Truth through Fiction

Personal Reflexive Statement

I have been a fan of Carolyn Heilbrun for decades. Her writing, both nonfiction and fiction (as Amanda Cross), resonated with my own experiences. I gave her book, Writing a Woman's Life, to my teen daughters in 1989 with inscriptions encouraging adventure. I especially enjoyed her mystery novels examining social issues in academic settings with a woman professor protagonist, exposés of university politics, and professorial characters I recognized on my own campus.

Our histories as students, professors and activists are reflected in the Cross novels. I benefitted as a student and assistant professor from mentoring by good people, both men and women. I learned to minimize, to the extent possible, interactions with harassers and bullies. The activists of the women's movements serve as models when I advocate for equality to school boards, city councils, and legislators. The long-term constancy of such leaders supports our continued service on campus, community and professional association boards and committees. I am eager to introduce Heilbrun / Cross to progressive academic sociologists unfamiliar with her work.

Introduction

I fantasize about exposing the ongoing sexism in higher education, a less-exaggerated, feminist version of ProfScam, the book depicting professorial indifference to undergraduate teaching (Sykes 1988). Such an expose, however, needs to be cloaked in layers of pseudonyms to protect the survivors and their supporters. Sex discrimination, sexual harassment, salary inequities, old boy network hires, and double standards continue. They often, however, fall into dismissive, “she said, he said” counteraccusations. Documentation requires extensive collection of private data. Our realities in the academy and elsewhere often cannot meet the exacting legal requirements for public accusations.

The Amanda Cross mystery novels analyze these and other truths through fiction. Amanda Cross is the pseudonym for Carolyn Heilbrun, the late Avalon Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. The protagonist of the 14 Cross novels, Kate Fansler, is a fictional Professor of English at a prestigious university in New York City. Multiple parallels between Heilbrun and Fansler as well as between Heilbrun’s nonfiction books and the Cross novels provide intriguing interplay between real life and fiction. Her biographer points out that Heilbrun “… would unfold her selves like Russian dolls, or Chinese boxes, emerging mysteriously one from inside another. Thus, Carolyn Heilbrun would triple herself to produce Amanda Cross who would, in turn, produce Kate Fansler” (Kress 1997:2).

Heilbrun turned to fiction to say what needs to be said without the restrictions of litigation-proof documentation. Her identity remained a secret through the publication of the first three Cross novels in 1964, 1967, and 1970. Writing popular mysteries might have given her colleagues an excuse to deny her tenure in spite of her impressive scholarship. The nomination of the first novel, In the Last Analysis, for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America caused her concern. “Winning would have blown my cover and I prayed to lose,” said Heilbrun (1988:117).

I wonder if Heilbrun also sought anonymity until she was ready to deal with the prices to be paid for such revelatory writings. Institutionalized stratification privileges a few who resist efforts for equality. Activists like Heilbrun violate what I call the “privilege of silence” that supports continued stratification. This privilege refers to the expectations that discrimination and other mistreatments will go unchallenged. Everyone, including victims, often remain silent because it is less trouble. Survivors “let it go” to move on with their lives. Others look the other way instead of witnessing, naming, and testifying about unjust behaviors. It is easier to laugh, for example, rather than challenge jokes based on racism, sexism, homophobia, or other stereotypes.

Those who advocate for equality and justice report retaliations ranging from name-calling, counteraccusations, and shunning to lost jobs or unrealized promotions to threats or violence. Heilbrun admitted her Cross authorship after becoming the first woman to receive tenure at Columbia in 1972. She reported, however, that “When I spoke up for women’s issues, I was made to feel unwelcome in my own department, kept off crucial committees, ridiculed, ignored” (Matthews 1992).

Heilbrun publicly resigned her position in 1991 to protest colleagues’ denying tenure to three women supported by her in six years including discrimination against a “really dazzlingly qualified young woman” (Holt 2003). She said, “It was all very political. If I tried to tell people what really went on, I’d sound like a madwoman” (Matthews 1992). I can relate. Perhaps we all can.

Feminism is not just about gender because patriarchy is not just about sex discrimination. The core of patriarchy, hierarchy, produces multiple, overlapping stratifications by various categorization schemes: gender, race, ethnicity, class, orientation, nationality, age, ideology, and so on. Differential privilege, advantages available to some due to category membership, follows.

Neither Heilbrun nor Cross ever mention conflict theory. A sociologist, however, may note that this theory about power and privilege permeate her writings. Privilege provides the underlying theme of multiple issues explored in the Cross novels and the Heilbrun nonfiction books.

