LOIS BANNER – PROFESSOR, HISTORIAN, WRITER,
AUTHOR OF THE LATEST BOOK ON MARILYN MONROE, "THE PASSION AND
THE PARADOX"
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Lois's
mother, great grandmother, sister and
Lois |
I was born in Los Angeles County General Hospital on
July 26, 1939, and raised by Christian fundamentalist parents
(Missouri Synod Lutheran Church), in Inglewood, a working-class
suburb of Los Angeles. My family came from German farm backgrounds
in Milwaukee and Spokane. In good German fashion (my parents spoke
German before learning English), they managed to buy a large house
and to bring all the aging relatives to live with them: grandmothers
and grandfathers; even my maternal great grandmother, who lived to
be ninety-five.
Large
houses were cheap in Los Angeles during the Depression of the 1930s.
In our house there were plenty of people to clean, cook, and care
for my two brothers and sister and me. But in the 1950s ageism was
rampant, and my relatives internalized society’s scorn of the
elderly and blamed themselves for it. Seriously depressed, they
complained about their health. At one point there were twelve people
living in our house and my mother’s brother, a beautiful, dashing
musician, moved in and out between marriages. My great-grandmother
had no affection for the younger generation, but she told me stories
about Indians and adventurers she had encountered in the late
nineteenth century, which perhaps inspired me to become a historian.
How
did a 1970s radical feminist like me emerge out of such a family? My
parents were racist and anti-Semitic, but even as a child I found
those attitudes wrong. Jesus Christ taught us to love all humanity
and to be charitable and non-materialistic—that’s the message I
picked up from Lutheranism. God the father was a terrifying being
who would send us to hell if we didn’t believe, and I was frightened
of him. God the Holy Ghost, the third part of the triune god, made
no sense to me, until I learned as an adult that the “ghost” was
probably female, the “mother” written out of the historical record.
My maternal grandparents were Franklin Roosevelt Democrats. My
grandmother constantly talked about the Depression and how Roosevelt
got the nation out of it.
My mother had a B.A. from the University of
Southern California and was a virtuoso pianist. I grew up admiring
women who worked, and was taught that I needed an education to
support my family if my husband was out of work. My maternal
grandparents were good caregivers, and we had special times with my
mother. I was a singer then, and had my mother lived (she died when
I was thirteen), I would probably have been a musician. I adored my
mother; and I was proud of her working. My father, a Victorian sort,
worked in advertising agencies. He was devoted to the church and
should have been a minister.
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The house Lois grew up
in |
Are
we born with characters already formed? I am so different from my
two brothers and my that I sometimes think I was sneaked into the
hospital where I was born. They are conventional homebodies
(although my brothers have had brilliant careers, one as a
scientist; the other as a businessman.) But I was rebellious, always
wanting to be different, determined to achieve the Ph.D. my mother
failed to attain. I was also very shy; I never spoke in any of my
classes at UCLA , but somehow I knew I would be a
professor.
At
that point in my life, I didn’t notice that there weren’t any women
professors at UCLA and had no understanding of discrimination
against women. I was regularly denied fellowships, scholarships, and
jobs with the statement: “Why does a pretty girl like you want to do
anything but get married?” I internalized my failures and told no
one about them. Luckily, my three best friends in my sorority were
all bent on achievement, and we bonded together to get ahead. I
worked hard, got good grades, and dated a lot, although my major
boyfriend ,a philosophy major, was a sometime hippie who took me to
rent parties in Venice. I also dated fraternity boys and dreamed of
being “pinned” -- wearing a fraternity pin on my sweater close to my
heart. Thank goodness that fantasy was never fulfilled.
In
the end my sense of adventure won out I moved to New York City to
fulfill the fantasies I had constructed from movies and books. Los
Angeles was very provincial in the 1950s, and I dreamed of the
special cultural delights that New York had to offer. I was accepted
for graduate school in the history department at Columbia, though I
later learned they were accepting almost anyone with good enough
grades, because they needed money.
New
York didn’t disappoint me. I studied hard, although I didn’t
understand much of what I was being taught . At least I was good at
parroting what they said. I managed to stay afloat, and spent
Saturdays visiting museums and shopping on Fifth Avenue.
I
had three offers of marriage within three months of arriving at
Columbia. (Columbia had a male-female ratio of five to one, and most
everyone in the 1950s before feminism happened was married by age
twenty-one.) But I couldn’t compete with students from the Ivy
League schools; it turned out I hadn’t learned much at UCLA. In 1962
I married the best student in my class and got a job as a teacher at
Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut, an elite private girls high
school. In the context of teaching, married to a man who had been to
Yale before Columbia, I made up my deficiencies and was admitted
back to Columbia for a Ph.D. , now with the smarts to hold my
own.
