Ryland wasn’t a very political place, so you took what you could get. Every once in a while a wave of protest unexpectedly lifted up. A few years into the clanking Iraq War, Zee and two sophomores were sometimes seen out on the steps of the Metzger with a megaphone and handouts. Then there was a series of protests by the very small but well-organized Black Students Association. The climate change group had become a persistently grave presence, and Zee was part of it as well. The sky was falling, they told everyone again and again, the hot and seething sky.
“You know,” said Zee, “I once made and sold T-shirts to raise money to stop animal cruelty back in Scarsdale when I was a kid. I’m thinking we could make T-shirts with Darren Tinzler’s face on them and give them away. And beneath it could be the word ‘Unwanted.’”
Money was pooled, and fifty cheap T-shirts were quickly purchased from an online closeout wholesaler, and Greer, Zee, and Chloe stayed up late in the basement of Woolley among the stored bikes and chugging laundry machines and the sluice of toilet water through overhead pipes, ironing transfers of Darren Tinzler’s face onto synthetic fabric because it was cheaper than having them printed. By four a.m. Greer’s arm was still strong as she ran the hot, pointy anvil over and over the image of Darren’s bland paleness—the baseball cap worn low, the unusually wide-set eyes. He had a stupid face, she thought, but buried in it was a brutish, cunning instinct.
Soon afterward, Chloe gave up, standing and reaching out her arms, saying, “Must. Have. Bed,” so a few hours later it was just Greer and Zee who sat yawning in the bright entrance to the dining hall, trying to get people to take their T-shirts. “Free T-shirts!” they told everyone, but in the end they gave away only five. It was a disappointment, a sad failure. Still, Greer and Zee wore theirs as often as they could, though the fabric shrank a little in the wash and Darren Tinzler’s face was stretched and slightly distorted, as if he’d put his head in a copy machine.
They were both wearing the T-shirts the night Faith Frank came to speak.
Zee had seen the announcement for the lecture in the Weekly Blast and was very excited. “I’ve always loved her,” she said to Greer. They had become friends in an accelerated way because of the night they’d spent with the T-shirts, scheming, talking, free-associating. “I know she represents this kind of outdated idea of feminism,” said Zee, “that focuses on issues that mostly affect privileged women. I totally see that. But you know what? She’s done a lot of good, and I think she’s amazing. Also, the thing about Faith Frank,” she went on, “is that while she’s this famous, iconic person, she also seems so approachable. We have to go see her, Greer. You have to talk to her, tell her what’s happened. Tell her. She’ll know what to do.”
Greer knew shamefully little about Faith Frank, though the night before the lecture she fortified herself with some intensive Googling. Looking facts up online comforted her; the world could be out of control, but still there were answers that could easily be found. Yet while Google provided timeline and context, it gave her no real sense of how a person like Faith actually became her whole self.
In the early 1970s, Greer saw, Faith Frank had been one of the founders of Bloomer magazine, named for Amelia Bloomer, the feminist and social reformer who published the first newspaper for women. Bloomer was known as the scrappier, less famous little sister to Ms. magazine. The magazine had been very good in the beginning, not as polished or sophisticated as Ms., never particularly well-designed but often filled with columns and articles that were absorbing and charged. Over the decades, readership had gone way down, and finally the magazine, once seen as a bulletin from the front, became as thin as a manual that came with a small appliance.
But Faith, who had been described as “a couple of steps down from Gloria Steinem in fame,” remained visible. In the late 1970s she began writing books for a popular audience that sold well, with their feisty, encouraging messages of empowerment. Then in 1984 she had an enormous hit with her manifesto The Female Persuasion, which essentially implored women to see that there was a great deal more to being female than padded shoulders and acting tough. Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate. They could be strong and powerful, all the while keeping their integrity and decency.
People really seemed to want to hear this message, including every woman who had gone to Wall Street and ended up miserable. Women could get out, Faith said; they could start cooperatives, or at least they could challenge the prevailing culture at their firms. And men, she added, could use some persuading to balance their long-established toughness with a new gentleness. Balance, she told them, was everything. The book had never gone out of print, though each new edition needed to be severely updated.
Because Faith was poised and articulate and effective when interviewed, she had been given her own short segment on PBS’s nighttime magazine-format TV show Recap, where she interviewed other people; sometimes she chose sexist men as her subjects, and in their vanity they seemed to have no idea of why they had been selected. They appeared on-screen, occasionally preening and making objectionable remarks, and she calmly and wittily corrected them—and sometimes just easily took them down.
But though Faith’s interviews were popular, by the mid-nineties the whole show was canceled. Faith was still writing books by then, but they had stopped selling well. Over the years she had continued publishing more modest sequels to The Female Persuasion. (The most recent one, in the late nineties, about women and technology, was The Email Persuasion.) Finally she stopped writing books entirely.
In the earliest photographs Greer found, Faith Frank, a tall, slender woman with long, dark curls, looked tenderly youthful, open. In one shot she was seen marching in DC. In another, she was gesticulating intensely on the set of one of those cultural-roundtable talk shows that used to be on late at night, with the guests on white swivel chairs in bell-bottoms, chain-smoking and yelling. Faith had gotten into a notorious debate on-air with the proudly male chauvinist novelist Holt Rayburn. He’d tried to shout her down that night, but she’d kept speaking in her calm and logical way, and in the end she’d won. It made the papers, and ultimately ended up being the reason she was offered her interview segment on Recap. Another photo showed her wearing her infant son in a sling while squinting at a magazine layout over his loosely screwed-on head. The photos kept moving forward through time, with Faith Frank still retaining a version of her elegant, lustrous self into her forties, fifties, sixties.
In most of the photos she was wearing a pair of tall, sexy suede boots, her signature look. There were interviews and profiles; one made reference to her “surprising impatience.” Faith could apparently get angry quickly, and not just at chauvinistic male novelists. She was depicted as kind but human, sometimes difficult, always generous and wonderful. But by the time she came to speak at Ryland College, she was seen as someone from the past, who was often spoken of with admiration, and with a special tone of voice reserved for very few people. She was like a pilot light that burned continuously, comfortingly.