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Chapter 18. Good Will Toward Men: Carol Iannone
Professor; the politics of feminist scholarship
Carol is one of the twenty-two women interviewed in the 1994 book Good Will Toward Men.
Carol Iannone, Ph.D., is a professor of literature and writing at New York University’s Gallatin Division. She is a vice-president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), an organization formed to combat the politicization of higher education, a phenomenon now commonly known as political correctness. She is a consulting editor of Academic Questions, the journal of NAS, and has written for Commentary and other periodicals.
(This info is from 1994, when the book was published.)
Jack: You were once a feminist. What caused your disenchantment with feminism?
Carol: I taught feminism and literature as a teaching assistant at the university level. I started being skeptical after being interviewed for a teaching job by a couple of feminists. Then I did my dissertation on feminism, and through the process of doing my dissertation, I came to feel that feminism was really a very limited, and in many instances, totally false, ideology.
Can you tell me about the interview that made you skeptical?
In the mid-1970s, I interviewed at a university in upstate New York for a job teaching three courses, only one of which was concerned with feminism. Before being interviewed by the chairman of the department, I was interviewed by the department’s two very radical feminists. They picked me up at the train station and took me to a Howard Johnson’s to talk. Since only one of the courses was going to be on feminism, why send two feminists to interview me, outside the school, by themselves? These two women were very, very harsh on me, especially one of them, and I could feel that there was no way to please them except by being a radical, committed, ideological feminist.
At that time I had the liberal idea that there was a liberal way to be a feminist. You didn’t have to be radical; you didn’t have to be a zealot; you could have a general feminist outlook and you could look at literature in a generous way, using some feminist ideas: what were the women characters doing? what was the importance of women? what was the…
