Ellen Papazian

Bitch Magazine, Issue #48, Fall 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A review of the books Girl in Need of a Tourniquet:
Memoir of a Borderline Personality,by Merri Lisa Johnson,
and The Buddha & The Borderline, by Kiera Van Gelder.
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Bitch Magazine Online, May 18, 2010
AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR ADA CALHOUN
A Q&A with the author of Instinctive Parenting:
Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids.
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Bitch Magazine, Issue #46, Spring 2010
BOOK REVIEW: ANGRY FAT GIRLS
A review of the book Angry Fat Girls: 5 Women,
500 Pounds, and a Year of Losing It ... Again,
by Frances Kuffel.
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Bitch Magazine, Issue #45, Winter 2009
OH YOKO!: 20 WAYS OF LOOKING AT
AN ART-WORLD ICON
A feature story on Yoko Ono for Bitch magazine’s
"Art/See" issue that asks 20 well-known musicians,
writers, visual artists, and scholars for their thoughts
on how one woman has come to stand for so much.
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Bitch Magazine, Issue #44, Fall 2009
BOOK REVIEW: ASK ME ABOUT MY DIVORCE
A review of the anthology Ask Me About My Divorce:
Women Open Up About Moving On, edited by Candace Walsh.
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Bitch Magazine’s Book Blog, August 24, 2009
SIX QUESTIONS ON MEN AND FEMINISM
FOR AUTHOR SHIRA TARRANT
A Q & A with author Shira Tarrant
on her new book Men and Feminism.
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Article Archive >

Bitch Magazine’s Book Blog, July 31, 2009
STORIES FOR GIRLS: AN INTERVIEW
WITH LIZZIE SKURNICK
A Q & A with author Lizzie Skurnick on her
new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics
We Never Stopped Reading.
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Bitch Magazine’s Book Blog, July 24, 2009
SIX QUESTIONS FOR JESSICA HOPPER
A Q & A with music and culture critic Jessica Hopper
on her new book Girls’ Guide to Rocking.
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Bitch Magazine’s Book Blog, July 20, 2009
CATCHING UP WITH RED’S TEEN GIRL WRITERS
A Q & A with five of the 58 teen girls who published
essays in the anthology Red: Teenage Girls in America
Write on What Fires Up Their Lives Today.
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Bitch Magazine’s Book Blog, July 19, 2009
SIX QUESTIONS FOR STACEYANN CHIN
A Q & A with writer and activist Staceyann Chin
on her new memoir The Other Side of Paradise.
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Article Archive >

Feminist Review, May 2009
SUBVERSIVE ART STAR:
AN INTERVIEW WITH JERILEA ZEMPEL
A Q & A with feminist artist Jerilea Zempel.
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Article Archive >

Bitch Magazine, Issue #43, Spring 2009
TWO BOOK REVIEWS
A review of the anthology One Big Happy Family,
by Rebecca Walker, and the memoir It Sucked
and Then I Cried, by Heather B. Armstrong.
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Feminist Review, January 2009
SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER:
AN INTERVIEW WITH JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER
A Q & A with the third-wave feminist
author and activist.
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Article Archive >

Hip Mama, Issue #41, Fall 2008
WIDE AWAKE
A personal essay about a child’s voice.
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Feminist Review, August 2008
LIVE THROUGH THIS: AN INTERVIEW
WITH SABRINA CHAPADJIEV
A Q & A with the editor of Live Through This:
On Creativity and Self-Destruction.
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Article Archive >

Feminist Review, July 2008
FEMINIST MEDIA RECONSIDERED:
AN INTERVIEW WITH MAKE/SHIFT
A Q & A with the founders and editors of
make/shift magazine.
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Article Archive >

Feminist Review, May 2008
RECLAIMING FEMINIST MOTHERHOOD:
AN INTERVIEW WITH AMY RICHARDS
A Q & A with feminist activist and writer
Amy Richards on her new book, Opting In:
Having a Child Without Losing Yourself.
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Hip Mama, Issue #38, Winter 2007
NOT WHAT I THOUGHT
A personal piece about childbirth.
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Ms. magazine, November/December 1997
RIGHT WING CUTS OFF FEMINIST FILMMAKERS
Women Make Movies battles threats to its funding.
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Ms. magazine, November/December 1996
WOMAN ON THE VERGE
Ani DiFranco is the hottest indie musician around
and an icon for her generation—but at what price?
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Ms. magazine, September/October 1996
BOOK REVIEW: ANGEL MAKER
The Short Stories of Sara Maitland
Reviewed by Ellen Papazian
Read Article >

Ms. magazine, September/October 1995
ARE NURSES BEING PHASED OUT?
American nurses face a new crisis in this update
on the state of the U.S. nursing profession.
Read Article >

feministreview.org

In 2003, The New York Times Magazine published “The Opt-Out Revolution,” by Lisa Belkin, a now nearly infamous contribution to the never-ending “mommy wars” collection of work. The cover story asserted that the nation’s most educated career women were “opting out” of their professional lives to become full-time, stay-at-home moms. A revolution it was not—as the piece focused narrowly on select female Princeton University graduates and failed to document a real sea change in the landscape of American motherhood.

Yet seven months after its publication, feminist activist and writer Amy Richards attended a get-together with other feminist moms who couldn’t stop talking about the piece—despite the fact that their lives were, as Richards writes, the “living rebuttal” to Belkin’s claims. Richards—a founder of the Third Wave Foundation who cowrote two popular feminist works (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism)—realized that these moms were devaluing their own realities and valuing another’s opinion simply because it was “codified in prestigious print.” Yet she also understood that there was a pressing need for real dialogue about one essential question: “What is feminism’s relationship to motherhood?”

