As Ann Snitow closed a speech or lecture, she would clap her hands together and say, “Avanti!” Italian for “forward,” Ann’s sign off was a call to push on, to be resilient and fearless in confronting patriarchy and sexism. It was also a reminder that political struggle, no matter how arduous, can also be fun. Her passing this weekend marks the end of a lifetime working to make the world a more just and equitable place.
I met Ann as an MA student at the New School for Social Research. She was organizing a large conference to celebrate the rebirth of gender studies at the university, entitled “No Longer in Exile: The Legacy and Future of Gender Studies at the New School.” The conference capped a tumultuous decade of controversies about the identity and diversity at the self-styled progressive institution. The original gender studies program was disbanded after student protests and hunger strikes over the administration’s refusal to hire M. Jacqui Alexander permanently. By serving as the reinstated program’s first chair, Ann had the chance to turn the page on that painful history. She decided to throw a party.
Ann brought together a veritable who’s who of Big Names in feminism and queer studies for a weekend in March 2010. Rather than cordone undergraduate and graduate students into their own panel presentations, Ann insisted that students present alongside faculty. Each panel included contributions from established scholars as well as original research conducted by New School students. Anthropology PhD Randi Irwin and I researched the New School’s (paltry) maternity leave policy. We interviewed faculty and staff about their experiences with parental leave, and we presented our findings in a panel on body politics; Jack Halberstam was a co-panelist. By providing a space for ruminating over the state of gender studies at both the university- and national-level, the conference was a massive success.
As any of her students will attest, Ann was a dedicated and passionate teacher. She convened a university lecture course called “Feminist Thought and Action,” which many NSSR students like myself were lucky to TA. Ann recognized that the university leaned heavily on (while not adequately compensating) its graduate student teaching assistants. As such, she took us to breakfast every week to discuss the course and, more often, to commiserate about the state of the world. The course changed each time she taught it, reflecting the interests of the TAs she selected for that term. At the time I taught with her, I was thinking through rightwing feminism typified by Sarah Palin’s “mama grizzly” campaign in the 2010 midterms. Though Ann was fundamentally opposed to Palin’s retrograde mommy politics, she included a unit in the course on rightwing women. Ann’s approach to teaching allowed everyone a seat at the table, not because everyone was right, but because everyone deserved to be heard.
She took her vision of inclusive pedagogy on the road, teaching alongside and organizing women in Eastern Europe. She was a founding member of the Network of East-West Women, a resource network for promoting women’s rights in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. As an organizer, Ann was unmatched in her ability to bring activists together and her excitement for doing so. Ann was also active in the New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute, held in Johannesburg, South Africa and Wroclaw, Poland. In the summer of 2011, Ann’s course at the Wroclaw institute addressed gender in times of crisis. “Gender itself is often currently figured as in crisis,” Ann wrote in the syllabus, “with some concerned about a collapse of male and female identity and of the family, while others eagerly and urgently foster that collapse of gender categories.” The gender trouble Ann identified in contemporary politics seems to have fully materialized in our present moment.
I am most indebted to Ann for her service on my dissertation committee. Though literature was her intellectual home, her wide-ranging interests in the politics of gender made her a great fit for my project on family discourse in recent American liberalism. Ann read everything I sent her, including the very bad chapter drafts and incomplete outlines. She made detailed recommendations about substance and style. At my defense, Ann was the last around the table to speak. She interrogated my first chapters dealing with family discourse in the Reagan era. In her supportive-yet-incisive way, she raised concerns that I had not been critical enough in my appraisal. “There are a lot of bodies buried here,” she said, by which she meant that I had not fully attended to the destruction wrought by family discourse during the period. Knowing her long history carrying the banner for women’s liberation, I knew that this criticism came from an honest place. I felt I had let my teacher and friend down. In retrospect I recognize that her comments were part of her political project, as she sought to give voice to those rendered voiceless in the pursuit of justice.
Ann leaves behind a reinvigorated feminist movement that is indebted to her hard work. She was never concerned about the future of the movement, though. “People always say to me, ‘Oh, the young—they’re not going to be doing it!” she told The Nation. “I don’t worry that way at all. You can’t put it back.” For her, feminism was always about the future. In her honor, we continue to push forward. Avanti!
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