GORNICK, Vivian

Born 14 June 1935, Brooklyn, New York

Daughter of Bess and Louis Gornick; married (divorced)

Vivian Gornick earned a B.A. from the City College of the City University of New York in 1957 and an M.S. from New York University in 1960. Like many of her female writing colleagues, she began her career as a teacher, as an instructor in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1966-67), then at Hunter College of the City University of New York (1967-68). Periodically throughout her career she has had one-year guest teaching appointments, such as one at Yale University, where she taught literature from a feminist perspective. Her writing career began with a position as staff writer for the Village Voice in New York City from 1969 to 1977; since then she has worked freelance. She is a member of P.E.N. and the Authors Guild.

Gornick's first book, Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (1971), was coedited with Barbara K. Moran. She collaborated on the introduction and contributed the article "Woman As Outsider," which became one of the two most widely read books from the early years of feminism's "second wave" (beginning in the 1960s and, in some ways, still continuing). Along with the Sisterhood is Powerful anthology, edited by Robin Morgan, Women in Sexist Society formed a framework from which early women's studies courses were launched.

Gornick and Moran's book included such famous essays as "Psychology Constructs the Female" by Naomi Weisstein, "The Paradox of the Happy Marriage," by Jessie Bernard, and "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" by Linda Nochlin. Gornick's feminism has continued to fuel her writing. She had an essay in the first regular (July 1972) issue of Ms. and continued to write for it. She was a regular contributor to the Nation and the New York Times Magazine, where her "Who Says We Haven't Made a Revolution?" (about the feminist movement) was the cover story on 15 April 1990. Other venues for her critical or analytical pieces have been the American Scholar, Utne Reader, and the New York Times Book Review.

Gornick is the author of seven other books. In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt (1973) resulted from a sojourn in Egypt, where Gornick lived with the family of a close Arab friend of hers. The book, according to reviewer Sara Blackburn in Ms., is about a society "in which family relationships and personal friendships take precedence over the acquisition of material goods, success, and the abundance of leisure activities that some other cultures find so appealing." Gornick observes and describes the sexism "that locks Egyptian women into a definition of themselves only in relation to their male counterparts." Yet, as an outsider, Gornick's chief interest during the Egyptian visit was the male society where she, as an American journalist, "could be and was…eagerly accepted."

In The Romance of American Communism (1977), Gornick reported on a year of interviewing Americans who had been involved with American Communism, either as "card-carrying members," "fellow-travelers," sympathizers, or simply interested observers. Gornick's interest in the subject came from the fact that her parents had been sympathizers and that she herself had been a member of the Labor Youth League, and from her sudden realization in the mid-1970s that the subject fascinated her. "I wanted to show how human they [her interviewees] were and how varied their experiences had been," Gornick said. "The great thing about them all was their tremendous vitality. They were people who cared very deeply about living and about living serious lives." It wasn't until the 1980s that the subject of the dearth of women in the scientific professions moved to the front consciousness of feminists and others concerned with the exclusion of talent from sex-biased workplaces. Gornick stepped in with a significant book, Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition (1983). Drawing on both careful research and interviews with 100 women of all ages who have pursued or are trying to pursue scientific careers in a variety of disciplines, Gornick produced a book that Ruth Schwartz Cowan in the Quarterly Review of Biology said was "not a sociological study of women scientists, in the sense that the sample is not random, and the questionnaire not standardized.…Yet it is sensitive, insightful, stimulating, and thought-provoking.…"

Women in Science is full of sobering statistics on the low percentages of women earning science degrees at all academic levels, on the high unemployment rate of those same women, and on the inequity in promotion and tenure for women in science. Because of these statistics and the stories of the women themselves, Cowan recommended that the book be assigned to students to read, because it is "career counseling of the most salient sort: reminding us that there are living, breathing, painful, joyous lives [of women in science]…and that recently some of those lives have started…beating time to a new tune."

Since 1983 Gornick has published Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987), Approaching Eye Level (1996), from which her essay on fearing loneliness was published in Utne Reader, and The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a series of critical essays on novelists (Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, George Meredith, Raymond Carver, Jane Smiley, and others) that aim to prove Gornick's thesis that romantic love can no longer be "the center of a novel," that today, "love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery."

As the range of her publication indicates, Gornick is proof again that those who want to be writers, if they pursue it with discipline and without distraction, can succeed. By her own testimony, she was not immune to the distraction and lack of focus that so many women writers testify to, but she apparently had two means of salvation: first, she did not have the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood that seem to frequently hobble women's career pursuits, and second, she was and is "passionate about ideas."

In an interview in Publisher's Weekly she said her Yiddish teacher told her: "Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything." "The explosion of an idea inside you, that sudden consciousness, is everything," she continued. In addition, she apparently found her life's passion in feminism, which, in turn, helped to fuel the ideas which have driven her writing commitments.

Other Works:

Essays in Feminism (1978). Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory, revision of the 1983 book, with a new title (1990). Fierce Attachments (1988, reprinted 1997).

Bibliography:

American Literary History (Spring 1998). American Scholar (Winter 1999). Atlantic (June 1979). CA 101 (1981). Commonweal (23 Apr. 1982, 13 Feb. 1998). Ms. (July 1979, Apr. 1982, Oct. 1983, June 1987). Nation (23 Sept. 1978, 18 Nov. 1978, 6 Nov. 1995, 21 Oct. 1996, 22 Sept. 1997, 26 Jan. 1998). NYTBR (16 Jan. 1983, 2 Oct. 1983, 22 Nov. 1987, 16 Sept. 1990, 31 July 1994, 13 Oct. 1996). NYT Magazine (10 Jan. 1971, 14 Jan. 1973, 15 Apr. 1990, 2 Mar. 1997). New Yorker (9 Sept. 1996). Physics Today (Sept. 1984). Quarterly Review of Biology (June 1991). Utne Reader (Sept.-Oct. 1989, Nov.-Dec. 1996). Yale Review (Oct. 1998).

—JOANNE L. SCHWEIK