I
never expected to actually become a professor. High school or junior
college teaching was my goal. My husband got a job at Princeton; I
got a part-time job at Douglass College (then the women’s college of
Rutgers), teaching sections of the required Western Civilization
course. Feminism was aborning, and Douglass turned out to be one of
the first academic centers. My introduction to the movement came
through Elaine Showalter, then also married to a Princeton
professor. We lived a block away from one another and commuted to
Douglass together. She told me about the movement, inspiring the
“click” that went off in my head, as I realized the oppression that
had always been visited against me . I was physically beautiful, but
that was hardly an asset, and though I did well academically in high
school I was often called a “dumb blonde.”
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Lois 1946 |
It
was the 1960s , and I was teaching and getting my Ph.D. I had my
first child, Olivia, in 1968, and finished my dissertation on the
Protestant ministry in early America. (Don’t scratch your head at
such a topic; I found a cache of minister’s sermons in the
eighteenth century at the Princeton Theological Seminary.) I began
teaching women’s history in 1969 because the students at Douglass
were demanding it and none of the senior professors in the history
department wanted to teach it.
We
women at Douglass and some of the faculty wives at Princeton were
rebels of sorts; we started a women’s studies program and pressured
Princeton into setting up a daycare center on the campus. I was more
a follower than a leader; my endemic shyness kept taking over, butt
I found my forte as a writer, and I began the career of teaching and
publication that has sustained me to this day. I wrote a history of
women in modern America , a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
a history of physical appearance in the United States, while
teaching and having my second child, Gideon. I was raised by child
tenders, and had no issues with putting my children in day
care.
Predictably,
the men in history at Rutgers (who controlled the Douglass
department) refused me tenure, largely because I didn’t publish my
dissertation on Protestant ministers as a book. The truth is that
after I published four scholarly articles from that topic, I was
bored with it. Women’s history was more interesting. When I was
turned down for tenure gossip was that I was terrible teacher and
scholar; I was little more than the wife of a Princeton professor;
that, because of my “good looks”, I could never be successful in a
university setting. I wasn’t tough and assertive until I was thirty
–five, when I became less shy and a lot smarter.
So I began what I jokingly call my hegira, as I
taught at seven separate
universities, always taking my children with me, always
publishing—sometimes articles, sometimes books. The universities and
colleges where I taught ranged from private to state institutions
and included Princeton; the University of Maryland, Baltimore
County; George Washington University; the University of Scranton;
Stanford; and UCLA. Individuals I knew in the history profession
were kind to me. They watched for openings and recommended me as a
visiting professor . It was difficult at the time, but it was the
making of me, and, by the end, no one knew more about the academic
world than I.
Throughout
my career I was enmeshed in feminist politics, usually through the
academy. My Douglass colleague, Mary Hartman, and I, became involved
in founding the field of women’s history. We created the first
Berkshire Conference in Women’s History in 1972, now the major
national gathering in the field. I organized panels at history
conventions, became involved in the American Studies Association,
and was the first woman president. When I published American Beauty in 1983 with
Alfred Knopf , I had reached the top. The University of Southern
California extended me an offer at full professor level, where I
would remain for thirty years.
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Lois at 20
years |
My
husband and I divorced when I and my children moved to Los Angeles
in 1983. I joined colleagues in women’s studies at USC: Carol
Jacklin, Barrie Thorne, Judith Stiehm, Gloria Orenstein, Harry Brod,
and many more. We shook up the university. I chaired departments and
programs, served on university committees; won prizes for teaching,
service, and scholarship. Between 1983 and 2003 I published many
articles and three books: In
Full Flower: Aging Women,
Power, and Sexuality (Knopf: 1989); Finding Fran: History and
Memory in the Lives of
Two Women (Columbia University, 1989); and Intertwined Lives: Margaret
Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (Knopf: 2003).
During
those years at USC I refined my feminism. Gloria Orenstein, an art
critic involved in goddess worship, introduced me to the subject. I
was intrigued by its premise that god had been a woman and now
realized how that tyrannical Lutheran god of my childhood had
scarred me, and felt empowered. I also realized that many feminists
have a strong spiritual bent, and need to have it nurtured in order
to engage in the rough and tumble of political action. I wrote about
goddess worship in my book In
Full Flower, a celebration of the potential of aging woman over
time and space.
Finding
Fran included
my own biography and that of my best friend from high school, Fran.
Fran had participated in founding one of the major communes in the
1960s in Taos, New Mexico: The Lama Foundation, a spiritual commune,
grounded in an ecumenical sect, called the Sufi Order in the West.
