ABSTRACT
Here, the question (once again) is: Who is “we”? The persons named and pictured throughout Gornick’s article provide an implicit answer. Beginning with the cover photograph and continuing on through the collage reproductions of women’s movement figures and scenes, the “we” (the point of view
from and to which the essay speaks) seem to be white, college-educated, socially prominent women.3 Scanning the pictures, one sees no apparent black or brown faces; the names invoked repeat the pattern set by the pictures. In a concluding series of anecdotes designed to illustrate the degree to which feminist efforts have brought about social change, we are told of two women whose consciousnesses have been raised to such a point that when one complains of being late for work because “her husband had failed to do the laundry last night” and “she had to go digging for clean underwear” (Gornick 1990:53), the other nods sympathetically and approvingly. This incident, Gornick implies (the fact that two “ordinary” women take for granted the idea that laundry is also men’s work) demonstrates the degree to which “we” have indeed “made a revolution.”
