In Memoriam Sandra Bartky Lisa Heldke ([email protected])
I was deeply honored by Charlotte Witt’s invitation to participate in this panel commemorating the life and work of Sandra Lee Bartky. As much as I am honored by Charlotte’s invitation, however, another part of me wants to take a leaf from “Wayne’s
World,” fling myself on the ground, Garth-style, and wail “I’m not worthy!” There are so many feminist philosophers out there who have learned from Sandra, as students in her
classrooms, as graduate advisees, as colleagues in professional organizations, and as readers of her philosophy…so many feminists, I say, that it seems absurd—no, it seems a virtual Zeno’s paradox—that I have been chosen to be one of the few speaking here today. How did
Charlotte traverse that infinite list of names to arrive at me? And, more to the point, how will I do Sandra justice?
My impulse, here at the opening of my remarks, is just to apologize—to Sandy, to the audience, to all the other folks who could be speaking right now—for everything this talk will not be. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve been this scared of falling short of expectations since I
participated in a panel on bisexuality at a lesbian separatist conference twenty years ago. “Why the drama?” you’re asking. It’s pretty simple: Today I have the opportunity to
bear witness, in public, from my vantage point, to the impact that Sandra has had on a
generation of feminist thinkers. And I get a little panicky about the importance of such a task, when I consider the centuries of practice in woman-forgetting that western philosophy has
under its belt. I feel a level of desperation to remember everything I can about Sandra, and to make sure that I support it with enough evidence to contribute to the preservation of her
philosophical legacy.
philosophy, helping to bring this field into existence both by writing path-breaking work in feminist phenomenology, and by co-founding, tending, and participating in an organization
that served as a vital incubator for the work of numerous feminist philosophers. (You have no idea how difficult it was to write that sentence. I questioned every verb choice. That’s what feminist philosophy does to you.) As a member of the feminist philosophical community, she
was warm and steely; generous and exacting; welcoming and angry; tender-minded and tough; funny and ferocious. She welcomed you into the field with the graciousness of your
favorite aunt; and in an argument with you she defended her most strongly-held beliefs with a fierce tenacity that surprised you…the first time.
The headline of Sandra Bartky’s obituary in the New York Times places her “at the
vanguard of feminist philosophy” for the path-breaking analyses of women’s bodily disciplines she undertook beginning in the 1970s. Her later description of psychological
oppression, in the essay by that name, never fails to rivet students with the aptness and intimacy of its account. Sandra’s writing is filled with sentences you can’t ever forget, like this one: “The project of femininity is a ‘setup.’” And you know that phrase, “the tyranny of
slenderness,” we now see everywhere? She said that first, as far as I can tell (using my highly sophisticated Google research techniques).
I’m not going to undertake a philosophical examination of Sandra’s published work here. Instead, I’ve chosen to tell some stories about Sandra—stories that illustrate who she was to me: a teacher, a mentor, a professional colleague, and a writer whose work has shaped
my philosophical bones and sinews. These stories--about the work Sandy did with and for others--are, I submita fitting philosophical tribute to her, because her work as a feminist
During the months since her death, I have pieced together our various interactions and have realized—to my amazement and chagrin—that Sandra, more than any other feminist
philosopher, mentored me into this profession. Amazement, because I hadn’t put these pieces together before, and chagrin, because I have realized this too late to thank her for it. Sandra held this position despite having no “official” role in my life. She was “just” a senior woman
philosopher from a neighboring institution, who knew me in a few different contexts. I was none of her responsibility whatsoever.
SWIP
Sandy is inseparable from SWIP, the Society for Women in Philosophy, of which she was a founder. Of SWIP, Sandra said, ‘Clearly, if there were to be such a thing as feminist
philosophy, we who were philosophers and feminists would have to invent it.’” How brilliant were Sandra and her cofounders to bootstrap the invention of feminist philosophy by
founding an organization, giving it a name, creating for it a loose structure, and then making sure it met regularly and cheaply? SWIP became, in Sandra’s era and in no small part thanks to her efforts, an ongoing feminist philosophical conversation. That conversation regularly
produced ideas, papers and theories that are today canonical. But always, SWIP was this conversation among women who were invested not just in thinking together but in
transforming ourselves and our worlds.
Kate Norlock, in her memorial blog post about Sandra, notes that Sandra’s philosophical writing itself bears the imprint of her experience as a founder of this great
consciousness raising conversation; it “was her aim, that [those] who read her work were shaped by it, shaken into new awareness of ourselves, and expanded by our appreciation of
Sandra began seducing me to feminist philosophy at a meeting of Midwest SWIP in Minneapolis, in 1984. Not only was it my first encounter with Sandra, it was my first SWIP
meeting. SWIP was a very big surprise for a second year grad student who’d barely
encountered a woman philosopher, let alone a feminist philosopher up until that point. At the time, I felt like I was invading a club that had existed forever; in fact, it was just over ten
years old. Sandra had, of course, been one of its founders, and the organization I was encountering very deeply bore the imprint of her hard work to bring it into existence. I
describe my experience here in some detail because I want to remind us of just how…incredible its existence was.
