Folly (23 page)

She sat up straight, wide awake as ever she had been. “Martha, listen, we gotta talk. I got an idea.” She held Martha's hand tighter, passing her some of her adrenalin. They were pulling up between the trailers.

“Wait,” Martha said. “Let's go in my place. You want to check the kids first?”

“No, I don't want to, but I better.”

“You go on in. I'll do it and be right over.”

Martha, I been waiting for a woman like you all my life, Folly said to herself as she went in, and I never did expect I'd be findin' you, much less right next door.

“All's quiet,” Martha said, entering a few minutes later and kicking off her shoes. “Now, what's this idea that's got you all worked up?”

“A co-op mill,” Folly said, simply, trying to hold down her excitement. “Owned by us, the workers.”

“Us? You mean that for real?”

“Yeah, I mean you and me and the women who work on the line with us.”

“But we'd have to have money to start anything like that. Who's got any money?”

“The insurance.”

“But Fol . . . it ain't gonna be all that much.” Martha felt confused. She sensed her own blood beginning to race to meet Folly's fervor, at the same time she held onto the vision of the house, a place for them to rest and be further from the mill.

“Hey, look here,” Folly said. “Imagine working this way—no boss, no Fartblossom officiating hisself away. Goin' in and doin' your work at the pace that goes right for you and havin' time to stop and say hello to someone when you want to. Somebody dies, people offer to help you out, none of this shit we're gettin'. It would be like a dream.”

The problem was seeming more and more like a song in Folly. She was up and practically dancing around Martha. She was not the same woman she used to think of herself as being, the plodding one who didn't want to be bothered with more than one day at a time.

“I guess it could be,” Martha said, clasping both of Folly's hands, breaking from her own losses. She pulled her around and they sat facing each other, intent on pulling that dream down to the table in front of them, working right along with the song.

Martha remembered the night of the walk-out, how afraid she'd been of the feelings that had generated between them when they'd clasped each other's hands. By comparison, she felt as if she'd lost all sense of caution now, though she said, “But you know we'd have to find other ways to get money, too. Daisy's policy wouldn't really take us far.”

“I know,” Folly said, “we'd have to borrow. Everybody would. We wouldn't want people excluded because they couldn't put up money. Let's just figure if it
was
possible to get up the money, what then? What all could we do?”

Afterword

One of the valuable insights of the women's liberation movement is contained in its rhetorical slogan “the personal is political.” Feminist scholars have continued to explore the contrasts and connections between the categories of private (the personal) and public (the political). The public sphere has always been conceptualized as male territory: work, politics, war—in short, the large and expansive world outside the self. The private world of domesticity, feelings, the family, and home, in contrast, belongs to women. Feminism, in its theories and practices, explodes this opposition, not only by claiming for women the public world and requiring from men attention to the private sphere, but also by demonstrating the ways in which similar structures and forces operate in both public and private arenas.

Folly,
by Maureen Brady, is an excellent example of a novel written within the context of this feminist deconstruction of the opposition between public and private. Its plot revolves around the very public structures of factory and union local and the private territories of home and family. It requires that the reader acknowledge the similar processes at work in all locations. It refuses the split between woman as worker and woman as mother/lover. It pays close attention to issues of class and of sexuality. It locates politics in the external struggle of labor against management and in the internal struggle of white women against racist attitudes. It recognizes the way in which capitalism impacts on the home and the way the home extends into the workplace. In short,
Folly
claims that the personal is political, and the political, personal, in every social institution.

I

Maureen Brady was born June 7, 1943 in Mt. Vernon, New York.
¹
Her father, she writes, identified firmly with his working-class origins, while
her mother held to the American myth of upward mobility—a conflict that provided Brady with the impetus for exploration of her own class identity. Her adolescence and college years were spent in Florida, giving her a knowledge of and a sensitivity to southern attitudes and values that often appear in her fiction. Since the late 1960s, Brady has made herhome in New York State, where she earned a master's degree from New York University in 1977. Although she always knew she wanted to write, Brady, like the protagonist of her first novel,
Give Me Your Good Ear
(1979), also has worked as a physical therapist while devoting herself fulltime to a career of writing, teaching, and conducting writing workshops.

