Chalk and a blackboard. Tokens of her trade. A young woman wearing jeans and a sweaty leotard surreptitiously adjusts her bra strap while writing PARTICIPLES in capital letters on the board.
Dear Reader, that woman was I, having rushed to class from the gym. I hastily slipped my jacket over the leotard so the male students would not stare at my flat breasts, which had never previously provoked interest. I was frazzled: my watch had stopped at the gym and I’d had to race to class.
“A participle is a verbal adjective,” I said, sweating. “Take the English verb stem and add the ending, -ing: Praising, running, smiling, rushing, falling, singing…”
They took mad notes. I gave examples. “The man speaking to the audience has a lisp. Did you see the woman dancing at the rock festival? The waitress dropped a plate of spaghetti on the smirking man who pinched her butt.”
I taught them the formation of the Latin participle and we did a worksheet together.
I loved teaching Latin at the university. So help me, that was the best job I ever had. I’m looking back, decades later, and that job made me very happy. I was a Latin T.A. in graduate school and then had a one-year position as a Visiting Lecturer, teaching first- and second-year Latin classes. I was honored when two of my best first-year students (pre-med students) asked me to teach an independent study in Virgil. We were a roving independent study group: we usually settled at a table in the Student Union, or perched on couches in a cozy room with a fireplace.
In my leisure –too much leisure that year; I had energy to teach a couple of more classes– I was peripherally involved in women’s politics. I was the Volunteer Coordinator of the state chapter of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League). This meant that I “manned’ a trestle table in a university building, or scheduled other volunteers to do so, and called out to passers-by, “Keep abortion safe and legal!” They stopped to sign postcards that said, I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE, which were addressed to their Congressman. The feeble anti-choice crew had a trestle table across the way, but attracted few students in those days.
I was startled and depressed in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Well, weren’t we all? We had worked hard against that very contingency, but I never believed it would happen in my lifetime.
That year, I also volunteered at a women’s bookstore, which, I believe, was unimaginatively called The Women’s Bookstore. Hardly anyone came in, except one of my former professors, a brilliant, eccentric man who loved science fiction and recommended C. L. Moore, Vonda McIntyre, and Joanna Russ.
But the store was usually dead. One can only perch on a stool in a bookstore so long without going mad. What was the point of a women’s bookstore that sold books neither to women nor men? We were a group of white women who read widely and intended to sell copies of Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tillie Olsen and Zora Neale Hurston to our non-existent customers. I resigned out of boredom.
The only radicals I knew were a generation older than I, the energetic people who founded collectives and co-ops, small presses and underground (not alternative) papers. They discussed socialism and anarchism, formed health collectives and nonprofits (notably the publisher of Our Bodies , Ourselves), and lived in collectives where they founded women’s centers, broadcast radio shows, had their own press, and formed free schools.
I have not been that kind of radical. No, we were exhausted by our elders’ radicalism. My life’s work, and my most political work, has been keeping an underground body of classical literature alive. For years I taught Latin, but more important, I read and reread the literature of the Roman civilization that has less in common with our culture than is usually asserted. But the Latin language influenced English (60% of English words are derived from Latin), the Romance languages, and other European languages. And the Western canon is founded on the small body of Greek and Latin literature which survived general disintegration, wars, library fires (the Christians burned down the famous Alexandria Library and other libraries), and other disasters.
I also love the Greek, but I feel myself to be aligned mentally with the Romans. I imagine myself a Roman matron, one who would have supported Clodia, the powerful woman jeered at by Cicero in Pro Caelio, a woman who has seen better days but soldiers on. Because everything is unstable these days, is it not?
At the British Musum, I patted a statue of Augustus on the head. No bells went off. If for nothing else, that was worth the trip to London.