'First of all, we are the women': Confronting Fascist Fathering with Dr. Jane Malcolm, Université de Montréal

In 1937, Laura Riding wrote, printed and mass-distributed an open letter arguing that women or “inside people” and their intellectual labor offered the only viable solution or counterpoint to the rise of fascism in Europe and the lived precarity it occasioned.

The gendered thinking structure Riding elaborates in this letter represents a foundational (and ambivalent) feminist dialectic that we see repeated independently in the anti-war discourses of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein in this same era, in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), respectively.

Despite their divergent feminisms and aesthetic priorities, and despite there being no personal relationship or exchange between the three by the late 1930s, much can be learned from reading Riding, Woolf, and Stein together through the phenomenon or coincidence of their shared diagnoses: that the world suffered from the effects of epidemic fathering, hyper-masculinity, and a banal recourse to unthinking violence and externalization.

Riding, Woolf, and Stein each turn to alternative venues (the letter, the popular magazine, and the autobiography) to mount their critiques of the political sphere (and, implicitly, of modernist institutions), offering discrete but complementary versions of a gendered ontology of modern warfare, alongside a defense of private, intellectual life and the material advantages of "tea-table thinking."

About the speaker

Jane Malcolm is an associate professor at the Université de Montréal. She is the co-editor of A Description of Acquaintance: The Letters of Laura Riding and Gertude Stein 1927-1930 (UNM Press) and a scholarly edition of Laura Riding's 1928 treatise, Contemporaries and Snobs (UAlabama Press), as well as essays and articles on the work of Muriel Rukeyser, Alice Notley, Yoko Ono, and Gail Scott, among others.