New Voices Heard : Martin Raises Consciousness as Editor of Heath Anthology

One day in 1985, UCLA professor Wendy Martin looked up from the podium of her women’s fiction class and realized that she was lecturing about Edith Wharton and Emily Dickinson to a class filled with young Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Latinas.

“I was teaching the white woman’s canon, but . . . these were not their stories,” said Martin, who now chairs the English Department at Claremont Graduate School.

Her curiosity piqued, Martin asked the students what they were reading outside class. She made notes on the names--Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Maxine Hong Kingston--and read up on those she did not know.

From her research came “We are the Stories We Tell,” an anthology of post-1945 women’s fiction that she edited and was published last year. The stories cross ethnic and racial lines and reveal the hidden aspects of women’s lives and struggles with such issues as rape, abortion, poverty, lesbianism and motherhood.

For Martin, 51, the book was a culmination of her own ongoing quest to redefine the role of women in society.

“Wendy Martin’s voice was one of the strongest and earliest and most articulate in . . . encouraging the study of literature with a multicultural context,” said Don McQuade, an English professor at UC Berkeley who is dean of undergraduate and interdisciplinary studies. “She was out there doing this long before it became fashionable.”

Martin is “one of the founders of feminist criticism and she’s always been very sensitive to hearing the voices that have been previously excluded,” said Catharine Stimpson, dean of graduate studies at Rutgers University and a past president of the Modern Language Assn., an organization of university professors who teach English and foreign languages.

Martin was one of 12 editors who put together the Heath Anthology of American Literature, a groundbreaking and controversial collection published in 1990. The anthology recasts American letters by including the writings of black slaves, female abolitionists and Chicano poets as well as American Indian creation myths and more traditional writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

The Heath sets a literary standard “to which all others will have to respond,” said Cecelia Tichi, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and an editor of a competing anthology called Collins American Literature.

Martin, who spent seven years on the collection, edited the sections on the Puritans, early American explorers and 17th- and 18th-Century authors. She included an entry by Mary Rowlandson (1636-1678), a settler who was captured and lived for awhile among Indians.

Another find was Judith Sargent Murray (1757-1820), who wrote eloquently about equality between the sexes and the education of women and children.

The Heath has been vilified as well as hailed for its multicultural approach to literature.

The mammoth work--two volumes, 5,550 pages--has heated up a long-simmering controversy over whether students should be taught classic, Eurocentric literature or a canon that includes lesser-known men and women of varying ethnic and cultural backgrounds that more accurately reflect the makeup of America.

Critics complain that the Heath tosses out towering giants of literature, replacing them with lesser writers who are included only because they are women or minorities. They argue that anthologies should retain the best and most classic writers, regardless of race or sex.

Martin voices exasperation with the critics. “Everyone seems to think we’re throwing civilization out the window and we’re not; we’ve just left out all the junk that had been kept out of habit, like (most of) Longfellow, who wasn’t nearly as good as some of the African-American authors,” Martin said.

As a Heath editor, Martin sifted through mountains of papers, letters, diaries, speeches, treatises, poems and short stories, many of which had been ignored or were unknown.

Martin was among the first women scholars to write about feminist criticism. What Betty Friedan was to the women’s movement, Martin was to feminist criticism, colleagues said.

In 1972, while teaching at Queens College, City University in New York, Martin founded the seminal journal “Women’s Studies.” That same year she published “The American Sisterhood,” which traces feminist writings from colonial times to the present.

The Claremont academic traces her feminist epiphany to a 1971 New York conference on women. The movement was just coalescing, and after hearing Gloria Steinem and Friedan, she began seeing literature and American culture through a feminist lens. Martin said her subsequent interest in multicultural writers grew naturally out of her interest in disenfranchised women.

A second realization came when a college friend showed her a world map he had bought in the Soviet Union. Martin found no familiar guideposts. It took her a few moments to realize that the Soviets had placed the Soviet Union squarely in the middle and that she was used to seeing the United States take center stage.

“What you’re taught in school reflects the politics of the people around you,” Martin said, and that is why she thinks most students until recently grew up reading mainly dead, white, male authors.

Conversely, Martin believes that the surge of academic interest in women’s studies and multicultural issues has happened because the students of the 1960s are entrenched in academia and questioned traditional canons.

Certainly, that is the case with Martin. She also epitomizes today’s hectic lifestyle with a commuter marriage, dividing her time between her job at Claremont and her home in Berkeley, where her husband designs computers and her 10-year-old daughter attends school.

Martin says somewhat resignedly that her daughter has never known her when she was not commuting. Martin has come to terms with the arrangement, saying that it gives her time to pursue her research.

Besides, there is much more that needs to be done, she said. “We need to make sure that we don’t just represent the history and literature of the conquerors but those in the margin as well. We’re looking at (American literature) as a patchwork or a quilt.”