise initiatives that both can provide some economic opportunities for villages as well as sustain their natural resource base on which those villages depend. So Development Alternatives has been very much in the forefront of working to advance interest in and support for the Clean Development Mechanism. Now, as we've traveled around the country, we have also met any number of small, locally active groups, like the Organization for the Development of People in the Bangalore and Mysore area, who upon learning of the Clean Development Mechanism, immediately recognized the advantages presented in terms of fmding those resources that are increasingly scarce to meet the development priorities that they have been working so hard on.

there is a difference of opinion. Many of them recognize that especially as bilateral sources of aid are diminishing from every country in the world, that new and creative ways to fmance pressing sustainable development need to be found. Many of those groups recognize in the Clean Development Mechanism an incredibly important tool to help meet severe air pollution, water pollution, and poverty alleviation needs, and those organizations are becoming more vocal in support of trying to bring the CDM into full force and effect. There are a couple of organizations, however, that feel more strongly that even if the CDM can bring benefits to India, the United States is a

country that consumes too much of the world's resources, that Americans lead lifestyles that are too demanding of the Earth's resources, and therefore that the United States should just change its lifestyle and that India should forgo the opportunities that come with the CDM on that basis, further reinforcing the point that the U.S. should just change its lifestyle. So that form of resistance does exist in the nongovernmental sector.

One NGO that operates on a national and local level, a group called Development Alternatives, has as its priority mission poverty alleviation and has seen within the CDM an important new opportunity to find

How important are women in identifying problems and implementing programs related to climate change?

It's very interesting to me to see the extent to which women are able to help identify, the extent to which women first understand acutely the challenges and the problems that are caused by environmental degradation. Their ingenuity in helping to devise the solutions to those environmental challenges, perhaps because so much of their daily existence is spent trying to eke life's basic necessities off the land. Whether it is getting water or gathering firewood, women seem to understand intimately the tremendously adverse effects on their well-being, the well-being of their families and their children when environmental sources are degraded. At the same time we have seen very innovative micro-enterprise initiatives taken by women, that are aimed at both sustaining the natural resource base and funding the economic opportunities to help support their families.

For example, women in some areas are gathering wild mushrooms that grow in a forest area, finding a market for those mushrooms, which had the effect of pre-

serving the land itself because now that forest has economic value with the trees standing and providing the space for these valuable mushrooms to grow as opposed to a resource that only has value when it is extracted and sold. Similarly we have had the privilege of seeing other women's groups who are moving away from lifestyles that are a hundred percent dependent on extraction of natural resources to the creation of economic initiatives that are not dependent so heavily on natural resources.

The Clinton Administration appears to put a high priority on the mechanisms to address climate change. Why? The sheer magnitude of the challenge posed to humanity and the planet by climate change is one that both the President and Vice President take extremely seriously and feel strongly that we have a moral obligation to this generation and to the next, to insure the survivability of the planet. And science is telling us increasingly that the stakes are very high here. That the ability of human civilizations to thrive, if not just to survive, depends on our developing and using much cleaner technologies as we provide the economic opportunities for the future. And that the disruptions that can and will be wrought by dynamic changes in climatic patterns will exact tremendous suffering on human beings around the planet.

And on that basis the President and Vice President are committed to trying to find that path for the world seriously to deal with this issue and to put us on a cleaner development course for the future.

How do you answer those people in developing countries-and there are many-who are suspicious of initiatives putforward by Western countries? When it comes to big business, many feel that the countries where giant multinationals are based have exploited resources in the developing world.

I think it is very true that there is an enormous amount of distrust between countries, among individuals within countries. I think there is an enormous amount of misunderstanding also of intentions and motives and purposes. And I think that the first answer to that has to be to impress

upon people the need for a willingness to keep an openness of mind, and a willingness to leave preconceived notions at the door, and instead come to the table with the intention to try to hear and see and understand the message differently from what one might have in the past.

With regard to global environmental challenges, it seems to me that a country like India has an invaluable role to play in leading the world to a better set of ideas and directions and paths that we might take. India is a leader among developing nations. India is a country that by virtue of its sheer size-the geographic size, the size of its population, and the richness of its biodiversity-will play a determinant role in terms of the future ecological stability or instability of the planet. India is also a country of incredible technological ability, and incredible depth of resourcefulness in helping to provide the solutions to some of the challenges we face, whether it is information technologies or clean energy technologies like biomass technologies, India has much to teach the world. And I believe that India can come to the table on these issues very much in a leadership role, defining the agenda, shaping the agenda, not just responding to the positions of other countries. And that ability to be a confident and competent participant in these interactions, I believe, can help to reduce the mistrust and misunderstandings that may have arisen before.

The bottom line is, India does not need to just respond to someone else's agenda. I think the world needs India to help set the agenda and be willing to lead.

Recently you participated in a meeting in Washington, D.C., of business leaders from India and America, and you feel the dialogue was positive. What was so encouraging?

Business is moving from rearguard action that we had seen historically-fighting efforts to clean the environment-and instead becoming the vanguard on environmental challenges, saying, look, we can devise the solutions to some of these challenges, we can both clean and protect the environment while we make our businesses more efficient, more productive and more competi-

tive. Indo-U.S. dialogue is a wonderful example of this renaissance in the business world that offers tremendous hope that the future will be defined by economic progress that is environmentally, socially, culturally not only appropriate, but resilient and sound and sustainable.

What, do you feel, is at stake if the moment is not seized with regard to sustainable development issues, particularly climate change?

We are at a crossroads with regard to the climate change issue as a whole and especially with regard to whether or not tools like the Clean Development Mechanism will flourish and will reach their potential of helping to build these win-win partnerships between the developed and developing world. At this point, anything is possible. Either we could have a world defined by a common resolve to work together to protect the planet and to lift people out of poverty, or we will have a world that is divided by an increasing chasm between the developed and the developing world, between those countries with the ability both to clean air and environment and provide economic opportunity for their citizens and those countries that are mired in huge environmental challenges, even while their people are mired in overwhelming desperation of poverty.

So for those who would like to see that world of partnership instead of that world of polarization come about, the Clean Development Mechanism is one of those determining factors. People need to be engaged, need to be helping to forge the way ahead, need to be expressing their views, their interest, their concerns, because we really are at a turning point. Within the next 12 months it will be decided whether there will be such a thing as a Clean Development Mechanism and if there is such a thing, whether it will be designed actually to work, or it will be hampered by so much bureaucracy and red tape that even if it exists on paper it will not fulfill its objectives.

Will we choose the course and the future that is characterized by hands clasped in friendship, or will it be a course characterized by fists clenched in rage? Now is the time for people to be involved.

D

Farmer's Friend A LOW-TECH BOON ist a familiar sight in the Indian countryside: a scrawny, bare torsoed farmer toiling ceaselessly on his small patch of land. Seasons change, but not the farmer's routine. For centuries the small and marginal farmer in India has followed the same practices that his father and others before him did. His life still revolves around the availability of water. If there is water and the crop is good, the fanlily will survive. If the rain gods fail to deliver, it brings misery and starvation. And so the story plays out in India as in other developing countries.

But for almost a decade now, a small but determined outfit has been quietly changing the lives of thousands of farmers across India, from the terraced hillsides of the Himalayas to the drought-prone villages of Orissa.

Operating from a small office in New Delhi's Safdarjung Development Area, International Development Enterprises (IDE) India, is part of IDE International, a Denver-based nongovernmental organization that "specializes in developing and promoting affordable technologies that boost incomes of small and marginal farmers," according to Thomas H. Hemphill, director of IDE India. "Within that, we specialize in irrigation-related technology, though we are interested in other areas as well. In India, however, we are working almost exclusively in the area of irrigation."

Today the small farmer, defined as owning less than two hectares of land-nearly 75 percent of India's farmers-has such IDE products like the treadle water pump and micro irrigation systems to help irrigate his land. The Krishak Bandhu (Farmer's Friend) treadle pump-marketed under the brand name KB-is the most successful product launched by IDE since it began operations here in 1989. 'Till date we've sold 1.4 million treadle pumps in South Asia. In India we have sold about 100,000 pumps," says Ananda Mohan De, manager communications, IDE, cautioning not to be impressed with the figure. "We estimate a total market potential of at least eight to 10 million pumps in India, and it will take a consistent effort over the next 10 years to realize this potential."

Nevertheless, IDE's efforts are quite laudable. India, Hemphill explains, has the ideal conditions for manual irrigation. The population of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and the Northeastern states is around 400 million. The region is dominated by the Gangetic Plain, characterized by small landholdings, high water tables, severe poverty, low

I

International Development Enterprises, a U.S.-based NGO, is bringing new hope to small Indian farmers through its affordable and environment-friendly irrigation systems such as the popular KB brand treadle pump shown alongside.

International Development Enterprises' microirrigation technology includes drip irrigation systems (above and inset) and microsprinklers (below). In the former the water is stored in a drum or bucket (right) and passes through micro tubes to water the plants. All the pipes are pre-fitted and packed in kits. Farmers simply have to unroll the pipes. lay them on the ground and connect them to the bucket or drum.

enables it to playa pivotal role in developing rural markets. It has labor rates and high market demand for agricultural produce. IDE's established a penetrative supply chain for KB products to ensure treadle pumps, he argues, are among the most inexpensive inigation systems available in the country. The cheapest treadle pump in their availability at the village level. Hemphill explains the IDE the IDE range costs a mere Rs. 380 and the most expensive one is strategy: "After we've identified the products and developed the technology, the next step is to develop a marketing channel that priced at Rs. 800. It is ideal for small landholdings of one hectare will manufacture the products and distribute them on a commerand less, easy to install and requires minimum maintenance.

The KB pump follows the basic lifting principle of the hand cial basis. This is for two reasons. One, when we have left, the pump. It consists of two balTels, plungers and pedals and is operatcommercial channel continues to function. People are making ed by one person ("one human power," as Hemphill puts it) who money, they keep manufacturing products, the products are availmoves his weight on the foot pedals while holding a bamboo or able, they are being advertised and farmers keep buying them." wooden frame for SUPPOlt.Water discharge ranges between 4,500 The other reason, according to Hemphill, is that a lot of government programs and other NGOs treat falmers as recipients or and 6,000 liters per hour. The pump can lift water from borewells beneficiaries. IDE treats farmers as customers. "Some NGOs feel and surface water bodies.

The basic concept is not new. Practically every ancient society that this makes us a little too crass, as though our socialist phihad devised some sort of animal-driven pump; the Persian wheel, losophy is not quite well established," he says adding, "our orifor example. But Hemphill argues, "The reality is that almost none entation is to treat farmers with respect. They pay money for the of these has survived even in remote areas because they are highly other things they need, we offer them a good product that gives them good retums. This way, we also have the opportunity to inefficient. The advantage of a treadle pump is that it takes almost make the channel itself last for a long period of time." no costs, no space and produces excellent results."

Hemphill is often asked whether IDE is in the Besides the low cost, which is a major consideration for a small-time falmer, the treadle pump has many sales business or the marketing business. "I say we're really in the promotion business. Social maradvantages over other varieties of water pumps. Most of the other pumps in the market---diesel, kerosene or keting, when you promote a new idea or a new concept. We've linked social marketing with product electricity-are much laI路ger. They are five horsepower or maybe down to 3.5 to 2.5 horsepower. The KB pump marketing. There is no question that our commitis human-driven. It involves simple technology and low ment is not to a product, our commitment is to improving the socioeconomic conditions of fann costs, but is high on utility, and hence, ideal for the unique land patterns seen in India: even if a small families. We use the products as a means to an end, fanner owns two hectares of land, it is probably not all and we use the marketing system as a means to that end. We're not just product hustlers, we're in this in one chunk. More often thall not, it is broken into three for long-telm socioeconomic benefit." or four smaller plots. "What you really require for irriIt was this corporate idealism that attracted gation here is something that is suitable both in its cost Hemphill, a career businessman, to work for IDE. and its output for an area like a half hectare to one hectare. That's very small scale. We needed a product Having spent most of his career in multinational "We treat that made sense in that size of acreage. There is nothing companies, including a long stint in New Delhi durfarmers with ing the 1970s, Hemphill was drawn by IDE's belief out there but the treadle pump to do it," asserts respect."

Hemphill. in delivering simple but efficient technology at a -THOMAS H. HEMPHILL, IDE's intense technology-focus stems from its core price that would seem absurd if it wasn't actually cOillllry diret(m', IDE true. "I said to myself, 'this organization must be philosophy. "One of the rules of our CEO is you should __________ be able to take any technology and cut its cost in half," doing something right,' " he recalls. His earlier stint says Hemphill. Parimal Sadaphal, senior manager R&D, agrees. "It in Delhi made him a natural choice as IDE country director in India is tougher than it sounds. Most of us-marketing people, engineers when his predecessor left a few months ago.

"Each product must produce a retum of over 100 percent per and scientists-have been schooled to do just the opposite: How to improve a product by adding more features or 'benefits,' little real- year as its purchase price," Hemphill says. "If it is something that izing what all that innovation does to the product cost. A lot of we cannot make worthwhile for the falmer to invest in, we don't R&D effOlts result in the product actually costing more." PaI'imal, even consider it." an agricultural engineer from Pusa Institute, conducts most of his The KB treadle pumps, for instance, come in several models, in research at IDE's display center at Bijwasan, a small village on the view of the varying telTain, climate, soil, water and income condioutskllts of Dellli near Haryana. Here his chief concerns are how to tions in the different areas. In the Terai region, for instance, where simplify the technology (and hence costs) but still retain, if not the water table is fairly high, IDE markets bamboo treadle pumps actually improve, the efficiency of the product. It is a challenge he (costing between Rs. 380 and Rs. 410). In other regions it markets is happy to accept. u'eadle pumps made of metal in various sizes and best suited to water levels up to 25 feet below the ground. These are more expenThis belief in simplicity distinguishes IDE from other NGOs. It has also helped IDE evolve a new integrated strategy that (Continued on page 34)

ver

Increasing pollution and chaotic traffic in cities have inspired a new cycle-rickshaw --en vironment- friendly, affordable and easy to use.

since environmentalists initiated the campaign against vehicular ~ pollution and the judiciary issued directions to the Indian Government regarding controlling pollution in cities and towns, the automobile industry has been vying to meet the Euro-2 standards by buying the state-of-the-art technology and upgrading the existing units. The unorganized Indian cycle-rickshaw industry is not lagging behind in the modernization and technological innovation program, either. There have been no new improved designs in the cycle-rickshaw in the past two decades, but that is about to change. The New York-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), in collaboration with the Asian Institute for Transport Development (AITD) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, is working on the Agra Cycle Rickshaw Improvement Project in Agra since last September. The project is primarily funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development The Taj Mahal is backdrop fo an ergonomically improved cycle-rickshaw model titled "2001." Left: "Raja ki Baggi" is fest-driven by an enthusiast.

(USAID), with contributions from ITDP and private organizations such as the Tides Foundation. USAID has provided a grant of $100,000 over a three-year period to the project.

In Agra ITDP found the ideal city for implementation of the project because USAID and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) have launched a special drive to clean Agra.

The main focus of the USAID-USEPA initiative in Agra is to protect the monuments of global importance; several studies have pointed that the Taj Mahal has been damaged by pollution, caused primarily by motor vehicles. The local civic authorities responded to the crisis by restricting the movement of motorized traffic within a four-kilometer radius from the monument. But this created an access problem to the hundreds of thousands of tourists wanting to visit the Taj Mahal.

The tourists are therefore dependent on cycle-rickshaws to visit the Taj. "We took this opportunity to provide a better alternative transportation to the tourist by way of improving the features of the existing traditional rickshaw," says Walter Hook, executive director of ITDP.

Matteo Martignoni, vice president of ITDP and an engineer and industrial designer by profession, realized that Agra was a perfect testing ground for practical application of his organization's idealistic aims. He says, "We can use the local expertise and governmental and industrial cooperation as a springboard from which to launch the Agra-based, mass-produced, ergonomically improved but inexpensive rickshaw, not only for use in Agra, but for international export."

The Asian Institute for Transport Development, a Delhi-based nongovernmental organization whose members include former officials from the national highways and railway boards, is implementing the project working with a committee of advisers, including cyclerickshaw manufacturers, tourism industry and transportation policy experts. c.P. Bhatnagar, an engineer who developed new rickshaw designs on his own, used his skills in designing the new models. He was later replaced by M.K. Mehta who has been the project manager of the venture.

Gadepalli Shyam, a student at lIT's Instrumental Design and Developmental Centre, along with ITDP and AITD's team of designers, started work on new models in Agra last September. Within six months, they had tested six new models.

In our first two prototypes, says Shyam, "the main rickshaw remains the samethe same chassis of the conventional rickshaw was used. But in one model what we did was to install a two-speed gear system that will enable the rickshaw-puller to pedal easily, work more hours as it does not cause fatigue or too much stress. In the second prototype, the handle bars were redesigned in such a way that the rickshaw-puller does not have to strain his wrist and lungs, thereby allowing him to breathe easily and as a result efficiency improves." Shyam cheerfully announces that the model they developed won the annual cycle-rickshaw race between Mathura and Agra, a distance of 60 kilometers, the winner reaching the finish line half hour before the rest of the pack.

Six models the Agra Cycle Rickshaw Improvement Project designed so far are: the Rani ki PaIki, Raja ki Baggi,

Udan Khatola (school bus), Vigyan ka Samadhan (the .. 7 answers of technology), Rickshaw 1947 and Rickshaw 200 I. The new models are more durable, 25-30 kilograms lighter than the conventional models, stw'dier and provide a more comfortable ride to the commuter. Udan Khatola, for example, has been designed to meet the requirements of schoolchildren. In Vigyan ka Samadhan, a lO-speed gear system has been fixed for smooth, easy pulling and also rectified the imbalances which often caused overturns in the conventional rickshaw. There is hardly any price difference between the new models and the conventional one available in the market. The new vehicles are moderately priced ranging from Rs. 3,600 to Rs. 4,200 each.

