The Invisible “Emancipated Woman”: A Closer Look at JML 42.2

Julia Chan’s article, "The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control," from the Journal of Modern Literature's newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Julia draws on the work of Ewa Płonowska Ziarek and Naomi Mitchison to suggest that fully registering embodied female subjects requires not only a different form, but a different understanding of form itself.

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My article, “The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control,” began with an imaginary walk along the streets of revolutionary Russia.

I had been researching utopianism in British modernist writing in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. There I was, among the dusty stacks in the library, in my hands a pocket map printed in 1929 by Intourist, the official travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was a flimsy little thing, the perfect travel size. Opening it up like a birthday card, one would find Leningrad on one side and Moscow on the other. Surrounding each map were sketches of important buildings and monuments: Lenin’s Mausoleum, the Smolny Institute, the Fontanka, the Admiralty, and on the bottom left-hand corner, “the Museum of the Emancipation of Women.”

What would it have been like for a woman to visit such a place, to encounter women’s emancipation in a museum as if it belonged squarely to the past? What did the “Bolshevik utopia” mean for women specifically? Though studies on the so-called “political pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union abound, there have been almost no independent studies of these women travelers. And while many have written on the significance of women’s movements in the Russian revolutions and on the Soviet policy concerning “the woman question,” how they might speak to feminism in the West is rarely asked. Like the marginal, half-erased museum on the Intourist map, the ideal of female empowerment and emancipation is simultaneously there and not quite there, a “must-see” that is nonetheless barely visible.

I wanted to draw out this invisibility of women’s issues, of women’s writing, and of women’s attempts at learning from each other’s historical experiences. I began to study the works by women who visited and wrote about the USSR, and discovered a long, eclectic list that included Sylvia Pankhurst, Louise Bryant, Anna Louise Strong, Isadora Duncan, Margaret Sanger, Clare Sheridan, even P.L. Travers (famous for her Mary Poppins books). With wit — and, in some cases, with moral outrage — they wrote about the Soviet women, who would obtain a divorce by themselves and as an afterthought notify their ex-husbands through a postcard, who were mothers but also engineers, whose functional dresses (with pockets!) freed them from “the tyranny of the handbag.”

Yet, in spite of these delightful stories, I was struck by the palpable silence in the travelogues on one of the most controversial topics: that for the first time in history, reproductive autonomy became (at least theoretically) available to women in the form of state-sponsored abortion. This, after all, was what drew so many to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the regular Intourist itinerary included visits not only to the Museum of Women’s Emancipation, but also to the abortarium — straight to the operating theatre itself.

This striking silence of Western women travel writers about abortions that took place daily in the USSR reminded me of Susan Sontag’s refrain in Regarding the Pain of Others — “Can’t understand, can’t imagine” (126). After all, how should one represent an abortion that was not a narrative crisis in fiction, but one of the unremarkable (and often repetitive) experiences of a woman’s life? And how does a writer/visitor convey her fascination with abortion and the body in pain without turning it into a specimen of the grotesque?

In my article I suggest that fully registering this embodied female subject requires not only a different form, but a different understanding of form itself. I draw on Ewa Płonowska Ziarek’s theory of a new feminist aesthetics in order to argue for the reinscription of the injured female body as witness to gender violence as the proper subject of modernism. For this I turn to Naomi Mitchison, one of the few women writers who chose to confront the implications of feminist reproductive politics directly. Her little-known novel We Have Been Warned invents a new kind of a female political subject: perceptive enough to see through the myth of the so-called “sexual revolution,” yet unafraid to challenge the sexual, social, and political relationships that define traditional womanhood. Inspired by her visit to the abortarium, Mitchison offers in her experimental novel deep and insightful exploration of how sexual and reproductive freedom is inseparable from not only political but also literary revolutions.

Works Cited

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003.

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Julia Chan is a PhD candidate in the English department at Yale University.

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Read "The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control," for free now on JSTOR!

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This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.