HOWE, Florence

Born 17 March 1929, Brooklyn, New York

Daughter of Samuel and Frances Stilly Rosenfeld; married Paul Lauter, 1967

Raised in Brooklyn in an orthodox Jewish family, Florence Howe received a B.A. from Hunter College (1950), an M.A. in English from Smith College (1951), and did further graduate work at the University of Wisconsin (1951-54). A teacher at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1960 to 1971, Howe found the direction of her thinking and teaching altered by work in a Mississippi Freedom School during the summer of 1964; by participation in the anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s; and by the desire to apply what she had learned from these experiences to writing and teaching, particularly to writing and teaching about women.

A national leader in the field of women's studies and one of its best-informed historians, Howe taught as a professor of humanities at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and has been visiting professor of women's studies at institutions here and abroad. She also served as editor of the Women's Studies Newsletter, president of the Feminist Press, and coordinator of the Clearinghouse on Women's Studies; she has been chairperson of the Modern Language Association's commission on the status of women and division of women's studies, as well as the association's president.

Howe's essays and books are marked by several general characteristics: a recognition of the interrelationships between education, politics, and the teaching and writing of literature; a tendency to move from personal experiences (her own or those of others) to more general social analysis and then to the working out of practical strategies for change; and a willingness to speak to a wide variety of audiences both within and without the women's movement and the educational establishment.

In essays on contemporary British novelist Doris Lessing, Howe comments on the ways in which Lessing links the growth of her characters and their struggles with freedom and madness, with larger struggles against racism and war, and with the breakdown of Western culture. Similarly, her introduction to No More Masks! (1973), an anthology of modern American women poets, emphasizes connections between the personal and the political in poems in which these writers explore their identities as writers and as women.

In more general essays on the connections between feminism and literature, Howe's principal assumption is that there are important—indeed crucial—connections of class, race, sex, and ethnicity between literature and the lives of those who write and read it. Pointing to our ignorance of women writers of the past, of feminist polemical writing, and of women's history, she asks us to search for what has been left out of the literary canon and to ask in what ways rediscovered works by women force upon us a revised sense of the value and function of literature. She argues that if women, blacks, or others whose viewpoints are absent from works deemed great by the literary establishment are exposed to a "vision of the power of language and idea" in literature expressive of their own experience, a growth in self-respect and self-awareness and a desire for social change will result.

In detailing the extraordinary growth of women's studies during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Howe has defined its goals as raising the aspirations of women as individuals and as a group working for social change, compensating for the omission of women from the curriculum, encouraging the development of research tools and skills, and working to discover the lost or neglected history and culture of women. Further, Howe insists the perspective of women's studies must be brought to the elementary and secondary schools, where perceptions of self and society are formed, if feminist goals for education and society are to be achieved.

On their broadest level, these recommendations stem from Howe's conception of power, as described in Women and the Power to Change (1975), "not as a finite commodity through which one person or group controls another," but as an instrument for social change that can be diffused throughout a group when those with the capacity to lead use their talents to energize others rather than to control them. Seeing women not simply as victims of socialization and discrimination, but as potential agents of their own deliverance.

Howe followed up her No More Masks! with a revised and expanded edition in 1993, compiling selected works from more than 100 women poets. As editor, Howe compiled an anthology which represents culturally diverse poetry. Both the former and the new anthologies have met with critical praise from experts and fans for highlighting little-known female writers. But critic Adrian Oktenberg of the Kenyon Review says the revised edition could have been deeper and more provocative, missing an opportunity to delve deeper into areas only touched upon by earlier works. Yet Oktenberg still believes No More Masks! is a work worth reading nonetheless.

Howe's Feminist Press marked its 25th anniversary in 1995. "The books we have brought to light are essential if our daughters and their daughters are to continue to live in a society that values and esteems not only women writers, but also the history and culture their books record," Howe remarked. The press publishes 15-20 books a year.

In 1993 the Feminist Press published Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present. The 1,200-page, two-volume work distills the most critically conscious writing from one of the longest traditions of women's literature in the world, according to the Press. It's next project is Women Writing in Africa, a series of volumes of African women's writings never before available. Other ongoing projects of the press include the Cross-Cultural Memoir series and the Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series.

Howe was the recipient of the Mina Shaughnessy Award Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education in 1982-83. In addition, she was an NEH fellow, 1971-73; a Ford Foundation fellow, 1974-75; Fulbright fellow in 1977; Mellon fellow at Wellesley College in 1979; and a U.S. Department of State grantee in 1983 and 1993.

Other Works:

The Conspiracy of the Young (with P. Lauter, 1970). Women's Studies: Evaluation and Impact on Institutions (1979).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

WW in America (1998).

Other references:

Choice (Nov. 1973). Critic (May 1971). Harvard Educational Review (Feb. 1977). Kenyon Review (Summer 1994). Political Science Quarterly (Spring 1976). Radical Teacher (Dec. 1977). Saturday Review (19 June 1971). WHR (Winter 1974). Women's Review of Books (Nov. 1993).

—JANET SHARISTANIAN,

UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT