Chasing the Famous
Marilyn Lake
Susan Mitchell
Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations
With Women Who Changed The World
Harper Collins $16.95pb
279pp, 0 7322 5731 X
IN FEVERED PURSUIT of ten famous feminists, Susan Mitchell flies to New York and then on to Arlanda airport in Stockholm, where she will interview Susan Faludi, author of Backlash. Faludi's passionate about feminism re-connecting with activism and developing an agenda for 'political and social change'. Capitalist feminism, she sees as a contradiction in terms; the contemporary focus on 'personality' and 'celebrity feminists' an obstruction to progress. What is needed is a new vision, fresh analyses, a re-invigorated movement, widespread agitation. This is not what Mitchell came to hear. When Faludi's boyfriend arrives to rescue her from the conversation, which Faludi insists can't be extended, a somewhat piqued interviewer takes refuge in grumbles about the younger generation's lack of respect for their elders.
I must confess to finding Faludi's sharp analysis of contemporary 'consumerist' feminism ('it's not a grocery store where you go to buy things') and her impatient dismissal of the 'numbers game' a bracing antidote to Mitchell's own ongoing effusions. (Currently working in Sweden, Faludi learns that even though women now comprise half the Cabinet, numbers in themselves mean nothing, for women are 'presiding over a government in cut-back mode.')
Making amends to 'tall poppies' seems to have become something of a lifelong mission for Mitchell, but in New York where peonies and roses grow in the heart of the wondrous metropolis, she is quite overcome. Marvelling at her good fortune in securing appointments with these 'women who changed the world', the girl from Down Under confides: 'To be here in New York, talking to women who had created history and, in that act of talking, to be myself recording and interpreting the history of our times, was definitely to be blessed.' Such is the cringe, one wonders whether Icons, Saints and Divas should not be read as parody. Admitted to the Upper East Side apartment of Gloria Steinem, the 'most glamorous and famous celebrity of the women's movement' -- in Mitchell's view a `modern saint' -- the intrepid reporter confesses `it was easy of fall under her spell, to drown in those big, sad, brown eyes. I fought those urges and pulled back to a question and answer mode.'
Susan Mitchell is widely regarded, as she tells us, for her persuasive powers as an interviewer. Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room is initially reluctant to be included in the book, but agrees because a previous interview was 'the best I have ever done, I will do it. For you.' Phyllis Chesler, recovering from an illness, had 'really given me her best in order to be a part of my book'. Although serving as the respectful scribe, Mitchell is nevertheless clear about her own centrality to the project: 'I would be the narrator of their lives and work.' Interestingly, Germaine Greer had refused to be included precisely because of the possible usurping of own discursive power and celebrity status. In the words of her assistant, she was 'fed up with being processed by celebrity interviewers for their own aggrandisement...Dr Greer still prefers that people read her, rather than about her'. In her querulous Australian voice, Greer points to one of the limitations of the genre: we learn more about the women's apartments, than about the ideas that brought Susan Mitchell to look inside them. But these are the lives of the rich and famous, well, famous anyway. Some of the most successful writers interviewed by Mitchell are the least impressed by the attention that came their way. Marilyn French reflects :
I wrote for twenty years, sending novels and stories out, and I got rejected for twenty years. For twenty years the world of publication told me I was no good. The last fifteen they've been telling me I'm good. I can't believe one any more than I believed the other.
Kate Millett reflects that success led to her being able to write more books, whose earnings were invested in a farm and feminist artists' colony...
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