Four years later, Richards answers the question in her latest book, Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. The book is both her rebuttal to Belkin’s “Opt-Out Revolution” and her exploration of what it truly means to be a feminist mother. She examines feminism’s relationship to motherhood and asserts a philosophy of feminist parenting that values women’s individual, unique choices over any monolithic expert advice. Feminist Review recently interviewed Richards, who lives in New York City with her partner and two sons, about her latest work.

Opting In addresses the divide between “feminism” and “motherhood” that has been present in the movement for quite some time. When did that divide become clear to you as a feminist activist—and what propelled you to do something about it?

Since the mid-’90s, I have had an online advice column, Ask Amy, located at Feminist.com. I frequently received questions to the tune of “can stay-at-home mothers be feminists?” or “how can I be a mother without giving up my own identity?”

Simultaneous to receiving those questions, I was traveling the country more and more, lecturing on college campuses, and I was struck by how many younger people had their lives all planned out: “babies and then career” or “career for a few years and then baby.” I was especially shocked that they were factoring babies into their future planning. Of course, when I was in college, I thought about it, but I just assumed it would happen. I took from that that most younger people wanted both or wanted it all and really assumed they could have it all, though maybe not at the same time.

While I was having these conversations, I was also becoming more enmeshed in my life as a feminist activist and started to pay attention to why mothers might feel excluded from the feminist movement. Certainly feminism had prioritized mothers and motherhood historically, but had it perhaps done so at the expense of some mothers (i.e., the way to be a good feminist was to work, have a midwife, and never allow pink or blue into your house)? Most mothers can’t and/or don’t want to adhere to all or any of those standards and thus felt confused about how they fit in as a feminist.

What was particularly challenging for this generation is that not only were women still struggling with society’s definition of what it meant to be a good woman (i.e., marry and procreate), but they were also struggling with feminism’s definition of what it meant to be a good woman (i.e., reject societal expectations).

You write that being a feminist parent was easier to define for your mother’s generation, in the Free to Be You and Me era of parenting. How is defining oneself as a feminist parent today a more complicated endeavor?

In past generations, being a feminist was more specifically about going against what was a prescribed role—for men and women alike. If you were a man, that meant rejecting some of your masculinity, and for women, that meant embracing your masculine side. There was the feminist hope that nurture had a lot more to do with “us” than we initially thought. Now, a generation or two later, we are seeing more scientific research that points to gender differences, thus requiring feminism to switch gears. It’s not about being the same or even having access to the same things, but about equally valuing our differences and our strengths.

Also, feminism initially was more explicitly about ensuring that girls had access to “boy things” (gym class, competitive sports, advanced math classed, competitive jobs). Today, even with that, inequalities persist because we have only made masculinity more valuable by giving boys and girls access to it, but that leaves femininity still marginalized. I also think it’s so much harder today because it’s so much easier to point out what’s wrong than it is to propose how to make it right—and that’s where we seem to be stuck.

As you detail in Opting In, an abundance of so-called “mommy wars” books are published in the mainstream today, and most seem to capitalize on women’s anxieties about motherhood and work. Why does this subject get so much media play, and, at the same time, still provoke people on such a deep level?

People love to see women fight—and that’s certainly part of the reason. We also want to see people’s facade of perfection cracked open. That’s the same motivation behind ogling over celebrity magazines or watching reality TV; we want people to be exposed, and that’s what we are hoping to find.

Sadly, I think we also devour these books—and the hype and controversy surrounding them—because women and mothers are terribly insecure, and socially we have been shown that to make ourselves feel better, we have to make other people feel worse. I don’t agree with that approach, and, more importantly, I want to understand it. And the way I have come to understand it is that many women prefer to shirk their own perspectives in favor of what the books say or what the experts say. They depend on them to say what they are too insecure to acknowledge on their own.

Your overall message in Opting In is that change begins with us—and that what is most important for mothers is to figure things out for themselves. Why—after so many years of the feminist movement—do these points even need to be made?

Most women have an easier time believing in change for others more than they believe in it for themselves—hence the popularity of “helping” women in other countries. If we look outside of ourselves, we are exempt from evaluating ourselves. Also, I think feminists initially thought that we would change the world, and now we realize that we also have to change ourselves—an evolution of an age-old problem.

Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice really helped me understand this. She was documenting the status of women post Roe v. Wade—a decision that ostensibly gave women autonomy over their own bodies, a very radical act. But years after that decision, why did it feel like we were regressing? Yes, in part it had to do with a radical-right surge in this country, but it had to do more with women not really believing they were entitled to the change they were advocating for.

We suffer too much from a nice girl syndrome—wanting to please others and not wanting to ask for more, assuming that actualizing that might invalidate someone else.

While your message is that change begins with us, you do not abandon the call for systematic change in society for all families. What would radically improve parents’ lives in the United States?

The Family and Medical Leave Act should be expanded to companies with 25 or more employees; as is, it only covers for companies with 50 or more employees. As California has done, and New York has proposed, we need to extend this to paid leave. At a minimum, employers should have to pay into Social Security, even if their employee is taking unpaid leave.

The government should subsidize childcare—not in the form of marginalized publicly funded centers, but in the form of sponsorship to attend private groups. As is, publicly funded day care is so bad that it is known to do harm to children, while the best centers are those with a balance of paid and subsidized spots.

Pressure employers—though tax incentives—to provide options for more work/life, not exclusively work/family, balances. But more than “providing” any of these options, the government must mandate the changes it does enact. What makes Europe so ideal when it comes to the status of child-rearing is less that options are available and more that most people take advantage of them.

The dilemma between working and staying home to raise kids is really a privileged one, as you point out that many women, even if they want to, simply cannot afford to stay home full-time to raise their kids. Your book—and, through example, your own life—illustrates a middle way. What does that way entail?

