February 18 2003
On a warmish, gray day at Cal State Fresno, graduate students collapse in little metal seats with desk trays for their class on Form and Theory: Creative Non-Fiction with Lillian Faderman, leading feminist scholar, lesbian writer, author of "To Believe in Women," "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers" and "Surpassing the Love of Men."
Faderman is one of a handful of founding feminists (Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Sheila Rowbotham, to name just a few) who, in the last 30 years, have helped build departments and syllabuses and careers in academia that focus on feminism and gender studies. These are not the Gloria Steinems and the Betty Friedans and the Nancy Fridays.
These are women working from within the tower, in the attic, fiercely changing the way scholars look at history and politics and economics and creating new generations of problem-solving feminists.
Dressed in tweed pants, a brown blazer, a scarf, Faderman communicates a life of quiet modesty and intellectual focus.
She reads the class a story from the book on her lap, "Naked in the Promised Land." It is the story of a girl named Lilly, born in 1940, whose father denied paternity and whose mother worked in sweatshops to support them. Lilly wanted desperately to be a movie star so that she could save her mother from poverty and from depression. Instead, she became a pin-up girl, a stripper.
"Naked in the Promised Land" is Faderman's memoir, out this month from Houghton Mifflin.
Lil, also known as Gigi Frost, sometimes Mink Frost, put herself through college and graduate school at UC Berkeley by working in clubs and doing photo shoots for magazines like King, a precursor to Hustler. The photos in the book reveal a girl-woman -- 38-26-36, short dark curly hair and a sad, if defiant, face. The photos are accompanied with captions like, "I'm in the Mood to Please."
Lilly, Lil, Lillian and Dr. Faderman were not completely reconciled until the writing of this memoir. "Distance is critical," Faderman, 62, tells her class. "What Wordsworth called 'emotion recollected in tranquillity.' It was only in the process of writing this book that I discovered the connections between the girl, the stripper, the lesbian and the professor."
Early reviews have praised the book, calling it a "uniquely American story." Faderman agrees. Her mother lost most of her family in the Holocaust. She was a single working mother, very poor. Movies were an escape. When mother and daughter and Lilly's beloved aunt moved to East L.A., they were that much closer to Hollywood.
Lilly was repeatedly molested from the age of 12 by her mother's suitors, later by fellow students and employers. She found a kind of refuge in the tough lesbian underground in San Francisco. She followed her dream and got her doctorate in English literature and became a professor of English at Fresno 35 years ago.
Lilly had to make her own success story. Her mother fed her the Hollywood dream, but for Lilly that dream was always a means to an end. It wasn't the glamour and attention that fulfilled her, it was the academic life. The parts of Lillian Faderman, more widely scattered than for most, were finally reunited. She found her niche.
Faderman lives with her partner of 35 years, Phyllis, in Fresno. They have a son (Lillian was inseminated), Avrom, who is 28 and lives in Palo Alto with his girlfriend.
In her office after class, Faderman says she is most worried about the effect the photos in her book will have on her students. "I don't want to hide anything. It's not that I'm ashamed of the pictures, it's just that the students might feel awkward about seeing their professor bare-breasted. I had hoped to be off this semester."
This is not to say, Faderman assures, that the college administration has been anything but supportive. And they should be. Faderman has won the Outstanding Professor Award at Cal State Fresno as well as awards for teaching excellence. She and Phyllis founded the women's studies department.
"I tried to write this book 10 years ago but got stuck after 80 pages. It was so angry. No one wanted to read about my terrible childhood. I've often kept a journal during difficult times, and four years ago I found one with a red velvet cover that I had kept while my mother was dying, in 1979. I had always thought that I was withholding at that time, inadequate to meet my mother's needs, but the journal showed me that this was not the case. We did connect and I wasn't inadequate. This freed me to write the memoir from a less angry, defensive place. I realized how much I loved my mother and how much she loved me.
"I was a stripper because there were things I needed to do," Faderman says. "I wasn't going to make $25 an hour working in the library if I could make $500 an hour posing nude or working in the Presidential Follies. I did what was logical."
Lil quit stripping in graduate school but, when her aunt stopped sending a small stipend, she went back to the follies. "I came on stage to thunderous applause and I thought, 'I really like this.' " Faderman kept her past secret for a long time, although she did tell Phyllis when they got together.
"I had the unconditional love of two women, my mother and my aunt," Faderman says, explaining the kind of mother she tried to be for Avrom. "He says he had a privileged childhood. I felt with Phyllis that we were quite grounded, unlike my mother's life, but the unconditional love was there."
Though she and Phyllis have engaged in some political activism, Faderman believes that her best contribution as an activist is through the pen. "I can't stand violence or shouting," she says, and it's no wonder. Her childhood was full of scenes and yelling and women tearing their hair out. Her mother and aunt fought constantly.
"It galls me when women students sit in class and say, 'I am not a feminist,' as if that were a bad thing. I think, you wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for feminism. And Phyllis Schlafly saying come back to the home. Well, then why did she get a law degree? What's she doing on TV? Shouldn't she be back at home?"
Faderman writes that all her life she felt she was playing a role. Is that still true? "Whoever this Dr. Faderman is," she says, "I've forgotten what it feels like to be different. There are many selves. There was something Lil and Lilly and Lillian had in common. You build on whatever that is. I'm still different talking to colleagues than I am to students or to friends, for example. But now there's a core that is strong."
Faderman is working on a partly fictional social history based on her mother's life. What was it like to work in the garment industry in New York in the early decades of the century? How would women get abortions? She has been trying to get more information about her mother's paternity case and the following appeal.
In the meantime, she and Phyllis travel. They have a salon with friends that meets every couple of weeks and she continues to teach three classes a year. "I encourage my students to write about their experiences honestly. So many have been molested, even since the feminist movement. They still tend to think it's their fault."
It was fun being in the limelight, but Faderman believes her books and her teaching have really helped people. "They see another side of feminism and of the lesbian life, a side that is not secretive or tawdry." For a woman who kept so many secrets in her life, this is her gift to the next generation.