From Sufi ecumenicism, Fran’s faith had evolved into a more
traditional set of Muslim beliefs, although she still followed the
mystical path. Soon after, she converted to Islam and wore
traditional Islamic garb, completely covering her body. Through that
dress, she told me, she found freedom. I had difficulties with the
argument, but I could see that rejecting the West, its materialism,
and its objectification of women and devoting her life to the Sufi
path had liberated her. When she converted to Islam she changed her
name to Noura. She does the traditional prayer ritual five times a
day, bowing her head to the ground in honor of Allah;
she;
eats
traditional Middle Eastern food and observes Ramadan. A talented
artist, she now does only calligraphy—and illustrates children’s
books. She supports equal rights for women, and contends that in the
original Arabic Allah is a being beyond gender.
Once
again a book I was writing took over my life. To understand what
Fran had done I followed her path. I spent time at the Lama
Foundation, joined a Sufi group in Los Angeles and came close to
converting to Islam, In the end I couldn’t cede all power to Allah,
even rhetorically, and that is the basis of even leftist Sufi sects.
But it became apparent to me at this point that my writing was
taking over my life. I integrated every book I was writing into the
courses I was teaching, which proved to be a very effective teaching
technique. My students loved being part of a book in
progress.
In
2003 I took on the most daunting topic : a biography of Marilyn
Monroe. After writing about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Mead,
and Ruth Benedict, I wanted to write about an individual from the
world of entertainment, and an icon like Monroe seemed perfect. I
live in Los Angeles, the historic center of the movie industry; I
teach at USC, which has the best film school in the nation. I joined
the Marilyn Monroe fan club and began on a journey that took me
across the nation and to Europe, as I interviewed about one hundred
people who had known Marilyn, gained access to about four hundred
interviews that previous biographers had done, and scoured archives
and artifacts at collections throughout the nation.
I
soon realized that writing about Marilyn was going to be
challenging. Aside from what Gloria Steinem wrote about Marilyn, I
trusted none of the biographies of her . For example, none of the
previous biographers had read Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, which documents
Marilyn’s influence on him. These biographers (mostly male) assumed
that the “great intellectual” had been her mentor. But that was only
part of the story of their relationship.
It
took me ten years to write the book, and sometimes my research had a
cloak-and-dagger element to it. I interviewed Mafia figures: I had a
four hour interview with Phyllis Maguire, Sam Giancana’s girlfriend,
in Las Vegas. I interviewed a private detective who had been at
Marilyn’s house the night she died. I spent five months going
through Marilyn’s private file cabinets. I gained access to that
hidden source as the result of an unexpected telephone call to me
from their owner. I was on the periphery of most of the many
lawsuits filed about the rights to Marilyn’s image. Thank goodness,
no one ever sued me. I had to sort through the many liars who
approached me, thinking my university status might promote their
case.
My
publisher, Bloomsbury Books, wanted a definitive biography, and
that’s what I gave them. I figured out Marilyn’s eleven foster
families and when she was with each of them. I documented three
episodes of childhood abuse, and tracked down the full dimensions of
her career. I determined the inaccuracy of shibboleths about
her—such as that she had no women friends and that she never had an
orgasm. I proved that she was bisexual, and I documented her affair
with her first drama coach, Natasha Lytess.
Above
all, I discussed her life as a feminist, pointing out that there
wasn’t much feminism in Los Angeles in the 1950s and thus she had no
framework from which to view her obvious oppression as a woman in
the masculinized Hollywood film industry, one of the most
patriarchal institutions in the history of the United States. I
concluded that she gained power through self-objectification, making
herself into a sex goddess for men, and argued that in the end it
was that stance that destroyed her.
I’m now over seventy years of age. I’ve been in
the classroom for fifty years. I’ve had a rich and satisfying
career, and am proud of the generations of students I’ve taught and
converted to feminism. I teach courses in gay and lesbian studies,
and eased the “coming out” transition for many students,
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Lois
Banner |
as they learn to take pride in their heritage and
saw that even a heterosexual woman like me supports them and their
cause. Last year I realized that I’m not happy if I’m not writing a
book in my head, and so I’m turning my freelance career into a full
time occupation. I’ve been married for nearly twenty years to
another academic devoted to writing and studying, and that works
best for me.
I’m
very proud of my children. My son, a successful actor, stars in the
Blue Man Group in New York and sometimes acts on Broadway. My
daughter, with a Ph.D. from UCLA and five years as managing editor
of Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, is a lecturer in literature, film, and
science studies at Rice University in Houston. The University of
Michigan Press is publishing her first book. After years of
resisting it, she follows in my footsteps, although she doesn’t like
me to say that.
Feminism
has given me a rich and fulfilling life. I’m proud to have been part
of one of the major movements of our times, one that changed the
opportunities for and status of women in the United States and
throughout the world.
Contact Lois Banner lbanner@usc.edu
Comments: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.com
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