If both parents are balancing work and family, it’s likely that you will have to sacrifice some financial security, but that can be balanced with the emotional security you gain from being with your family more. For me, personally, I also have to sacrifice some perceived middle class “needs”—how many music lessons, how many summer camps. For women, in particular, we need to relinquish control, and for men, they need to take control.

But what will make a middle way possible is belief that both work and family are essential to men’s and women’s lives. As much as we fought for women to have access to the workplace, we have to ensure that men have more access to home. That is, assume it’s a must for men, as we have always assumed it’s a must for women.

You quote many mothers in your book, but the voices of poor mothers—and mothers who live at the very margins of our society—seem to be missing in the text. How did you make decisions about whose voices to include in Opting In?

Though few poor mothers’ voices are in Opting In, their experiences are. Plus, part of my intention was to stop assuming that the only way to close the economic divide was to give poorer people more resources and access. Yes, we need to do that, but that only ratchets up, and we simultaneously need to put pressure on richer folks to do with less. It’s not enough to give poor people access to excellent public schools without draining the importance of private schools. Another example is giving fertility help to middle class families without examining who can’t afford it. Often that leads right back to a conversation about health care and who does and doesn’t have access to it.

In essence, I want richer people to own the fact that their privileged choices are at the expense of others. In my neighborhood, which is statistically one of the poorest in Manhattan, I increasingly see more expensive strollers. On the one hand, I think, “Great, good for them for having a fancy $800 stroller,” but my more pragmatic side thinks, “Damn those rich people for making them so popular, something they can readily purchase and others have to go into debt to get.”

Your chapter “Friends Forever” on how motherhood changes friendships and the not-so-subtle level of competition that exists between many mothers is something that many women can relate to. Why is true mutual support for parenting choices something that is hard for some feminists to give to one another?

Women naturally see another woman’s choice as a challenge to her own. And sadly, few women are confident enough in their own choices and, instead, hide behind the supposed experts or have to resort to being extra-righteous about their own choices, rather than be sympathetic to why we can’t all make the same choices.

I also think that women can, and should, raise the bar for their friends, and so some of the pressure is coming from a more thoughtful place; we want women to raise their expectations. The challenging of their choices can be an attempt to get them to demand more.

Your book is part memoir and includes passages about your own choices about pregnancy, parenting issues with your partner, and your feelings as both the daughter of a single mother and the mother of two sons. Will you speak about the importance and role of personal disclosure in your work as a feminist activist and writer?

Speaking personally is more difficult than having political opinions. You are certainly vulnerable. Initially, this was hard for me, because I want to be liked, and I know that some of my personal experiences might make people not like me. But I quickly learned that speaking my truths both made it easier for other people to do the same and, ultimately, made me feel better, because what I used to think was an exception I soon learned was more commonplace.

Also, my goal as an activist is to progress the conversation—about women’s status, around abortion, around what it means to be a parent—and in order to do that, we need to have more honesty. In the short term, speaking truthfully can be painful, but in the long run, I think you realize how it serves everyone to have it exposed.

You’ve been a feminist organizer for fifteen years and have spoken to countless women and men across the country. What do you continue to find remarkable about the feminist landscape in our country?

The treatment of Hillary Clinton has really exposed how much people don’t respect women, and it’s not shocking at all to me that elite women are her biggest haters. They are threatened by her. If a woman can have a successful career, keep a relationship intact despite big bumps, and raise a child, that raises the bar for other women to do the same.

I think that as much as some women want equality, they also like the short-term comfort of inequality—less is expected and, thus, they have to produce less. And this is what I see women struggling with. As oppressive as it was not to have choice, this generation is struggling equally with how difficult it is to choose when you have a range. I hope that women can believe in the change they advocate for others.

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msmagazine.com

Early this year, Debra Zimmerman, the executive director of Woman Make Movies (WMM), gave a presentation on women filmmakers at a public library near New York City. In the audience was the state president of the right-wing lobbying group American Family Association (AFA), who raised his hand with a question: “Since Women Make Movies is an organization that distributes pornography and offensive material, what are you doing in our library showing films to us?”

It was the latest confrontation in what should have been a celebratory twenty-fifth-anniversary year for the highly respected distributor, promoter, funder, and producer of women’s films. But this was also the year the Republican and Christian right targeted WMM in its ongoing battle to shut down the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

The Republican right had vowed to get rid of the NEA this year. In February, President Clinton requested $136 million for the Endowment. But in July, the House passed a bill with no NEA funding at all. (At press time, a final budget had not been agreed upon, but the House vote is not expected to prevail.)

Heading the attack against the NEA was Representative Pete Hoekstra (R.-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. After learning about a $31,500 grant to Women Make Movies that had been used to help fund The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye, Hoekstra wrote to NEA Chair Jane Alexander expressing his outrage: “Ms. Dunye spelled out her intentions to promote the African-American lesbian lifestyle in her grant application,” he fumed.

Next, Hoekstra zeroed in on “offensive” materials produced by grantees, including the lesbian-themed films in WMM’s catalog. Soon after, the American Family Association created a videotape using excerpts of lesbian sex scenes from WMM’s films and distributed the tape to every member of Congress.

Suddenly, the WMM was defending itself from charges that it funded pornography. The NEA was on the defensive, too. For the first time ever, it asked WMM to conduct an audit of how grant money had been spent, and then rejected the organization’s 1998 funding application—after 15 straight years of approving its requests.

For Zimmerman, the right’s targeting of WMM mirrors its contempt for women in the larger society. “The Republicans say, ‘The states should make more decisions than the federal government. Family should make decisions.’ Yet the issues they are the most unified around all have to do with preventing women from doing what women want to do: have abortions, have day care, have images of themselves that they control. The reality is that there are lesbian taxpayers out there and there is no reason in the world why the NEA should not be funding lesbian art. Period.”

msmagazine.com

Folk-punk singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco is the lone ranger of the music business. At age 26 she has been running her own label, Righteous Babe Records, for six years, producing eight albums in that time. Her last solo release, Dilate, debuted at number 87 on the Billboard 200, making Righteous Babe one of the few artist-owned, independently distributed labels to ever have an album on that list.

But while the media love to play up DiFranco’s independent status, that’s only a small part of what makes her unique. What’s really amazing about her is that she’s a take-no-shit feminist with incredible musical ability (ranging from plaintive folk to all-out rock, with African rhythms, hip-hop, and spoken word thrown in), whose lyrics inspire almost slavish devotion from her mostly female fans. Without taking a corporate dime, she has built a following matched by few other singers in recent years. One industry leader likens her to Bob Dylan, seeing in DiFranco that same nearly mystical talent for amplifying through music the angst and energy of a generation.

Until Dilate, most of DiFranco’s lyrics had been about empowerment. Her songs describe sexually exploited women who take power back from men (“Letter to a John”), trash racist stereotypes (“Names and Dates and Times”), assert a woman’s right to abortion (“Lost Woman Song”), and shove corporate America’s bottom-line morality back in its face (“Blood in the Boardroom”). Her work often has the power of autobiography. She has sung about her bisexuality, for example, demanding legitimacy in both gay and heterosexual circles.

But now there’s Dilate, an 11-song cycle about her current love affair with a man. In it, DiFranco gives notice that she is ready to strike out for new territory, both musically and thematically. “Who am I?” she asks on one of the tracks. “Somebody just tell me that much.” It’s a question many of her fans don’t want to hear. They want her to be what they have always perceived her to be, a woman-identified bisexual musician living on the raw edge of honesty, not a woman grappling with her life, a woman in transition. Dilate has sold incredibly well, but the response to the direction she has taken with it has made her realize that fame brings with it a diminution of the fiercely independent life she aspires to.

It was at this point in her career that DiFranco sat down with Ms. for an interview.

When DiFranco opens the door to her room at Marymount College, in Tarrytown, New York, where performers for Clearwater’s Great Hudson River Revival ’96 are staying, she appears, at five feet three, smaller than she does onstage. She sits on the bed to lace up her boots and wrap a thick metal chain around her right ankle. It is seven hours until performance time at Clearwater, an annual arts and music festival to benefit environmental conservation causes, in nearby Valhalla, and DiFranco seems physically and mentally exhausted.

She suggests talking on the building’s roof, where a view of far-off mountains and endless sky seems calming. The inspiration behind Dilate—the “crazy goat-creature” whom DiFranco has fallen in love with—appears on the roof with coffee and juice for us. DiFranco is very protective of his identity, although she openly discusses her feelings for him (“madly in love”) and his influence on her work (read the lyrics of Dilate). They have been involved for over a year. “I’ve been in love before, but never like this,” she told one interviewer.

When her lover appears, DiFranco is elated. “Hey!” she calls, “you brought us tasty treats!” After delivering the drinks, he heads to the lawn below, where he spends the rest of the interview waiting for DiFranco. She, meanwhile, straddles the ledge of the rooftop, and begins to answer questions.

Born September 23, 1970, in Buffalo, New York, DiFranco is the younger of two children of Elizabeth and Dante DiFranco. Her mother grew up in Montreal and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture, one of just a few women in her class. Back then, Elizabeth rode a motorcycle, just as her daughter does now. DiFranco’s father is a research engineer who also graduated from M.I.T.

Life at home with her parents and older brother was “a mess,” according to DiFranco, until she was about 11, when her parents separated. “The house, when everyone lived together, was like one scary scene after another,” she once said, “so it was a good thing we all kind of went our separate ways.”

Was independence forced on her by the family situation? “It’s partly just who I am,” she answers, adding that she was a “very precocious” young girl. “I would leave the house in the morning, and I was supposed to come home when the streetlights came on, but even that was a bit stifling.”

By then, at 11, DiFranco was playing Beatles songs at local clubs. She had learned to play guitar at age nine, and had befriended an older singer-songwriter who became her mentor. Michael Meldrum was teaching guitar at a Buffalo music shop when he first saw DiFranco, who was waiting for a lesson: “I saw a little girl with pigtails down to her knees, and braces. Big smile, open eyes, a lot of wonder,” recalls Meldrum. “I asked her to play me a song.”

She played “Wond’ring Aloud,” by Jethro Tull, and a W.C. Handy tune, “St. Louis Blues.”

“She had a great voice,” says Meldrum, “a big voice coming out of this very little person… And she really was working hard at playing the difficult parts of these songs. She wasn’t a hack. She was always interested in how the guitar worked.”

In a situation that may have raised a few eyebrows, the 10-year-old girl and the 30-year-old man became friends. Meldrum took DiFranco to three-day folk festivals out in the woods, and to concerts at universities and bars. Since Meldrum was also producing local concerts featuring such New York City-based musicians as Suzanne Vega, Michelle Shocked, and Rod MacDonald, some of these musicians found their way to the DiFranco house when they were in town. Suzanne Vega would spend the night, sharing a bedroom with the preteen DiFranco. “Ani had this hyperanimation which she still has now,” says Vega. “I used to see her at a club where we would all play, even after I stopped staying at her house. I remember being concerned for her because she was running with a fast crowd.”

“I had to get out of the house,” says DiFranco, “so I went and hung out in these circles, and I started playing guitar. I learned you could write songs for a living, which is not something they teach you in school.”