Good fiction provides timeless exploration of the dilemmas faced by multiple generations. The Cross mysteries are just as relevant in our society today as during their publication between 1964 and 2002. The struggle with various manifestations of differential privilege continues. Four areas of particular note in the Cross novels include privilege in war, women’s attitudes toward women, the attitudes of the privileged toward others, especially men toward women, and stratified privilege in higher education.

Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Privilege in War

The parallels between Vietnam and the recent and current conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries intensify the relevancy of Poetic Justice and The Theban Mysteries, the third and fourth books in the Cross series. Poetic Justice was the last for which Cross remained an anonymous pseudonym. Its setting was a prestigious New York university with student sit-ins and takeovers, administrative turnover, and university politics. The obvious parallels to Columbia University and some professors at the time prompted people to suspect that Cross and Heilbrun were the same (McFadden 2003).

Student demonstrations in Poetic Justice provide a backdrop for university politics. The investigation of a professor’s death revolves around efforts to close a college serving nontraditional students. The debate pits the old guard protecting elitist prestige and those supporting emerging, more egalitarian institutions for serving students. The senior professors, dismissive of students and activists, suggest that political demonstrations may be merely “a new form of panty raid” (Cross 1970:13).

In The Theban Mysteries, Kate Fansler teaches a seminar at Theban, her prestigious high school alma mater. Discussions analyze Antigone, the ancient Greek play about a “tyrant who wants to impose his rules and his ideas of patriotism, and this young woman, this single individual, who insists on following her own conscience about what is right, … ” Kate challenges the tyrant label because he has “a good deal of right on his side, which also makes the play so modern” (Cross 1971:53). Cross’ use of Antigone reflects the debates at the time about Vietnam, patriotism and conscience and again in more recent deliberations about the American military role in various world conflicts.

Two subplots involve intergenerational conflicts and expose the hypocrisy of the wealthy who supported the war without sending their own sons to combat. Kate’s nephew, Jack, leaves home because he and his father disagree about Vietnam. Jack plans to register as a conscientious objector because he does not “believe in this filthy war” (Cross 1971:15). His father supports the war although “he wouldn’t mind using his connections to get [Jack] a cushy slot at the Pentagon” (Cross 1971:15).

In the meantime, a Theban student hides her brother at the school from both the Selective Service and their wealthy grandfather who supports the war and wants his grandson to allow himself to be drafted. Fansler asks the grandfather if he would “have taken … steps to keep him away from the fighting in Vietnam?” He responds that he “certainly” would use his “contacts and influence” (Cross 1971:159). When she challenges this as wrong, he disagrees claiming he has “earned” such connections. Fansler points out that if his grandson did not go to Vietnam, “someone with less influence would have gone in his place.” He responds, “I realize that. That is the way of the world, and it doesn’t do to pretend the world is not a jungle” (Cross 1971:160).

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney all avoided the Vietnam draft through college deferments. At the end of his educational deferment, Bush used family influence to jump a long waiting list to get a coveted position with the Texas National Guard to avoid Vietnam (Lardner and Romano 1999; Public Broadcasting Station 1992; Seeyle 2004). The use of such deferments and/or influence was common at the time. Consequently, the working class and families of color disproportionately sent their sons to that war, another example of “Rich man’s war; poor man’s fight.”

Today’s volunteer army and National Guard consist primarily of citizens from the second socioeconomic quartile, the working class for whom the economy has been particularly difficult (Glater 2005; U.S. Department of Defense 2005 ¹ ). Enlistees report that economic and educational incentives prompt their decisions to volunteer. The financially comfortable can simply ignore military recruitment efforts. The Army started offering recruits “assignment incentive pay” of an extra US$400 a month for units scheduled to deploy to Iraq ( The Free Press 2005). Enlistment bonuses currently range up to US$40,000 (Military.com 2014). Who needs the money?

Divide to Keep Conquered: Women’s Attitudes Toward Women

I feel sorry for young people today, especially the women. They have all of the gender issues, problems, and frustrations we had 30 and 40 years ago. What they most often lack, however, is a sense of feminist theory. Feminism resonated with our lives in the 1960s and 1970s by offering, not only explanations for “the problem that has no name” (Friedan [1963] 1974:15) but also strategies for confronting it and related problems through individual and collective agency.

Feminist theory could help this new generation to better understand their challenges and to formulate better responses for greater self-determination. The younger generations often reject without consideration, however, anything labeled “feminist” because the conservatives have successfully maligned the term. Many have not figured out that feminism challenges the hierarchies that produce current versions of problems without names.