According to one estimate, in Delhi 250,000 cycle-rickshaws are operated, Agra has 25,000 rickshaws. If the rickshaw-puller or the owner wants to have an improved vehicle, he can buy the gear kit at Rs. 250 as an add-on and get it fixed to the old vehicle. The Agra project is in the initial design stage, and the commercial production will begin once the Agra initiative is successful. Bicycle manufacturers like Neelam have shown keen interest to manufacture the models designed in Agra, but ITDP has not decided yet. When asked about the commercial production of the new designs, Martignoni says, "We want to see a successful project happen in Agra, and this success then flows into other places. We do propose to transfer this technology so that commercial production could begin and benefit passed on to other cities and towns."

There are many similar projects going on the modern- .' ization of cycle-rickshaw.

Currently, one such World Bank-funded project is underway in Bangladesh. Dhaka has more than 750,000 cycleWorthy of a queen, "Rani ki Palki" is a new model being tested on Indian roads. Right: A couple enjoy their ride in "Vigyan ka Samadhan."

rickshaws, which is the highest per capita in the world. "Even though we have not visited the project in Bangladesh, we believe that the Agra project is somewhat more advanced," says Walter Hook. "We are intending to closely integrate the design with manufacturing and potential market for the new prototypes."

In some cities, the civic authorities are banning the movement of cycle-rickshaws in certain localities. But the rickshaw is the most efficient mode of transport for intra-city travel or within a crowded locality. According to Shyam, "In a crowded place like Delhi's Chandni Chowk, if you remove all the cars and trucks, rickshaws can create a far better transportation system both in terms of passenger transport and cargo transport than any other mode of transport. The amount of space they occupy versus the amount of luggage they carry is a lot more."

"Cycle-rickshaw is not the vehicle of the past, but of the future," says Martignoni. "The rickshaw has a lot of potential.

It is not the ultimate solution for transportation problem, but it can very well be integrated in the larger transportation network."

Certainly, in our overpopulated cities, where cars, buses, trains and other means of public transport are fast proving ineffective, actually contributing to the urban chaos and burgeoning pollution levels, it is the humble cycle-rickshaw that is finally being recognized as the ideal means of transport.

D

In Strictest

Overconfidence It can get lonely at the top, so lonely the big boss can lose touch with what the organization needs. Overconfidence in one's own acumen and unwillingness to listen to subordinates can lead to mistaken decisions, and has caused the downfall of more than one bright executive. How to avoid the pitfalls of overconfidence?

In a look at possible explanations for discounter Kmart's loss of market share under the leadership of CEO Joseph Antonini, the Wall Street Journal reported that "attitude may have made a bigger difference than strategy ....Mr. Antonini didn't think others could tell him much about the business ...he bristled at criticism and ...didn't do much hiring of managers from outside the company who might challenge him."

If this assessment is correct, Antonini was the victim of overconfidence-the understandable and all-too-human tendency to accept our own experiences and beliefs as reliable truths. We humans, it seems, are almost irresistibly motivated to use even the flimsiest evidence as the basis for unshakable conviction.

Further, we are convinced that we have a solid basis for our conviction, when in fact the vast majority of us are stunningly overconfident. And even when we are incontrovertibly proven wrong by events or the weight of other opinions, we are inclined to go in a direction that compounds rather than alleviates the damage resulting from our original position.

These powerful tendencies are most vexing to people who are frequently called on to make decisions and those whose careers have been marked by steady advancement toward the top CI wouldn't have been promoted for being wrong, would I?").

Fortunately, if you can accept these package that comes with being human, effects and sometimes even turn them perstar leaders Jack Welch of General of Intel have done.

tendencies as part of the you can neutralize their ill to your advantage-as suElectric and Andy Grove

We Really Don't Know the Half of It Decision research shows that we groundlessly bolster belief in the extent of our knowledge. Among the more prominent ways we do this: • We remember little of what we experience. University of Bamberg psychology professor Dietrich Dorner, in his book The Logic of Failure, observes, "Human memory may have a very large capacity, but its 'inflow capacity' is rather small.

What we perceive at any given moment may be rich in content, colorful and clear in its contours. The moment we close our eyes, however, a great deal of that richness instantly disappears-unclear and pale outlines remain."

• We remember selectively. In The Challenger Launch Decision, Boston College sociology professor Diane Vaughan observes that even highly skilled and experienced professionals have been shown to selectively accept or dismiss new facts and evidence to fit their existing worldview.

The result: decisions based on preconceptions rather than cunent circumstances.

• We remember prejudicially. Eliot R. Smith, a Purdue University psychology professor, studies the effects of exemplars-mental pictures of, say, a least-liked schoolteacherthat we unknowingly carry with us and apply to others. The danger? If a new acquaintance, perhaps a prospective new hire. reminds you of one of your exemplars, even "below the level of consciousness," then you will judge the new person by what you think of the exemplar. Smith relates findings of an experiment in which participants had an encounter with someone with a particular hairstyle who was mean to them.

Later, when presented with a new, not-unfriendly person with the same hairstyle, the paJ1icipants judged that person to be unfriendly. "It doesn't make sense," Smith notes, "but it sti 11 has an effect."

• We change what we expected to fit with what actually happened. Vaughan observes that evidence of the design flaw that led to the 1986 Challenger tragedy was first seen in 1977. But the "deviancy" from expected performance was "normalized"-engineers found an explanation for it.

Subsequent manifestations of the same problem over the years were treated the same way: Deviances from past performance were, in fact, predicted.

We toss these and other monkey wrenches into what we swear is "knowledge," giving us a gigantic case of overconfidence, according to J. Edward Russo, a Cornell University professor of management who conducts executive seminars on managerial decision-making. He and Wharton School research director Paul

J.H. Schoemaker have administered "overconfidence quizzes" to thousands of managers around the world, consistently finding that the managers grossly overestimate what they claim to know.

Russo says that the attitude of one bank's chief loan officer is typical. "He claimed that he and the loan officers who worked for him would score very high on a quiz which he himself assessed as being germane to his industry and not particularly difficult. , 0 one is more realistic than a banker,' he said. He then took the test-and failed miserably. He had his loan officers take the same test. Everyone of them flunked."

In a 1992 Sloan Management Review article, Russo and Schoemaker explained that their overconfidence quiz "measures something called metaknowledge: an appreciation of what we do know and what we do not know ....We draw on our metaknowledge when we conclude that we have enough information and are ready to make a decision now ....No group of managers we tested ever exhibited adequate metaknowledge; every group believed it knew more than it did about its industry or company. Of the 2,OOO-plus individuals to whom we have given a IO-question quiz ...fewer than I percent were not overconfident."

A Sad Saga of Caprice One group that appears to have fallen victim to a very public case of costly overconfidence is the General Motors corporate design staff who redesigned the 1991 Chevrolet Caprice.

Numerous press accounts noted the staff's rejection of negative comments on the prototype, such as this one in the Washington Post: "[T]he design staff ...had a reputation for being resentful of marketers, engineers and other corporate outsiders who had the gumption to tell them what was and was not attractive." The article goes on to report that when a focus group also voiced its strong objections to the proposed new Caprice exterior, design staff VP Charles M. Jordan "didn't like the clinic's reaction. 'We were excited about the design,' he said. 'We decided not to do anything about it. We believed in the design ....All the car guys liked the design.''' Caprice sales for 1991 amounted to half the anticipated volume, and in 1995, the model was discontinued.

But the Caprice saga is distinguished in the annals of overconfidence only by its very public unfolding. "This is the stuff of human nature," Russo observes. "It is apparently worldwide. We've tested in Europe and Asia as well as North America. Asians, admired in many ways for their business acumen, are, if anything, even more overconfident than Americans. It's not culturally specific--either in terms of societal or organization culture."

It's difficult, not to mention personally risky, for a subordinate to try to get a message of reality through to the overconfidentand-proud-of-it boss. "There's no way to convince that boss to hear what he doesn't want to hear," Russo laments. "It would be like the Hollywood mogul who was reputed to have said, 'I don't want a bunch of yes-men around me; anyone can say no if he's willing to lose his job.'"

Nonetheless, Russo says, "Overconfidence isn't all bad. It fills our need to believe in our abilities. It can contribute to a palpable

optimism, which has motivational value. And an argument could be made that risky projects are undertaken when some key people have an unrealistic belief in their chances of success."

A Compound Fracture of the Evidence We've seen that we can easily be led to errant decision-making by believing we possess a level of knowledge about our industry or field of expertise that we, in fact, overrate by 100 percent or more. Now for the really bad news: Human nature doesn't just lead us to mistaken judgments by routes such as those discussed above; it invites us to follow our initial misjudgment with responses that, at best, do nothing to correct our course or, at worst, lead to tragedy. Thus, Vaughan recognizes, "The a-ring failure that destroyed the Challenger was preceded by a years-long series of sporadic a-ring problems."

A series of decisions with increasingly poor outcomes is called a "doom loop" by Eileen C. Shapiro, president of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, consulting group Hillcrest Group Inc., in her fOlthcoming book The Seven Deadly Sins of Business. In an interview, Shapiro told me, "Many executives get caught in this downward spiral, where unquestioned and inconect beliefs lead them to compound rather than eliminate their past mistakes.

Look at what happened when consumers began to turn away from microwave ovens that were progressively loaded with more and more features, options and complexity. The response by some manufacturers was not to simplify things, but to offer cooking classes, more elaborate instructions, and-incredibly-still more features."

Why would anyone follow the doom-loop path? "Because some leaders can't believe that their initial decision was wrong," Shapiro says. "They're thinking, 'Since we couldn't have been going in the wrong direction originally, we must simply have failed to go far enough.' " Shapiro acknowledges that dogged belief in the rightness of one's course is understandable and sometimes even necessary.

"You can't endlessly examine assumptions; at some point you have to regard some of them as actionable beliefs. Without beliefs-things that you know-you're always caught in the headlights. But a great paradox of effective leadership is the requirement to hold a set of core beliefs that you know to be true and, simultaneously, to leave those beliefs open to challenge by yourself and others." Shapiro says former Digital Equipment Corporation CEO Kenneth Olsen seems to have been unable to accept such a challenge. "His belief that growth for his company could come only by taking on IBM in mainframe computers was made inconect by the emergence of Apple's Macintosh computer and the practical applications developed for it. But he couldn't bring himself to change directions."

Reality Checks to Knowing What You Don't Know So the odds are clearly stacked against us: The notion that we should question the things we're sure we know is not just counterintuitive but bordering on the illogical. "We will often see the error or foolishness in other people's beliefs," observes psychology professor James E. Alcock of York University, Toronto. "It is very difficult to see the same in our own." Nonetheless, the experts assert that we can take steps to examine our beliefs and expose the weaknesses or outright fallacies on which some of them are based.

Recognize the problem. "The single most important step you can take is to allow your beliefs to be called beliefs and not truths," says Shapiro. Russo agrees, adding, "You have to have that crack in the door: the boss recognizing at least the possibility of his fallibility. It involves an absence of self-delusion that is itself closely related to overconfidence-the leader who isn't afraid to admit what he doesn't know. Jack Welch is reportedly such a person. If so, the phenomenal value he has added for GE probably results at least in patt from his willingness to acknowledge he may not have all the answers."

Russo also reports that some executives may overcome overconfidence with awareness alone. He cites a study in which half of the participants in a negotiation exercise were warned about overconfidence: "Compared to the un warned group," he says, "those forewarned were 30 percent more likely to reach a negotiated agreement instead of having to turn to costly arbitration, and they achieved net dollar benefits that were 70 percent higher."

Similarly, "good managers devise their own solutions to the problems of overconfidence," Russo continues. "That head loan officer who had been so overconfident of his knowledge devised a 'competitor alert' file for his team of loan officers-they were required to contribute to it and read everyone's compiled submissions. Only three weeks after initiating the file, one of the officers was alerted to the possible defection of a major client to another bank. He contacted the client and convinced him not to switch, saving $160,000 in annual revenue."

Question experience. "As strange as it may seem," says Alcock, "experience is often a poor guide to reality. Critical thinking helps us question our experience and avoid being too readily led to believe what is not so. In effect, we come to a conclusion and they say, 'Hold on, how do I know this?' We suspend judgment. We can't apply this to everything we do--for example, standing at the supermarket dairy case and thinking, 'This looks like a quart of milk, but is it really?' But we can apply it in the case of decisions that are outside our areas of expertise."

We must also make sure the experience we rely on is relevant.

Russo cites development of the Gillette Sensor for Women as

instructive. "Gillette management asked their only female industrial designer to look at the women's-shaving market. She put herself on the right track by rejecting the [decision] frame that had always been used in developing women's shavers: Start with a man's razor, then make a few modifications 'for the ladies.'"

Instead, she ignored all existing products, focused on how women shave, and came up with the greatest success ever in its product category.

Russo mentions another reason to closely examine experience: "We often see managers make the mistake of equating experience with learning. Experience is inevitable; learning is not. Overconfidence persists in spite of experience because we so often fail to learn from experience." Organizations can help their people extract more learning from experience, Russo says, by keeping better track of managerial judgments over time. "Performance reviews should emphasize the value of realism to the firm and back this emphasis up with both assessments and incentives. In addition, training programs can provide feedback on simulated or past decisions whose outcomes are not widely known."

Consult others. Russo reflects the consensus of opinion in concluding that "group judgments, on average, [are] better than individual judgments" in decision exercises. But he and other experts caution that listening to others involves its own pitfalls. Foremost among these is the natural tendency to seek out people (and literature, anecdotes, etc.) who agree with us. In his book Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, Kellogg School professor Max H. Bazerman mentions the special susceptibility of corporate leaders to this tendency: "Prior successes often reinforce this behavior.

Almost by definition, a track record of success means there is lots of evidence confirming what one believes."

Alcock warns of another pitfall: "You have to watch out for those people making the same mistakes you might be making.

The corporate leader, above all, must be wary; he is likely to be hearing from people who want to gain favor and may do so by not raising problems or objections to the boss's idea."

The danger of such behavior is particularly acute in the presence of a forceful and strong-willed boss. The tough-guy reputation of former Eastern Airlines CEO Frank Lorenzo, for example, is said to have so intimidated top executives that they dared not defy him. A former colleague says lieutenants would strain to catch clues of Lorenzo's position on an issue and then rush to get on board with the boss.

There are several ways in which you might be able to gauge and adjust for the yes-man factor, First, layout problems and perhaps alternative responses, but don't state an opinion until others have stated theirs. Second, state an opinion and gather comments from aides, then drop the issue for a week or two. Bring it up again by taking an opposite stance, and see who switches with you. Third, be truly receptive to dissenting opinion. Go beyond lip service; thank subordinates immediately and publicly for stat-

ing their objections. And fourth, formalize dissent and counterargument; this measure is unanimously advocated by the experts.

Russo, for example, champions "counterargumentation, which has proven so valuable in several studies that it's probably smart to insist that one or two people take a devil's-advocate role, even when your team's opinion on an issue is unanimous ....Other studies have found that, when listing pros and cons, the cons do the most good in countering overconfidence."

That suggests a process described in a 1990 Walter Kiechel III Fortune essay: "Have opposing sides blast away, secure in the knowledge that they need not take their differences personally. For big decisions you may even want to put in place a formal system to make sure you hear all sides. This could be as simple as appointing someone as devil's advocate for the minority view ....Or as sophisticated as the dialectic practiced at Anheuser-Busch, [where] assigned teams make the case for each side of the question."

Intel president and CEO Andy Grove is credited with going to great lengths to try to prove himself wrong. In his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, he lists reality checks such as: • Adopting the perspective of someone outside your organization who has no vested interest in the status quo.

• Encouraging "company Cassandras." From their neverending stream of nightmare scenarios, genuine causes for concern can be identified.

• Never doing anything that even hints at disapproving of dissenting viewpoints. "It takes many years of consistent conduct to eliminate fear of punishment," Grove writes. "It takes only one incident to introduce it."

• Envisioning alternative futures. Russo contends that techniques associated with scenario-planning and other strategies aimed at anticipating possible future developments can help expose holes in what we think we know. "Fault trees may help. These are hierarchical diagrams designed to identify all the paths to some specific fault or problem." Another exercise: "Envisioning vastly different worlds than those everyone thinks are most likely. This has helped companies like Royal Dutch/Shell to better estimate economic and political uncertainty."

Questioning yourself enough to avoid overconfidence-but not so much as to cause needless self-doubt-is a tricky balancing act to maintain, especially since we are rarely willing to admit that we could be the victims of our own hubris. But if the alternative is to realize at some point in the future that you could have avoided a mistake, it suddenly seems easier to take a deep breath and ask yourself: How do I know?

0 About the Author: David Stauffer, a frequent contributor to Across the Board, heads Stauffer Bury Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based firm that provides management injc)rmation for corporate investors. customers and opinion leaders.

The struggle to get the vote and participate in government took American women 70 years.

The League of Women Voters is as old as women's right to vote. After nearly 80 years, it is still a significant vehicle of empowerment for women at all levels of American society. A discussion with Carole Wagner Vallianos reveals why.

I

he fiery Elizabeth Cady Stantons, Lucretia Motts and Susan B. Anthonys who spearheaded the movement for women's right to vote and their greater involvement in government in the United States might smile benignly upon Carole Wagner Vallianos. She, like many American women today, embodies the dreams of these early activists.

Vallianos' career has been dedicated, to a great extent, to public service. As a consultant attorney, former director and thirdterm board member of the League of Women Voters, she has considerable knowledge of women in government. The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan political organization that advocates citizen participation in government.

Vallianos recently visited India on a working tour, meeting women leaders and elected officials. She was enthusiastic about women's growing participation in politics and was interested in the ways Indian women exercise their voting franchise and how they manage their duties in public office, with the many challenges that face them.

A meeting in Udaipur with the NGO Astha made a big impression. "We sat on the floor on pillows, and local women

came in, tribal women, speaking not only Hindi but dialects. It was the most incredible aITay of women imaginable and some men as well." Astha-the name means "deep faith and conviction"-is a fieldbased support and resource organization in Rajasthan that implements programs of training, organization, research, networking, advocacy and lobbying. At this and other meetings Vallianos attended were many women who were elected to public office at the grassroots level. They talked about their concerns, the obstacles that they face, discussing ways and means to deal with them. "I understand that 39,000 women have been elected at various levels as of 1999, which is a wonderful number," Vallianos enthused.

