A roll call? Okay
I'm an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout--middle-aged,
hetro, white, male--I teach science fiction and children's literature and
write about both with some regularity. Just finished teaching a course on
SF and gender. Just wrote an essay called Ophelia Triumphant: The
Survival of Teenaged Girls in Recent SF by Octavia Butler and Jack
Womack, which will be published next year. The essay reflects my recent
reading of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and the fact that I have a 10
year old daughter who's already on the ragged edge of puberty.
I guess I was a feminist long before I was consciously aware of the concept.
My mother has degrees in math and physics, worked on the Manhattan
project during WWII, and later taught in the Chicago Public Schools. I
grew up in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood where all the girls I knew
and eventually dated simply assumed that they were going to college and then
on to professional level jobs. As a kid and young adult I don't doubt that I
was occasionally guilty of the kind of casual sexism that was so ubiquitous
in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but I think that, on a gut level, I always
pretty much assumed that women were as smart and competent as men. By
the time I was in graduate school any last vestiges of obvious sexism
were generally pretty much beaten out of me by various female friends and
colleagues. Now my wife and daughter handle that job.
Mike Levy
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