Risking the Personal: Academic Friendship, Feminist Role Models and Katherine Mansfield

ABSTRACT

This article celebrates friendship as a valid starting point for scholarly enquiry and uses conversation as a valuable methodology. While completing their doctoral research on modernist short stories and women’s art collectives, co-authors Rydstrand and Mayhew discovered New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield was a contact point between their respective projects. Around 1981, Harridan Screenprinters quoted Mansfield’s injunction to ‘Risk anything’ on a poster, invoking Mansfield as a role model—as a leading modernist author and as a risk-taker. Mayhew later gave Rydstrand a copy of the poster as a thesis submission gift. This article explores interrelations between personal, creative and professional risks, from Mansfield’s avant-garde milieu of the early twentieth century, to the dynamic scene of second-wave feminism in Australia, and finally to the precarious world of the twenty-first century academy, all brought together by the physical artefact of the Mansfield poster. In this threefold engagement, we counter the presumed masculinity of experiment and champion feminine forms of risk.

KEYWORDS:

• Modernism
• feminism
• collaboration
• friendship
• academic precarity
• resistance

Acknowledgements

Our warm thanks to Anne Sheridan for generously encouraging this project. Thank you also to Emma Crott, Alys Moody and Stephanie Russo for your feedback on our drafts. We’d also like to acknowledge the Australasian Modernist Studies Network for supporting the symposium and all of the presenters and guests who contributed to the ideas that round out this article. Finally, our very warm thanks to our reviewers for their generous insights and encouragement.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Dr Louise R. Mayhew is an Australian feminist art historian and a lecturer in Art Theory at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Her research investigates women-only artistic collaboration. Her research interests extend to include Australian and feminist art histories and art’s contemporary engagements with relational aesthetics, selfies and social media. In 2015, with Professor Susan Best, she co-edited the 2015–2016 Summer issue of Art Monthly on Feminism Now. Mayhew’s research is published in the edited anthology Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and in journals including the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, re*bus: A Journal of Art History and Theory, CAA.reviews and Imprint.

Dr Helen Rydstrand is the author of Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story (Bloomsbury, 2019), and with Dr John Attridge, co-editor of Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art (Bloomsbury, July 2019). Her current research takes a feminist approach to investigating the ordinary in intersections between anthropology and modernist literature and film, in light of the concept of mimesis. She serves as Vice Secretary to the international Katherine Mansfield Society, and Publicity Officer for the Australasian Modernist Studies Network.

ORCID

Louise R. Mayhew http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5400-5219

Helen Rydstrand http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0366-561X

Notes

1 The Risk Anything! Modernist Women between Centre and Periphery symposium was presented by the Australasian Modernist Studies Network, at UNSW Sydney, 6 April 2018. Our colleague Baylee Brits made valuable contributions to the earlier stages of its organisation. https://risksymposium.wordpress.com/prog/.

2 One of the most compelling components of this project has been recognising the twinned arguments and positions that filter through the feminist studies of our distinct disciplinary areas. This was strongly evident on the day of the Risk Anything! symposium. This article deliberately reflects on the ideas raised in this forum.

3 The full list of figures and accompanying texts are as follows. Thank you to Anne Sheridan for providing.

‘Amelia Earhart: “When a great adventure's offered you don't refuse it”’

‘Virginia Woolf: “Oh women are my line … ”’

‘Bessie Smith: “No time to marry | no time to settle down | I'm my own woman | and ain't done running round” Quote adapted from Young Woman's Blues by Bessie Smith’

‘Qiu Jin: 1879-1907. “Passivity is the dragon that each woman must slay in her quest for independence”’

‘Janet Cumbrae Stewart: (1883-1960) An Australian lesbian artist who exhibited in Australia, London & Paris. She was principally known as a pastellist … virtually her entire oeuvre was the nude figure.’