Social constraints ranked high on the list of problems, pmticularly in places like conservative Rajasthan, where it is not acceptable for women to go about unaccompanied. It is difficult for them to interact with men in the villages, and they are afraid to go to the police station. "When many of them were first elected that seemed to be the big issue, the police. And yet their job required them to do a lot of interaction with the police.

Over time, they explained, they later were able to go to the police, and they often did go out alone." Since their reputations suffer in some ways, these elected officials feel isolated, lacking a strong support system. "One of the wonderful things, though, about so many of these women is the men who support them. Yes, some of the women are elected and do the job in name only, the men take over everything. But some of the men actually help the women and women grow into the role." So many of the women are illiterate, Vallianos observed, "it's remarkable that they are able to do that at all." Illiteracy is a major factor, and she feels much would be remedied

if the women had even functional literacy, knew some arithmetic and measurements.

Given this and the fact that they have tremendous workloads, household and farm work and caring for families, Vallianos says, "You can see that their spirit is just incredible to continue." She adds, "These women have been put into this office and this is like a stepping-stone to the future if they can build on it, and they feel hopeful that they can."

As members of the local panchayats, they must deal with entrenched social issues. Vallianos recounted a story told by one woman that pointed up what many say is the biggest problem: the caste system.

"She was asked to mediate a dispute between a Brahmin and a different caste, and her family is Brahmin. She mediated this dispute successfully, but when she came home her father-in-law was incensed that she would stoop so low as to try to resolve something in favor of this other caste when she should have been resolving it in favor of the Brahmin. And instead of being defeated, she said, 'When I am in my elected official role I am not your daughter-in-Jaw, I am an elected official. When T am at home, T am your daughter-in-law.'

And this very same woman, she came into the meeting with a man. And as the introductions were made, her husband was the man, and said he was accompanying her to this meeting because it took her 24 hours to get there."

The issues faced by the women elected to the panchayat and other public offices are not unlike those that historically were faced-and sometimes m'e sti II faced-by American women making their voices heard through political process that was denied them not so long ago. Vallianos sees parallels in the development of women finding a political voice in India:

"The League of Women Voters was formed in 1920 when women got the right to vote. But prior to that, that whole period building up to women getting suffrage, one of the issues women had was involved with the Temperance Movement. Trying to get men to stop the alcohol. And it's so funny because here I see exactly the same thing, and so many of these women were elected on that platform."

She confronts the criticism that women are fronts for their husbands, and are elected in name only while their husband does all the work. "We certainly have parallels in U.S. history. George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, was precluded from running another term as governor, and he put up his wife Lurleen. I'm not sure if she had a high school education, but she was not a very educated woman, and she was governor. She died, and then he remarried and put up his second wife as governor. And so there is one situation in which the woman didn't really grow into the job. He controlled the strings. Most recently there have been so many instances of women in American history who have taken a seat in government because their spouses died. And they've gone on to grow into that role, and the only reason they've been able to do that is they were pushed into it by someone who was working with the husband. The most recent case is Sonny Bono. His wife ran on his seat after he died, and actually, she's been growing into the job. People have given her fairly good praise, saying she has been a hard worker and that she is growing into the role. Just two examples of so many in the U.S. where women have moved into high spots just by chance."

Vallianos says the National Women's Commission (NWC) in India seems to be working on some issues in much the same

"Gen. Rosalie Jones crossing the Delaware." This 1913 cartoon by James Donahey from the Cleveland Plain Dealer-a take-off on thefamous portrait of George Washington crossing the Delaware---cast suffragists in a heroic mold. Bur most male cartoonists made fun of women's aspirations.

way that the League of Women Voters does, in a nonpartisan fashion. "Our organization is issue-based. And they [NWC] are very concerned about issues. They are trying to transcend the party problems and the party situations and look at domestic violence and violence against women at election time." The NWC members, she says, are doing a lot of investigative work: "They are not just deciding on issues, they are actually going out in the field and doing some grassroots investigative work," she continues, 'There is a tremendous difference between sitting in a national organization and just talking about the issues. I think the first step is actually going into the communities and seeing first hand what goes on, and they seem to be doing that and caring about what happens." ack of money is another thing that both Indian and American women who are engaged in the political process face. "I believe that's what's held women back in the United States. Even though women have been in the workforce for quite some time, they haven't been full force until the last 20 years or so. And even then, women

L

didn't feel free to spend their money in politics, or send it to a political candidate. They may give it to a charity or hospital or university or something like that, but to send $100 or more to a political candidate was almost unheard of. And suddenly there were a few organizations, one of them Emily's List in the United States: 'Early Money Is Like Yeast' -EMILY." Yeast causes the bread dough to rise, and the idea is to provide seed money to help women candidates rise to the top. "It formed a basis for women candidates to be known in the United States.

When you join Emily's List you pay them $100. They use that $100 to go out into the field and recruit women and also to evaluate other candidates who come to them, and then they send biographies to all of the members of Emily's List, and you are asked to promise to support two candidates and send them $100 each. And so this grassroots support among women in the United States of sending money to the candidates-not to Emily's List but to the candidates directlyhas really created a difference. Barbara Boxer, one of Califomia's two women senators, credits Emily's List with more than a (Continued on page 30)

"There are five square knots on the quilt evel)' two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada. The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear's paw trail to the crossroads ..."

It is not part of a fairy tale, but the key to a coded message. The speaker is Ozella McDaniel Williams, repository of wisdom passed on from grandmother, to mother, to daughter, from slavery to freedom. The coded messages were on quilts: quilts that were used to help escaping slaves find their way along the Underground Railroad to safety in the days preceding the abolition of slavery in America.

Hidden in Plain View, a recently published book by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, PhD, traces the histol)' of this well-kept secret. In the following excerpt from the book Tobin describes how she came across quiltmaker Ozella. Professor Dobard, an expert on African American quilts, kindly provided the photos.

walk through the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, is like a walk through the con-idors of American Southern history. Here, one is confronted by all the hustle and bustle of the retentions and re-creations of a bygone era. At the heart of historic Charleston is an imposing brick enclosure with open sides, known as the Old Marketplace. It looks very much as it did over one hundred years ago, as it still defines the length of the district. As it was in years gone by, the Marketplace is still the center of commerce for the area. Under the roof of the structure, long wooden tables, laid end-to-end, go on for blocks to create two narrow avenues for selling wares. As early as 1841 it was a marketplace for fresh vegetables, fish, meats and other goods brought to Charleston from the sUITounding farms and plantations and other coastal ports and faraway lands; it is still a vendor's market, but with stark contrasts between the old and the new.

African American women sit by pails of

A

From Hiddell ill Plaill View by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard. Copyright Š 1998 by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard. Used by permission of Doubleday. a division of Random House, Inc.

sweet grass and weave baskets much as their African ancestors did over a hundred years ago. But these crafts women, many of them descendants of slaves, are now sUITounded by merchants of flea market trinkets, Southern memorabilia, and newer, cheaper baskets from China and Thailand.

The smell of the daily ocean catch or freshly slaughtered meats is no longer the predominant early morning smell of the Marketplace. Today the aroma of freshly baked cookies and newly ground coffee beans from the gourmet shops sun'ounding the area compete for attention. Certain sounds can still be heard; the din of tourists and locals alike crowding the streets and trying to avoid the horses, their hooves providing the percussive rhythm for this city as they clop loudly over original cobblestone streets. CaITiages are drawn around the district, past the Custom House and on toward the Battery, where decorative wrought-iron fences accentuate the largess of old historic homes.

Taverns and brothels have given way to fern bars and upscale hotels (Text continued on page 24)

Facing page: O:e1la McDaniel Williams among her quilts in the Charleston Marketplace. In her lap is a wall hanging of Ihe Bear's Paw pallern, an instruction, according to the code, to follow the tracks of a bear through the mountains.

RighI. Map illustrating the various Underground Railroad escape routes. Created

by Christian Harrison, based on a map of the Narional Park Service.

Far right: Slave cabins on slave row, Boone Hall Planrarion, Charlesron. South Carolina. The cabins are made of brick and wood.

Harriet PowerS Pictorial Quilt. This quilt dates to 1895-98. Bible quilts preceded today's story quilts. This quilt is unusual in that it contains not only scenes from Scripture but also depictions of natural phenomena, such as the Leonid meteor storm ofc. 1833, which Powers knew of from stories of elders.

A Log Cabin quilt displayed as it once might have been to serve its hidden purpose: "airing" in the window of a slave cabin at Boone Hall Plantation.

The Plantation Quilt by Elizabeth Talford Scott is a replica of one she owned as a girl that was destroyed in a fire. The constellation of stars is believed to represent a plantation.

Detailed stitching surrounds the stars, forming what appears to be a topographical map.

Drunkard's Path pattern encouraged the slaves to follow a zigzag path. The AFicans believed that evil only traveled in straight lines. There is believed 10 be a connection between that superstiTion and The quilt pattern.

Safe houses were also staggered for protecTion.

Star/Evening Star/North Star

The Log Cabin pattern, late 19thcentury block.

touting Southern hospitality and cuisine. Newly restored, on a lesser traveled street, is the original slave mart, now a historical museum, whose presence jars us into remembering a less civil piece of the history of this Southern port city.

As 1 walked the aisles of the Marketplace, 1 found myself standing in front of a stall lined with quilts of all sizes, colors and patterns. 1 was drawn in by these piles of quilts, as long-forgotten memories of my grandmother's quilt box, filled with her handmade quilts, were brought to mind.

Before 1 could do much looking or reminiscing, an elderly African American woman, dressed in brightly colored, geometrically patterned African garb, slowly walked up to me from the back of the stall. She motioned me to follow her to the back, where an old metal folding chair sat surrounded by more quilts. "Look," she said. She chose one of the quilts from the pile, unrolled it, and while pointing to it said, "Did you know that quilts were used by slaves to communicate on the Underground Railroad?" The old quilter continued to speak but 1 could not hear her clearly in the midst of the noise of the Marketplace around us. 1 wasn't sure why she was telling me, a complete stranger, this unusual story. 1 listened politely for a short while. When 1 didn't ask any questions, she stopped talking. 1 purchased a beautiful, handtied quilt and left with her flyer advertising "historic Charleston Marketplace" quilts.

1 returned home with my quilt and memories of Charleston. 1 hung my quilt and laid my memories aside. 1 didn't think too much about my conversation with this quilter until several months later when 1 came across her flyer again. 1 remembered the story she had started to tell me and 1 wondered about it. 1 had never heard such a story or read about it in any books. Was there more to the story?

The flyer listed the quilter's name and phone number. 1 decided to call Mrs. Ozella McDaniel Williams and see if she would be willing to tell me more. When she answered the phone, 1 reminded her of who 1 was and asked if 1 might hear more about how quilts were used on the Underground Railroad. She told me curtly to call back the next evening, which 1 did. At that time she said, "I can't speak to you about this right now." When 1 tried pressing her, she laughed quietly and whispered into the phone, "Don't worry, you'll get the story when you are ready." And then she hung up.

D About the Author: Jacqueline L. Tobin, author of The Tao Women, is a teacher, collector and writer of women's stories. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

"/'m simply not going to react to your calling me passive-aggressive."

Drawing by Paul Michael Davies.

Reprinted from rhe Saturday £"ell;1I8 Post Š 1995.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

=-~ -

-~

"Thefifry-five-gallon drum is completely filled with pennies, sit: Should it be taken to the bank?"

On the verge of the Tle1Nmillennium, Indian women are taking a hard look at their \ options, which have

t! ~

. ,

multiplied like never

before. How to l take advantage of new opportunities without compromising old values?

wo basic changes are happening today under the impact of globalization. In the Western countries, not just public institutions but everyday life is becoming opened up from the hold of tradition. And other societies across the world that remained more traditional are becoming detraditionalized. I take it this is at the core of the emerging global cosmopolitan society I have spoken of in previous lectures."

In the BBC Reith Lectures series 1999, entitled "Runaway World," held consecutively in London, Hong Kong, Delhi, Washington, and then London again, Professor Anthony Giddens spoke on various issues related with globalization. Although in his introductory talk in London, he had traced "a truly global revolution in everyday life" to "women staking greater claims to equality," in his lecture on tradition, delivered in Delhi on March 25, he did not touch upon gender at all. In the historical environs of the Teen Murti Bhawan, the erstwhile residence ofPrirne Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Kiran Bedi, the first Indian woman police officer, and Urvashi Butalia, a well-known feminist publisher, expressed their discomfort with the relatively limited space accorded to women in his thesis.

In a conceptual framework that works globally, women's issues may be discussed tangentially, or simply not highlighted as "women's issues" to prevent ghettoization. However, there can be no running away from the fact that the entire discourse of tradition in India is centered around the changing roles of women. Modernity ushered in by enlightenment, is now generally recognized to be an incomplete process. owhere was that more apparent than in India, where as late as 1987 a woman was burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her husband, and later revered as the apotheosis of the Sati tradition. But since the 1990s when India-albeit reluctantly-joined the global village, and began to eat at McDonald's and swing with Madonna, the social scene has become even more complex. The challenges that are now facing modern Indian women are not only from conformism and dogma, but also from global homogenization.

It would be a salutary exercise in assessing the impact of globalization to see how traditional practices are being negotiated in the present time by different classes of women. In the more fortunate instances-as in the upper classes in a metropolis-global influences seem to blend wonderfully with tradition, creating exotic hybrids. The women of the Y generation wear their Indianness effortlessly with their bikinis. This is a generation nurtured on MTY. Madonna's is perhaps a more familiar face to them than that of their next-door neighbor. Even if they have never left the shores of the country they are likely to be well up on the latest trends and fashions in far-off ew York. These women appear to be individualistic, sometimes affecting bizarre "attitudes" to state their identities. They also appear more confident, worldly-wise and assertive than their predecessors even 10 years ago. They have reason to be. The world is opening up for them. A new legitimacy of glamour-based options among the

II

T

middle-classes alone has led to a multiplicity of career choices: modeling, deejaying, managing events. To add to that there can be careers in public relations, advertising, journalism, media, that can be tapped after a degree from a polytechnic. Prodigious intelligence or diligence are no longer prerequisites for a woman to be economically independent.

But although economically savvy, in certain other ways these women are a throwback to their grandmothers. The dichotomy between "bad" tradition and modernity around which the postIndependence generation of progressive women (their mothers) organized protests against issues like child marriage and dowry, has collapsed for this lot. Pragati Mohapatra, a lecturer of history at Indraprastha Women's College, says that out of her class of 30, at least 29 students see early marriage with an economically wellplaced man as a desirable goal. Arranged marriages are no longer anathema, with many a mini-skirt-clad young woman ready to contract a lifelong relationship with a man their family selects for them. These women do not perceive marriage as "restrictive," the way the earlier generation did: husbands, for them, are supposed to stand in for boyfriends. They feel fully confident of pursuing a rich and fulfilling career-Dften in unconventional fields like media

and films--even after marrying and producing children.

Unfortunately, many contradictions arising from the conflict between modem and traditional values go unresolved in such a position. The globe is spinning toward democratization of each and every aspect of human life whereas our local matrimonial practices are still feudal and sexist. Young people often do not perceive the clash until it hits them. Indeed, in this increasingly fast-paced and changing environment extreme astuteness is required to recognize things for what they are. Sophistry and wordplay is replacing real debate in the public sphere. The space that used to be reserved for intellection-newspapers, magazines, television-is being taken over by society gossip, catch phrases and sound bytes. The slick use of tradition to further vested commercial interests is a case in point: advertisers do not hesitate to condone even regressive practices like the giving of dowry to sell products ranging from investment schemes to diamond jewelry; the grooms' parents laying down the law during wedding ceremonies is made comic and trivialized as a charming eccentricity in some other advertisements. The repercussions of such tradi-

tions are hardly as innocuous as they are touted to be in this Indipop discourse. They begin to be felt when even in organizing "love marriages" the bride's family finds itself bearing most of the expenses. Unfairness doesn't stop here, it soon creeps in between couples. Not too many Indian men are ready for the kind of partnership the boyfriend-model presumes. They may selfconsciously use the enlightened rhetoric of relationships but there is neither outside pressure nor inside motivation adequate for them to effect a sea change in lifestyle. If anything, the new corporate culture with its premium on entertaining only reinforces the traditional image of the wife as an accomplished hostess or a beautiful complement. A cursory glance at matrimonial columns would show that there are hardly any advertisements for brides that don't include "homely" (a malapropism for skilled in home-making) as a desirable prerequisite, in the same breath with "professionally qualified," "intelligent" and "fair-complexioned." In fact, the more qualified the boy, the more idiosyncratic and self-contradictory the list of adjectives for the desired partner. The figure of the made-to-order superwoman has yet to be dislodged from both Indian male fantasy and Indian women's aspirations.

Trying to attain the impossiCourtesyDcYATISHAGARWAL ble, lives of working women become studies in the balancing act. Many prefer to forego promotions, some even give up high-pressured jobs after having children. Dr. Sudha Marwah, a gynaecologist practicing in Colaba, Mumbai, many of whose patients are high-achievers, says, "A trouble-free pregnancy is a rare phenomenon these days.

Most women are highly anxious. It is difficult for them to slow down." The incidence of stress-related diseases like hypertension has also increased dramatically among younger women in the last 10 years. It seems that the pressure of trying to reconci Ie disparate elements has been pushed away from the conscious mind but right into the hearts of women. The strain is showing also in the increasing divorce rate. If not radically redefined, the institution of marriage is in for more trouble in future.

The conflict between tradition and modernity in India is further complicated by the intrusion of chauvinistic nationalism. To many Indians globalization is interchangeable with Americanization.

Americanization is a more difficult term to define than the "westernization" of yore. Whereas westernization was closely allied with progressivism, Americanization is used derogatorily to suggest the mass culture of jeans, mini-skirts, pop and fast living.

"Many of the most visible cultural expressions of globalization are American-Coca-Cola, McDonald's. Many multinational companies are based in the U.S. too," admits Professor Giddens.

Porousness of national borders is one of the most crucial aspects of globalization and the most difficult to negotiate for a developing country like India. Americanization is of course not the whole

reality of the phenomenon, but it is significant enough. For one, it has enabled the more conservative elements in society to collapse the concept of nationhood with tradition, and aggressively lay down the constituents of Indianness by opposing anything that smacks of a "foreign" perspective. "Lesbianism is not a part of Indian tradition," said those who tore down the posters and actually hindered the showing of Deepa Mehta's film Fire (made in English, with foreign viewership in mind). Fire is a sensitive portrayal of the relationship between two women struggling with sterile marriages. Interestingly, supporters of the film also dug up evidence from art and literature to prove that lesbianism has been "traditionally" present in this country. So ironically enough, globalization while challenging tradition has also breathed into it a new and passionate lease of life.

Lower down on the social ladder, where one might feel that globalization has not made an impact at all, the opposition between women's articulation of their desires, and the clamping down of restricting locks and chains in the name of tradition has assumed the proportions of a war. The age-old saas-bahu conflict was always an excuse for the parents of the boy to exploit and milk the daughter-in-Iaw's family for financial gains. Sudha Tiwari, who works with destitute women in shelter homes and is associated with an NGO, Shaktishalini, for the last 12 years, says that the nature of measures employed against women in their marital families has become far more horrifying. Earlier brides were only burned, now they are also shocked and hanged into silence. Worst of all, there is a new trend of getting women certified insane. However Tiwari does not foresee a bleak future.

"Women are coming out more and more with their experiences.

Be it torture, sexual abuse or demands for dowry-they are expressed far more openly than ever before."

Openness is equally a gift of globalization as the desire to own more consumer durables. Unfortunately they have come interlocked with each other to India. It is ironical that the same television set for which a daughter-in-law might be beaten, also brings into the home images of women having extramarital affairs, suing for divorce, and being single parents. The proliferation of television channels has changed the face of programming.

Within the last two years there have been at least six longrunning soaps with adultery as their theme. In talk shows various issues ranging from sexual harassment to rape are being discussed threadbare. Besides this, foreign serials like Baywatch and Bold and Beautiful have proved to be runaway successes. It is as though the purdah of shame has at last been pulled away.

Everyday life can no longer be the same. Social roles are crying to be rewritten; new definitions are being called for. The debate is high-pitched; passions inflamed.

Caught between the aggressive traditionalists and the swinging hip generation the task of the women's movement-never simplistic-has now become even more difficult. The worst casualty is that the intellectual and social space occupied earlier by progressives is being usurped by those who misuse the discourse of tradition. Urvashi Butalia cites the opposition to the Miss Universe beauty contest held in Bangalore in 1997 as an exam-

pie. Certain women groups there pitted "Indianness" against the "vulgarity" of women baring their bodies, and used traditional symbols like the rolling-pin and even cow-dung to disrupt the function. In itself, this is a dangerous trend because here tradition was used prescriptively to muzzle women's expression of themselves. Also, it must be added, that it involved a gross misrepresentation: in a plural society like India it is impossible to talk of the tradition without falsifications.

The women's movement in India has always used aspects of tradition creatively and for the betterment of women. Ela Bhatt's pioneer work in organizing a trade union for women workers in the informal sector, including home-based workers (Ahmedabadbased SEWA), which has inspired similar experiments in microfinance all over the world: in South Africa, and even North America, are examples. Using traditional methods where the initially trained woman goes out with new infonnation and trains her sisters who, in turn, train their family members, SEWA has in fact been able to harness tradition to create economically independent women. It has led to greater self-esteem in marginal women.

SEWA is important also because it is a confluence of three grassroot movements of India: labor, cooperative and women's movement. "SEWA has shown that microfinance is a powerful tool in developing institutional strengths and strong economy," says Smita Srinivas who has researched extensively in the field.

Globalization thus need not only be about Americanization. It need not be merely passive. Sociologists have invented a term "reverse colonization" to suggest the influence of developing countries on the developed. In Indian English writing and the overwhelming presence of Indian restaurants in London, the former colony has been striking back for a while. There has also been the emergence of a globally-oriented high-tech sector in India. Perhaps Ela Bhatt's SEWA is a beginning from which Indian women can make their unique negotiations with tradition examples to the rest of the world.

But first of all we have to choose what it means to be Indian, and what it means to be a woman. Indian women need to define themselves, not definitively but in constant contextualization. If globalization is about anyone thing, it is about multiplicity of options. On the one hand we have the reactionary discourse that is prescriptive and closed; on the other, we have the world to choose from. At times, it may seem that the former is subsuming us. The unprecedented success of mainstream films like Dilwaale

Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge is an example of how Indianness is being imaged very seductively by negating the rest of the world. The heroine, a young Indian woman, while taking a holiday in Europe, falls in love with another Indian there. Returning to England she discovers that her father has already plighted her troth with an unknown man-a "true Indian"-back home. She leaves reluctantly for India with her family, and is pursued by the faultless paramour who makes it clear that he would marry her only with the blessings of her father. Many a fight sequence later that actually happens. Besides making a point about the location of Indianness (spiritual not physical), the film is replete with controversial messages: Indian women unlike the western do not have sex before marriage; they are first "owned" by their fathers and then made over to their husbands; they may choose to take a holiday by themselves or fall in love without permission like their western counterparts but they would never compromise their family's honour by running away. It is as though the entire case for tradition vs. foreign has been fought and won. This is not an isolated example, if anything, it is a trend. The more recent box-office phenomenon Kuch Kuch Hota Hai outrightly cast the ideal contemporary woman as the one who progresses to Indianness (symbolized by traditional dress, singing religious bhajans, and being approved by the hero's mother) from the foreignness of the titillating dresses she wears in the first half of the film.

However, there is much else to take heart from. Dissemination of information globally is destroying myths all around. It is perhaps not so easy anymore for those with vested interests to "mislead" people. To my mind, a recent global event, the brouhaha around the Lewinsky-Clinton affair made a significant intervention in the climate of paranoia about Americanization in India by unveiling the "reality" of America. For the first time, while the case was being argued at various levels, Indians became privy to a continuing international discussion of social, political and ethical issues pertaining to American society. Is Hillary in standing by her erring husband just like an ideal Indian wife? people asked in bewilderment, both in the press and drawing rooms here. The answer was sought in the fact of her being a wife, a mother, the First Lady-in short, being a woman. There was an inevitable comparison of social roles and values. From icons or images wearing tight skirts and sporting loose morals, American women at last became "real" for many of us.

Even before the beginning of this century women in various parts of the world had started thinking globally. Feminism has been furthering the cause of all women for more than a hundred years. What we need to do now is to knit our experiences with other emerging global ideologies, and cast the net of sisterhood all over the globe. For the first time in history, we are presented with an unmediated choice of role-models. We can either spread our wings and fly out to a horizon that is suddenly visible or we can submit our heads to be buried forever in the sand.

0 About the Author: Anuradha Marwah-Roy leaches English literature at Zakir Husain College, Delhi University. Her first novel, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta, came out in 1993, and the second novel, Idol Love, is expected next month.

million dollars in the past election given by 11,000 members. That's very impressive.

It's women giving to women. And I think it's going to build a base of SUpp0I1 for women candidates." omen are still fighting to get more representatives into legislative assemblies in the United States. "There are nine women senators out of a hundred, so that's only 9 percent, but we've never had that before. Almost 13 percent of the House of Representatives are women.

Statewide elective office gets more impressive. Women hold almost 28 percent of the available positions at statewide elective offices, that is governor, vice governor or any of the state treasurers. State legislatures: 22.3 percent are women. It says that the number of women serving in state legislatures has increased more than fivefold since 1969. That's 30 years. That's a long time.

But the momentum is building. So we share with India the problem of trying to get more women into office. We are going about it in different ways. I don't see the momentum in the United States for any kind of reservations or affirmative action (a program in the U.S. that gives equal opportunity to minorities), our courts have determined that you can't have a numerical quota. California has voted no on affirmative action, and other states are going that way. So I don't see any momentum for that kind of a change. But 1 do see a momentum for head-to-head fights among equals. And I think that's the way the United States will change."

About reservation in India, Vallianos observes, "With the social structure as it is, it seems to be one way of doing it." She points out another parallel in the United States: "You know, women were fighting for the right to vote since 1848. And, of course, African Americans couldn't vote at that time, because they were slaves.

Slavery was still in full force. And women were fighting not only for suffrage for women, but they were fighting against slavery." The women's movement split because a wedge was driven between the women who believed in subsuming their desire for suffrage into the abolitionist movement, because they believed that there shouldn't be slaves and the women

W

who wanted universal women's suffrage now. "The anti-slavery arm was stronger.

And, of course, men slaves, not women slaves got the right to vote. And the women's movement split at that point because there were these ardent feminists who said no, we want everyone to have full suffrage. We don't want slavery and we don't want women to be slaves and not be full citizens. And there was a more rational, less ardent arm that said no, the only way that we can do this is have the slavery issue decided now and get our suffrage later. So it created such an incredible division among women that it was not until 1920 that women got the vote. And the Civil War was in 1865. So women didn't come back into one unit until somewhere in the 1890s.

And because of that collective effort they were able to finally push suffrage, but it took 30 years even at that point."

Vallianos sees a parallel in India, where the caste system is used as a manipulative device against women in government.

"Wedges are driven, say, between the caste system and women. 'Why should women have reservation when we still have all these problems with the caste system?' I think that parallel is a perfect parallel. I don't know what the right way is, but I know it has been done in many countries.

Every time someone has to give up power, they are unwilling to do it, and they are willing to drive wedges any way they can."

When asked about what kind of elected officials women make, Vallianos is evenhanded. "They have a different perspective from men. In a participatory democracy we need all perspectives." She continues, "When there were very few women in our U.S. Congress, finally there were some women who were debating a budget bill, and they wanted to put money for research on breast cancer. And it was like a light went on. The women said, why don't you put this money in for breast cancer research? And those men said, we never thought of it. And one of the male legislators said, well, my mother had breast cancer, of course I want to do it. And it was not that they didn't care, it was not that they didn't want to do it, because they did it eventually. It's just that it wasn't on their front burner. They didn't think about it."

Another thing, "We always hear about woman as the conciliator, the mediator, as the consensus builder. And, after all, politics is the art of compromise, so it should be a perfect role for a woman."

The Clinton Administration has brought women into the cabinet in a big way.

Vallianos sees them as good role models: "They are doing incredible jobs. And so when people say that the United States doesn't have a lot of women officials elected in high office, I say that time is coming. I see that grounds well just looking at the cabinet of President Clinton," In Asia and even in Europe women have held the top governmental post, yet America lags behind. When will a women be elected President of the United States? Vallianos leans back and smiles, "I don't see it in the next four years but I see more and more elected officials who are women. And it will come-I hope in my lifetime!"

One of the things the League of Women Voters supports is education on issues as well as procedures. To illustrate how important development of training programs could be in India, also, Vallianos gave an example of a tribal woman she met in Jaipur "with rings in her nose, who spoke a dialect, who covered her face with a scarf

every time she spoke. She was obviously poorer, if you compare her to some of the other people, and she spoke so much from the heart. She talked about an affiliation with an NGO that came to work in her area.

She is an elected official, and she is illiterate. She said because of this NGO she realized the value of being literate. For that very reason she sent her three daughters to school. I think it is so important for all of these villages and all of these elected officials to have some kind of linkage with NGOs." It's a big step to train them, she says, "even understanding what meetings are, how to go about holding a meeting in a different way, perhaps, from what they are used to. Because they are not only going to have to interact at their local village level the way they are used to, but they are going to have to interact with people at the other ends of the party and of the political system."

The League of Women Voters was formed as a direct offshoot of the women's suffrage movement, Vallianos continues. "It was formed to help women learn about the issues that they would be facing when they voted. And there were a lot of issues at that time. So it was also an issue-based organization, to help to get ac-

So there is a lot of good instinct there. But there are other aspects as well, such as political knowledge, about how to function within the party system a little better."

One of the things the League does is ~ train women who go out to train five to 10 ~ others. Vallianos thinks it might be a use~ ful model. But, she adds, it's no substitute for solid regional training. "One of the things that the women seemed to love was the interaction among others who are in the same position, and they need to know that everybody's facing these same problems, and they need to know the solutions that somebody else has found, because they are working in isolation a lot of times. And do the networking, the building of alliances, that's something that all the women's groups and other organizations do in the United States, and they do it here in India as well, but I don't think it has filtered down to this village level yet, among these elected officials."

Projects like this take money, and fundtion on these very issues that were so trou- raising is a continual challenge. Vallianos blesome, like child labor, women's hy- cites history again: "Before women got giene and family planning." There were the vote, before 1920, women funded this broader issues, too, like world peace and whole process of lobbying and campaignhealthy water. "So from the beginning the ing for the vote by using inheritance League was not about women. It was an money, by selling their jewelry and meltorganization of feminist women, but it is ing it down." Women didn't control their own money at that time, and women not a feminist organization. It is really weren't working, so they could only use about citizenship, and the goal of the their personal money, she points out. A League is to encourage the participation of citizens in government processes. And few enlightened husbands of the wealthy women helped, but basically it was inherialso to learn about how government runs. tance or jewelry. Many women of very So the goal is not just to help members, modest means contributed their jewelry to but the goal is to help citizens." further the cause. "We haven't been colembers leam about the government as lecting jewelry lately in the League of they support causes, and Vallianos Women Voters, although I threatened to thinks something like that here would collect it myself, and evaluate it," she be very helpful, noting that illiteracy is a big laughs. "Members pay membership dues. obstacle. She thinks some of the member Leagues are formed around units of govtraining programs might be adapted to India, ernment, and so you have local leagues in too: "It seems to me that people need skills- the communities, you have state leagues building. There are so many things that they formed around state governments, and would like to do that they don't know how to then the ational League that is formed around the federal government. If you are do, but if they were taught, they certainly a member of one level of League, you are could learn." Not only practical, literacyrelated things, but good govemance. "They a member of every level of League. And are familiar with a lot of it instinctively. so when a member pays her dues she pays Like, they are not willing to give bribes to it to the local level, and then the local govemment officials to get something done.

(Conrinued on page 60)

M

T

e

Riture Is Ours to Lose This century saw great betterment of the lot of women, but, the author warns, if women forget the history of their struggle for hard-won equality, they risk losing the gains.

S

tanding at the turn of the millennium, how odd it seems that women, the majority of human species, have not, over the course of so many centuries, intervened successfully once and for all on their own behalf. That is, until you consider that women have been trained to see themselves as having no relationship to history, and no claim upon it.

Feminism can be defined as women's ability to think about their subjugated role in history, and then to do something about it. The 21 st century will see the End of Inequality-but only if women absorb the habit of historical self-awareness, becoming

a mass of people who, rather than do it all, decide at last to change it all. The future is ours to lose.

Since there has always been some scattered awareness that women's low status was unfair, you could say that there has always been a women's movement. And just as you could say that there has always been a women's movement, you could also say that there has always been a backlash. It is truly striking how often Western humanity has taken the leap forward into more egalitarian, rational and democratic models of society and government, and made the decision-for a decision it had to be-to leave women out. At every turn, with a heroic effort of the will to ignore the obvious path of justice, men were granted, and granted themselves, more and more equality, and women of all races were left in history's tidewater.

Once again, we are at a turning point. This decade has seen one new landmark after another: the Family and Medical Leave Act; a feminist sitting on the Supreme Court; a woman in charge of American foreign policies that now include opposition to clitoridectomy. Indeed, feminism has become mainstream: Betty Friedan has met Betsy Ross; Barbie's ads now read "Dream With Your Eyes Wide Open" and "Be Your Own Hero." Oprah is talking about how to walk out of an abusive marriage, and Tori Amos and Fran Drescher speak out in the celebrity press about sexual assault. This flood tide could either crest further to change the landscape forever, or it could recede once again. This is what historians call an "open moment," and women have blown such moments in the past. What determines the outcome is the level of historical awareness we reach before the tide inevitably turns.

There are four ways that our culture militates against historical consciousness in women. One is the steady omission of women from history's first draft, the news. Women, Men and Media, a national watchdog project, reports that women are featured in only 15 percent of the front-page news-and then usually as victims or perpetrators of crime or misconduct. It is not because no one is interested in what women are doing that this ceiling of visibility is kept so low; nor is it a conscious conspiracy. But if tomorrow the editors in chief and publishers of national news media were to see front sections dominated by 53 percent female newsmakers, they would not shout, Stop the presses! Too many women! Rather, there would be the impression that somehow these publications had, by featuring news makers who are part of a majority, marginalized themselves. So women's advances take place with little day-by-day, let alone month-by-month, popular analysis.

The second pressure, which complements the omission of women from historical culture, is the omission of history from women's culture. One example: under its previous editor, Ruth Whitney, Glamour magazine ran a political column. Bonnie Fuller, a new editor fresh from Cosmopolitan, has deleted this monthly column and added a horoscope. It's a shift from realtime-historical-political time-back into that dependent, dreamy, timeless state of Women's Time. In Women's Time, your fate is not in your own hands as an agent of historical change.

Rather-Hey, are you a Pisces? Why bother running down your

Manolo Blahniks to do something as mousy as voting? Your fate is in your cleavage, and in the stars.

Emerging naturally from this is the third pressure: the recurrent ideological theme that if women take themselves seriously they will lose femininity and, therefore, social status. If what they do, think, worry about and long for doesn't matter, surely it's not important that history pays them attention.

The fourth pressure is forgetfulness. Young women I have met on real college campuses think sex discrimination is a thing of the past. Or that the struggle for the vote lasted maybe 10 years, not more than 70. Or that women got the vote when AfricanAmericans did. Or that it has always been legal to get an abortion in America. They are stunned to discover that in their mothers' lifetimes women could not get credit on their own. They are amazed to learn that it was African-American middle-class women's clubs that led the movement against lynching. They didn't know that women chained themselves to the gates of Congress, or went on hunger strikes and were force-fed-so that young women far into the future could take their rights for granted. These young women are shocked, in other words, to find that they have a history.

As a result, women remain dependent on other models of "revolution" for their own. They must catch the taste and techniques of activism like a hit song of the month wafting through the air.

So one sees women slumbering and then "waking up" every 30 years or so; periods of feminism always follow periods of agitation by women on behalf of other, more respectable causes.

This past century shows how fragile conscious feminism has been. The 191Os, with their wave of populist reform, saw the crescendo of women's push for the vote. But the year before it was granted, in 1919, the term "post-feminist" had already expediently been coined. By the '20s, pop culture was once again ridiculing the suffragists' generations as being man-hating old battle-axes, irrelevant and out of touch with "today's women."

