On Florence Howe

Abstract

F lorence Rosenfeld Howe (Figure 1) died on Saturday, September 12, 2020. She had created an indelible life of magnitude and consequence. Florence and I were not close friends, but we were close neighbors in the rugged terrain of women’s studies. I write now to serve as a witness to her greatly beneficial accomplishments. I will speak of her as “Howe,” not “Florence.” She is no longer the woman I might talk to at a conference or meeting, but a part of history. In 1982, when Howe was 53 years old, she published an influential article in Change, “Feminist Scholarship: The Extent of the Revolution.” If the article now seems conventional, that is a sign of how much Howe and her contemporaries have achieved. Then, it was a provocative signpost of what women’s studies was and should be. Lucid, like all her prose, it interweaves two histories: of self and women’s studies, and more largely, of self and society. Her own history tells of the possibilities of psychological, educational, and social change. A reviewer of a collection of her essays, Myths of Co-Education (1984), notes how the essays “follow the consciousness of the author, who grows before our eyes as a teacher, editor, and feminist theorist” (Crumpacker, 1985, p. 130). Rhetorically, this mobile personal narrative offers her reader an appealing vantage point through which to imagine a mobile historical narrative. In the Change essay, Howe confessed that she once had a blank consciousness about women and the curriculum. As a compliant graduate student and young teacher, she used the “homophobic, male-centered curriculum” she had been taught. However, she now wrote and taught in a different “social milieu.” Women like her students are now far more aware that they will most likely work outside the home after graduation. Yet that hidebound liberal arts curriculum has stubbornly resisted change. Still male-centered, it will inevitably blur into misogyny in its view of Catharine R. Stimpson is Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science and University Professor at New York University (NYU). She is also an affiliated faculty member at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; the NYU Law School; and NYU Abu Dhabi. Her academic interests include feminist criticism; the study of women and gender; academic freedom; and education, the liberal arts, and the humanities. Her public service includes Scholars at Risk (now Board Vice Chair), New York Live Arts (board member), Creative Capital (cochair, National Advisory Council), and Bennington College (board member).