Success was not easy at first, however. Like most novice writers, Brady collected her share of rejection slips until she began sending stories to newly established feminist and lesbian feminist literary journals. In fact, chapter one of
Folly,
then titled “Grinning Underneath,” appeared in the very first issue of
Conditions
in 1977. Subsequent chapters would appear in
Sinister Wisdom
and
Southern Exposure.
Brady's career as a writer has moved in tandem with the women's liberation and lesbian feminist movements. Not only do feminist themes and issues predominate in her work, but she has also found in the feminist presses a sympathetic home for her novels, stories, and plays. Moreover, Brady, with Judith McDaniel, founded a feminist press, Spinsters, Ink, in order to publish her first novel,
Give Me Your Good Ear.
During Brady's tenure (1978-1982), Spinsters published such landmark works as
The Cancer Journals
by Audre Lorde
, Ambitious Women
by Barbara Wilson, and
The Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire
by Kitty Tsui.

Between 1977 and 1982, the year in which
Folly
first appeared, Brady wrote and published prolificly. In addition to writing fiction, she had two plays produced (one of which,
I Know a Hundred Ways to Die,
was published in
Sinister Wisdom
12); reviewed for feminist journals; conducted creative writing workshops throughout New York State and elsewhere; and received a number of grants, awards, and residencies, activities that she continues to pursue. She enjoyed particular success in and appreciation from lesbian and feminist readers, her chosen community or “home.” But, after the publication of
Folly,
she began to find this community too restrictive. She desired wider recognition and a more diverse range of topics; she wished to stop participating in the idealization of lesbian characters, to break the rules and cross the boundaries that are inevitably established by any close-knit literary community. Of particular importance, Brady began to explore her own history as a survivor of incest. Given these new conditions and constraints, her work after 1982 has been less prolific and less visible. She began to experience the same
repeated rejections from lesbian and feminist journals that she had endured from mainstream journals in the early 1970s. Since the publication of
Folly,
Maureen Brady has published only one volume of collected short stories,
The Question She Put to Herself (
1987), and two meditation books dealing with recovery from incest,
Daybreak
(1991) and
Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse
(1992). She has completed a new novel,
Rocking Bone Hollow,
and is currently at work on another.

For Maureen Brady, like many feminist and lesbian authors, writing has been a way of working through issues of personal and political importance.
Give Me Your Good Ear,
a Finely etched story of one woman's coming to terms with her family history of violence and abuse and her present sexual and emotional choices, was Brady's “coming out” as a lesbian.
Folly,
in which coming out functions as an important theme and plot device, was for her most significantly a coming to terms with her internal class conflict and the movement's lack of attention to working-class women and history. When she began writing the first chapter in 1976, she thought she was writing about women who were strangers to her. In order to assuage doubts and fears that she would be accused of appropriating other women's experiences, she “would lie down, go half to sleep, then listen very hard for voices that were speaking far away.”
²
These voices reminded Brady of her own working-class heritage, which had been pushed into the background by her mother's upward mobility, her own college education, and the movement's inattention to working-class women. She writes of her ambivalence about making the journey necessary to reach these voices: “Because surely we are not meant to make literature that takes its strength from the steely knowledge of our oppression. We are meant to identify with whatever access, gains, privileges we have been born into or acquired and put these to work for the further exaltation of homogenized middle-class America.”
³
Fortunately, Brady made that journey, and Folly, Martha, Mabel, and Lenore were born.

Although
Folly
is not strictly autobiographical, it makes abundant use of material from Brady's past. As a hospital worker, she had been involved in labor organizing, and she also drew on stories told her by her factory-working spinster aunt. The character of Lenore, she writes, was based on the butcher at the A&P on whom she had a childhood crush. She chose to set the novel in the South because of her own adolescent experience of southern racism and because of the importance of North Carolina in the history of labor struggles. At one point she tried to relocate the labor struggle in a northern hospital, but the characters insisted on
staying in Victory. These specific details are not as important, however, as her overall project, “a process of remembering for me, of finding and attaching my parts.”
⁴
The following discussion will investigate how the novel puts those parts together into one creative whole.

II

Although Maureen Brady attempted to shift the location of the events represented in
Folly,
her original instincts were absolutely correct. Few other locales carry the same resonance in the history of twentieth-century women's labor struggles as the textile mills of the South.
⁵
In the 1880s, the textile industry began to shift from the mill towns of New England to new ones in the Piedmont region of southern Virginia and the Carolinas, as well as northern Georgia and Alabama. The agricultural self-sufficiency of the Piedmont, a land of small yeoman farmers rather than large slave holding plantations, was severely disrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath. The cheap labor force produced by this disruption combined with a growing rail infrastructure and existing close-knit communities made this region perfect for the development of a new economic order based in the mill town. By 1900, almost 200 mills had been constructed, 90 percent of them in the Piedmont.