A long sleep followed, with fitful waking. After Betty Friedan's 1963 book helped middle-class white women identify the causes of their deeper malaise, the magical 15 years, from 1965 to 1980, began, representing a high point of historical selfawareness for Western women. Again, other movements had to set the stage: the anti-war movement, the free-speech movement and the hippie movement all contributed to the idea that it was all right to break free of social roles. The civil rights movement trained a generation of African-American activists. The '70s were astonishing: the statutes against sex discrimination labeled Title VII and Title IX; Shirley Chisholm's 1972 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. That era, personified by Steinem and Jong, NOW and the National Women's Political Caucus, showed what could happen for women when, as an energized mass in a democracy, they wanted change badly enough to make noise about it.

The predictable backlash came, as it always does; the evil '80s were a time of shoulder pads, silicone and retrenchment. Again-so quickly, so thoroughly-women "forgot." A Time/CNN poll found that only 33 percent of women called

themselves feminists-and only 16 percent college-age women.

"Guilt" and "the Mommy Track" were the catchwords of the day. Once again, feminists were represented as hairy-legged man-hating shrews.

The heartbreak of those times was in seeing newly clueless young women come of age. Once, when I visited Yale as a speaker, a brilliant young Asian-American student joined her male debating society peers in loudly ridiculing feminism. Later, when we were alone for a moment, she confided that she didn't really believe what she said-but the guys were in charge of the club and she just wanted to get along with them. "Besides," she had said, as if parroting some women's magazine, "women my age just have to accept that we can't have it all." It was as if all those words-flextime, family leave, egalitarian marriage-had vanished, taking with them the ways in which that young woman could have reconsidered her life.

Enter the explosive '90s. Women are now the most important voting mass in America. "Women's Issues" dominate the agenda.

The word "feminism" is as taboo as ever, but does it matter if you call yourself a feminist if you are living feminism? And American women are doing that, considering the number of their new businesses, and their new judgeships, new elected officials and new spending power. Feminism today is not a label; it's a way of life.

But here's the catch: if we remain indifferent to history, we risk losing it all. The bad old days are always ready to knock at your door, sisters: while you're packing your briefcase or getting into your truck, feeling confident, having thrown out the mailing from that advocacy group, you could just find that you can't get a legal abortion anymore; or that your boss knows that those sexual harassment statutes can be managed with a wink and a nod.

Women who are ignorant of their own history forget the main lessons, like: Here's how you mobilize; being nice is never as good as getting leverage; the nature-nurture debate has been going on forever, and neither side is going to win; your representatives pay attention when you use your money, your voice and your will. And voting millions can provide the will.

Maybe we will learn at last. Maybe we will create institutions that are willing to share influence with younger women coming up, rather than hoarding power for one generation. Maybe we will learn to honor our heroines and role models while they are still alive: maybe Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm will get their commemorative stamps and parades in their own lifetimes, so our daughters will grow up with someone to turn to more powerful in their imaginations than Kate Moss and Calista Flockhart.

Maybe we will learn at last that dissent and disagreement among women across the political spectrum is a sign of our diversity and strength. Maybe we will turn from the horoscope page to the Congressional Quarterly, and understand at last that our salvation lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

0 About the Author: Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities, is a regular contributor to the New York Times and New Republic.

sive, ranging from Rs. 725 to Rs. 850. For coastal areas where the water is saline, IDE has developed treadle pumps made of concrete as the brine would corrode the metal.

In the semiaIid regions, in Westem India and in the hilly tracts, IDE is focusing on affordable micro irrigation technology in the form of drip irrigation and small sprinkler systems.

The benefits for a farmer are considerable, claims Ananda Mohan De. Installing a KB pump would give him ownership of water-a crucial factor for a successful harvest; it provides an assured access to water, freeing the farmer from the vagaries of nature or elTatic electric or diesel supply; it is efficient and affordable, he can recover the initial investment in one growing season. Using the KB pump, a farmer is able to cultivate two crops and his earnings increase by at least Rs. 6,000. The rise in the income level allows farmers to choose when to time their crops to fetch the best price.

Effective promotion in rural aI'eas is crucial for the success of IDE's programs. In pursuing its market-oriented development strategy, therefore, IDE works closely with governments, NGOs and self-help groups active in rural areas, aIld even private sector entrepreneurs. These organizations work with farmers and look out for new ideas, products and opportunities that will benefit their own farmer members. "We work with more than a dozen local manufacturers in each state where we have a presence, like Orissa, West Bengal, BihaI' and Uttar Pradesh. We reach individual fanners in every way we can think of," Hemphill says. "We have our own marketing assistants in rural areas, we work with local dealers of agricultural products and also through mistries-selfemployed mechanics-not only to train them to install and service our products but also because they are in touch with farmers on a regular basis."

IDE's promotion activities center around the cluster approach, focusing on a nucleus village to create awareness and generate sales. Says Hemphill, "We use video vans, hoardings, flyers, brochures, public demonstrations. But the best recommendation for a faI'mer is another farmer who has used the product successfully.

So our best adveltising is really the fanners who have bought the products and are using them and getting good results."

Following the success of the KB treadle pumps, IDE is now eying new opportunities in areas where water is scarce and therefore needs to be conserved. For this it has turned its attention to microin-igation technologies----drip inigation and sprinkler inigation.

Microirrigation is the most effective way to provide water to plants in such aI-eas. IDE's research shows that microinigation saves at least 50 percent water, reduces labor and soil erosion, and increases crop productivity, It Oliginated in Israel where the scientists came up with a very effective but highly technical product. It is also extremely high-cost and thus inaccessible to small farmers, even though the Indian Govemment provides huge subsidy and over 60 companies aI'e involved in manufacturing drip irrigation components in the country, True to its business ethos, IDE has adapted the technology to make it affordable for their farm customers, Says Hemphill, "What we canle up with in drip iITigation was, instead of emitters-

which are fairly high-tech gizmos that drop water on the plants-we devised micro tubes with simply holes punched in them, It's very simple technology and works extremely well. So you get most of the benefit of the high-tech system at a fraction of the cost."

Along with this, IDE is working on developing a micro irrigation program to work in tandem with canal systems to help achieve better water utility and higher productivity. Most canal systems tlu'oughout the world distribute water unevenly, with farmers at the head of the canal getting all the water they need, the people in the middle getting some water and the tail-end farmers receiving much less than they were promised.

By using the "crop per drop" method-for every drop of water, how much crop is produced-IDE hopes to use the canal water more efficiently, "liTigation experts traditionally measure efficiency, which has to do with the movement of water and evaporation, and how much water is soaked into the soil," says Hemphill. "But for us, water is just a means to an end. What we want to measure is for the amount of water you use, how much crop aI'e you getting out of it. We now plan to work with governments to get them to introduce microirrigation along with caIlal command areas so that the entire water is used more effectively," IDE has designed and developed five different combinations of affordable microinigation teclmologies that would suit the needs of small and maI-ginal farmers, "Moreover, we have set them up in kits," says R&D chief Parimal. "We have a ~ucket kit which is just enough for a small backyaI'd gaI'den. You literally fill the bucket with water and then the bucket goes out tlu'ough micro tubes and waters the plants. A laI'ger vessel, called the drum kit, can cover an area of 10 meters by 10 meters," The drum kit consists of 130 tiny 1 mm diaITIeter micro tubes, fitted to five rows of 12 mm diameter pipes called "laterals." These laterals are connected to a drum of water by a 16 mm diameter pipe.

All the pipes, in the bucket kit and the drum kit, are pre-fitted and packed in a small box, The farmer has only to unroll all the pipes, lay them on the ground and connect to the drum. In both cases the technology is extremely simple and, more importantly, inexpensive, Even a poor farmer can afford a bucket kit (cost Rs. 225) to grow vegetables near his home, For larger plots, IDE produces microsprinkler systems, also available as a pre-assembled kit.

With a staff of about 275, most of them in the field, IDE is aware of a much lmger responsibility than merely pushing its faImerfriendly products, Hemphill says, "One of our areas of concern is the whole socioeconomic situation of the farnl faITIily.So we me training our field staff in agronomics-the whole issue of seeds aIld feltilizers and pesticides, and when to plant and how to plant. We don't claim to be experts, but it is something we need to know, both in order to make our products more useful from a purely maI'keting point of view, but also to benefit the fann families from a larger socioeconomic view," For the thousands of small faImers who have purchased a KB treadle pump or a micro sprinkler kit from IDE, the organization is already living up to its noble ambition, 0

Women should look past the male milestones which make up the traditional history of the millennium and focus on overlooked milestones of their own. orall their drama and insight, traditional histories of the last thousand years fall short. Written mostly by men, they introduced women into the standard parade of wars, revolutions, monarchs and parliaments only at moments like their ascension to inherited thrones or religious authority. In the 19th century, most male historians compounded the problem by making women's history sound as though women had only then begun making headway.

Women's history has more to it than that.

Women have always questioned their subordination and often found ways around it.

Further, some institutions important in the lives of women that seem timeless, like monogamous marriage, are in fact rooted in the last thousand years; some ostensibly modem movements reach far back in time.

Indeed, many turning points on the thousand-year time line of women's history are little known or little understood. The following brief account of that history describes the rest of the story.

F

Who Says Men Are Closer to God?

1

1140 C.

Hildegard of Bingen recording her visions. The German nun upheld the dignity of women in medieval times, when some theologians taught that women were not created in God's image and the church excluded them from performing important liturgical functions.

Are women and men more alike than they are different? And where they are different, are women inferior or superior? Such questions have been debated since biblical times, and especially in the years after 1000. Some medieval theologians-male, that istaught that woman was not created in God's

image. But that could not be true, abbesses and nuns objected, for they had felt Christ's "imprint of resemblance" on them.

Hildegard of Bingen, a nun in the Rhineland in the 12th century, insisted that women's "weakness" did not refer to spiritual capacities. A woman could mortify the flesh and draw close to God as well as any man.

Such women accepted the general view that the universe was organized into realms of higher and lower: angels over humans, humans over animals, nobles over commoners, soul over body. But when it came to men over women, women balked.

Christine de Pizan, poet and moralist at the French court, said in her Book of the City of Ladies of 1405 that God had created men and women with equal potential. If men had stronger bodies, women had freer and sharper minds, if they were just educated.

Against the old medical idea that women had a hungry womb--that is, a sexual appetite less controllable than men'sChristine countered that women were by nature virtuous and modest.

The hottest debates about male-female relations in medieval Europe turned on celibacy. In the 10th and 11th centuries, many priests were married, and their wives had access to the sacred. In a turning point in women's history, the 11thcentury reforms of Pope Gregory VII did away with clerical marriage in the Roman Church. These reforms inaugurated 10 centuries in which sexually active males-and all women-were forbidden to perform important liturgical functions.

A spiritual demotion it may have been, but it also confirmed an ideal of the celibate life, leaving nuns like Hildegard of Bingen scope for high ascetic devotions.

One Man, One Wife The church put all its force behind insisting on monogamous, permanent marriage. An important step was declaring the full doctrine of marriage as a religious sacrament in 1215. Getting the doctrine accepted by lay people was another matter. Among the landed classes, men lived with concubines instead of, or along with, wives and cast their women aside at will.

Only when the great families decided that the church's rule would help keep feudal

property together did they go along.

Then in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation did away with marriage as a religious sacrament and allowed for divorce. Yet it legitimated marriage all the more by allowing clergymen to wed and doing away with celibate nunneries and monasteries. In Europe, prostitution was made illegal in both Catholic and Protestant cities. It was still practiced, of course, as was concubinage, especially between European settlers in America and their female slaves. But monogamous marriage remained the triumphant cultural ideal.

According to religious teaching and secular law, the wife was "subject" to her husband, and her property was under his control. He was to rule her justly and not be cruel. Moderate beating was permissible, though some Protestant pastors preached against using it at all, and Ashkenazic rabbis disagreed about whether it was grounds for divorce.

Divorce was not an easy out: a single woman with children could scarcely survive. Marriage was a frame that most women accepted, hoping for affectionate unions. What we today would call lesbian couples lived as married partners in the 17th and 18th centuries, one cross-dressing as a man. Protofeminists chronicled abuses in marriage, but did not reject the notion of "subjection" outright until the 18th century. A 17th-century male feminist said that wives should defer to their husbands not because the men were truly superior, but to keep the peace.

Nine Babies, Three Adults More worrisome to women than subjection was procreation. For most of the millennium, the pattern was many births, many deaths. Given the poor food and poor health, it was not always easy to get and stay pregnant. Many infants, even among the wealthy, died at birth. In 17th-century France, a long-lived peasant mother might bring nine children to tean; half might survive till age five, and she could rejoice if two or three reached adulthood. Under these circumstances, the local midwife was consulted much more often for medicines to conceive than for those to abort. Only in the late 17th century, when a better food

supply in Western Europe allowed more children to survive, did couples start to limit the number of their children.

The model of man over woman had some effect in every sphere, forcing women to find means to cope or resist.

Female wage earners were paid less than men; the women improvised new ways to stitch, smuggle, peddle or beg. Male surgeons began to deliver babies in the wealthy families in the 17th century; midwives defended their female turf in the village, claiming their dexterous hands would do better than the surgeon's forceps.

Does "Man" Include Woman?

Since the days of Hildegard of Bingen, women had tried for a larger role in religion. The witchcraft prosecutions that swept Europe and then New England in the 15th through 17th centuries threatened that initiative: among the many thousands executed, women outnumbered men everywhere, at least four to one. To rulers and churchmen seeking control, the sorceress with her pact with the devil was the symbol of secret revolt. Out of jealousy, infertile village women even accused other women. Meanwhile, during the Counter Reformation, energetic women founded teaching orders that brought instruction to many girls other than nuns; contemplative orders were reformed by leaders like Teresa of Avila. Her autobiography, a profound account of a woman's interior and mystical life, was read as eagerly as Augustine's Confessions.

Jewish women followed their own leader in the women's gallery of the synagogue; one Yiddish prayer visualized women studying Torah in Paradise.

Protestant women expanded their Bible reading, but it was especially radical sects like the Quakers who challenged the limits on women. Margaret Fell wrote her 1666 tract, Women's Speaking Justified, against Paul's admonition that women should keep silent in church. Women "led by the Spirit of God" could preach.

"Christ in the Male and Female is one."

For centuries, women had been queens, some of whom, like Elizabeth I of England, sustained authority by combining "masculine" and "feminine" styles of

rulership. But no woman served in the law courts or chancelleries of late medieval and early modern monarchies. If a woman wanted to fight in the royal army, she had to do so disguised as a man. Joan of Arc, openly leading soldiers into battle to save France, was an exception in her day-and she ended up burned at the stake.

Most political action of women was taken informally through conversations and coquetry at court and as sponsors of the salons that arose in many cities in the 17th century. More open influence came about through increased literacy and printing. By the 18th century, women of diverse views were contributing to the abundant pamphlet literature on public affairs. The English historian Catharine Saw bridge Macaulay published tracts defending authors' copyright, frequently elected parliaments and the rights of the American colonies. As for the illiterate women of the lower classes in England, France and the Netherlands, their only lever of protest was joining in street riots.

All these forms of political action came together in the French Revolution, and some new ones were added as women made public political speeches and joined the army openly. The new philosophy of rational natural rights placed all men on an equal footing in regard to citizenship and the law. But did "men" include women?

The French playwright Olympe de Gouges insisted that it did in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, in 1791, as did Mary Wollstonecraft the following year in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Others did not want women to have so much of a share in political Iife. Men of the revolution said that women should stay home and rear their sons to be good citizens. Even evangelical women encouraged their sisters to seek reform through religion and leave matters of state to men.

It would be the new American republic where the issues of women's status would play out most vigorously over the next century.

"The Slavery of Marriage" When enlightenment ideas came to America, the debate about women's rights found a new context, since the most power-

ful form of social hierarchy there was not gender but race. And the American Constitution, by dispensing with hereditary rank and monarchical institutions, immediately granted women a new role: teaching republican values to young Americans.

The new republic opened many avenues to women: social, economic, political, educational and religious. Evangelical Christianity made the home, not the church, the site of religious instruction.

As women increasingly assumed this responsibility, they also began teaching outside the home and stressed the need for women's schools. In the first half of the 19th century, Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary and Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary became thriving institutions, followed by Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. By midcentury, it was clear that tax revenues should be spent to educate girls as well as boys, at least in New York and New England. By the 1870s, many public universities admitted women, and elite women's colleges like Smith and Wellesley were established. In 1894, feminist donors to Johns Hopkins Medical School used their gifts to compel the admission of women.

Still, far into the first half of the 20th century, many professional schools continued to bar women, and when they were admitted, discrimination drove them to lower-status professional fields. Female doctors were steered toward public health, lawyers to social work, language scholars to library cataloging, scientists to high-school teaching.

Within the whjte middle-class family, education and religious responsibility for children improved women's status through the 19th century. By the 1830s, magazines analyzing life from a woman's point of view began to flourish in North America. In Europe, female writers of philosophical insight, from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century and on up to Simone de Beauvoir, steadily clarified women's issues. But mostly, wives were still considered their husbands' subordinates.

American feminists wishing to convey their critique of marriage often did so through the lens of slavery, the most

volatile public issue of the mid- and late 19th century. "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own," wrote Angelina Grimke, a Southern abolitionist. "I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land ....Now if rights are founded in the nature of our moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities than to woman."

Though they didn't participate in elections, American women believed that they had access to the political system through the right to petition Congress. But as the conflict over abolition escalated, it became clear that women's petitions were not being heard. The right to vote was moved to the top of the list. Female reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anna Howard Shaw combined spellbinding oratory with noisy street politics.

Stanton was well known, for instance, for her lecture "The Slavery of Marriage."

The argument for suffrage then became more expedient: white women's votes would balance those of newly enfranchised black males and immigrants. The majority that ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920 was built on these racist grounds.

New Experts in Mothering: Men Meanwhile, biological science was replacing theology as the language for discussing the differences between women and men. The popularity of Darwinian thought and the discovery of the endocrine system anchored the discussion firmly in science. Nor were such discussions purely theoretical, for by the 1920s women and men began to inhabit the same workplace. Even so, the young women taking clerical jobs in corporate offices were considered little threat, for it was thought that their hormones would drive them to maternity and service rather than wealth and power.

