Newly uncovered archival documents reveal how a sexist critique in The New York Times pushed Joan Didion to finally claim feminism as her own.
Joan Didion’s rigorous intellect and lambent prose may have inspired generations of women to be journalists, essayists, novelists or whoever they wanted to be—but the author traveled a roundabout road to feminism. She famously critiqued the women’s movement as “febrile and cerebral” in a brutal 1972 article for The New York Times. That unsisterly attack earned her the ire of many activists who were laboring hard to bring change to women’s lives.
“I know at whose door to lay the charge of intellectual rigidity,” Susan Brownmiller (author of Against Our Will) wrote to Didion in a subsequent letter—now available for reading in the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Papers at the New York Public Library’s Manuscript and Archives Division.
Other documents in the recently opened archive reveal that when push came to shove, the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking did align herself with gender politics.
“Yes, I am a feminist,” Didion told New York Times columnist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in a 1984 unpublished interview, whose transcript is tucked away in box 133, along with other documents related to what could be called a literary nipplegate. She was quick to qualify that statement: “But I’m not an activist.”
Didion was apparently driven to this rare statement of allegiance with identity politics by the Times writer’s disapproving comments about her author photograph. The slut-shaming of the queen of new journalism in the paper of record is a little-known chapter in Didion’s well-documented life. Archival research reveals that it was a fraught moment at a difficult time for the future National Book Award winner. The incident provides a case study in the way patronizing comments about appearances can reduce women to their bodies, no matter how heady their accomplishments.
Didion was withering in her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement,” but her relationship to the movement is more complicated than that one critique.
In one of her earliest articles for a national magazine, “San Francisco Job Hunt,” published in Mademoiselle in 1960, she wrote a pointed takedown of the gender inequities of the Bay Area publishing world. Around the same time, she famously encouraged women’s self-respect in Vogue, inspiring multiple generations of young women and influencers. In her writing and her life, she repeatedly sought to elevate the work of women she knew and didn’t know, from Georgia O’Keefe to Elizabeth Hardwick to Martha Stewart to Eve Babitz.
Didion distanced herself from political movements in general: She was the proverbial lone wolf. She voted for conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, then decades later, became good friends with Jerry Brown. Yet she clearly understood that no matter how great her success, as for all women, her gender raised obstacles. She wanted to cover the Vietnam War; Life magazine told her to stay home and let the men write about it.
And in 1984, her best-selling, critically acclaimed books didn’t stop a respected critic such as Lehmann-Haupt from presuming he had the right to criticize the publicity photo for her novel Democracy. The black-and-white image, he wrote in a July 5 “Critic’s Notebook,” “presents the author wading in a skirt and sweater that cling sufficiently to reveal somewhat more of the anatomy than one is accustomed to seeing in a dust-jacket portrait.”
Taken by Didion’s then 16-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in Hawai’i in 1982, the photo captures the writer in an intimate light. The mother stands in ankle-deep water while a palm tree bends in the wind on a promontory in the background. (Democracy largely takes place in Hawai’i and other Pacific islands, and, as in most of her novels, has a central troubled mother-daughter relationship.) Sandals dangle from Didion’s right hand and her left hand is on her hip, holding her dark skirt hitched above the water. Her signature big sunglasses hide half her face, but her closed lips curve upward in a slight smile. The wind and sea gently plaster skirt and blouse against her thin body, so that if you look closely there is a dark shadow of her thighs. You can more clearly make out Didion’s nipples above the lower curve of her breasts through her white shirt. The image provides a throwback to the Joan Didion of the 1960s and ‘70s, a symbol of West Coast free spiritedness.
In the Times article, “Pondering the Secrets Photographs Reveal,” Lehmann-Haupt paired the image with a contemporaneous People photo of Gloria Steinem reclining in a bathtub in a pearl-clutching rumination on why women pose for and publish such images. “Both photographs, one must assume, were posted for and released for publication in a mood of exuberance, not with the intention of reducing their subjects to cheesecake,” Lehmann-Haupt wrote. Instead of celebrating their exuberance, he raised the cheesecake innuendo—then said, without providing evidence, that “Miss Didion’s dust-jacket image was thought to be in questionable taste by a number of fastidious observers, including her English publisher.”
Lehmann-Haupt knew that Didion saw the photograph not as revealing but as “pleasant,” as she told him in an interview for the article. “I tend to, in some of these photographs, to look very unhappy and strained looking, which is not normally the way I am,” she says in the transcript. “It looked relaxed.”
The transcript reveals that ageism also colored Lehmann-Haupt’s critique. He tells Didion that his wife said, “Oh, she must be approaching a significant birthday,” presumably implying that Didion was compensating for insecurity over approaching 50 by flashing a little flesh.
The statement that others, including her English publisher, Chatto, found the article “in questionable taste” took Didion by surprise. Letters in the archives of her then-agent, the late Lois Wallace, housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, reveal a months-long contentious back and forth between author, agent and publisher that almost resulted in a severing of ties.
The column drove Joan Didion’s husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, into a chivalrous rage. He wrote a long, fuming, alternately deadly serious and rather hilarious letter to Lehmann-Haupt defending his wife’s honor. He called Lehmann-Haupt and his wife “Mr. and Mrs. Grun-Dy of Riverdale,” a reference to an 18th-century literary term for prudish gatekeepers, a character in Archie comics, and the Times writer’s Bronx neighborhood.
Dunne’s letter reveals details of Didion’s health that add poignant context to the body shaming. Due to “a recurring vaginal yeast infection complicated by chronic cystitis,” she had not worn underwear since she was in college. Eight months before the photo was taken, she had a hysterectomy. (These confirmations of Didion’s gynecological problems may explain why she was not able to give birth and therefore adopted Quintana.) “As for a bra, she reasoned that it would have been sheer braggadocio for a woman with a 32-double-A cup size to wear one. So what Joan was wearing in the photograph that so offended the nipple cops of Riverdale was what she wears every day of her life …,” the offended spouse wrote.
Dunne ended: “Mr. and Mrs. Grun-Dy of Riverdale would stick pasties on the Venus de Milo and call it taste. It is a taste I want no part of.”
Lehmann-Haupt conceded defeat. The Times critic responded, “Dear John: Thanks for writing. I guess you’re right.”
Great Job Evelyn McDonnell & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
