Invisible Women, Blind Men : Barbara Tuchman Was Seen Where It Counted

“If a man is a writer,” Barbara Tuchman once said, “everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you’re an ordinary female housewife, people say, ‘This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it’s not professional.’ ”

When she died Monday, Barbara W. Tuchman had won two Pulitzer Prizes and had, at the age of 77, yet another book, “The First Salute” on the best-seller lists. But Tuchman was still very much a part of the locked-door theory of education and knowledge. She didn’t have a Ph.D. She had used that time slot in her early life to marry a nice man and produce three children. By this harmless (some might even say productive) activity, she had rendered herself invisible to the history Establishment. She worked steadily, did reams of research, wrote marvelously readable books, but the more she did, the more “they,” the guys inside the ivy-covered walls, couldn’t/wouldn’t see her. . . .

Well, it’s nothing new. In 1928, beside herself with exasperation, Virginia Woolf lectured about the locked doors of the university system. She conjured up the fictional university of “Oxbridge,” where women might hang around on the margins of things but still might not take a degree. She railed at male academics who thought they had it nailed; who thought they controlled the knowledge, the culture, of the time. So furious was she that she fell back on the time-honored female occupation of making fun of how those scholars looked: “. . . Others, though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium.”

Virginia Woolf went on to be a very famous novelist whose books are still in print, while few of those on the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge from that time (which remember, in those days, she was not allowed to attend), are remembered by anyone at all.

More recently, a lowly British journalist named Brenda Maddox visited the preeminent James Joyce scholar, Richard Ellmann, in his Oxford digs, respectfully asking if he thought there might be material for a book on Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s wife. Ellmann said no, Nora wasn’t important, and besides, he was a Ph.D. and he’d already done a book. But Maddox went on, wrote her book (which won a passel of prizes) and incidentally uncovered a raft of Joyce letters that the great scholar had suppressed.

Whew! Lucky for everybody that Brenda Maddox was locked out, not the owner of a Ph.D., to all intents and purposes invisible. Otherwise, somebody might have gotten embarrassed. Just as, when Barbara Tuchman wrote “March of Folly,” taking as her subject the “wooden-headed” errors committed by men in leadership positions, all the way down through history from Troy to Vietnam, some men in current power might have taken offense (or God forbid!) even changed their ways, except that Tuchman was locked out, degreeless, still invisible, even with both her Pulitzer Prizes, her secure niche on the best-seller list.

None of this, by the way, is about men and women. It is about systems of “Us” and “Them.” When I was a first-grader at St. Dominic’s Elementary School, the nuns taught us that the whole world was divided into Catholics and non-Catholics. (That system, so convenient in the first grade, ceased to apply when our age hit double digits.) Armenians, historically beset upon from all sides, have evolved a system of Armenians (“Us”) and “Odars” (everybody else). In public America, the system has narrowed down and narrowed down; our world has become a place of momentous conflict between Some Guys. For the working classes, it’s the Rams and Raiders crashing into each other on Sunday afternoons, with multiple injuries, and winners and losers. (And “invisible” ladies: cheerleading if they’re young, making Super Bowl buffets if they’ve already borne children.) For intellectuals, our world is pretty much described and defined to us by White Guys, usually from the American East. Some of them own toupees; some have earned Ph.D.s. They’re very nice, by and large, until somebody tries to open their doors, get inside their system. Then they get a little peevish. (Who can blame them?)

But outside these systems, this grid of knowledge-as-football--of leadership as Super Bowl contest between “Us” and some “Evil Empire,” all that sort of thing--”invisible” people keep doing their own work and redefining the universe in ways that the system can’t see. Maybe--listen to this!--maybe Barbara Tuchman wasn’t invisible; maybe her fellow historians locked inside their university walls were blind as bats, dopey as crayfish heaving with difficulty across the sands of the cosmic aquarium, totally impervious to and unaware of the lovely, delicate Tuchman fish swimming in circles above all those crabby scholars.

More and more “invisible” people keep coming into view these days. A whole Latino exhibit, for instance, down at the County Museum. Frank Romero, a Chicano Guy who’s been drawing pictures of cars all his life, suddenly gets his cars inside, pinned up on Establishment walls. Gilbert Lujan hauls an honest-to-God real Chevy inside those hitherto almost always locked doors, and suddenly this Chevy is visible, even though Romero and Lujan didn’t exactly make it by the academic route. . . .

Partly, all this is written in bad faith, by a genuine Ph.D. who believed in the system and has an unreadable 535-page doctoral dissertation to prove it. But when I was in graduate school at UCLA in the ‘60s, a lot of bright Bruins and Trojans thought that they were going to change the world. Out there on the margin, making canapes and giving parties to further their husbands’ promotions--in between having a total of seven children--two invisible faculty wives, having, as Tuchman once described her own condition, “no status whatsoever,” wrote their first and second and third novels. Today, Diane Johnson is a MacArthur Prize winner; Alison Lurie has her Pulitzer.

I guess the message is this: Wake up, Boys! Unlock those doors! Let’s have a conversation or a dance instead of the same old intellectual football game. There’s a bigger world out there than you know, something beyond your Establishment credentials.

It could be said that Barbara Tuchman missed out by never being quite accepted by the history Establishment. But other voices from the invisible world are whispering, shouting, calling out: It’s the Establishment who missed out in not quite having accepted Barbara Tuchman.