“FOR IT WILL ONLY BE WHEN WOMEN SUCCEED IN RELEARNING
THE FACT THAT THE ONLY SERIOUS BUSINESS OF LIFE IN WHICH
THEY CANNOT BE ENTIRELY OUTCLASSED BY THE MALE IS THAT
OF CHILD BEARING THAT THEY WILL ONCE MORE LOOK WITH
RESPECT UPON THEIR NORMAL AND LEGITIMATE FUNCTION.”
Found in a nondescript folder in the Princeton University archive, these words were written almost a century ago-not by some Victorian male as one might immediately guess but by a well-known woman author who has become something of a feminist icon.
Gertrude Stein.
In the course of research for her recently published book, Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo
Stein, Brenda Wineapple, the Washington Irving Professor in Modern Literary and Historical studies, came across a previously unknown and unpublished essay. Eight pages long, typed on legal-sized paper with notations in Gertrude Stein's handwriting and probably written in the early 1900s, “Degeneration in American Women” argues that American women have too few babies, with the worst offenders being college-educated women who delay or ignore childbirth.
The educated American woman has a tendency, the
twenty-eight-year-old Stein wrote, “to mistake her education her cleverness and intelligence for effective capacity for the work of the world….” Stein concludes that the only activity that women can be better at than men is having kids.
Although Stein focused on college graduates, less-educated women don't escape her wrath. The said that the “lower-class” American woman is “incapable for the most part of cooking and sewing or any of the household duties for which her European sisters are famous.”
And what about Stein herself, a childless lesbian never known for her cooking or sewing? She attempted to dismiss the matter, saying, “Of course it is not meant that there are not a few women in every generation who are exceptions to the rule.”
Wineapple says, “Gertrude Stein argued that women would inevitably be outclassed in careers by men. Since that was the case, they should do what they do best. You can imagine how horrified early feminists must have been.”
The essay was a function of Gertrude's own depression, Wineapple says. “She had just left medical school at Johns Hopkins and decided not to pursue a degree.”
“Degeneration in American Women” is published for the first time in Sister
Brother, Wineapple's second book, which was released in April by G.P. Putnam's Sons. The dual biography is the first
completely researched biography of Gertrude Stein in twenty years and the first book ever to be written about Leo.
The book examines the relationship between the sister and brother whose Paris apartment-crowded with the early work of Picasso and Matisse and Cezanne masterpieces-can be accurately described as the time and place where modern art had its coming out.
When Leo moved out of the apartment in 1914, however, the split between the two was final-they never spoke to each
other again. When Gertrude writes of those years in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude's secretary and companion), she doesn't even mention Leo's name. Gertrude goes on to become a writer and feminist icon, and Leo falls into obscurity.
In Sister Brother, Wineapple reveals a wealth of new information about the Steins-reports of Gertrude's medical career, never-before-examined papers of Leo's, and Gertrude's astonishing early manuscript.
“The voice is young, fresh, untried-and very much hers,” Wineapple writes in her introduction to the essay. “It is my hope that this voice, now recognized, will fuel future scholarship-to say nothing of pleasure and debate.”
Since the book's publication, Wineapple has received attention from The New York
Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Albany Times Union and other local newspapers, and appeared on the program “New York and Company” on WNYC-AM radio.
Wineapple's previous book examined the life of the author of The New Yorker's letters from Paris. Published in 1989, Genet:
A Biography of Janet Flanner is now in its second printing.
Wineapple joined the English Department at Union in 1976 and was named the Washington Irving Professor in Modern Literary and Historical Studies in 1994. She received her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University and earned both her master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
While working on her book, Wineapple was a Guggenheim Fellow and the Donald C. Gallup Senior Fellow in American Literature at the Beinecke Library at Yale, which holds many of the Stein manuscripts.