This February, I had the honor of interviewing Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Professor Fishkin teaches English at Stanford University and is an author and editor of numerous books, articles, papers, and more. Enjoy!
Much of your work involves bringing underrepresented perspectives to light. How do you approach uncovering and amplifying the stories of women in American literature and history?
I'm always on the lookout for intriguing women who deserve more attention than they have received. Since my background is in literature and cultural studies, I sometimes look for women authors on various topics to include in my classes, and when I don't find them, that makes me look all the harder. For example, years ago, when I was teaching a course on writers whom moved from journalism to fiction, I wanted to find a writer who wrote about working women in the early 20th century to pair with Theodore Dreiser--a writer who began as a journalist and then moved to fiction. This pattern was the topic of my class. My good friend, the brilliant, feminist, scholar, Lillian Robinson, told me about Theresa Malkiel, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who wrote journalism and fiction about working women in the early 20th century. I was able to locate her journalism, but her only novel, Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, which came out in 1910, was out of print and only available in a French translation. I tracked down a copy of the 1910 original edition in the library at Yale, photocopied it, and taught the photocopy for several years in class before realizing that it really should be reprinted for use in American classrooms. I helped make the case for this to a university press, which ended up publishing the book--with a translation of the extraordinarily helpful introduction that had appeared in the French edition. It was “the diary” of a worker, who began very hostile to the labor movement, who, by the end of the book became an avid striker herself. The diary's “author" was befuddled by the sounds of Yiddish she heard at workers’ meetings and held many anti-Semitic views at the start, but by the end of the book, she came to admire enormously the Jewish women leading the strike. But the diary’s “author” was nothing like the real author of the novel: Malkiel herself spoke Yiddish before she spoke English, and was a labor organizer. But she wrote the book so convincingly, that for years scholars viewed it as a real diary that a Christian, anti-Semitic, American-born shirtwaist striker, had written herself. They took her novel as a historical document rather than a work of the imagination. It was a pleasure to the book’s real author some of the attention she deserved. To help get attention for women who changed the world but whose stories need to be better known, I’ve recently joined the Board of “Look What SHE Did”. Do check it out. Over 150 short (4-minute) films telling these women’s stories!
As a scholar of Mark Twain, have you encountered female figures in his life or work whose contributions have been overlooked? How do you think their inclusion changes our understanding of his legacy?
Women were central to Twain’s creative process. Twain’s first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly had its roots in the story he was told by a formerly enslaved woman he knew well—the cook in the farm where his family spent summers. Mary Ann Cord’s account of being separated from her children on the auction block and reunited with one of them after the war moved Twain enormously and also impressed upon him how powerful a story told by a vernacular narrator could be. Cord told the story in her own voice, eloquently and compellingly. Twain found it an unusually strong “literary work” to come from someone “untutored in literary art.” Hearing her tell this story did more than provide the basis for Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I heard it” (1874); it helped plant the seeds for the narrative choice he made in Huckleberry Finn: telling the story in the voice of an untutored child who had never learned proper grammar. Mary Ann Cord’s impact on his career cannot be overstated (I address it in my books Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, and my forthcoming book, Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade. In addition to providing him with inspiration, women in Twain’s life provided him with feedback and guidance that shaped his writing in profound ways.
Your work often takes a global view of American literature. How do you see the narratives of women in American literature connecting with or diverging from those of women in other cultural traditions?
It is striking how patriarchy shaped women’s lives in both the US and other countries often in remarkably parallel ways. Women have been treated as second-class citizens around the world for centuries. This is why a key (but often neglected) American feminist like Charlotte Perkins Gilman struck such resonant chords around the world: her book Women and Economics (1898) was translated into many languages, for example. Double standards that seem home-grown turn out to have parallels around the world and women writers who have explored them in their work (like Gilman, Fanny Fern, Tillie Olsen, and many others) have captured the interest of women around the world for that reason. Globally, women have long been devalued, dismissed, denigrated, and denied their right to develop fully as human beings.
What do you see as the future of women's stories and storytelling? What is the next frontier for amplifying women’s voices in literary studies and beyond?
It is more important than ever to tell women’s stories —especially at a moment when when women’s rights are under siege. Anti-abortion legislation threatens women’s control over their own bodies. Their right to vote is under threat by proposed legislation (the SAVE act) specifically designed to disenfranchise women (women using married names that don’t match the name on their birth certificate could be denied the right to register to vote without a paper trail of documentation). Current assaults on gender include deleting all references to “women” and issues that impact women particularly from government website. Women’s voices need to be heard loud and clear. Their stories are crucial to the survival of our nation — and, indeed of our planet.
As a teacher and mentor, how do you encourage young women scholars to carve their paths in fields that might still undervalue women’s contributions?
I encourage them to think big, imagine boldly, and not be deterred by those who don’t value what they do. I encourage them to take inspiration from foremothers who met even more daunting obstacles than women face today, and who overcame them. To foreground feminist issues on campus, I organized a campus-wide celebration of “Ms. At 40 and the Future of Feminism” when Ms. Magazine was four decades old. Last spring I organized another symposium with Ms., on “The Past and Future of Reproductive Justice in America.” I teach a number of inspiring women writers in my class on “American Literature and Social Justice.” I short, I try to motivate young women scholars to achieve their goals and also expose them to others who have met some of the challenges they will face.
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