Within a few years, DiFranco was ready to turn to something else—ballet—and gave up guitar altogether. Then, when she was around 14, she found herself at loose ends while on a vacation and picked up her guitar. Unable to remember any songs, she wrote her own. Back home, she played them for Meldrum and asked, “What do you think?” He quickly organized concerts for her in Buffalo.

“She was a very precocious 14-year-old writing songs about alienation, loss, and change,” Meldrum says. “And she could sing the phone book; she’d sing the most simple, declarative statement and your heart would just wrench. I learned a lot from her; it was not one-sided,” he continues. “I needed her. I don’t know if she needed me or not. I was certainly her pal and her mentor, and there wasn’t too much we couldn’t talk about.”

By the time DiFranco was 15, her parents had divorced, and her mother moved to Connecticut. Ani chose to stay behind in Buffalo, living at the homes of various friends. At the time, she was performing every Saturday night at a local bar. She graduated from high school a year later, and spent the next few years writing and performing music. By 1989, when she was 19, she had written more than 100 songs.

That was also the year she met the next major (older, male) figure in her career, a 47-year-old local rock critic named Dale Anderson, who had been watching DiFranco for years and thought she had become a truly exceptional musician. When he learned that she was planning to move to New York City, he approached her. “I was getting every record that came out at that point and she sounded better than 95 percent of what I got,” remembers Anderson. “I was afraid someone was going to come and rip her to shreds.” So he introduced her to a lawyer familiar with the music industry, who briefed her on what she would face if she tried to build a career, things like losing ownership of her songs or being trapped in unfavorable contracts.

Armed with that knowledge, DiFranco went off to New York City, where she attended college classes, played gigs, and worked various part-time jobs. People started requesting tapes at her performances, but she had nothing to offer, so she and Anderson, with whom she had remained friends, decided to record a demo that would be, he recalls, “good enough to sell.” With $1,500 and the use of a studio owned by friends, they produced Ani DiFranco, making 500 tapes. The album was simply DiFranco and her acoustic guitar. It had a fertile, melancholy sound and a strong lyricism, held together by her voice, which could travel from an exquisitely held high note to a rough growl, from sharply rapped-out rhythms to soft, tremulous notes. It also was filled with songs about relationships, women’s battle for respect, and a track about an abortion she had a few years earlier. Anderson sent tapes off to the press, and DiFranco quickly sold the rest at club dates.

In 1990, DiFranco founded Righteous Babe Records to market the tape. The company was based back in Buffalo, but she ran a lot of the operation from her New York living room, and stored tapes in her car—once she could afford one. It was part of the do-it-yourself ethos common among independent musicians. “It was like a joke in the beginning,” DiFranco later said, “very theoretical, like, ‘I have my own record company,’ which means that I just put out a tape independently.”

Initially, her music circulated mainly among folkies and on college campuses. Dale Anderson, who was by now her personal manager, remembers a call from a woman who ran a radio show in California. She had heard of DiFranco from a friend in New York, who got the word from an acquaintance in Massachusetts. Another young woman formed her own student organization at her college so she could fund an Ani DiFranco show. “Whole campfuls of people in Maine had seventeenth-generation Ani DiFranco tapes they were playing over and over again,” Anderson recalls. But, he says, “it was not like she was an entertainer. She was a person who changed your life. And people really did feel empowered listening to her music.”

In 1991, DiFranco toured the U.S. in her Volkswagen, using “crazy little promoters” to book gigs. One night in Texas defined what those early years were like. As she later described it, she was playing for “six or seven cowboys and one chick…I stood in the corner and played for an hour. When I finished, the woman started screaming and yelling and hooting. I remember the triumphant feeling I had when I left the bar, clutching my 20 bucks, and knowing I’d won over a fan. I thought, ‘Wow, somebody really heard something there. There is some value to what I’m doing.’ It seemed like a small victory.”

DiFranco pumped out six albums in four years. Her CD and cassette holders were filled with her scrawlings and photographs of herself, a young, pierced, and tattooed woman with a shaved head. Righteous Babe Records now had its own emblem: a drawing of a woman with strong muscled arms and raised fists.

By 1993, she was regularly being approached by major labels—and regularly rejecting their offers. “She’s one of the most brilliant and compelling artists out now…a genius,” says Danny Goldberg, president and CEO of Mercury Records, and the man credited with helping to transform Nirvana from a local Seattle band into an icon of new music. Goldberg made several calls to Righteous Babe, “but they never returned any of them.”

Perhaps it was because Righteous Babe was doing so well on its own. DiFranco had hired staff and was selling merchandise, such as T-shirts and posters, along with cassettes and CDs. What began as a “joke” was now a viable business as well as a political statement: this artist would not be owned.

“The music industry, come on,” DiFranco had told National Public Radio in 1990, “it’s just another big business. They could be selling microchips or oil. I just don’t want to participate in, let alone perpetuate, a system with the motive of making money and amassing power—priorities which I think are fundamentally contradictory to art, to people.”

In 1994, Anderson left Righteous Babe, and Scot Fisher—a longtime friend of DiFranco’s and a lawyer who had worked with death row prisoners in Texas—became president of the company. At that point, DiFranco was touring over 200 days a year—a pace she continues to keep. As her fame grew, requests for interviews poured in. After all, in what the media fixated upon as the never-ending “year” of the angry women of rock, DiFranco made for fascinating copy: she is CEO of her own label, bisexual (or “lesbian,” depending on the relative ignorance of the interviewer), feminist (or “angry” or “man-hating,” also depending on the interviewer).
She is also loud, funny, and, according to Gannett News Service, “not a pretty girl, but only by mainstream standards.”