That first conference exists for me as a set of fragmented, but (even now) remarkably
vivid snapshots of an enchanted, but really scary place. The first picture depicts a plane trip from Chicago to Minneapolis with my fellow Northwestern grad student, Kelly Oliver. Kelly
was carrying, as her suitcase, a leather backpack so improbably tiny it brought to mind the overnight case Ingrid Bergman whipped out at the end of “Rear Window.” The suitcase was only the first utterly improbable thing I encountered at SWIP.
The first night of the conference—of the conference!—featured a musical
performance of an original composition called “Minstrel Cycle” based on the old hymn “Who
Can Wash Away My Sins? Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.” It included the line (mind-blowing to me at the time) “We need a god who bleeds.” That snapshot is in Kodachrome.
The next day, when papers began to be read, a woman sat on the floor—the floor!—to
listen to someone’s paper! In the afternoon, I heard the word “racism” used in a philosophical context for the first time, during a panel discussion on the topic. During the panel, one of the
women cried—cried!—while reading her paper. (That was the point at which I finally
But for all its differences from more mainstream philosophy conferences, that SWIP meeting was like the others in one regard: when mealtime came around, folks headed out
with their own friends, to eat and talk together. It’s natural; you see these treasured friends so few times a year that you guard that time with just them jealously. You’re not necessarily interested in sharing your table with some eager-beaver graduate students. So, at dinnertime
on Saturday night, Kelly and I figured we’d be hitting the nearest Chinese noodle restaurant alone. That’s when Sandra and Nancy Fraser swooped in and invited us to join their group.
Oddly, I have no vivid snapshots of that dinner; where it was, how many people were there. I remember a (literal) round table. And I remember Sandra talking to us as if, well, as if we belonged at that table. Sandra straightaway treated us as philosophers, as feminist
philosophers. There was no asterisk after our names; we weren’t treated as “in training.” We were parts of this conversation, entitled to be there.
Around the table, people talked about the papers we’d heard that day—particularly that panel on racism. Turns out there was a robust discussion of racism going on at SWIP; who knew? Talk then turned to the internal politics of Midwest SWIP. It was the first of
many times I heard Sandra describe her particular take on this organization, on its strengths and challenges, and on her relationship to it. As one of its founders, she was fiercely loyal to
it. But precisely because she was fiercely loyal to SWIP, and to the spirit of feminist consciousness raising in which it was founded, she was often skeptical or critical of the positions various of its members held, and sometimes even of the direction the organization
as a whole moved.
That first SWIP weekend amazed, confused, startled and challenged me. It also, for
Writing
Sandra wasn’t my advisor, nor was she my formal teacher, except for one quarter,
when Northwestern’s lone feminist went on sabbatical and they needed someone to teach a graduate course on feminist philosophy. Sandra came and taught Alison Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature, which had just come out. I was done with classwork, but sat in
so I could get the chance to study with her. That nine week interval provides more evidence of Sandra’s philosophy-by-mentoring.
It was spring quarter, and I’d allegedly been working on my dissertation prospectus for two quarters by that point. (Heaven help me if I had to account for those eighteen weeks. I was getting nowhere, despite having every advantage a person could want: a perfectly lovely
dissertation advisor who was trying to be nothing but helpful, and the time and money to support my work.) Sandra invited me to her office to talk about my dissertation “idea” with
her. She had no obligation to do so. She was just spontaneously reaching out to a feminist woman student, to see if she could be of some help. (I know!!! Right?)
When I sat down in her borrowed office, she wasted no time. “Here’s what you
should write about,” she told me firmly, and she proceeded to sketch out a project in epistemology that drew on Marxist concepts. It turns out it wasn’t exactlywhat I wanted to
talk about, but—hallelujah!—I could tell that! What’s more, I could glimpse a topic (my topic!) from the philosophical location she had plunked me. Thanks to her description, I could see the topic I did want, because she had so clearly laid out what she thought the issues
should be. And here’s the thing about her guidance: she didn’t pussyfoot around. She didn’t worry that, by telling me what to do, she might be being too directive. Having witnessed me
failed) to follow for years. “Just write. Don’t agonize. Don’t be like me. It takes me forever to write anything, because when I write”—and here, she took out an imaginary pen—“I write
‘thus,’ and I cross it out. Then I write ‘hence,’ and I cross that out. Then I write ‘therefore,’ and I look at it for a while and decide it’ll have to do for now. Don’t be like that.” How did she know that I would be like that? Much as I have failed to take her advice over the years, I
have also, over these years of pressing the backspace key, been comforted to know that, a couple hundred miles to the south of me, Sandra Bartky was probably pressing the backspace
key too.