The new economic forces at work in America radically altered the role of women as workers, mothers and wives.

Industrialization had created jobs for women in factories and textile mills in the mid-1800s. At the same time, the fruits of

Elizabeth Cady Stanton energized the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. She was known for her oratory on "The Slavery of Marriage" and was an important activist for women's suffrage.

industrialization-mass-produced clothing and foods-gave middle-class mothers a new role: manager of household consumption. But many female responsibilities were subject to male guidance at the turn of the century. In the new field of child studies, male experts like G. Stanley Hall even tried to make mothering a science.

Isolation made mothers willing recipients of such expertise. The middle class had begun its flight from the city in the mid-19th century, and by its close servants were being replaced by new labor-saving household equipment.

So suburban women were alone with their children.

Whereas in the 18th century the family was a partnership for spouses and children, the 20th-century family became based on intimacy. Greater life expectancy meant that marriages lasted longer, well past a woman's childbearing years. As infant mortality declined, the family became more child-centered, and private insurance and pensions, as well as governmental assistance, made older parents less dependent on working children.

The emotional tone of marriages also changed with the rise of the corporation and the profession. Increasingly, the vocations of middle-class men excluded their families. This prompted a movement for more accessible divorce, along with longer marriages, increased mobility and the growing ideal of emotional and sexual fulfillment between spouses.

Not-So-Equal Rights Sigmund Freud and other pioneers of psychology profoundly affected the status of women by arguing that an acceptance of gender difference was a prerequisite for mental health. From the 1920s through the 1970s, women with political, scientific or intellectual interests were stigmatized as neurotic, while men involved in the more "feminine" realms like the arts were considered less than fully male. The family dynamic laid out by Freud, based on latent erotic attachments, encouraged sons to overcome their mother complexes by becoming strong and independent.

Daughters, meanwhile, were encouraged to replace their love for their fathers by finding a male romantic partner rather than by developing an independent self. In time, however, feminist interpretations of difference developed. In the 1970s, Nancy Chodorow reworked Freud's Oedipal system to point out that the strongest erotic

gratification a female infant receives comes from a same-sex relationship with her mother, raising questions about the inevitability of female dependence on males.

In the political sphere, meanwhile, female voting didn't change party power structures, and women began developing parallel institutions like the National Woman's Party, in 1916. Its 1923 drive for an equal rights amendment failed, just as its successor fai led in the 1970s, partl y because Americans, including women, remained resistant to the idea of a woman as

r

e.10gO

Industrialization enabled women 10 earn a living. Here at Eastman Kodak's factory women employees made Solio prints by exposing them (0 sunlight in a windowed affic.

President. Once again, feminists created parallel structures to support female candidates, like Emily's List (Early Money Is Like Yeast). Where once the rare women elected to public office were typically the widows of male office-holders, the election of women became unremarkable, though even now they comprise only a fraction of Congress and high state officials.

In the I960s, feminists began to focus on changing the composition of high-status professions. Once access to graduate education was won, feminist scholars pushed to change patterns of research and teaching so that women were no longer regarded as a failed model of the male norm, but as a norm themselves. In so doing, they helped ignite the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s. And by the end of the '90s, women constituted 60 percent of college graduates.

Even so, on leaving school they still face the continuing reality of the glass ceiling.

Inflation, rising economic expectations and women's quest for professional equality after World War II produced the reinvention of the nanny-a movement promptly challenged by the argument that only birth mothers could care effectively for their children. A successful dual-track life as mother and professional, therefore, required heroic energy or a flouting of this conventional wisdom. Two careers within one family often meant a commuter marriage, which may have seemed new but which echoed the old aristocratic pattern: spouses parted by attendance at court and by journeys to distant estates or remote colonies. But now there is a big difference: a woman's property and income do not necessarily belong to her husband.

While feminist interpretations of gender difference gained favor in the 1970s, and while lesbian feminists argued in the 1980s for difference with a difference, claiming the superiority of same-sex relationships, a strong backlash arose in conservative quarters. This was marked not only by a denigration of feminism but also by an elevation of macho versions of male power and fresh assertions of difference. Such arguments were once again located in theology by Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists. Meanwhile, new debates about gender difference emerged in brain

research. While female and male synapses might fire the same way, doubters insisted that there must surely be a difference in the circuitry. Questions about differences in wiring are a new form of debate that goes back to the medieval question about whether women have souls.

The New Terrain So what has happened to women over the past thousand years? Western women and their children have made astonishing gains in health and life expectancy, though most of their non- Western sisters have not yet shared those benefits. The scope of women's work has expanded vastly, much of it paying well enough so that women with children can survive. Women in the West have secured access to education beyond the wildest dreams of their medieval counterparts. Women's athletic prowess has captured public imagination, and a female general is no longer a novelty.

But what of the mixed outcomes?

Feminist spirituality today provides a powerful leaven within some Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities, but others still forbid female participation, and the loss of the institutional structure once provided by female religious orders has shrunk the territory controlled by women.

The reduced number of women's colleges has had a similar effect. Women's reproductive lives, though, are now managed by technologies subject to male control.

The ability to detect the sex of a fetus can result in higher abortion rates for female infants, whereas in medieval society the girl babies at least had a chance to be born.

Sexual freedoms have enlarged the sphere of pleasure, but with them have come unresolved problems about sexual behavior.

What will be the new terrain for addressing the issues of likeness and difference? What new strategies will women develop to dismantle exclusively male hierarchies? The cognitive sciences will most likely inherit the role of theology in arguing about differences between male

r

"Rosie the Riveter" was a World War II icon. The war was a significant empowering factor for women, boosting them into the workplace in c.1941 unprecedented numbers. As more and more men went to war, women replaced them in blue-collar jobs that were once men-only occupations.

Women were recruited to help build ships and join the armed forces, though in the military they usually filled nursing or administrative posts.

and female. Still, the global rise of religious fundamentalism will counter women's efforts to secure equal footing.

And among women worldwide there will remain stark differences about how to achieve a better life.

But argument-and laughter-about the relationship between women and men will never end. Our physical bodies are cultural texts that are constantly revised, and no single formulation of the relationship between the sexes can last.

0 About the Authors: Natalie Zemon Davis is a former history professor at Princeton University and the author of The Return of Martin Guerre and other books. Jill Ker Conway, author of When Memory Speaks, is a former president of Smith and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

<, --"--, !.~

.. ,'0,

-~.

"

..

::..."' ., ,,-.......0, -,.,.

â&#x20AC;˘

.--"!!'

,.

::-: ..

- -.'

'>,to-' .'. , ,-f',. ,,'''-!i... .â&#x20AC;˘.'

BRUCE PECK

Printmaker's Odyssey

Vegetable Dreams 13 x 15 ems,

he etchings of Indian-born American printmaker Bruce Peck are visual documents that evoke

T

a keen sense of history, or as he puts it, "a remembrance of things past." A recent exhibit of the artist's prints in Chennai revealed a sure feel for life in South India; each image captures some splendid moment, but somehow speaks beyond it. Vegetable and flower sellers, temples and buildings, rickshaw pullers and crowded streets-all objects and characters in Peck's artistic universe mix and merge into a rich tableaux of Indian culture.

Peck's commitment is evident when he terms these works as "autobiographicaL" He was born in a small town in Maharashtra and spent the first 10 years of his life in India. He first returned to India when he was 20 and has continued to come each year to travel and pursue his art that harks back to 18th-century printmaking. Major influences on him were a couple of British printmakers, Thomas and William Daniell, who traveled extensively in India from 1786 to 1793, making accurate drawings of the places they visited and recording notes on architectural forms in the country. Their work presented a pictorial survey of India in all its variety. Peck has followed in their footsteps, traveling the same route and making his own discoveries. He has not only recreated the scenes first recorded by the British artists but hand-colored them in the bright, sunny colors of India. Says Peck: "The D challenge of my work in India lies in capturing the true essence of the place."

Flower Seller If 23 x 15 ems.

Flower Seller 1I 23 x 15 ems.

Rickshawallah 20 x 15 ems.

Temple Shop J 15 x 23 ems.

Meenakshi Temple 15 x 23 ems.

I~merican Culture From the letters of Ralph Ellison

L_

ll

Is of a Whole Introduction

by John F. Callahan

Ellison is among the most important writers of the 20th century.

Newly-published letters reveal the many facets of his life and thoughts, and the conflict between his love of America and his hatred of its inequities that fueled his work.

ll

alPhEllison "had a calling, not a trade," Saul Bellow wrote shortly after Ellison's death, "and what we witness in Invisible Man is the discovery by an artist of his true subject matter."

Acknowledged as a classic of American literature and world literature during his lifetime, Invisible Man secured Ellison's reputation as a novelist, just as Shadow and Act (1964) established his standing as a preeminent American man of letters, and Going to the Territory (1986) enhanced it.

When he died in 1994, Ellison left behind also an extraordinary legacy of unpublished work, an oeuvre that nobody dreamed existed.

Of course, there were the manuscripts of his novel-in-progress-"very long in progress," Ellison joked in 1969, and still in progress at his death. Everyone knew of the novel's existence. No one knew-not even Mrs. Ellison, who kept the faith and the files for five decades-the extent of Ellison's unpublished work. But unpublished and uncollected essays were discovered in his papers, and they have been gathered (along with Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory) in his Collected Essays, which appeared in 1995. There were also early short stories, the best of which were recently published in Flying Home and Other Stories; and fragments of a novel from the late 1930s and early

,40s; and a novella; and a memoir.

And there were Ellison's letters.

Written over six decades, his correspondence ranges from early letters to his mother, Mrs. Ida Bell, which were written when Ellison was at Tuskegee, between 1933 and 1936, to exchanges, in some cases over decades, with many of the central figures of American intellectual and literary life-with Romare Bearden, Saul Bellow, Kenneth Burke, Albert Murray, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Alfred Kazin and Richard Wilbur. Equally important for what they reveal about his private self and his boyhood experience, there are also letters to old friends and relations from Oklahoma City. In the last years of his life, perhaps sensing that he might not live to write his autobiography, Ellison wrote more than a few letters that record in detail his memories of the people, the places and the events of his early years in Oklahoma.

Ellison's correspondence tells his story on several levels. Biographically, the letters tell of his metamorphosis from an impressionable young man from the provinces into a man of the world by virtue of his fierce allegiance to his Oklahoma roots. Artistically, they tell of his evolution from an aspiring composer into a writer, then into a distinguished novelist, and then into a man of letters

whose embrace of American complexity led him to a defiant patriotism bred of his need "to affirm while resisting."

"Personally," he wrote to Time magazine in 1958, to correct its characterization of him as a Negro writer in exile, "I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here, to be too long away."

"There was a time," Ellison wrote to Richard Wright in 1953, "when I was more myself when writing a letter than at any other time." Whether writing downand-out from New York to his mother in the 1930s, to Richard Wright from Dayton, Ohio after his mother's early, painful and avoidable death, or to old friends and new acquaintances in old age, Ellison comes across as a man utterly at home in his skin. The early correspondence reveals an artist emerging from the chrysalis-a young man not so much adrift as in transition. Ellison's letters to his mother in the late 1930s, after he left Tuskegee for New York, show him discovering Harlem and the great city with the eyes, ears and nose of a writer. His earnest, unguarded sense of the injustice of poverty and racism in the new universe of New York releases a lyricism that leavens and deepens his protest.

Unsurprisingly, sometimes Ellison expresses himself with more candor in his letters than in his essays or his interviews. Writing to a certain Mrs. Turner about Invisible Man in 1953, he declares that "the writing of this particular book was an act of social responsibility as well as an attempt at an artistic projec-

tion." In 1970, not altogether patiently, he chides his "old friend and intellectual sparring partner" Stanley Edgar Hyman, instructing him that the frame of reference for the underground as the setting, the theme and the metaphor in Invisible Man is far wider and different than that suggested by Wright's novella, The Man Who Lived Underground. "The point is that, like yourself, I existed in afield of influences, both personal and environmental; but despite this obvious fact you go on reducing the complex field to a single writer and implicitly to the race of that writer."

Wearing the mask of the intellectual, rather than that of the artist or the storyteller or the preacher, Ellison avowedly joins a long line of African Americans prepared to guide their countrymen through the labyrinth of American experience. "For didn't Mark Twain's Jim teach Huck of ethics?" he asks in a letter not included here. "And didn't Uncle Remus instruct the little boy in philosophy-or was it calculus?" In Ellison's case, "calculus" is a name for his repeated attempts to calculate subtle shifts in the fault lines of social hierarchy in America.

And, of course, the letters reveal the self-instruction that went on in Ellison's mind. To James Roark, a historian who had unearthed evidence that one William Ellison had been a black slaveholder and, it appeared, Ellison's ancestor in antebellum South Carolina, he wrote that "I was forced to conclude that whatever the facts turned out to be [in truth, the aforementioned William was not a blood relation], there was no more disgrace in one's being related by blood to a black slaveholder than to those who happened to have been designated 'white.'''

But Ellison tempers his conclusion: "Nevertheless, the possibility that I might in fact be related to William Ellison left me uneasy, for as the saying goes, I had enough troubles of my own." His witty understatement underscores the painful point.

Lord only knows what Ellison's militant attackers in the 1960s and '70s would have done with a family tree that had

him great-grandfathered by a black slaveholder!

Ellison's letters show him generous to aspiring black (and white) writers and scholars, but he had a condition for his support: it was that "even home-boys must do their 'homework,'" as he wrote Robert O'Meally in 1989. Certainly the letters show Ellison paying his own dues to what he called the "very stern discipline" of the writer. Whether his subject is the weather in Manhattan or in the Berkshires where he spent summers; or the tense, expectant feel of Harlem on the day of a Joe Louis fight; or the look of rabbits in the woods surrounding Dayton; or the debt of Phillis Wheatley to Alexander Pope's neo-classical prosody; or the fledgling birds blown out of pecan trees on his grandfather's farm the first and last time he saw the formidable "Big Alfred" Ellison; or the impact of the Mississippi River on the form and techniques of Louis Armstrong and T.S. Eliot; or the hidden incongruities of a black man in his sixties with a rake (a professor incognito) passing a young black man in overalls (a student manque) in a college town in western Massachusetts-whatever his theme, the epistolary Ellison finds original, humane and witty meanings in his experience of the world around him.

The letters that follow express Ellison's views on the fraught matters of race and identity. On these urgent and delicate questions, Ellison's wisdom is distilled from his sense of the interrelatedness and the unpredictability of American life. The letters elaborate Ellison's profound conviction that because of its diversity, and not despite it, "American culture is of a whole." Firmly rejecting racial determination, without ever denying the reality and the effects of racism, Ellison contended throughout his life that, to a significant extent, "each of us is responsible for his own fate." Yet his sense of individuality, though self-reliant and uncompromising like that of his namesake Ralph Waldo Emerson, was not complacent or self-satisfied. Nor did

he regard his own fate in isolation: writing to Horace Porter in 1976, he pays homage to "those who endured and sacrificed to enable us to become better prepared for our continuing role in the struggle for freedom."

Ellison was proud of his identification as a Negro, as an Oklahoman, as an American, and as a writer. Over and over again, these remarkable letters insist upon his determination to create an identity greater than the sum of its parts. In 1954, in a moving letter to Morteza Sprague, the librarian at Tuskegee for whom he had worked in his student days, he remembers that he was reading A Stillness at Appomattox when Brown v. Board of Education was handed down by the Supreme Court. The decision, he writes, "made a heightening of emotion and a telescoping of perspective, yes, and a sense of the problems that lie ahead that left me wet-eyed. I could see the whole road stretched out and it got all mixed up with this book I'm trying to write and it left me twisted with joy and a sense of inadequacy." Ellison's tough introspection provokes him to a symbolic toast that might serve as epigraph for his life and his work, and for his exemplary concern for the fate of America: "here's to integration, the only integration that counts: that of the personality."

In the texts that follow, I have corrected typos and spellings, inserted missing punctuation marks, and from time to time used ell ipses to indicate passages that I have omitted-passages in which Ellison apologizes for a delay in answering, discusses matters of family business, or passes on his good wishes; passages, in short, without the force or interest of the extraordinary miniature essays or narratives contained within so many of these precious documents.

0 About the Author: John F. Callahan is Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College and Ralph Ellison's literary executor.

He is the editor of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories and Juneteenth, Ellison's most recently published work.

iIlugust 30 1937 t

I haven't written because there really hasn't been anything new to write about. I am still living with Lang's aunt, but since her fall season has started I fear I'll have to find another place to stay. She is a very busy dressmaker, and people come in at all hours making my presence somewhat an inconvenience. They thought I would have had the job on the boat long before now, so I can't impose on them much longer.

The job has failed to materialize due to the strike situation and I have no idea as to when it will. In the meantime I am trying to go on relief in order to get a job on the WPA [Works Progress Association]. This has its own set of difficulties, the most important of which is to establish residence. I received your letter with the dollar which certainly was needed but you must not try to send me anything as long as you yourself are unable to work ....

I am very disgusted with things as they are and the whole system in which we live. This system which offers a poor person practically nothing but work for a low wage from birth to death; and thousands of us are hungry half of our lives. I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode so the world could start again from scratch. Now one must have an education in order to get most any job, yet they don't give us opportunities to go to school. Look at your own life. You've lived these years since Dad died toiling from morning to night, toiling and praying from morning to night. From Okla. City to Gary, to Okla., only there was no work in Gary, only prayer and those dimes with the holes which we filled with lead, then to McAlister where things were about as bad, and then back to Okla. City, and now it's Dayton. You've seen Herbert1 and myself grow up, and neither of us has a job. All those years and all that work, and not even a job to bring a dollar a week. The people in Spain are fighting right now because of just this kind of thing, the people of Russia got tired of seeing the rich have everything and the poor nothing and now they are bUilding a new system. I wish we could live there. And these rich bastards here are trying to take the WPA away from us. They would deny a poor man the right to live in this country for which we have fought and died. You should see New Yorkwith its million of unemployed, the people who sleep in the parks and in doorways. The rich old women strolling down Fifth Avenue carrying their dogs which are better cared for than most human beings. Big cars and money to burn and right now I couldn't buy a hot dog. I'm sick thinking of the whole mess and I hope something happens to change it all.