Her work now wins raves from the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time, and Spin; on CNN, she likened her career to a Chia Pet—“just exploding.” By industry standards, she is doing very well. Righteous Babe has sold more than 500,000 copies of her albums, and at press time, Dilate has sold almost 80,000 copies. At one point this year, she was ranked number 31 in the list of the top 50 grossing artists at the box office, according to Pollstar, the trade journal for the concert industry.

Despite her rapid rise in popularity, DiFranco has remained open and candid with her audiences. As media attention escalated, she let the fans in on the fun, joking from the stage about press interviews. She had a field day after the 1995 release of Not a Pretty Girl, aping the reporters who came around, trying to figure out what the album meant. “‘So, are you saying that your lack of beauty is a liberating force?’” she mimicked one interviewer. “I’m like, ‘Man, why don’t you get a real job?’”

The image of DiFranco on stage—having a ball, seemingly just hanging out with her friends— indicates to her audiences that she is one of them: a woman who describes their own roller coaster of emotions and experiences—love, sexism, women’s solidarity, depression, and joy. Her audiences are filled with pierced women in “Girls Kick Ass” T-shirts. They know all the songs, laugh at the quips, and cheer at the lyrics—a whole crowd shouting along with the line from “In or Out”: “It’s Mr. DiFranco to you.”

The liner notes to Not a Pretty Girl made clear how important it had become for the fans to personally reach DiFranco—and how impossible it was for her to respond in the same way. In the notes, she listed things that had been sent to her: “letters, albums, CDs, tapes, poems, crayon-scrawled stories, laser-printed essays, incriminating photos, escaped journal entries, books, art, letters, dinner invitations, doodles, action figures, suspicious mementos, letters, ’zines, jewelry, T-shirts, insomniac ramblings, etc…”

“Thank you,” she wrote. “I know it sucks that I can’t respond personally, but believe me, I just can’t.”

Currently there are 14 fan-generated websites devoted to DiFranco on the World Wide Web (she reads none of them). While she tries to educate the mainstream press about “gender definitions,” her fans on the Internet debate using the words “Ani” and “worship” in the same sentence. One referred to her as the “Ani Lama.”

In songs like “I’m No Heroine,” DiFranco has tried to stop this cult of personality from obliterating her music and its message. “You think I just saddle up my anger/and ride and ride and ride/You think I stand so firm/You think I sit so high on my trusty steed/Let me tell you/I’m usually face down on the ground/when there’s a stampede.” But her most hard-core fans aren’t listening. They feel they have the right to talk back—from the audience, on the Internet, in letters—to tell her how to handle fame. They debate the trajectory of her career: If DiFranco refuses all corporate support, should she refuse all corporate media attention also? If she talks to Rolling Stone, is she a sell-out? How much bigger does she need to be—and why?

Once, for an MTV feature on her, DiFranco allowed the network’s film crew onstage during a performance. Her fans were furious. “MTV sucks,” yelled one. “What are they doing here?” To some of them, DiFranco appeared to have gone from small, intimate shows at college women’s centers and coffeehouses to being courted by—and perhaps courting—one of the most capitalistic music conglomerates. Others argued that she was doing what she had always done—getting her message across.

“I have never come into contact with such protective—to the point of possessive—fans as DiFranco’s,” MTV journalist Tabitha Soren wrote afterward. “I realize[d] what an awkward position I put her in.”

And that awkward position is where DiFranco is now. She stands in that peculiar
space— known only to the famous—where the private self is eclipsed by the public self,
while an adoring crowd wants more. This is the theme that dominated her interview
with Ms. She explored her success and the resulting struggle in typical fashion—head-on—returning repeatedly to one subject, her fans. “Much more now, I’ve been thinking about women,” she said. “That I represent their own liberation to them, and yet they cannot bring themselves to let me be me.”

What was your family life like?
It was a mess. My parents were completely wrapped up with my brother. They were very, very busy, and they didn’t like each other too much anyway, and then, finally, when I was about 11, they split up. My family was very chaotic.

Do you take after one of your parents?
My mother. I am my mother. I guess I could do a lot worse. She always fed me this “you can do whatever you want” kind of thing, and I bought it. It’s crazy shit to tell a kid, but she was always incredibly supportive, one of those parents that thought whatever I did was fabulous. Right from the beginning she was the one person who always said, “I trust your judgment.”

Why do you think she trusted you?
I think she always treated me with respect, even though she was a parent. Actually, when I was younger, she was the heavy. My father was laissez-faire about parenting—“Whatever you want, eat Jell-O and doughnuts, whatever, like, I’m busy.” My mother was very strict when I was growing up, and then at some point, she was like, “Well, you’re a person, and I respect you.”

Is she a feminist?
Oh, yeah. She was always a very, very, very strong female role model. Crazy woman.
Very headstrong.

Growing up, would you play your songs for her?
From really early on my music was something that my family didn’t have anything to do with. I had to get out of the house, so I hung out and I started playing guitar. I was hanging out in bars—I was 10, 11—with this crew of degenerate, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking, alcoholic, singer-songwriter-barfly types. There was a whole culture of acoustic songwriters who would sit around and talk about literature and have debates about Thomas Mann’s philosophy. They’d smoke, and then they’d go and write poetry. I would play John Lennon songs—I didn’t start writing my own songs until I was 14 or 15. I was hanging around, being the one nonembittered, noncynical listener-person. And they would all get drunk.

I was this precocious little upstart, but I was part of the community right from the beginning, and I had my input. Actually [folk singer] John Gorka and I were talking last night about the first time we met. I was 16 or 17, and I was hanging out in New York. We were over at the Speakeasy in the West Village, and it was open-mike night—everyone trying out new songs. Eventually, it got really late and they just locked us in. It was John and a few other folksingers of note—and me. They were due for some young blood. John was the one who didn’t hit on me. He’s the sweetest man, and he was the one nice guy. The rest of them were kind of threatened and competitive and skeezy.