Similar observations were made at a Modern Languages Association conference session honoring Carolyn Heilbrun and published in a special tribute issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Hite (2005:272) observed, “Undergraduates and many graduate students … now seem scarily unaware of …garden-variety sexism.” Paretsky (2005:244) commented about “battle fatigue” in the feminist movement and asserted that “We’ve let ourselves become timid: we don’t want anyone to call us feminists, and that’s what they’ll do if we start speaking up again and pushing back.”

An assignment in my family class asks students to identify what they like and dislike about men and women, what characteristics they value in prospective dating partners, and to report on comments they have heard about men and women. Both men and women generally report liking men better and are more critical of women. Numerous women but few men report liking the opposite sex better than their own.

Cross and Heilbrun repeatedly comment on the phenomenon of male-identified women. Women characters in the novels, like my students, are often unaware of their self-prejudice. In the first novel, In the Last Analysis (1964), a student, Jackie, declares “… they all say you’re one of the few professors who manage to be entertaining and profound; and let’s admit it, most women professors are dreadfully dull old maids” (Cross 1964:70). As Fansler, Cross observes, “It did not apparently occur to Jackie that there was anything infelicitous about this statement” (Cross 1964:70).

A secretary in Poetic Justice (Cross 1970:119) threatens to quit if her department ever hires women teachers describing them as “a dreary bunch … all brains and messy hair.” A woman faculty member in the same novel labels an organization for liberating women as “utter nonsense” and declares that “Women are liberated the moment they stop caring what other women think of them” (1970:106). Cross, as Fansler, observes in The Players Come Again (1990:87) that “there are always women in the male camp” and “there are sometimes a few brave men discovered” in the women’s camp.

Heilbrun expands the issue of division among women in her nonfiction work including Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1964), Reinventing Womanhood (1979), and Writing a Woman’s Life (1988). She recognizes that women “try to protect ourselves as women by betraying other women” (1964:111). This exceptional woman points out that “Exceptional women are the chief imprisoners of nonexceptional women, simultaneously proving that any woman could do it and assuring, in their uniqueness among men, that no other woman will” (1988:81). Heilbrun comments that “married women, powerless in their marriages, joined with the patriarchy in isolating those who dared to live out other plots” (1988:88). She is particularly critical of tokenism:

Tokenism allows males to use one woman, or a few, to protect themselves against the claims for equal representation in their ranks. Established males discover, moreover, that they can count on the token women of achievement to isolate themselves from other women, from the causes of women, and from identification with women (Heilbrun 1979:24).

Death in a Tenured Position, Feminist in a Tenured Position, and “Rage in a Tenured Position” are the respective titles of the sixth Cross novel (1981), the Heilbrun biography (Kress 1997), and a New York Times article about her resignation (Matthews 1992). The novel directly scrutinizes the situation of women in the academy. The fictional story takes place at a real Harvard University and is supplemented with references to real Harvard history and quotes from real Harvard documents including their Report of the Committee on the Status of Women.

The fictional, all-male faculty of the English department are unhappily forced to hire a woman and carefully choose a traditional, antifeminist, and male-identified scholar. These faculty, nevertheless, treat her badly. She is eventually killed with her body dumped in the men’s restroom.

Fansler assumes that most of the English professors “would have settled for a slower death, and not so physical a one. They had only to treat Janet with disdain and distance, to undercut her by indicating to students that support for her was not the fastest way to appreciation in the right quarters, and slowly Janet would have retired from the scene” (1981:88). Cross is speaking from the experiences Heilbrun reveals in her nonfiction work and interviews (Heilbrun 1988; Holt 2003; Kress 1997; Matthews 1992). We hear similar stories today.

Hielbrun attributes the failure of the women’s movement to achieve real and lasting change for the majority to the lack of solidarity among women and the opposition of women who identify with men (1979:67). The solution, of course, involves networks, friendships, identification with women’s issues, and female bonding. Cross (1995) demonstrates how this works in Imperfect Spy, a novel set in a law school populated with particularly chauvinistic male faculty:

The women students had begun exchanging stories of faculty moves on them, each woman considering herself alone in this until they had begun to talk to one another. “Women talking to one another are dangerous,’ Kate said … “That’s why men liked to isolate us in separate houses and make us identify with men rather than with each other. Women comparing notes frighten men. Auden said that somewhere. That’s one of the reasons, though not the main one, women were supposed to be virgins at marriage: the men didn’t want any basis for comparison.” (Cross 1995:112)

A Few Allies But Many Others: The Attitudes of the Privileged

The Cross novels include characters who are thinly disguised replicas of real people in Heilbrun’s life (Adrian 2003; Kress 1997). I suspect others may be composites of real people as well. Adrian (2003:22) claims that Cross created a “veritable rogue’s gallery of pompous, vicious, cunning, greedy, snobbish, power-mad misogynists.” No matter how outlandish or extreme the chauvinism, however, the only exaggeration committed by Cross, if any, is one of concentration. The range of negative attitudes and presumed differential privilege displayed by her characters is similar to that encountered in real life. Real universities, colleges, departments, committees, and social groups, however, may include a larger proportion of moderates and bystanders than her fictionalized counterparts. Fictional characters may demonstrate their bigotry more frequently, more blatantly, and/or more dramatically than people in real life.

