The Feminine Mistake?

Like many young women coming of age in the 1980s in Manhattan, I arrived at college in the fall of 1986 thinking I could do anything. I had been encouraged in this by my passionately cultured, stay-at-home Belgian-Jewish mother, whose hopes for me and my generation knew no bounds. Her favorite Gloria Steinem line? “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” I was most definitely not a seventies-style feminist. As far as my peers and I were concerned, those fiercely fought battles for equality were long over, the hard-won fruits of victory ours. Besides, their approach seemed—from the safe distance of our boom-boom decade—decidedly too earnest and unglamorous. I would never go around with my legs or armpits unshaven. I preferred Chanel bags and black stockings and a well-turned heel.

My first day as a Harvard freshman, while I was unpacking in my Matthews dorm room, a girl from across the hall came and stood in the doorway and said, her red curls and Louisville accent full of charm, “Oh, dear, I dragged my trunk down the hall and made marks on the floor.” She looked forlornly at the two freshly carved grooves running in wavering parallel lines down the hallway. “Don’t worry about the floor,” my mother said, “you are going to make marks on life!”

I also quickly found my groove, signing up for classes in history, literature, and art, trying out for a few plays, comping The Crimson. Thursday nights, my dorm mates and I watched “Cheers,” and I took pleasure in its subverted sexism, subscribing to its message that a snappy comeback held a power all its own. Before long, my favorite meal was the double cheeseburger at the Tasty, especially when eaten at 2:00 a.m. in the company of my new best friend, a fellow dark-haired East Coast sharpie whose charismatic if slightly overbearing mother was Armenian rather than Jewish. She and I found ourselves in sync, whether dancing, all bent knees and swinging elbows, to the seductive beat of Madonna, or admiring the brilliance of art historian T.J. Clark, whose seminal course “An Introduction to Modernism” we took together. We had no problem bluffing for a final about the Venus of Willendorf as a symbol of earthy feminine power, and then showing up later that evening at a party wearing identical black miniskirts and red lipstick. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” a girl said to us deadpan, taking in our matching look.

Although Harvard had a long and storied tradition of gender bias—there were far more male professors, deans, department heads, and housemasters than female—and had only recently “officially” disengaged from those bastions of patriarchy known as final clubs, by sophomore year I took a certain kind of equality for granted. I got a tremendous kick out of the fact that I lived in one of the traditionally male river houses while my boyfriend had to hike all the way up to the Quad. I was far less amused by the fact that I couldn’t walk through the front door of the Fly, where he was a member, and quietly cheered when, later that year, a female student took the club to court, suing it for sexual discrimination.

Even if I had been able to ignore the signs of lingering sexism (after all, Larry Summers’s infamous quote about men and women’s “innate differences” was only two decades off), star professors like Alice Jardine and Barbara Johnson were there to remind me of the dangers lurking always beneath the surface. We were the first class that could graduate with a degree in Women’s Studies, and high-minded high-feminist theory, held aloft by such intellectual goddesses as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, was the rage. There were all kinds of theoretical stripes one could adopt at the time—semiotic, Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, poststructuralist, postmodernist, and more—but for me and my friends the feminist theorists had a particular hold, from the film course in which we were taught that such Hitchcock classics as “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” were, as critic Laura Mulvey famously observed, “cut to the measure of [male] desire” to a French Literature class, in which almost every obscure French novel we read was, it turned out, about castration. As a male friend of mine put it, “Who knew?” (How we laughed a few years later when that same friend, now a Professor of French at Yale, ended up standing at side-by-side urinals in the men’s room next to Jacques Derrida—at least one of us finally laid eyes on “the ultimate signifier.”)

I enjoyed learning this new language, speaking fluently about the “objectification of women,” the “power of the male gaze,” the “fetishization of desire.” But I was still a romantic at heart. Like many of the girls in my class (although we were supposed to be called women now), I had the poster of Robert Doisneau’s “Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville” up in my room, and my favorite movie was “A Room with a View.” I was obsessed with the moment when the hero, played by Julian Sands, approaches the heroine, Helena Bonham Carter, in a field of wildflowers, only to sweep her up in a fervent embrace. “Yes, but Valerie,” a friend of mine remarked, “if anyone tried to do that to you, you’d slug him.” True enough. At the same time, unlike the emerging tide of third-wave feminists, the riot grrrls and womyn intent on destroying the hegemony of the male canon, I didn’t consider myself overtly outraged about the state of gender affairs, in or out of the classroom. I had no desire to Take Back the Night, as those annual rallies that began in Harvard Yard and wound their way around campus were known—I wanted already to own it. I felt I should be able to go anywhere at any time, even if that wasn’t entirely reasonable (besides, I knew of too many guys who went on the candlelit march hoping to meet women).

The men in my crowd seemed generally unthreatened by the new lingo; after all, weren’t they guaranteed members of the patriarchy? Some of them got right into the spirit of things. One guy I knew took a popular French feminist theory course in which the students sat in a circle, because, the professor explained, it was gynecologic in shape, and at the beginning of class, introduced themselves according to their “matrilineage.” To illustrate the “dominance of the phallocracy,” my friend brought a bottle of Corona in to class, shook it, opened it, and then asked his fellow classmates, “What does this remind you of?” He is still proud of the A+ he received, and I still feel like hitting him over the head when I hear the story.

On the other hand, men had to walk a confusing line. The unforgiving demands of political correctness, which had begun to dominate campuses everywhere, threatened them at every turn. Friends of mine put on a production of “Play it Again, Sam” and spent an inordinate amount of time on the disclaimer in the program, which explained that Woody Allen’s sexist views “did not reflect the views of the producers.” Another friend wasn’t allowed to tell his girlfriend that she was pretty: She found it demeaning, implying that he only liked her for her looks.

Like her, I wanted to be taken seriously, while also dressing however I pleased. I didn’t go so far as to wear bunny ears to class, as one classmate did as part of a performance piece, but I do remember sitting at some black-tie dinner my senior year wearing a silk Hermès scarf as a halter top (a Swiss friend had taught me how to knot it just so). At the end of the conversation with the older gentleman seated next to me, with whom I had discussed everything from my thesis subject to the state of American politics, he turned to me and said, “Well, Valerie, I really enjoyed your top.” I was shocked.

Looking back now, I realize I probably deserved it. What was I thinking? A scarf? But back then it seemed too terrible to be reduced to my outfit in that way. I told the story to a friend recently, and he asked, “Is it possible you misheard him, that he actually said ‘our talk’?” Yes, entirely possible.

Valerie M. Steiker ’90 is the culture editor at Vogue. Her books include The Leopard Hat: A Daughter’s Story and Brooklyn Was Mine, which she co-edited with Chris Knutsen.