It is rainy weather here and for the last few days the skies have been gray with mist falling whenever it isn't raining. The water lies in puddles and you have to pick your way if the soles

of your shoes are not the best. The Fall is coming and the boys will soon be returning to school and I hope they leave a few jobs behind. I would like to be in a car riding up through Illo just now while the trees are beginning to turn deep red, and yellow, and purple and you can see the birds flying southward in the distance, soaring away, soaring away, and the apples on the trees, and the hay stacks in the fields. You can see the sun rise in the early morning blending the color of all this foliage into one sparkling mass of natural beauty with the dew upon it all. Sometimes you can see the harvesters already working in the fields and you think of the stories of the big meals they are supposed to serve and eat, and you visualize the big prize pies and home cooked breads, and sometimes you become hungry thinking about it all. Especially when you are hungry as I am now, I missed my lunch.

The city is no different in the Fall. The only change here is in the skies which on some days are gray and misty and rainy; and you wonder where the people who sleep in the parks will spend the long night to come, the cold nights to come, and if you'll have to join them.

The kids are now flying kites but they haven't started playing marbles. Those who can afford them are still wearing summer clothing and there is some talk and much talk of hope of buying new overcoats. Over the tops of flats and bUildings you can see the kites sailing, and dipping, and rising like gulls riding the wind over a blue gulf, and you can hear the cries of the boys floating down, floating down to the street, like when you were around Look Out Mountain and you heard people climbing above you. On the streets are picket lines of people fighting for higher wages and shorter hours, and when you walk down some of the streets you wonder how some of the people are able to eat. If you walk down Eighth Avenue you can see the curb markets and fruit stores and sea food joints and if you come by around meal time when the poor people are eating you can smell the fish frying and the hog maws and home fries. On the stands you see plenty of tropical fruit: mangoes, guavas and plantains, melons and yams. And on the corners you can buy bananas and fresh fish from vendors of push carts. All the fruit and fruit smells and fruit colors become all mixed with smells of washed and unwashed bodies and perfume and hair grease and liquor and the bright and drab colors of dresses and overalls, and that which the dogs leave on the side-walk. I like to walk on such streets. Life on them is right out in the open and they make no pretence of being what they are not. The whore, the pimp, the ditch digger, the likker head, and the down-and-outer are all here trying to get along. It makes me very angry to think of the causes behind all the misery in the world, and the way it's all concentrated here in Harlem. I hope something happens to change it all.

Please let me hear from you soon, and you must remember not to worry about me. Tell me how your hip is doing and if

you are able to walk.

Tonight's the night of the fight between Joe and Farr.2 Already you can see the excitement rising and the police gathering. Just now a regiment of patrol passed all in blue and yellow-trimmed uniforms and you can hear the horses' feet going cloppity clop, cloppity clop on the asphalt sounding all out of place and the smacking whirr, smack, smack whirr of the rubber tires. Tonight there will be hundreds of cops in Harlem and

fldober 27, 1937

I have intended to write you for some time but most intentions are neglected in face of death. Even good ones.

I lost my mother the day after I arrived in Cinn. The funeral was over in a week's time and my brother and I are now here in Dayton transacting all final business. This is the end of childhood for both of us. I used to pretend this was so when I came to New York but now I know it was just pretence and nothing more. This is real. and the most final thing I've ever encountered. I feel very sorry for my brother as he has never been away from her before and though he tries to hide it he is hurt very much. We"8'pend a lot of time at the movie here eating candy like we diClquite a while ago and then go along the streets, that are very much like those of Oklahoma City, home. I say home because much from Okla. is here. Sometimes we kid each other but we avoid talking of certain things and I see that he spends much time away from me so as not to mention these painful things. It is terrible. He needs her very much and I am able to help so little. Too I know that as the pain which holds us becomes a little blunted the antagonism between us will come alive and then things will be very difficult to manage. We are so utterly different.

You must write and tell me of the magazine.2 If possible I should like for you to send me copies. It might be that I can secure a few subs. I go down to Cinn. where my aunt lives and I might try there. There is no Daily nor Masses3 to be had here, and I've only today discovered this very old typewriter. I spend most of my time in the woods which surround the town with a friend's young hound and a .22 rifle. Most of the time it is very cold in the woods and the rabbits stick very close to their beds making it very difficult to see them, so close do they merge into the fall scene. I walk along thinking, rifle ready, eyes supposedly looking for the cotton-tailed gents but lost in the color of leaves the

much shouting of excited Negroes and most of the whites will stay out if Joe loses and if he wins, they'll come up to see the fun. I'll write of it later. So until next time-Love Ralph I

2

Ellison's younger brother Herbert, born 1917, died 1998.

The boxers Joc Louis and Tommy Farr.

variations and designs from which I've been away a long time, then suddenly the sound of fast falling feet and mister rabbit is laying tracks up the hill to beat hell and the bullets which usually I'm unable to send into him. I lack the discipline which enables the eyes to pick the small live black eyes of mister rabbit out of the leaves and grass which are so much like his coat, but in a week or so he'd better beware. And anyway the season will be open then.

And I will be able to use a shotgun. But who knows, perhaps I'll be in New York by that time and someone else will bring these elusive dinners down to dust with metal sticks which roar and into flame do bust. (How's that? Me, Marvell, Eliot, Hemingway.)

Yesterday we picked a bushel of pears growing wild in the woods and Sunday we brought in two sacks, "gunny sacks" full of walnuts and fine full-flavored butter nuts, which are new to me, and which I find very tasty. I don't hold Rousseau in very high regard but nature in fall dress is nice. You cannot say as in the Spring 'l\in't Nature gland," but a belly full of apples, pears, and nuts is very swell, and no pun is intended.--What are you doing about the girl's girls?

Had to give up the type. If the syntax is bad, blame it on my mother's great-aunt who is near a hundred years old and who is trying to tell me of her childhood as I write. She spends most of these days there back in Va. and Georgia. Seems that I come from a line of niggers that liked to run off to the Yankees. I am unable to decide whether she approved or not. She's a fine old lady and quite spry despite the age. Just now she's telling me (for the fiftieth time) of my grandma who always spoke up to the white folks. Dick, I feel this a large enough dose of this for you this time, so try to answer soon.

Richard

I

2

Wright,

whom

Ellison

met and became

New Challenge, which had recently

which, 1

at Wright'S

urging,

published

he submitted

fast friends Ellison's

with in July 1937.

first review

his first story, "Hymie's

Daily Worker and New Masses, the leftist periodicals.

Bull."

and to

tllollember 27 1958 t

The Editor Time Dear Sir: I was surprised to return from a hard afternoon of hunting the domestic cornfields around Tivoli, New York to learn from Time's Alien Corn piece that I am allegedly self-exiled in Rome. May I inform you that your report is, to say the least, exaggerated? Actually, I returned to the U.S. a year and two months ago-not from voluntary exile, "for social and political purposes," as Richard Gibson's! rhetoric would have it, but from a stay at the American Academy in Rome; which was my privilege as winner of the 1955 Fellowship in Literature granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Admittedly, two years may seem a long time to be away from this swiftly changing country even for purposes of broadening one's personal culture-which is the aim of the fellowship-but exile is, fortunately, (and even for Negro Americans) largely a state of mind. As such I don't think it should be confused with the American's right to live wherever he wishes without having his feelings about this country put to question. Indeed, it is possible to live abroad for good reasons and to remain at home for bad ones.

My wife and I found living in Rome a wonderful experience and a welcome relief from the racial stresses of American life, but neither the artistic glories of its past nor the social felicities which were so generously extended us there got to us with quite the immediacy of the news that broke in Montgomery, Alabama.2 Yet during my time in Europe I had more than one white American tourist assure me that he saw the stigmata of the exile on me and thus felt challenged to take a moral position toward my presence there. Some were apologetic, as though my presence in Europe was an accusa-

Thanks for the encouraging words concerning the Bearden piece,2 as you probably realize it is my first attempt at art criticism and I undertook it with fear and trembling. I hope you'll still find some of it valid once you've seen Bearden's work.

There are several here in the apartment at which you and Phoebe are welcome to have a look-see whenever you're in New York. But now to remove a few of the needles you in-

tion and a rejection of them personally. One or two reacted like a white Southerner trying to intimidate a Negro tenant who had packed up to try his luck in the North into remaining on the old plantation. And others felt compelled to give my assumed exile their rather hush-hush moral sanction. "If 1were a Negro, I'd never go back to the States," they'd whisper. But in fact, my wife and I were so little concerned with thoughts of exile that we didn't even have our New York telephone disconnected.

On such matters as these, Gibson, whom I don't know, should speak for himself, for the issues which claim one's heart and intellect are most personal. Thus while I sympathize with those Negro Americans whose disgust with the racial absurdities of American life leads them to live elsewhere, my own needs, both as citizen and as artist, make the gesture of exile seem mere petulance. Nor do I find Negro Americans who exploit the racial tragedy of our people for the entertainment of the Ftench any less odious than those professional white southern literary men who go about Europe preaching the high value of that segregated and stultif'ying South in which they've avoided living since the early 1920s; both protest too strongly. As writers I should think the question of where one lives would be secondary to the question of where one is most creative. Faulkner writes with great creativity in Mississippi; Hemingway and Henry James wrote well in Europe; Richard Wright wrote better in Chicago and Brooklyn than he has in Paris. Let the writer go where he works well and if he goes stale in one place let him try another. Personally I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away ...

Sincerely, Ralph Ellison I

An expatriate African American novelist

2

The Montgomery

living in Paris.

bus boycott began in December]

955.

serted with your kind words.

When we discussed your essay on Wright at the Mitchells' either 1 was drinking faster than you, or you were three sheets in the wind; therefore since both are possible let me hasten to say that if you thought that I was objecting to your using such terms as "Negro artists," "Negro American experience," etc., you were mistaken. My objection was to such generalizations as "There can be no doubt that Negro hatred of whites is close to universal." For if Negro hatred of whites were so universal such black militant writers as Jones3 wouldn't have to go to such frenzied lengths in their efforts to arouse that hatred. I also objected because I believe that you

make our Negro American attitudes and emotions toward whites far too simple. You allow us no contempt~a quite different emotion than hate~no irony, no forbearance, no indifference, no charity, no mockery, no compassion, no condescension~not to mention that ambivalence of emotion and attitude which you so readily see in the Blues.

As I see it, Negro American art style, from that of the folk to the most sophisticated individual expression, embodies a transcendence of raw hatred or any other "raw" emotion.

Indeed, as with any cultural expression worthy of the name, it is transcendence and sublimation that define it as art. And despite the prevalence of stereotyped notions of Negro spontaneity and instinctuality, our lifestyle~at least as it has evolved in the South~has been shaped by a determined will to control violent emotion (we seldom run amuck) as a lifepreserving measure against being provoked into retaliatory actions by those who desire only to destroy us.

One of the functions of such emotional control has been the preservation for ourselves of a maximum freedom of decision in selecting the moment and circumstance under which retaliatory action would be taken and aggressive emotion released. Such control has been often interpreted as apathy and fear by sociologists both black and white, and by those who view us from a distance or who tend to congratulate themselves as being of a superior and nobler race because we avoid easy provocation, but we know better because we cling to our own sense of values and have never been sold on Sir Walter Scottish notions of bravery, cowardice, honor, etc.

Such values have a class and race aspect and woe to a minority that forgets it. For here questions of life and death are always just beneath the surface of the simplest confrontations between the races. But another function of such emotional control springs from our will to humanize a hostile society in our own terms and to convert that control into a source of pleasure and affirmation by transforming the threat of social existence into forms of self-definition and triumph.

Thus our resistance to provocation has acted as a life-preserving discipline~which in turn has reinforced our tendency toward stylization, not only in art but in the process of everyday life, from work to worship. What is so ironic about our efforts at literary (as against musical and choreographic) projections of our lifestyle and experience is the fact that we've seldom achieved a formal control~or control of literary forms~commensurate with the control cum flexibility that is so characteristic of Negro American expression at its best. I refer to Negro American idiom as it finds expression in oral tradition and in physical movement, whether in work or play, sports or ceremonial activity, in dress and cosmetic culture; and to the essence of which we hear in Jazz.

But how could I have objected to your use of the terms "Negro artist" or" egro American experience"? I use them not only in the Bearden piece but in almost everything else

I've written about American culture. I have, however, tried to see that the meaning that is conveyed is not primarily racial, but cultural. I try to make the terms convey something of the complexity of Negro American life and expression along with their intricate connections with the broader culture of the United States. Because far too often they are used in a manner reductive of that compleXity and slighting of those interconnections. When I refer to the plastic possibilities of Negro American experience I am giving recognition to such features of physical identification as hair and skin texture, facial structure, skeletal structure and variation of skin color, ete.

Over the centuries, so-called "primitive" African sculptors have made much of these possibilities in terms of their tribal and religious values from the most subtly observed naturalism to the abstract manipulation of forms which in the West we recognize as cubism.

In a predominantly white society where so much vicious nonsense has been imposed upon blacks in the name of European (I almost said 'I\ryan") standards of physical beauty, the problem of what to do with the given physical features of people who are culturally and visually egro American became a special problem for the plastic artists of that background. All too many attempted to find a solution through the language of naturalism, when the answer lay, as it lay for most western artists, in the direction of abstraction~very much as it did in the choreographic and literary arts. But since in the fields of painting and sculpture the greatest activity of black Americans came during the Depression and under the auspices of the WPA at a time when agit-prop theories of art were the rage many black artists got hung up on the notion of "content" at the expense of mastering form and technique. But you know all of this.

My reference to Negro Americans depending upon narrative was not meant to imply that other Americans had not so depended; it was to point out that for a people lacking a class with broad formal education as it fought for a positive definition of itself in a society in which an inferior status was imposed upon it by force, violence and anti-Negro stereotypes (the time I referred to, or meant to refer to, was the period of slavery and the early period of emancipation) narrative played a special role. (Yes, I know the narrative function of stained glass windows, items presenting national iconographics, and such in developing religious and national identities for those without literal skills.)

The Negro American's conception of himself was seldom supported by an articulate philosophy, or by conscious theology, or by any of the specifically analytic forms of the mind.

Note, too, that I referred to narrative forms that were simple and graphic, and this because the majority of my people were at the time unlettered and, for a great part of that time, enslaved. This was not true of most whites, and at the time that our great American folk archetypes were being created white

Ellison and fellow writer Richard Wright, author of Native Son, became lifelong friends after their meeting in 1937.

American intellectuals, with very few blacks participating on a conscious intellectual level, were extending and testing the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. The spirit of those ideas and ideals was indeed present among the slaves and free blacks but for the majority of slaves, as for many uneducated whites, they required simplification and indeed sloganization. As you damn well know, I view my people as American and not African, and while our experience differs in unique ways from that of white Americans, it is never absolutely at variance with the dominant American mode.

Diversity within unity is the confounding reality. Nevertheless, no Negro has ever headed the Stock Exchange, been President of the U.S., Chief of the Combined Armed Forces, or even president of Harvard, Yale, or General Motors. Second, plots and pastoral motives are indeed present in the American drama of blackness and whiteness but here it is prudent not to let oneself be carried away by abstractions.

And now, since you've managed to needle me into type (!) concerning your Wright essay, let me say that I found it a useful piece despite my objections. What's more, it gives me a special satisfaction because it gives the lie to the character in Life who would make all literary judgment a matter of racial prejudice. You were taking Wright seriously long ago and as far as I know only Irving Howe beat you to the popular press with a re-evaluation of Native Son ... .1am enclosing a more recent piece on yrs truly and Wright in case you missed it.

Now back to my carping. I do by no means agree with your statement that The Man Who Lived Underground "is the perfect metaphor for Negro identity in life under the streets in a sewer that is the formulation of ecclesia supra c1oacam. "

Cloacal, yes; Eccelesia, no; metaphor, yes, but perfect not at all. Here I feel like the soldier who was questioned by his captain after being observed shaking his head throughout a lecture on sex during which the captain stated that an orgasm was no more than a form of relief from muscular tension and very much like taking a crap.

"Captain," the soldier said, "I wasn't shaking my head out of disrespect, I just meant that either you don't know nothing about fucking or I don't know a damn thing about shitting!"

Seriously though, my objection is to what Wright did with his metaphor. I find it too mechanical and his character too limited in mind and sensibility to make it come alive. That is why I continue to reject the notion that InviSible Man was inspired by Wright and insist that my character was inspired by the narrator of NotesJrom Underground. My narrator, like Dostoievsky's, is a thinker, and this is true despite the fact that my character doesn't think too clearly or too well. Nevertheless, my protagonist does possess a conscious philosophical dimension and is, since he lives by ideas, an intellectual.

In reading your piece I was amazed to discover you involved with the notion of a "racial" line of continuity in fiction by Negro Americans, a notion for which I raised hell with Irving Howe. Why is this notion so compelling, is it that you overlook the fact that such fiction is written by Americans and that black American writers are no less the heirs of all the world's fiction than any others? I get the feeling that if ninety-nine Jewish and Irish American writers had used the metaphor of the underground at the same time as Wright and I had read them all you'd still trace my use of it back to Wright. What about the multiplicity of influences available to those who seek for a way of doing things in this country?

And what about the fact that books are so ever-present for those who've learned to use them? And magazines? I was reading Babel in issues of International Literature before I ever met Wright and I still have the copy of Kafka's The Trial which I read in 1937. Nor is this simply a matter of reading European fiction, there were metaphors of the underground (Continued on page 56)

Heme Told Me Things 1999 is the centennial year 01 Papa Hemingway's birth. The sharp wit and complex, controversy-making personality of one of the 20th century's most brilliant authors keeps his memory-and his writingsalive as solidly as if he were still turning out his meticulous prose.

These notes on a decade of correspondence recall a talented, vulnerable, larger-than-life man. first met Ernest Hemingway on Christmas Eve, 1947, in Ketchum, Idaho. He liked vacationing there, away from his home, in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, and eventually built his own house there. I had gone to talk to Hemingway about Sidney Franklin, the bullfighter from Brooklyn, whom I was writing about.