Are you having problems, now that you’ve become well known?
Many, many, many. I was this little shaved-headed girl back before shaved-headed was in. I was this little punk girl with an acoustic guitar. As soon as I started making recordings—my first album had a very heavy feminist content—young women would make copies of copies and send it to their sisters’ friends, their girlfriends at other schools. And people would start writing in, saying, “Can you come play here?” So I would get on the Greyhound. For a couple of hundred bucks, I started touring the Northeast. I would go to college women’s centers and they would get the money together to pay me.

Then the audience over the years broadened and I moved out of that circuit into this general folk music circuit and festivals. Then I moved from there into the rock ’n’ roll world, but now all these women who have been around since the beginning— young women who invested a lot emotionally in my work—feel that they have a claim on me. And everything that I do now is suspect. For as many people who say, “Wow, that’s great,” there are that many critics.

What do you think of their criticisms?
Well, my idea of feminism is self-determination, and it’s very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do. But there are all these righteous babes out there who, if I step onstage in a dress, are infuriated.

There’s this chick recently who has been showing up at shows because she wanted me desperately to know how wrong everything I was doing was! She was yelling things like “sell-out!” and writing angry, angry letters to me. I try to question everything I do. Not to play martyr, but I have just tried so hard to do anything but sell out. And she’s infuriated because now I’m all femme and chicky.

I’m a sell-out because my new album doesn’t have overtly political songs. This new album—I’m just in love. I always write about what I’m living and thinking about. I mean, two bars into the album you know that I’m messed up over something, maybe it’s a farm animal, but chances are it’s a vibehead. It’s not some kind of calculated move. Everything I do now is suspect.

I learned a long time ago, being a performer, that I cease to be a person in my public life, which oftentimes overwhelms the private one. There are fewer and fewer places I can go and be doing whatever the hell I want to do on the street because there’s somebody there and then suddenly it’s on the Internet, and then it’s like, if I pick my nose on a bus—that’s it, the word ’s out. And so I realize that I’m not a human being to them. It’s amazing, because they scream, “I love you! I love you!” but they have no respect for me. It’s like that Beatles thing. They scream, “I love you,” as they’re ripping at you.

Did you ever think it would get to this point?
No. I realize that I’m a symbol for a lot of people, for whatever it is they project onto me, what they need me to be. I’ve always been very open with my sexuality. I’ve had love affairs and I’ve known wonderful, wonderful people who are men, women, whatever. The gender thing isn’t really primary for me. But the fact that I’m in love with a man now means incredible violation and betrayal for so many people, and it’s really scary.

Have you learned anything from the fans’ response?
I wish I could say I’ve come through with some sort of Zen acceptance—you know, “Project onto me, and I can take it”—but lately I’ve been wanting to quit because this just seems like a ludicrous situation. I never wanted them to worship me and I don’t think I deserve for them to hate me, but I don’t think any of this makes much sense. I just always wanted to be a human being and become myself, and maybe be an encouragement or an inspiration for other people to become themselves. People have an individual experience with my work, and so they then demand that they have an individual experience with me. They have no idea that that’s not possible.

A lot of people come to the shows and listen to the albums and get something out of them. And that’s cool. They’re fine. It’s the crazy people, the angry people that I come in contact with, the really fervent ones who are up front, and the really crazy ones who are at the backstage bus or at the door of the hotel. I want to think they’re only a small percentage of the fans, but of course to me it seems like they’re all fucking crazy and they’re making me miserable.

I’m standing there singing and there are young girls screaming, five feet from me—screaming in my face the whole time. I turn on late-night TV in hotel rooms all over America, and I see TV evangelists and people testifying—their eyes are rolling back and they’re falling over, they’re flailing. Then I step onstage and I see the same thing, because people are people—people have those same tendencies. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little baby dyke in an urban setting, or someone else in a rural setting. People have those same tendencies.

How serious is your thought, “I want to quit”? And what does that
mean—stop recording?
[Laughs quietly] It means, I guess…touring has become very different because people are so evil to me and it affects me so greatly. I’m not completely thick-skinned. I’ve had a long day—I exhaust myself onstage fully. I have what I feel is a really good performance, and I’m about to fall over—I just want to get to the bus and drink some juice and there’s this crowd of people. I try to make my way through them and smile and be like, “Thank you for coming. Thanks. Sorry. Take care.” Then I get angry letters. “You fucking rock star, you won’t even sign autographs.” But I never wanted to be a rock star. I don’t think that’s useful.

How much a role do you have now in the business?
I’m a little less aware lately because my personal life has taken precedence. But Scot is very much the other half of Righteous Babe. I’ve known him since I was 18 and he’s always been an activist. Our business meetings are like political discussions.

What are some of the issues?
Well, advertising. Which is interesting in relation to Ms. I’ve always been completely against advertising. I just got in my little VW bus and drove to the bar and played and that was my advertising, marketing, and publicity. But then Scot said it depends where you’ re advertising. “You can advertise in political [journals].” We advertise in The Advocate now, so it’s showing our support, rather than just sending in a donation. Also, it’s information. But is it hype or information? What if you just say, “There is a new album and this is what it is.”

What’s a bad gig for you?
A bad gig for me is the gig that I just desperately don’t want to play. I just want to be alone.

Do you think that shows?
No. That’s my definition of professional. I get up there and I’m making jokes and I’m playing my songs. Oftentimes when things are going really bad technically, I’ll just be in a rage. But I turn that into music and I try not to break anything. Although on this last tour I broke one of my guitars, I hit it so hard.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not touring?
Oh, painting. I enjoy painting very much. And I used to dance. I haven’t done that in quite some time.

