Janeway, Elizabeth Ames

(b. 7 October 1913 in New York City; d. 15 January 2005 in Rye, New York), novelist, literary critic, social historian, and feminist whose groundbreaking book Man’s World, Women’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology explored the themes of gender, myth, and power, giving voice to the emerging women’s movement.

Janeway, the younger daughter of Jeanette F. Searle Hall, a homemaker, and Charles H. Hall, a naval architect, described her neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, as complacent and respectable. After graduating from Shore Road Academy, she attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1930 to 1931. The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression wiped out her family’s savings. Forced to drop out of college, she worked two jobs, handling orders for the Book of the Month Club and writing advertising copy for Abraham & Straus, a department store. One of her lines read, “Get these divine $3.98 dresses with a touch of Paris about them.”

Writing was a top priority for Janeway. She enrolled in Barnard College in New York City, earning a BA in 1935. Encouraged by winning a writing competition, she began her first novel, The Walsh Girls. In 1938 she married the economist, writer, and presidential economic adviser Eliot Janeway, who, she said, was “the most intelligent man I ever met.” Their first son was born in 1940. In 1943 she finished The Walsh Girls, signing her book contract on the way to the hospital to deliver their second son. The book became a best seller. Her 1945 novel, Daisy Kenyon, another best seller, was made into a film starring Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda. Both books earned her praise for their psychological insights, with critics calling her a modern Jane Austen. Many thought her 1949 novel, The Question of Gregory, mirrored the troubled life of an acquaintance, James Forrestal, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Defense, who had committed suicide. Janeway told a reporter she had finished her book before Forrestal’s mental collapse, adding the book’s larger theme was “liberals in trouble, because so many of them were so darned immature. They are well meaning people afraid to take action.”

A Communist in the 1930s, Janeway later described her politics as “disturbed,” yet her friends and acquaintances included U.S. presidents, Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, labor leaders, and journalists. Known for her sense of humor, she was often quite shy but eloquent. Described as “frighteningly smart,” she was not afraid to take action or express beliefs. During the 1940s, as some Americans argued for an isolationist policy that focused attention on problems in America, she spoke out about the value of international relationships. At the behest of the labor leader Walter Reuther, she served as secretary to the national committee that helped autoworkers during a postwar strike. By the 1950s Janeway was writing essays on literary, political, and social trends, including several articles about her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady.

As a book reviewer for the New York Times and other publications, Janeway praised explicitly sexual books such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. She told her friend the U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas that he might enjoy Jong’s novel, “though it might shake up Justice Potter Stewart a bit.” Janeway served as president of the Authors Guild from 1965 to 1969 and on the executive board of the PEN American Center (for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists). Working tirelessly to defend her peers against censorship, she became a well-known advocate of free speech. Not intimidated by Washington power brokers, she often addressed legislators about copyright protection and other literary issues. “It’s lovely to get invited to a White House dinner,” she said, “but as a practical matter, our older writers would rather know that they could receive royalties from early works that are still selling.”

In the 1970s she learned Russian and visited the Soviet Union with the writers John Cheever and Ralph Ellison. She said, “I have a problem about being nearly sixty. I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I’m thirty-one.” In 1971 Janeway published her groundbreaking feminist book, Man’s World, Women’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology, recognized as a landmark in the literature of the women’s movement and making her a respected voice for the emerging movement. She worked alongside other feminist writers, such as Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Gloria Steinem, and was a director of the legal and education fund for the National Organization for Women. A strong supporter of abortion rights, Janeway publicly added her name to a full-page advertisement acknowledging that she had once had an abortion.

In speaking about the women’s movement, she said that “the breakthrough is here and will continue.” She characterized feminism as a “major response to enormous changes in the human environment and the context of life” and went on to say that in her work she was “exploring the interactions that are shifting our perceptions of gender roles and, indeed, of the entire political process through which our world is managed.” In 1974 her book Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening came out, followed by Powers of the Weak (1980). Cross Sections from a Decade of Change (1982) brought together a group of her reviews, essays, and speeches from the previous ten years. Included were two particularly significant pieces: one on women’s literature written for the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing and the other an article on the history of the women’s movement. Improper Behavior: When and How Misconduct Can Be Healthy for Society was published in 1987.

In 1983, at age seventy, she spoke to 400 delegates at a New York State conference focusing on the concerns of older women, urging them to get involved in political action at every level. “We’ve been brought up to be private and leave the world outside the home to men. Instead, older women should lobby, argue, demonstrate, form political alliances and register new voters.” Throughout her lifetime, Janeway received many literary and scholarly awards. She judged the National Book Award in 1955 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. In 1979 she received the Distinguished Alumna Award from Barnard College, where she been a member of the board of trustees since 1970. She was a visiting professor at Yale and the University of California, Los Angeles. Writers for the television series Stars Trek: Voyager named the lead female character “Kathryn Janeway” after her. Janeway, an influential social critic, feminist, free-speech advocate, internationalist, writer, wife, and mother, died at age ninety-one from a series of strokes.

Janeway’s reminiscences about her childhood are in Cross Sections from a Decade of Change (1982). Obituaries are in the New York Times (16 Jan. 2005), Washington Post (18 Jan. 2005), and Guardian (20 Jan. 2005). The Library of Congress holds a collection of the papers of Eliot and Elizabeth Janeway.

Julianne Cicarelli