FRIEDMAN, Susan Stanford 1943-

PERSONAL: Born May 3, 1943, in Bluefield, WV; daughter of Ralph B. (in business) and Anne (Thompson) Stanford; married Edward Friedman (a professor), 1969; children: Ruth Jennifer, JoAnna Stanford. Education: Swarthmore College, B.A., 1965; University of Wisconsin, Madison, Ph.D., 1973. Politics: "Feminist."

ADDRESSES: Home—2326 Rugby Row, Madison, WI 53705. Offıce—Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Helen C. White Hall, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY, assistant professor of literature, 1973-76; University of Wisconsin, Madison, assistant professor, 1976-81, associate professor of English and women's studies, beginning 1981, currently Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies. Public speaker on feminist issues.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, National Women's Studies Association, Women's Caucus of the Modern Languages, National Organization for Women.

AWARDS, HONORS: Florence Howe Award from Women's Caucus of Modern Language Association, 1978, for article "Psyche Reborn: Tradition, Re-Vision, and the Goddess As Mother-Symbol in H. D.'s Poetry"; American Council of Learned Societies grant, 1978; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1981-82; Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. was named one of the best academic books of the year by Choice, 1981; Fund for Psychoanalytic Research grant, 1983.

WRITINGS:

(With Linda Gams, Nancy Gottlieb, and Cindy Nesselson) A Woman's Guide to Therapy, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1978.

Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D., Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1981.

(With Rachel Blau DuPlessis) Signets: Reading H.D., University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1990.

Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.'s Fiction, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor) Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1993.

Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies ofEncounter, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998.

(Editor) Analyzing Freud: Letters of H. D., Bryher, and Their Circle, New Directions (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to literature and women's studies journals.

SIDELIGHTS: Susan Stanford Friedman is one of the pioneers of the women's studies program as now taught at many colleges and universities worldwide. The Women's Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Friedman teaches, is a model of such programs, as it works through interdisciplinary studies rather than through an autonomous department of its own. Hence, though she is known for her writings on feminism and gender issues, Friedman is also a professor of English who has published several books on the twentieth-century poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her contributions to literature and ideas. Friedman told the Wisconsin State Journal that she wants to train students "to take a women's studies perspective to their chosen fields, to become a feminist social worker or a feminist psychologist or a feminist journalist." She added: "There is a distinction between feminist inquiry and studying about women. Women's studies believes that all knowledge comes from a standpoint, so we're going to be upfront about ours."

In a New York Times Book Review piece on Analyzing Freud: Letters of H. D., Bryher, and Their Circle, Robert Gottlieb wrote: "The letters reveal two complicated, appealing, highly intelligent women; give us a sense of Vienna at a time of great political upheaval and danger; and present Freud in close-up, as observed by the awed yet canny H. D." Gottlieb praised Friedman as "an excellent editor—scrupulous and thorough."

Friedman once told CA: "Personal and professional associations intersect with my own desire for the words that can capture a reality, an idea. Writing, as a focus of my intellectual life, is an end in itself, as it must be to sustain the exhausting labor of birthing a book, whose significance to me is necessarily greater than it can be to anyone else. But my writing is also caught up in the moment of history to which I was born. I owe the dimensions of my work and its plea for audience most fundamentally to feminism. The urgency I feel to write, read, and teach is tied to my sense of my work as a small portion of a larger task: the re-vision and transformation of culture."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

American Literature, December, 1992, Robert O'Brien Hokanson, review of Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.'s Fiction, p. 839.

Journal of Modern Literature, spring, 1993, Robert Spoo, review of Penelope's Web, p. 176.

Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 1992, Michael J. Hoffman, review of Penelope's Web, p. 470; winter, 1994, Suzette Henke, review of Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, p. 894.

New York Times Book Review, December 22, 2002, Robert Gottlieb, "Analyze That," p. 13.

Wisconsin State Journal, May 6, 2000, "Providing Another Perspective," p. 1A.*