Fast forward. I got a real job and had gotten through my probationary period. Sandra wrote a letter for my tenure file. At the last minute. Because someone else I’d been counting
on simply didn’t do it—and didn’t tell me until the eleventh hour that they weren’t going to do it. I felt guilty asking her, because even though I didn’t exactly have a massive scholarly
output, she wasn’t sitting around staying caught up on my work in her spare time. But write for me she did. At the last minute. As an act of tremendous generosity. She wrote a letter for me that made me feel like what I was doing made sense. Her letter guided me at a time when
my own view of my work was finite to the point of being myopic. I don’t know that
everything she described was really there…but her generosity of interpretation buoyed me up,
and gave me yet another boost of confidence that I “belonged” in this club.
Teaching me how to “be there” with others over the long haul, intellectually The years I spent attending SWIP conferences with her gave me an opportunity to
understand the contours of Sandra’s philosophical position, not just as it existed in published works, but as she presented it in works in progress, and enacted it in discussions of others’
that’s part of what made their painfulness so inescapable. Arguing about it felt different from arguing about the nature of justified true beliefs. (That sounds obvious; it didn’t feel obvious
at the time.)
Many philosophers in Midwest SWIP—among them some of Sandra’s dearest friends—were working in lesbian philosophy. As a heterosexual woman, she worked hard to
engage with and draw from this groundbreaking work. She actively disagreed with some arguments in some lesbian philosophy. She articulated her disagreements effectively.
Sometimes, like every human being ever, she responded defensively—and sometimes that defensiveness got in the way. This, too, was a part of her educating me; it turns out that you have to learn how to disagree with your mentors and role models. Sandy showed me that she
was willing to be disagreed with, and that it wouldn’t ruin everything forever.
Her willingness to stick her neck out and offer positions she knew were unpopular
still impresses and inspires me; she was willing to tell her friends she thought entirely differently from them—indeed, that she thought they were wrong. I deeply admire her commitment to hang in there over the years, arguing with her friends. Sandra was willing to
state views she knew were in opposition and to keep coming back to them, year after year. To get angry, and sometimes personally hurt by another person’s interpretation of her work, and
to say as much in so many words. To refuse, in short, to behave like a thinking machine; to be present in those heated philosophical discussions as Sandra, whose life history shaped her thoughts about guilt, whose relationships with men shaped her thoughts about separatism,
whose choices of clothing shaped her thoughts about the construction of femininity.
Watching her and these other senior women philosophers argue year after year about
the surface whenever I enter into a dispute. They remind me that disagreement does not— should not--be used as an excuse to dissolve human connection.
I learned from (and with) Sandra the philosophical significance of being in an organization, taking on responsibilities in it and living with the consequences of them. One year, she and I served as the program committee for a SWIP meeting. I’d never organized an
academic conference before—probably never organized anything bigger than a 4-H bake sale at that point in my life—and so I had a lot to learn about the logistics and the politics of such
work. As luck would have it, we received a particularly robust set of papers that year, and so made a decision that we knew would be extremely controversial—to schedule some
concurrent sessions. We thought through the implications of our decision in a long phone
conversation (during which I boiled a teakettle dry and heated it to the point that the aluminum bottom melted all over the burner).
It was a big deal, and we both knew it. SWIP had always met as a committee of the whole; everyone heard everything, and this format was, in some not-fully-articulated ways, essential to the organization’s identity. Concurrent sessions were a direct challenge to that
identity. Sandra and I talked through all the ramifications of the move that we could identify, and decided that the benefits of doing it outweighed the problems. We asked particular
speakers if they’d be willing to participate in our experiment, and when they agreed to try, we held our breath to wait for the results.
Let’s just say it was a wildly unpopular choice among those who addressed it with us
at the business meeting. I remember the arguments made against us pretty vividly. Among the most unexpected criticisms was the charge that, by dividing the audience, we diluted the
presence and impact of lesbians at the conference as a whole..
meant to take a controversial position and stick by it. It meant, among other things, showing up again at the next conference, continuing the conversation. The memory of that painful
business meeting influences the ways I make decisions as part of an organization today. I still think about the important philosophical reasons members of the group disagreed with what might seem a minor organizational decision; that memory keeps me listening when
everything in me wants to respond dismissively. And…scene
Sandy let me in on what was, to me at the time, a revelation: philosophers are
ordinary people with everyday lives. Yes, those everyday lives include time spent confronting profound philosophical quandaries, but they also include the need to make time to buy
underwear. God knows that the underwear purchases were, themselves, subject to feminist philosophical examination, but that didn’t take away from the fact that they were, also, the
quotidian tasks of an everyday human being. In short, she gave me to understand that being a professional philosopher was not discontinuous with being an everyday woman. In her willingness to be an ordinary, underwear-buying woman, and to tell us about that
ordinariness, she made it clear to me that philosophers are not thinking machines. In doing so, she gave me reason to believe that philosophy in fact was something I could do—and, more
than that, something to which I could bring my whole person.
Looked at from the distance of thirty (eek) years, I can see so clearly that Sandra’s regular interjections into my life as a graduate student and a young professional assured me
that my ideas about feminist philosophy made sense and deserved to be given an airing; and gave me a three-dimensional image of a feminist philosophy professor, if not exactly to