Every sexist, racist, homophobic, or bigoted remark made by Cross’ fictional characters, however, reminds me of similar remarks I have heard in real life. Every problem person in the Cross stories reminds me of someone I have known. Reading the Cross novels reminds me of the disclaimer in the novel about the Catholic hierarchy, The Cardinal Sins by priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley. After declaring the characters imaginary and the story fiction, the author concludes, “It is nonetheless true” (Greeley 1981:Author’s note). The Cross novels are fiction. They are also true except, of course, for their high homicide rate at college campuses.

The James Joyce Murder (Cross 1967) illustrates how even our heroes may be prejudiced. Fansler and her guests at a country summer home are guilty of urban chauvinism, snobbery, and classism making numerous snide or sarcastic remarks about country life, the less educated, or stepping into cow manure. The permanent residents of the rural area, on the other hand, gossip about the summer people. Fansler, herself, makes some comments that would be considered homophobic today. Cross/Heilbrun later “vehemently repudiated” this attitude about homosexuality and had the remarks deleted from later printings at her own expense (Kress 1997:75).

Poetic Justice (Cross 1970) exposes the nastiness of university politics as some advocate for traditional privilege and prestige against others who want to serve nontraditional students. A promoter of change explains a traditionalist’s objection to a woman’s attendance at a meeting, “He dislikes women if they are not beautiful, not slender, not stupider than he—or willing to pretend they are—and not flirtatious. Mrs. Airhart made a clean sweep” (1970:105). Another traditionalist comments that, “All women should be married. An unmarried woman is an offense against nature.” He thought this a “marvelously witty remark” (1970:89).

Death in a Tenured Position (Cross 1981) exposes blatant sexist attitudes throughout starting on page one, with academic men expressing worry about a prospective colleague’s menopause. The idea of women at Harvard is described as “laughable” and prompting snickers (1981:18). A male assistant professor “doesn’t approve of intellectual women” (1981:54). A male graduate student declares, “I think women are happier when they’re looking up to some man, and having kids, which is what nature intended them for” (1981:114).

It also provides glimpses into differential privilege beyond gender. The richly endowed university is described as not providing much support to new or visiting professors even of the “right sex” (1981:24). Few professors “bother with the underlings” (1981:54). A witness explains her withholding information from the police with a comment that reflects today’s attitudes:

Look, Kate, I know that you believe in a world with honest policemen. I don’t want to say there aren’t honest policemen but most of the people I know don’t meet up with them. It’s no use getting all anecdotal, is it? It just seems to us that, for people without power, the police couldn’t care less. (Cross 1981:70)

Higher Education: Institutionalized Privilege

Just as wars are fought disproportionately by the working classes, colleges and universities are populated largely by the middle and upper classes. Within higher education, furthermore, the institutions are highly stratified with rankings influenced by categories: private or public; large or small; liberal arts or applied; research or teaching focused; colleges or universities; four-year or two-year schools; and richly endowed or financially struggling. Some institutions, particularly two-year schools, were designed to serve working class, nontraditional, and/or first-generation students. Such schools, however, are ranked below those serving students from middle and upper classes. Prestigious universities with highly selective admissions provide a more rigorous education to well-prepared students as well as high aspirations and appropriate social networks all of which help maintain class boundaries (Arum and Roksa 2011; Aulette 2010).

Various colleges and universities provide the settings for most Cross novels giving her many opportunities to express her concerns about and frustrations with higher education. Differential privilege and opportunities are the expected outcome from higher education in general and from the prestigious institutions in particular. Cross asserts, however, that many schools are serving neither their students nor society well.

Imperfect Spy (Cross 1995) is set in a lower ranked law school serving working class and first-generation students including many women and minorities. Fansler asks a faculty member if the women and minority students challenge the presumptions of the faculty serving white, male privilege. He responds “But little. These students are not your pampered darlings from Harvard and Yale, princes of all they survey. They’ve made it this far by the skin of their teeth, and they aren’t inclined to interfere with their eventual law degree and job” (Cross 1995:37).

