Amy Richlin

WCC Questionnaire

(I wrote about a lot of this in the Intro to Arguments with Silence; writing this now on my 70th birthday, makes me happy!)

Please identify yourself and tell us how you have been involved in the WCC over the years. How did you decide to build this organization?

I wasn’t a founding member – I graduated from college in 1973, the year it was founded?  Maybe 1975?  I was in grad school then.

My Greek teacher, Ann Bergren, encouraged me to take the train to Philadelphia in December 1972 in order to get a taste of the APA; I saw Judy Hallett from a distance, in her famous magenta hat – that was as close as I got.

I was a VAP for the first five years after I had my PhD and didn’t feel I could get involved until I had a tenure-track job.  The WCC activities at that time were centered on the annual meetings, and I was always running to job interviews.  I attended my first WCC business meeting in December of 1978 (Vancouver – sparsely attended), while in my first VAP at Rutgers; there was no such thing then as grad student or VAP outreach/support, the WCC was a bunch of untenured women battling the APA hierarchy just for a toehold, with a few male sympathizers (John Sullivan).  I did participate in the WCC boycott of the APA meeting in December 1980(?), when the APA met in New Orleans, LA, which was a non-ERA state.  

In December 1982, now with a tenure-track job at Lehigh University, I crashed the steering committee meeting at the Philly APA with some ideas.  Bookbag design?  Not sure.  It was, I think, Barbara McManus, the great head-for-business of the WCC, who started the idea of selling bookbags.

What did you hope to accomplish through WCC?

I joined up in the heyday of tremendous pushes for change within the organization itself:  ending the double-jurying system for the annual meeting, starting day care at the annual meeting, making the election of APA officers more transparent by sending candidates a questionnaire and publishing their answers, cleaning up the mess at AJP, instituting anonymous readers’ reports at the journals, instituting preferential ballots in the elections (that came out of my co-chairship with Jim Tatum of the Nominating Committee).  I was on Steering Committee from 1984-1987 and Judy Hallett and I were co-chairs in 1987 – we did a great deal of butt-kicking, Judy has a phenomenal nose for “good trouble,” and we made a lot of it. My own contribution was mostly as Newsletter Editor from 1986-1990.  As well as managing the candidates’ questionnaire for its first few years (before we shamed the APA into taking it on), I ran a blacklist of departments with “fewer than 1 tenured women.”  

How has the WCC shaped your scholarship, community, and career?

In every way.  Mmm, in the “Survival” issue I wrote one of the anonymous contributions and talked about forming a supportive network by mail – that was it!  It was the annual meeting or the US mail!!  That’s how I got to be friends with Marilyn Skinner, who in turn introduced me – by mail – to Suzanne Dixon in Australia.

Who did you see as your main supporters in those early days?

See above on John Sullivan.  There weren’t a lot of mainstream/male scholars who took the group seriously at the outset.  Judy can give you a full answer on this.  After the blowup over the nominations in 1991, it was Jeff Rusten of Cornell who pushed through the change to preferential balloting.

Why form a caucus in particular? Were there other models or were you doing something new?

I joined after that was a done deal!  But there was a caucus in the MLA and also in the AHA – not sure if the word “caucus” was in their title though.

Was the idea to create a space for women classicists to bond with one another, or a community to support the study of gender in antiquity?

First, professional survival.  The idea that we might also study women – that was (a) extremely radical, nobody in the field thought there was anything to study, and (b) insulting, since we’d all been trained in old-school philology and history, we didn’t want to be exiled to the kitchen.  However, Sarah Pomeroy + Helene Foley + Natalie Kampen, 1983 NEH Summer Institute, Goddesses, Whores, and we all got pressured to teach a course – the research came out of our existence, not vice versa.

How do you think WCC’s support for feminist scholars and scholarship changed the field of Classics over the past 50 years?

It’s unrecognizable today from what it was in 1971.  A sea of tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, with Judy’s magenta hat rising above the tide (it had a feather stuck in the hatband).

What has been the most meaningful WCC events, initiatives, or resources for you?

The Newsletter; the 1985 Ovid panel; the panels at the Berkshire Conference; the parties at the APA; friendships formed in struggle; the panel at the Dublin conference (see Arguments with Silence).

Do you have any favorite stories or anecdotes you want to share?

• I’m pretty sure I invented the idea of having a WCC table in the book display.  There was a regional meeting outside Philly (CAAS), am pretty sure it was at Villanova, so I drove over from Bethlehem and brought my card table with me – the plan was, to set up an “Amnesty table” in the hallway to sell memberships, and maybe I had some bookbags or order forms.  “Amnesty table” as in, the tables student groups like Amnesty International would set up along walkways on campus?  It worked, to my surprise, and one very conservative, misogynist classicist even came and sat down with me at the table, mostly to yank my chain, but he made his friends sign up.  Next stop, APA meeting!

• Judy and me dancing in our Lanz nightgowns at the Berks in 1987 in front of Mary L and Hugh Lloyd-Jones.

Did you imagine the WCC would still be such a strong voice in the field at 50 years?

That was the plan!

What are your hopes for the WCC and its members in the future?

Feminism:  The Longest Revolution, by Juliet Mitchell.

What about the WCC are you most excited for in the coming year(s)?

The influx of young women into the WCC just makes me so happy.  Keep it up!  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!  

I think Zoom is an extremely powerful tool to bring more people into the fold.  So terrific for people who are isolated.  I’d like to see reading groups combining Greatest Hits from the 1970s-1980s with what’s new and hot, on an ongoing basis.  Back then, all of us were discovering the writings of First Wave feminists, dusty and neglected on the library shelves.  We need to carry it on!  As long as women bear children, women are endangered in the academy.

For the Girls: An Elegy

In 1954, the girls went out to play
on the green lawns, under the maples lush with June,
and brought their cat's-cradle strings and dolls
and a book.

"She's always got her nose in a book," their mothers said,
wondering about the distant years,
and called them home to dinner:
"Barbara! Natalie!" -- names little girls had then,
just as they once were Sylvia and Celia,
Fanny and Minnie and Ida before that.

Serious girls, or rowdy, they got straight As,
they couldn't leave the books alone, and wouldn't rest,
but thought they might write one,
much to everyone's surprise.
(No one expected a girl to write a book; not someone
who loved the color pink, and liked to go shopping,
and once wore Mary Janes.)

Once they wore red Keds, and collected barrettes;
once their skin was smoother than a Band-Aid,
and their eyelashes lay as they slept
on cheeks like peonies.

Now it is summer again, and the trees cast the same green shade;
underneath, they still lie, reading;
and their mothers are calling them home.

Amy Richlin - July 2015


In memory of Natalie Boymel Kampen (1944-2012), Barbara McManus (1942-2015), and all the women of my generation who are gone; and thinking of all the rest who are gone too soon. Sylvia was my mother's name (1917-2003); Celia was the mother of a friend (1913-1973); Fanny and Ida were my grandmothers, Min was Fanny's cousin. Names mark generations, and each generation has its own roll call. "Barbara! Natalie!": maybe in small towns they still do this, I hope they do, but in our childhood mothers at twilight would stand on the front stoop and call their children home, on a falling minor third.

Virginia Woolf said, "We think back through our mothers if we are women." Not only my own childhood but my mother's and her mother's are part of me just like the rings of a tree; "We used to play under the front porch"; "The ladies used to hide us under the bundles of cloth when the inspector came around." The "distant years" come from Yeats, "A Prayer for My Daughter," from which this poem departs.

“For the Girls” was originally published in the SCS mag Amphora (issue 12.1), with explanatory notes, the year Barbara McManus died.