You dance onstage.
[Laughs] Yeah, in a kind of stompy, stumbly kind of way. There are all sorts of things I would love to do. I thought, maybe if I don’t give interviews anymore I’d have more time. But Scot’s like, “I respect the fact that you’re losing it, that it’s a really hideous experience a lot of the time, but that’s the media, the sources of information. We could stay in our living rooms and turn on the TV and close the curtains and complain, or you could get out there and try and talk to people.”

You once wrote that what makes a difference is reaching a woman somewhere, out there, who hears this…
Well, it must be why I do this. I always was an activist, and whenever I get bogged down, I look at all those progressive lawyers I know who work in death-penalty resource centers, or my friends who work at rape crisis centers or hospitals and AIDS wards. There are so many people doing work like that who don’t get applause at the end of the day. Those are the people I draw my inspiration from.

When you’re writing songs now, are you aware of an audience?
I am, and I have to deliberately say, “Fuck it.” Because I know what I’m going to be condemned for. Even before Dilate came out, I was touring, making jokes with the audience: “Remember how I used to be that life-affirming righteous babe?” I’d say. “If you expect any of that tonight, you’re at the wrong show, ’cause now I’m a melodramatic, self-absorbed, tortured artist. I’m fascinated by my own feelings. The melodrama has taken over.”

And it’s true, that has been my life in the past year. What can I say? This is just my work right now, and I see humor in it. It’s funny to me, who has never really had an attention span for my own emotions—I would sort of use them for various purposes. Now I am completely consumed by them, you know? It’s a new thing for me.

msmagazine.com

The title story from Sara Maitland’s Angel Maker revisits the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” Yet in this telling, Hansel, “the boy-child,” is nowhere to be found; the gingerbread house has a “dark and magical room where women go to take charge over destiny”; and the old witch woman is sage, friend, and abortion provider to Gretel, who, after centuries, returns to the forest. “I’m pregnant,” says Gretel, who wants an abortion. “I know,” says the witch. “It’s against the law, ” says Gretel. “Not my law,” says the witch. “Your law?”

Under Maitland’s control, this well-paced, piercing narrative becomes a meditation on women’s right to autonomy and reproductive control.

In Angel Maker, Maitland skillfully blends the fantastic and the ordinary, the chilling and the wry, to create 30 short stories that are imaginative, clever, and captivating. Her concerns do not end with abortion—motherhood, marriage, sexuality, ritual, mythology, and the supernatural are all explored in this rich new collection.

Maitland, a feminist who became a Roman Catholic in 1993, is most recently the author of A Big-Enough God: A Feminist’s Search for a Joyful Theology. Her stories are imbued with her awareness of the complexity of women’s spiritual struggles.

In “The Burning Times,” a child, ashamed of her sexual feelings for her mother’s lover, Margaret, turns her mother over to inquisitors, who burn her alive. “But on the bed, my mother’s hand on Margaret’s buttock, reaching across, fingers spread out, that had not been evil,” she realizes. “It had been beautiful.”

In “Flower Garden,” a girl who yearns for beauty places candytuft seeds on a tampon, inserts it into her vagina, and then waits to blossom. Maitland attaches three different endings to the story—as if to say, “Choose your destiny.”

Often, Maitland’s stories read like fables that are infused with a feminist awareness and that deserve to be read out loud.

msmagazine.com

In January/February 1993, Ms. ran a story about the state of the U.S. nursing profession. At that point, there weren’t enough nurses, leaving those who were employed overworked and often underpaid. Now nurses—the backbone of an $884.2 billion health care industry, almost two million strong, 96 percent female, and still sometimes shamefully underpaid—are facing a new crisis. Confronted with ever-tighter restrictions from health maintenance organizations, hospitals are trying to increase profits by eliminating nurses, specifically highly skilled registered nurses (R.N.s). They are being replaced with less-skilled workers, including unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP), who receive as little as four to six weeks training.

No exact figures on nursing layoffs are available, but according to a recent survey of 1,835 R.N.s conducted for the American Nurses Association, 68.4 percent of respondents reported layoffs or attrition cutbacks within the last year. The effects of these cutbacks are already being felt. State nursing associations have begun to document deaths and injuries due to hospital negligence. The California Nurses Association, meanwhile, has joined a class action suit against Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley, California, charging that it fraudulently misled patients about efforts to slash services and that it attempted to censor nurses who tried to publicize the changes in patient care.

In this forbidding climate, R.N.s are discovering that they have to become activists. Brenda Wolpert works in the intensive care unit at Mercy Community Hospital in Port Jervis, New York. In January 1995, she participated in a 35-day hunger strike for higher wages and assurances from the hospital that nurses wouldn’t be laid off or replaced with nurse’s aids. Said Wolpert: “When the hospital withdrew recognition of our union, we felt we needed to do something pretty dramatic to show our resolve.” Indeed, by March 1995, the nurses got a new contract that guaranteed higher wages and job security.

The nursing crisis inspired R.N. Joyce Riley from Missouri City, Texas, to start “Truth in Healthcare,” a talk show on KFCC radio in Houston, dedicated to “what’s really going on within the health care industry.” The show features a hotline for nurses wishing to make complaints (anonymity guaranteed) about safety issues or health concerns.

The new nursing activism reached its peak with the first annual Nurses March on Washington last spring, when 35,000 nurses from around the nation converged on the capital. R.N. Laura Gasparis Vonfrolio, the march’s organizer, encouraged her colleagues’ activism, insisting, “We have been quiet for too long.” Next year’s march will be bigger, promise the organizers—but things being what they are with nursing salaries, it will have to be funded out of Vonfrolio’s savings, just as this year’s was.