Pen and Paper Revolutionaries: Breaking into the Boys' Club

Virginia Woolf said that to fulfill creative potential, women need a room of their own. Not so for Romance Languages and Literatures Professor Alice Jardine; she needed Samuel Beckett’s room.

During her time in Paris, Jardine studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure, a previously all-male institution, but Jardine refused to be treated as a second-class citizen. “She showed up and she wanted to live in the famous dorm, the one where people like Samuel Beckett lived,” says Brian Martin, a Winthrop House tutor and long-time student of Jardine’s.

Ultimately, the institution let her live in Beckett’s former domicile. It wouldn’t be the last time she barged through a shut door. She is now one of only 39 tenured female professors in the humanities at Harvard. She has done pioneering work in race, class, and gender theory and has been a powerful force of change in College curriculum: she helped implement the inception of the Women’s Studies concentration, and founded the Graduate Consortium of Women’s Studies.

Her first book, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity, published in 1985, is part of the canon of post-structuralist feminist theory—a strain of theory that treats gender as a largely social construct imposed on biological differences. “I became fascinated by this group of people who seemed to be trying to understand the post-war world,” Jardine says.

Professor Janet Beizer, a fellow of Jardine’s in the Romance Languages and Literatures department, calls the book a monumental text. “She reads women and [the notion of] the feminine across cultures, languages, across genders, across oceans,” she says.

Gynesis was so monumental in part because the people about whom Jardine was writing—Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir and other prominent feminist thinkers—were Jardine’s peers during her years doing graduate work in Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship.

“I feel very proud to be a part of a small group—but nonetheless a very important group—of individuals who are not afraid to say that the world is in a terrible mess and at a moment of deep and profound crisis,” says Jardine.

In between teaching her popular course “I Like Ike, but I Love Lucy” and a sophomore seminar, Jardine is looking for a publisher for Booming, a new book about feminism in the 1950s.

She doesn’t want to stop writing. “If intellectuals like ourselves don’t step up to the plate, and try to think it through and have some influence,” she says, “I don’t understand who’s going to do that.”