‘Radclyffe Hall: “and if the world was not quite ready for them yet … still they were at least brave”. The Unlit Lamp, 1924’

‘Martina Navratilova: the best & most successful tennis player to date’

‘Beatrix Potter: 1866-1943. Scientist, artist, writer, farmer. Denied a formal education, she was a self taught scientist/naturalist. Her discovery that lichens are duel organisms, funguses living in close association with algae, was ridiculed by male scientists. Years later one of them claimed and was credited with this. Discouraged in science, she wrote/illustrated her books. She spent the last 30 years of her life as a conservationist, expert sheep breeder.’

‘Grace Chisholm Young: 1893 qualified for 1st class degree in mathematics at Cambridge University. Because women were not admitted to English graduate schools, continued her studies in Germany obtaining the first doctorate for a woman in any subject. Her husband William Young published most of her original research in his name, saying “mine the laurels … yours the knowledge only”. Despite him, and her responsibility for their six children her reputation as a creative mathematician spread.’

‘Dagmar Berne: The first woman to enrol in medicine in Australia (1885). She was forced by the antagonism of male professors at Sydney University to complete her degree in London where she graduated in 1891 with honours.’

‘Christabel Pankhurst: “Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.’”

‘The Amazons: Herstorical defenders of wommins lives, culture & community’

4 Mansfield’s turn to Gurdjieff, and the motivational tenor of the quote used in Sheridan’s poster, can be read against a broader history of modernist engagement with self-help (see Blum 2017).

5 The photograph, held by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, is recorded as ‘Photograph of Beauchamp family at Las Palmas, 1903’, by A. L. Delahenty, and dated 16 March (PAColl-4131).

6 She later tweaked her first name and borrowed her maternal grandmother’s maiden name to become Katherine Mansfield. The pen name was initially one of many she used, but it is the one that took over in her personal life too, so that the professional writer became fused into her everyday identity.

7 As the series grew in popularity, Sheridan explained, other women suggested historical figures for inclusion. Dagmar Berne, Beatrix Potter and Grace Chisholm Young were included as a result of these suggestions.

8 Colour choices in political posters were commonly made in response to three concerns: design, availability and symbolism. Pink operated as a feminist reworking of an anarchist red, or as a feminist reclamation of ‘feminine’ aesthetics. In Sheridan’s works, the colours appear to have been motivated by design principles. Colouring the roses in realistic yellows and pinks, Sheridan compliments the works with greens that recall dark English elms and bright garden lawns. Her use of vermillion avoids the symbolic connotations of red and pink.

9 The educational purpose of the Women’s Series is more overt in some of the latter posters, which pair portraits with biographical information. The proposal of designing posters for children’s classrooms was made to Sheridan at the Inner City Education Centre in Sydney (Sheridan, personal communication 2018).

10 In this respect, the series parallels the feminist subgenre of ‘encomia of notable women’, which have been popular since the eighteenth century (Taylor 2002, cited in Lyons 2015, 467).

11 I am thinking here of F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and New Criticism, themselves influenced by the aesthetic theories of modernists like T. S. Eliot. These models arguably still shape both the figure and work of the literary critic (see for example, Mao 1996; Green 2003; Cranfield 2016), despite the alternate models offered by second-wave feminist critics, many of whom explored the implications of including the personal in intellectual work (notably, DuPlessis 1990).

12 Drame et al.’s article recalls another study by Heather Sarsons (2017) on the success of male and female academics securing tenure. She found tenure review boards ‘count’ male-female co-authored articles as one article for male academics and less than half an article for female academics. By contrast, female-female co-authored articles were counted as half an article for each contributing author. This reveals a further gendered bias towards collaborative authorship. On reading coverage of the results by Justin Wolfers (2016) in The New York Times I decided not to collaborate with any male academics.

13 See Foo’s article drawn from this paper, ‘Bent on the Dark: Negative Perception in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood’, included in this special issue.

14 In the symposium iteration of this paper, I finished my section here with the following words: ‘I imagine it’s something we’ll continue to work through, negotiating space for the personal within the academic may well be our shared takeaway from this project.’ Ongoing conversation has enabled us to further develop our conclusions.

15 Mountz et al. (2015) proffer a parallel risk for resisting academia’s neoliberal paradigms, championing a feminist, and collective, commitment to slow scholarship.