Textile mills employed “a system of job assignments based on hierarchies of sex and age” as well as race.
⁶
From the beginning, white women were welcomed eagerly into the new mills as spinners and seamstresses, while African-American men were restricted to the hard, dirty, non-production jobs. African-American women were kept out of the factories altogether. Not only did these hierarchies maintain social customs rooted in racism and the patriarchal family, but they maximized profits. Adult women's wages were 60 percent of those of men; wages of children and African-American men were even lower.

As southern textile mills quickly became the only real employment alternative to farming, workers poured in from around the Piedmont and the wider Appalachian region. New towns grew up around the mills, totally dependent upon them for their economic and social existence. We see in
Folly,
for example, the trailer courts built next to the mill, a contemporary version of the factory housing typical of these towns. Sabrina mentions how bad business is while the women are on strike, and how it picks up again as soon as they go back to work. Generation followed generation into the mills, much as Mary Lou expects to join her mother after high school graduation. In these one-industry towns, workers yielded little power to affect conditions on or off the job. Nevertheless, the textile mills of the Piedmont became the center of a labor movement
that has taken an almost mythic place in the history of working-class struggles.

Labor organizing in the South began in the 1880s with African-American female domestic workers who were first to form associations and call strikes. In the same decade the Knights of Labor organized locals, often across race and gender lines, and even led a three-month strike in a Georgia mill town. Later, the far more racist and sexist National Union of Textile Workers led a brief insurgency that ended by 1902. Many factors militated against labor: the paternalistic control of mill towns by mill owners, the isolation of workers from the larger population, competition from a large potential work force, and government support of antiunion activities and attitudes. Faced with these conditions, workers were more likely to express their discontent by moving than by organizing unions.

World War I marked a turning point in the history of the southern textile industry. Labor shortages led to rising wages and rising expectations. After the war, however, technological changes and the loss of wartime wage gains led to a serious deterioration in working conditions, so that the 1920s was a decade of suffering and dissatisfaction in the southern mill towns. In 1929 workers responded with a spontaneous wave of strikes, the most famous of which was against the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. Although not the largest, longest, nor bloodiest, the Gastonia strike achieved particular notoriety because of the shooting deaths of the local police chief and of Ella May Wiggins, a celebrated union organizer and balladeer who took a prominent place in the pantheon of martyrs to the cause of labor.

The strikes of 1929 did not lead to ongoing unionization nor improvement in working conditions, although union activities continued throughout the turbulent years of the 1930s and 1940s. But strike defeats, declining membership, and anti-labor legislation (the so-called right-to-work laws) made organizing increasingly difficult throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Southern women workers in particular have had a low level of sustained union participation. In part this is due to labor surplus (as we see in
Folly
where the mill owner has no trouble hiring scabs such as Lenore's mother). But the most serious obstacle to unionization in the South has always been racism: “Unity among southern workers could never be achieved as long as black and white women remained segregated both on the job and in the labor movement.”
⁷
In fact, instead of unifying as labor against management, white workers sometimes went on strike over the hiring of African-American workers. Union locals remained segregated until 1965. Despite these problems, white women workers did
conduct a famous strike against J.P. Stevens in 1958. But more recently, leadership has most often come from African-American women trained in the civil rights movement and in their churches. Since 1965, as Mary Frederickson points out, “In garment factories across the South the relationship between black and white women workers has become a critical factor in whether union elections are won or lost.”
⁸
In this respect, as in so many others, Maureen Brady has produced a remarkably accurate picture of the southern textile mill environment.

III

Folly
is a complex novel that can be read fruitfully within a number of literary traditions. To begin, it owes much to the history of the labor novel and leftist progressive fiction in general. Although that history is a proud one, it has not been sustained in American culture, not even in the contemporary feminist movement. Women writers have been central to that history even though their achievements were often denigrated by their male colleagues and overlooked by contemporary readers and critics. Deborah Rosenfelt defines this tradition as “a line of women writers, associated with the American left, who unite a class consciousness and a feminist consciousness in their lives and creative work, who are concerned with the material circumstances of people's lives, who articulate the experiences and grievances of women and of other oppressed groups—workers, national minorities, the colonized and the exploited—and who speak out of a defining commitment to social change.”
⁹
Within this line of politically inspired women writers—among them Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Glaspell, Anzia Yezierska, Meridel Le Sueur, Tess Slesinger, Josephine Herbst, Agnes Smedley, Ann Petry, and Tillie Olsen earlier in the century, and later Marge Piercy, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker—Maureen Brady takes her place.