Conversations in Poetic Justice allow Cross to criticize the academy, describing inspired teaching as “rare” (1970:36) and expressing opposition to the “publish or perish racket” (p. 39). Fansler comments, “They could not understand that a fumbling, withdrawn administration and a self-indulged, indifferent faculty were as much to blame as a youthful generation’s failure to observed ‘law and order’” (p. 48).

Fansler briefly considers an invitation to apply for a college presidency in the James Joyce Murder (Cross 1967). She wonders, “Might a college president actually reverse the trend, or at least run counter to it, making teaching, rather than research, again an honorable profession?” (1967:140). She is critical of the sink-or-swim importance of academic publishing. Indeed, the need to publish creates the motivation for the crime in this book. Cross expresses concern that brilliant teaching by those devoted to it is insufficient without publication. Many faculty publish because of need to do so for tenure instead of the desire. Kate speculates that the profession could be “swamped in an avalanche of published, unreadable works, neither conceived with excitement, nor nurtured with love, nor welcomed with gratitude” (1967:140). A publisher claims that “everyone in the academic world is so busy publishing, no one reads anyone else unless he’s in exactly the same line … and then only to be certain he hasn’t been anticipated” (1967:152).

The Theban Mysteries (Cross 1971) examines the role of exclusive, private high schools in generating and protecting privilege. Theban’s education is so good that graduates find college to be an “anticlimax” (1971:18). Nevertheless, Kate expresses concern about “how all private schools and colleges were making their perilous ways on the thin line between financial and educational bankruptcy” (1971:94).

Cheating provides a subplot in The Question of Max (Cross 1976) and examines the nuances between fair and unfair advantage or privilege. A student at an exclusive high school hires a genius to take the exam in his name to get into Harvard. The headmaster learns about it but declines to act because of the influence of the boy’s family and his need to protect the image of the school. The interconnections between wealth, expectations, power, and prestige complicate the situation.

Cross explores the role of women’s colleges in society in Sweet Death, Kind Death (Cross 1984). Fansler is asked to investigate the death of a woman faculty member while serving on a task force for the exclusive women’s Clare College. She had always believed in women’s colleges which allow women to have the college experiences and develop leadership skills without the dominating shadow of men. She thinks that women’s colleges should be on the forefront of the women’s movement but suspects that they were missing “their chance to continue to be impressive” (1984:32). The college received a donation to establish an Institute “to deal with the problems of students and faculty as women” but is not allowed “to admit that there are any disadvantages to being a woman in our world today” (1984:32–33). “Consequently they are far behind the formerly all-male colleges in everything from women’s studies to public stands on battered wives” (1984:33).

Kate compares the public city college with her own prestigious university in In the Last Analysis (Cross 1964). A conversation with a professor of a city college reveals that while she had four or five mimeographed communications from the administration, he had hundreds about trivia (pencil sharpening as one example). She concludes:

the people here suffered, apparently, from the fact that they were employed not by an educational institution, but by a bureaucratic system.… Kate thought lovingly of her own university, where one struggled, God knew against the ancient sins of favoritism, flattery and simony, but where the modern horrors of bureaucracy had not yet strangled her colleagues or herself. (1964:101)

Conclusion

The Cross mystery novels are a rich, interwoven tapestry of social commentary amid mystery stories decorated with many literary quotes and allusions. Kate Fansler role models a steady activism challenging the presumptions of differential privilege. Carolyn Heilbrun did the same. They both spoke up when it was the right thing to do. They both advocated for students, for women, for those less privileged. They both worked for fairness and justice. They were both frustrated with the slowness or failure of social movements to achieve equality. After she resigned her position Heilbrun predicted, “Columbia will continue to be run by male professors who behave like little boys saying, ‘This is our secret treehouse club, no girls allowed’” (Matthews 1992).

Three years later, however, at the end of Imperfect Spy, Cross (1995) encourages people to do what they can, when they can, wherever they happen to be. The encouragement comes, however, not from our protagonist but from another. When Fansler expresses doubt about her involvement at the law school, a colleague suggests:

But do try to bear in mind that we live in new and frightening times. We live with corporate rot and a total loss of purpose, whether we mean nationally, internationally, or in institutions. That’s why extreme right-wingers succeed, if they come along when the rest of us are closing our eyes, going on with what we usually, comfortably do, and waiting for something to happen.… Don’t delude yourself you’re too good for such fights; that’s a liberal delusion that has devoured our causes. (1995:148–49).