Hemingway was extraordinarily patient and generous in giving me marvelous material on Franklin and bullfighting. Then he and his wife, Mary, invited me to join them and his three sons for an elaborate Ch.ristmas dinner cooked by Mary in the tourist cabin where they were staying. After that, we kept in touch, and a couple of years later, when the Hemingways came to New York, I was able to spend enough time with him to write a long Profile of rum for the New Yorker: He was, as he liked to put it, "half a century old" at the time. Throughout the succeeding 11 years, until his death, he wrote scores of letters to me. Mary also wrote from time to time. Our correspondence established an unshakable friendship. I last heard from Hemingway in 1961, when he was in St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota,

I

where he had gone to seek medical help. It was about five months before he killed himself, in Ketchum.

In his letters to me, Hemingway often used the joke "Indian" talk he had invented, dropping his articles and being intentionally ungrammatical.

He kidded around in other ways, too. For example, while writing a letter he would switch from typewriter to handwriting: "Had to quit typing due to my self pity + cramps.

There are a lot of compensations in life.

Anyhow, I don't have to re-marry Dorothy Parker. Please write. Huck Hemingstein."

Or: "Wrote you a funny letter last night when yours came. But had to tear it up because it was too rough. I shouldn't have said that about the sin house, etc., anyway.

But I got used to telling the truth to you and it's a hell of a habit to stop. Probably aIIl just as much of a jerk as those bastards that rush to their analysts. My analyst's name is Royal PortabLe (noiseless) the 3rd." He also liked to refer to his typewriter as the Royal Deportable Machine.

Hemingway signed a few of his letters "Papa," but mostly he signed them "Ernest" or "Honest Ernie" or "Huck von Hemingstein" or "Ernest Buck Hemingstein" or "Mountain Boy Huck" or "Huckmanship von Hemingstein" or "Love and good luck, Ernest." Or, after signing, he would draw three mountain peaks, which I assumed was his own idea of an Indian sign.

Occasionally, he would apologize for his "sloppy writing." And he would ask, "But you don't want me to write all the time with a hard, gem-like flame do you?"

Then he would throw in a Hemingway sentence as only Hemingway could write it. In talking about the "haunted, nocturnal life" he led in Cuba, he once wrote that he had been up since "0230" and it was now

"0530": "It is getting light now before the sun rises and the hills are grey from the dew of last night."

From Cuba, he often wrote once or twice a week. When he went to Spain or to Africa, the letters would come less frequently. Each time I opened one of them, on onionskin stationery with "FINCA VIGIA, SAN FRANCISCODE PAULA,CUBA" printed across the top, I felt the thrill of knowing that it was from Hemingway.

Every letter contained electric echoes of the writer I had discovered at the age of 11, when I found The Sun Also Rises, a forbidden book, under my brother Simeon's pillow. We planned a couple of times to meet in Paris, but we didn't connect, so we met during the Hemingways' few visits to ew York. Despite many invitations from Hemingway and his wife to come and stay with them in Cuba, I never visited them there. I've never felt comfortable "visiting" most people.

Besides, I didn't want to spoil our particular equation.

In my New Yorker Profile, I wanted to give a picture of this special man as he was, how he looked and sounded, with his vitality, his unique and fun-loaded conversation, and his enormous spirit of truthfulness intact. He had the nerve to be like nobody else on earth, stripping himself--like his writing-of all camouflage and ornament. To my surprise, the piece was extremely controversial. Some readers objected strongly to Hemingway's personality, and admired the piece for the wrong reasons. The Profile was called "devastating" by some reviewers. But Hemingway wrote to me afterward, "Actually good old profile made me about as many enemies as we have in North Korea. But who gives a shit? A man should be known by the enemies he keeps." Several years later, he

me, he ridiculed people he didn't respect; he gossiped about people he knew; he sympathized with people who were in trouble. He told of his impatience with the wife of one of his friends. "There was always, with her, a lot of stuff about being Jewish and not being Jewish," he said. "This always bores the hell out of me because I would just as soon observe Yom Kippur as Easter, and I am really an Indian I guess anyway, and we probably were as badly bitched as the Jews. I like Jews very much, but I always get bored with people making a career of their race, religion or their noble families. Why can't we take the whole damned thing for granted?"

In another letter he said, "I usually introduce myself as Hemingstein when meeting known anti-Semites and their friends. But actually the name is Hemingway, and there is nothing I can do about it." emingway liked to make lists, and when he listed the people he loved he usually started with the names of his sons: John (nicknamed Bumby), Patrick (nicknamed Mousie), and Gregory (nicknamed Gigi).

Next, he would affectionately list all his wives: Hadley, Pauline, Martha and Mary. (He described Pauline as a fine woman after she had visited Mary and him at Finca Vigia.)

When John became a capHemingway had some succinct advice/or me as a writer: "Just call them the way you see them and the hell with it." tain of infantry in Germany,

H

told me that people continued to talk to him about it: "All are very astonished because I don't hold anything against you who made an effort to destroy me and nearly did, they say. I always tell them how can I be destroyed by a woman when

she is a friend of mine and we have never even been to bed and no money has changed hands?"

He had some succinct advice for me as a writer: "Just call them the way you see them and the hell with it." In his letters to

Hemingway proudly told me, "He is a nice boy and I love him very much and he loves me. Since have never been on a couch don't know whether there is anything wrong with that."

In addition to being marvelously eclectic, the letters were full of facts.

Hemingway fold me things. I found skiing difficult, for example, and the proliferation of broken legs among skiers scared me. "Nobody has any real strength in their legs anymore, because they don't climb," he said. "Skiing is all on a ski-lift basis ....They don't know the mountains."

He didn't feel that he had to conceal his romantic notions about the military life.

He would tell me, "I wish we could go to war (shoot-shoot war) sometime with Buck Lanham and Chink Dorman-Smith."

Lanham, his best friend, was commander of the Twenty-second Infantry Regiment.

"You'd have fun. It is supposed to be a terrible sin to have fun in war. But we commit it and the three of us are very light-hearted people when the chips are down."

I didn't go fishing or shooting or hunting or camping or trekking on safaris to Africa-much less to war. I had no interest in doing any of that. But I enjoyed hearing Hemingway talk about all those things, because he said everything with originality, with zest, with energy and with humor. During one fishing trip, he reported to me that they had caught five marlin, five tuna, five kingfish, about a dozen barracuda, a very big grouper and a big female dolphin, "the kind that change from gold to silver when they die." He liked to instruct me in the ways of the porpoise and the whale. The porpoise, he said, is your best friend at sea; he will stay with you and play for miles and come around the boat and blow at night like a whale but without a whale's terrible stink.

The sperm whale, I learned, when he's been eating squid, has the worst halitosis.

Some of the fishing talk would keep me from eating seafood for months at a time.

Sometimes he described how he felt about the Finca. On returning there from a trip, he would say that it was even better than he remembered. It was wonderful, he said, "to have lots of room to work and plenty of big waste baskets." No one else told me things like that.

In our letters, we also discussed some of my enthusiasms. For example, he tutored me on the poker fundamentals.

Never call; either raise or throw down.

Play your good cards for keeps when you

hold them and ride out your bad ones.

Also, don't come in on every pot. As for tennis, he told me that he used to playa lot of singles with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. "You had to let her almost win for her to be happy," he said. "If you let her win, she became insufferable." hen we discussed writing or writers, it wasn't in a strictly intellectual idiom. In connection with the fish, we once got on to the subject of "Moby Dick." I remember that I told him I liked reading the book. He said, "It is all wondelful except the rhetoric, which is shit. Also it is a lot of words about a whale.

But in it there is something wonderful."

Then, in his metaphorical habit of comparing writers to baseball pitchers, he said that Melville is like a "truly good left-hand pitcher with no control but who has played with every club and knows everything."

Hemingway could be very funny about other writers. "What is Faulkner's book like?" he once asked me. "Did you read it?

I mustn't comment on it until I have read it or failed to be able to read it, but one thing I know is that writing would sure be easy if you went up in a barn with a quart of whiskey and wrote 5,000 words on a good day without syntax." Once he asked me what I thought of Faulkner's "ranking of American writers." He considered this an appalling practice. "They are all ranking each other now," he said. "Like in J. Arthur Ranking Service."

From time to time, I would ask Hemingway what he thought of this or that piece of writing. When Shirley Jackson's famous short story "The Lottery" was published in the New Yorker in 1948, I admired it, and I asked Hemingway to read it. He replied, "That story was a stinker." He called the ending "faked and phony," adding, "You have to write so people believe it." He said it was "the worst story I ever read in the New Yorker."

I liked Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and sent it to Hemingway. He thought that Mailer was very skillful and said he was "all for him." He went on, "I wish him luck and that he keeps on writing. He has lots of stuff." Another time he wrote of Mailer, "He has a fine imagina-

W

tion and if he disciplines it and controls it and invents truly from what he really knows, he can be a hell of a writer. Don't tell him this as kids resent even an opinion." He thought Irwin Shaw was a "a jerk and a good short-story writer. But if 1'd say he was a bad playwright (which he is) he would say I was anti-Semitic." He called Dawn Powell a wonderful writer who "has everything that Dotty Parker is supposed to have and is not tear-stained."

He told me that Thurber was a better writer than Benchley. Once I took my great colleague Joe Mitchell (that other fish enthusiast) to meet him, and thereafter Hemingway always said how much he liked Mitchell's The Bottom of the Harbor. But he criticized the New Yorker for "not being stapled well," and complained that the magazine fell to pieces in his hands.

When Hemingway liked or admired a bullfighter or a boxer or a writer or a cook, he was always generous about sharing the object of his enthusiasm with someone.

He was a good friend of Bernard Berenson ("the most intelligent man I know"), and told me, in a letter, "Old Mr. B is 86 plus seven months. He always wants me to be impressed by how old he is and how he might die and I never want to tell him that I don't impress by being old; only by being intelligent."

In 1954, after Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize, he said that he and Mary didn't see anybody coming down to Cuba but "bloody bores, ex-rummies and people who want to shake the hand of the man who shook down Alfred Nobel's legatees." He would tell me about people who came up to him and said, "I just wanted to tell you, Mr. Hemingway, that I think you are our greatest writer. You and Louis Bromfield." (That one made me laugh out loud.)

The same year, Hemingway shyly reported to me that another unusual visitor had turned up at the Finca-Ava Gardner.

"Only for three days," he said. "She is no strain, and I like to look at beautiful women and will go out in the boat tomorrow with her and Mary and Mayito Menocal. She was pretty good to come down with neither repOlters nor cameramen and using the name of Ann Clark."

Sometimes that is a little rough."

He seemed to enjoy having visi"I would stand and look out over the roofs All writers yearn to be considtors, but he often wished they would of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have ered the best. Some conceal the go away and let him work. At the always written before and you will write yeaming; others deny it. Hemingend of one letter, marked "0215" at now. All you have to do is write one true the top, he wrote, "I am awake for way, more than any other writer sentence. Write the truest sentence that you the night after haveing"-it was his I've known, was forthright about know.' So finally 1 would write one true habit to keep the "e" in participlesthis wish, and as touching as a sentence, and then go on from there." "sent everybody to bed. But if you child. He told me once that he want to know how lonely a man can -ERNEST HEMINGWAY, wanted to be Champion of the A Moveable Feast World. "But I have that son of a be when his damn book comes out you could bring down your lonely bitch Tolstoi blocking me and detector and make some accurate readings." he sometimes resorted to his baseball or when I get by him I run into Shakespeare," When Hemingway was feeling bleak, he said. "It would be an out to say S. never boxing metaphors, saying he was "pitchhe invariably apologized. "I'm sorry ing double headers to empty stands," or wrote them. But whoever wrote them is the daughter," he wrote, "when I'm not a bet"fighting 20-round fights with Stanley best writer. The main trouble is that he was ter example. Nobody ever fielded 1,000 if Ketchel without a paying customer in the in there first and wrote all the things I would they tried for the hard ones. Nor if they house." Then he added, "Well, Dr., when have liked to have written and never can didn't." And he added, "Anyway thanks you are half a hundred years old and know ever because he did." He would ask, "What very much for letter and try and have one your trade what the hell is the difference the hell do you do when they wrote it first?" here for when we get back. It is nice to under what conditions you practice it?"

In rereading Hemingway's letters, writcome back and have a letter. But don't There were times when Hemingway ten more than four decades ago, I am write if you are working too hard." thought nobody "wished him well." But struck by their modernity. For me, his He often wrote about the terrible heat, he quickly corrected himself and said that presence is as alive as his fiction, and I and once said, "Sorry this is such a lousy was wrong, that a lot of people wished feel blessed to have had his trust and his letter. Did you ever read any of those sto- him well but just didn't, he guessed, tell friendship. My respect for him may be ries about India and the summer heat him about it. Then he might become sadly somewhat deeper today, but I feel now, as when the Monsoon has failed and people I felt when I first got to know him, that he philosophical and say, "Your legend go heat nutty and take a rifle out of the grows like the barnacles on the bottom of represents the very soul of what we call a racks and shoot somebody in barracks? It a ship and is about as useful-less useful." writer. And I still believe that he may well has been that hot day and night. Only you be the greatest novelist and short-story can't take any rifle out of the rack and writer of our day. ere has been a great deal of speculashoot the sergeant. You get up instead and tion in the past 38 years about the na"The only thing for me to do is write re-write for six hours; copying and regood books," Hemingway once said to me ture of Hemingway's death. Mary writing and writing new in long hand until Hemingway said it was an accident, and I after reading a mean piece about his novel the paper gets so wet it won't take a penbelieve her. Hemingway was impatient with Across the River and Into the Trees, in cil. Then you stand up and sign checks and suicide. He would say, "Don't die. That is Time. "I may be a no good son of a bitch business letters and necessary family let- the only thing I know is really worthless." and lead a highly criticizable life. But I am ters on the typewriter hopeing to get to the He loved and believed in life. When Thomas a good and conscientious writer, and they pool before the last patch of shade where Heggen, the Mr. Roberts playwright, com- ought to give you that." Once he specuthe water is cool will be gone. That's why mitted suicide, Hemingway said to me, lated about why he had been criticized so you don't write Lillian ....Better stop be- "Now, a guy makes a little money with a often. "I joke all the time at myself, and fore I bore you some more." play like Mr. Roberts. Nothing occurs to him everybody else and at everything and most Hemingway always cheered me on in better than to kill himself. You'd think he'd literary critics are very solemn and without my writing projects, and he confided in buy himself all the women in the world or go humor and they resent that," he said. me about his own battles. In 1951, when to China or take a good room at the Ritz in "When I'm going good, don't give a he was finishing The Old Man and the Paris and be the Proust of the people. No, he damn about anything nor anybody," he kills himself."

Sea, he wrote, "By the time I get it all right wrote. "People who don't know work is and as good as I can do they will probably On the same theme, he said, "How peo- your truest love, feel the thing come bebe dropping atomic bombs around like ple cling to their useless lives I do not un- tween you, and always get jealous and pick goat shit. But we can make a trip to some derstand. Some Africans when they decide fights. Well, I love my work more than I comparatively unbombed area and you to die, just die. I think I understand how love any woman or anything else."

D can read it in Mss if they have stopped they do it, but have always been playing About the Author: Lillian Ross, a frequent publishing books." on the other team and engaged in deciding contributor to the New Yorker, is the author of When he was depressed or discouraged, to live when it is actually impossible.

Portrait of Hemingway, among other works.

---------------------

11

group is assessed per member payment at the state level and at the national level.

Generally the $25 to $50 that a member pays mostly goes to the state and national levels, so obviously there is a need to raise money in other ways. Leagues have done it in traditional ways over the years such as bake sales and yard sales. But Leagues have also been much more creative.

Sometimes they hold elections for private organizations. My local league holds an election for the credit union of Hughes' Aircraft, and they get paid $600 for one day's work, so that was a substantial amount of income, but it was in the line of work, so to speak. The city of Los Angeles holds elections for the community development agency, and it's a tremendous amount of work, but they get a substantial amount of their budget from holding these elections." The League also writes and sells publications, obtains grants from private foundations and the government. For organizing a teleconference on groundwater they got a grant from the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]."

Because of the grassroots network the League has, they were able to do some of the work for the EPA. "We have embarked at the national level on an endowment campaign. Women's groups traditionally have been endowment poor. The Boy Scouts of America has a huge endowment. And if you look at the Girl Scouts, I don't think you'll find that.

Again, it's not that they haven't been concerned, but women generally have given of

example in the inner~. cities, providing child) !Jl~ care for working poor ~~d~ and similar projects. ~~ Another thing the League is noted for is its forums and debates, giving a platform for the candidates that's unbiased. "We don't evaluate the candidates, we ask candidates to give us something of 300 words or less." Election materials that simplify the process are printed in Spanish, Chinese and other languages, to try to bring in the minority population who have not been as involved in the political process. "We have a long way to go to try to bring everyone into the political process, even the limited thing of voting, which doesn't require a whole lot of effort on people's part. It should be an obligation, but too many people are neglectful of that."

After passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote, male politicians suddenly discovered a new feminine allraction--a vOle bank--as depicted in this 1920 cartoon by John F Knolt,from the Dallas Morning ews.

Vallianos says she came to India to share her experience and to learn about India's experience, saying, "We in the U.S. don't know too much about India."

American women will be very interested in what is going on in India, she thinks, particularly when they learn "how successful these elected officials are against nearly insurmountable odds."

0

------------------~---------------------------------------------------------------~-------------------'

In case of a change in your address, please fill out this form; also attach the address label from a recent SPAN envelope, Since four to six weeks are needed to process a change of address, please let us know about any change promptly,

MAIL TO: Circulation Manager, SPAN MagaZine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001

60

SPAN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER

1999

BRUCE PECK

Printmaker's Odyssey

Chool Kata 15 x 20 ems.

SPAN

appeals to a power audience SPAN brings articles from the best U. S. magazines to your doorstep.The New Yorker, Fortune, Wired, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone are but a few of the leading magazines featured in SPAN. Not only that.

India)s top writers comment on latest trends in business) the arts and culture.

ADVERTISE Reach influential people

SUBSCRIBE SPAN

links America to India

For more information on advertising, contact: SPAN For subscription, contact: Circulation Manager American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 Phone: (011) 3316841 Fax: (011) 3327328 E-mail: rsa@usia.goY