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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Nadine Gordimer's Fictional Selves: Can A White Woman Be At Home In Black South Africa?, Nancy Topping Bazin
Nadine Gordimer's Fictional Selves: Can A White Woman Be At Home In Black South Africa?, Nancy Topping Bazin
Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) Growing up in South Africa where only 5.6 million people are white out of a population of 37.9 million, Nadine Gordimer became increasingly conscious of her whiteness1. The colour of her skin instantly signaled 'oppressor' to black South Africans. Her whiteness imposed upon her a social and political identity that she rejected; yet, it was like a face she could not wash off, a mask she could not take off. As she said in a 1978 interview, 'In South Africa one wears one's skin like a uniform. White equals guilt' (Bazin & Seymour 1990:94). She often …
The Gender Revolution, Nancy Topping Bazin
The Gender Revolution, Nancy Topping Bazin
Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) In the fall of 1958, when I arrived at Stanford University to begin a Ph.D., the all-male faculty of the English department were still grumbling in the corridors about the last woman they had hired. They had found her too assertive, so they did not want to repeat that mistake. Later, at a session on getting jobs, the department chair told us that females would be hired "at one level of university lower than what they deserved." In 1960, like the other silent students, I accepted that pattern as the way the world worked. Yet the injustice of …